A Bob Lee Swagger eBook Boxed Set

Cover

The 47th Samurai

Colophon

Also by Stephen Hunter

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Epigraph

1: Island

2: The Scythe

3: The Blockhouse

4: A Request

5: The Old Breed

6: The Big White House

7: Narita

8: The Yanos

9: Nii of Shinsengumi

10: Black Rust

11: Steel

12: Sake

13: Kondo Isami

14: Ruins

15: Toshiro

16: Kirisute Gomen

17: Ino

18: The Shogun

19: Dr. Otowa

20: The Young Men

21: The Cop

22: Yakiba

23: The Tokyo Flash

24: The Eight Cuts

25: The Floating World

26: Kata

27: The Samurai

28: Dragons

29: The Shrine

30: Sword of Life

31: Battle

32: Kondo

33: Orders

34: The Taking

35: Face-to-Face

36: The White Room

37: Strategy

38: Nii’s Dreams

39: The Kendo Champion

40: The Big Shots

41: Staging

42: Moon Of Hell

43: Chushingura

44: Edo Justice

45: Steel to Steel

46: Office Politics

47: Noto

Acknowledgments

Night of Thunder

Colophon

Also by Stephen Hunter

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Epigraph

Part I: Prelims

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Six

Seven

Eight

Nine

Ten

Eleven

Twelve

Thirteen

Fourteen

Fifteen

Sixteen

Seventeen

Eighteen

Nineteen

Twenty

Twenty-One

Twenty-Two

Twenty-Three

Twenty-Four

Twenty-Five

Part II: Race Day

Twenty-Six

Twenty-Seven

Twenty-Eight

Twenty-Nine

Thirty

Thirty-One

Thirty-Two

Thirty-Three

Thirty-Four

Thirty-Five

Thirty-Six

Thirty-Seven

Thirty-Eight

Part III: Last Lap

Thirty-Nine

Forty

Acknowledgments

I, Sniper

Colophon

Also by Stephen Hunter

Title Page

Copyright Page

Dedication

Epigraph

Chapter: 1

Chapter: 2

Chapter: 3

Chapter: 4

Chapter: 5

Chapter: 6

Chapter: 7

Chapter: 8

Chapter: 9

Chapter: 10

Chapter: 11

Chapter: 12

Chapter: 13

Chapter: 14

Chapter: 15

Chapter: 16

Chapter: 17

Chapter: 18

Chapter: 19

Chapter: 20

Chapter: 21

Chapter: 22

Chapter: 23

Chapter: 24

Chapter: 25

Chapter: 26

Chapter: 27

Chapter: 28

Chapter: 29

Chapter: 30

Chapter: 31

Chapter: 32

Chapter: 33

Chapter: 34

Chapter: 35

Chapter: 36

Chapter: 37

Chapter: 38

Chapter: 39

Chapter: 40

Chapter: 41

Chapter: 42

Chapter: 43

Chapter: 44

Chapter: 45

Chapter: 46

Chapter: 47

Chapter: 48

Chapter: 49

Chapter: 50

Chapter: 51

Chapter: 52

Chapter: 53

Chapter: 54

Chapter: 55

Chapter: 56

Acknowledgments

The 47th SAMURAI

ALSO BY STEPHEN HUNTER

American Gunfight (with John Bainbridge, Jr.)

Now Playing at the Valencia: Pulitzer Prize Essays on the Movies

Havana

Pale Horse Coming

Hot Springs

Time to Hunt

Black Light

Dirty White Boys

Point of Impact

Violent Screen: A Critic’s 13 Years on the Front Lines of Movie Mayhem

Target

The Day Before Midnight

The Spanish Gambit (Tapestry of Spain)

The Second Saladin

The Master Sniper

SIMON & SCHUSTER

Simon & Schuster

1230 Avenue of the Americas

New York, NY 10020

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 2007 by Stephen Hunter

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information address Simon & Schuster Subsidiary Rights Department, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020

SIMON & SCHUSTER and colophon are registered trademarks of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Hunter, Stephen.

The 47th samurai / Stephen Hunter.—1st Simon & Schuster hardcover ed.

p. cm.

1. Swagger, Earl (Fictitious character)—Fiction.

2. Swagger, Bob Lee (Fictitious character)—Fiction. 3. Tokyo (Japan)—Fiction. 4. Murder—Investigation—Fiction. I. Title. II. Title: Forty-seventh samurai.

PS3558.U494A615 2007

813'.54—dc22    2007006627

ISBN-13: 978-1-4165-7192-6

ISBN-10: 1-4165-7192-2

Visit us on the World Wide Web:

http://www.SimonSays.com

With thanks, respect, and appreciation to the samurai of the Japanese cinema:

Masaki Kobayashi, Hideo Gosha, Akira Kurosawa, Hiroshi Inagaki, Kenji Misumi, Tokuzo Tanaka, Kimiyoshi Yasuda, Kihachi Okamoto, Tadashi Sawashima, Toshiya Fujita, Haruki Kadokawa, Yoji Yamada, Kazuo Kuroki, Yojiro Takita, Ryuhei Kitamura, Satsuo Yamamoto

and

Takashi Shimura, Isao Kimura, Toshiro Mifune, Yoshio Inaba, Daisuke Kato, Mioru Chiaki, Seiji Miyaguchi, Tatsuya Nakadai, Shintaro Katsu, Raizo Ichikawa, Tomisaburo Wakayama, Tetsura Tambo, Sonny Chiba, Meiko Kaji, Michyio Aratama, Yunosuke Ito, Datsuke Kato, Yuzo Kayama, Machiko Kyo, Kashiro Matsumoto, Akihiro Tomikawa, Kiichi Nakai, Koichi Sata, Aya Ueto, Masatoshi Nagase, Mieko Harada, Hiroyuki Sandada

and

the great Shinobu Hashimoto

Turn, hell-hound, turn!

—MACDUFF IN MACBETH

1

ISLAND

SHOWA YEAR 20, SECOND MONTH, 21ST DAY

21 FEBRUARY 1945

A quiet fell across the bunker. Dust drifted from the ceiling. The burnt-egg stench of sulfur lingered everywhere.

“Captain?”

It was a private. Takahashi, Sugita, Kanzaki, Asano, Togawa, Fukuyama, Abe—who knew the names anymore? There had been so many names.

“Sir, the shelling has stopped. Does this mean they’re coming?”

“Yes,” he said. “It means they’re coming.”

The officer’s name was Hideki Yano and he was a captain, 145th Infantry Regiment, 2nd Battalion, under Yasutake and Ikeda, attached to Kuribayashi’s 109th Division.

The blockhouse was low and smelled of sulfur and shit because the men all had dysentery from the tainted water. It was typical Imperial Army fortification, a low bunker of concrete, reinforced over many long months, with oak tree trunks from what had been but was no longer the island’s only oak forest, the sand heaped over it. It had three firing slits and behind each slit sat a Type 96 gun on a tripod, a gunner, and a couple of loaders. Each field of fire fanned away for hundreds of yards across an almost featureless landscape of black sand ridges and marginal vegetation. The blockhouse was divided into three chambers, like a nautilus shell, so that even if one or two were wiped out, the last gun could continue to fire until the very end. It was festooned everywhere with the latest imperative from General Kuribayashi’s headquarters, a document called “Courageous Battle Vows,” which summed up everyone’s responsibilities to the Sphere.

Above all else, we shall dedicate ourselves to the

defense of this island.

We shall grasp bombs, charge the enemy tanks and

destroy them.

We shall infiltrate into the midst of the enemy and

annihilate them.

With every salvo we will, without fail, kill the enemy.

Each man will make it his duty to kill ten of the

enemy before dying.

“I am scared, sir,” said the private.

“I am too,” said Yano.

Outside, the captain’s small empire continued. Six pits with Nambu guns in each, each gun supported by gunner, loader, and two or three riflemen flanked the empire to left and right. In further spider holes were martyrs with rifles. No escape for them; they knew they were dead already. They lived only to kill those ten Americans before they gave their lives up in sacrifice. Those men had it the worst. In here, no shell could penetrate. The concrete was four feet thick, riven with steel rods. Out there a naval shell from the offshore fleet could turn a man to shreds in a second. If the shell landed precisely, no one would have time for a death poem.

Now that the attack was upon them, the captain became energized. He shook off the months of torpor, the despair, the terrible food, the endless shitting, the worries. Now, at last, glory approached.

Except of course he no longer believed in glory. That was for fools. He believed only in duty.

He was not a speech maker. But now he ran from position to position, making sure each gun was properly cocked and aimed, the loaders stood ready with fresh ammunition strips, the riflemen crouched to pick off the errant demon American.

“Captain?”

A boy pulled him aside.

“Yes?” What was the boy’s name? He could not remember this one either. But these were all good boys, Kagoshima boys, as the 145th was drawn from Kyushu, the home of Japan’s best soldiers.

“I am not afraid to die. I am eager to die for the emperor,” said the boy, a superior private.

“That is our duty. You and I, we are nothing. Our duty is all.”

But the boy was agitated.

“I am afraid of flames. I am so afraid of the flames. Will you shoot me if I am engulfed in fire?”

They all feared the flamethrowers. The hairy beasts were dishonorable. They chopped gold teeth from dead Japanese, they bleached Japanese skulls and turned them into ashtrays and sent them home, they killed the Japanese not decently, with gun and sword—they hated the blade!—but so often from miles out with the big naval shells, with the airplanes, and then when they got in close, they used the horrible hoses that squirted flaming gasoline and roasted the flesh from a man’s bones, killing him slowly. How could a warrior die honorably in flames?

“Or the sword, Captain. I beg you. If I burn, behead me.”

“What is your name?”

“Sudo. Sudo from Kyushu.”

“Sudo from Kyushu. You will not die in flames. That I promise you. We are samurai!”

That word samurai still stiffened the spine of every man. It was pride, it was honor, it was sacrifice. It was worth more than life. It was what a man needed to be and would die to be. He had known it his whole life; he had yearned for it, as he yearned for a son who would live up to it.

“Samurai!” said the boy fervently, now reassured, for he believed it.

Able Company caught primary assault. It was simply Able’s turn, and Charlie and Item and Hotel would offer suppressive fire and flanking maneuvers and handle artillery coordination, but it was Able’s turn to go first. Lead the way. Semper fi, all that fine bullshit.

There was a problem, however. There was always a problem, this was today’s: Able’s CO was shaky. He was new to the 28th and rumors had it that a connected father had gotten his son the command. His name was Culpepper and he was a college boy from some fancy place who talked a little like a woman. It wasn’t anything anybody could put a finger on, not homo or anything, he just wasn’t somehow like the other officers. He was fancy, somehow, from fancy places, fancy houses, fancy parents. Was Culpepper up to it? Nobody knew, but the blockhouse had to go or Battalion would be hung up all day here and the big guns on Suribachi would continue to shatter the beachhead. So Colonel Hobbs assigned his battalion’s first sergeant, Earl Swagger, to go along with Captain Culpepper that morning.

“Culpepper, you listen up to the first sergeant. He’s old breed. He’s been around. He’s hit a lot of beaches. He’s the best combat leader I have, you understand.”

“Yes sir,” said Culpepper.

The colonel drew Earl aside.

“Earl, you help Culpepper. Don’t let him freeze, keep his boys moving. I hate to do this to you, but someone’s got to get them boys up the hill and you’re the best I’ve got.”

“I’ll get ’em up, sir,” said Swagger, who looked like he was about 140 percent United States Marine Corps, chapter and verse, a sinewy string bean of a man, ageless in the sergeant way, a vet of the ’Canal, Tarawa, and Saipan and, someone said, Troy, Thermopylae, Agincourt, and the Somme. They said nobody could shoot a Thompson gun like the first sergeant. He’d fought the Japs in China before the war, it was said.

Swagger was from nowhere. He had no hometown, no memories he shared, no stories of the good old days, as if he had no good old days. It was said he’d married a gal last time home, on some kind of bond tour for the citizens back there, and everybody said she’s a looker, but he never pulled pictures or talked much about it. He was all guile, energy, and focus, seemingly indestructible but one of those professionals with what some would call a gleam in his eye who could talk any boy or green lieutenant through anything. He was a prince of war, and if he was doomed, he didn’t know it, or much care about it.

Culpepper had a plan.

Swagger didn’t like it.

“Begging the captain’s pardon, it’s too complicated. You’ll end up with your people all running around not sure of what to do while the Japs sit there and shoot. I wouldn’t break Able down by squads but by platoons, I’d keep a good base of fire going, and I’d get my flamethrowers off on the right, try and work ’em in close that way. The flamethrowers, sir, those are the key.”

“I see,” said the young man, pale and thin and grave and trying so hard. “I think the men are capable—”

“Sir, once the Japs see us coming, it’s going to be a shit storm out there. They are tough little bastards, and believe you me, they know what they are doing. If you expect men to remember maneuver patterns keyed to landmarks, you will be disappointed. It has to be simple, hard, basic, and not much to remember, or the Japs will shoot your boys down like toads on a flat rock. The important goddamn thing is to get them flamethrowers in close. If it was me, I’d send the best blowtorch team up this draw to the right”—they looked at a smudged map at the command post a few hundred yards back—“with a BAR and a tommy-gunner as cover, your best NCO running the show. I’d hold your other team back. Meanwhile, you pound away from your base of fire. Get the bazookas involved. Them gun slits is tiny but a bazooka rocket through one is something the Japs will notice. Sir, maybe you ought to let me run the flamethrower team.”

But the colonel said, “Earl will want to lead. Just let him advise, Captain. I need him back this afternoon.”

“But—” the young captain protested.

“Sergeant Tarsky is a fine man and a fine NCO. You let him move some people off on the left when we go. He’s got to get a lot of fire going, and the people here in front, they’ve got to be working their weapons too. I need a lot of covering fire. I’ll take the blowtorch team up the right. The Japs will be hidden in monkey holes, but I can spot ’em. I know where to look. So the BAR man can hose ’em down from outside their range. We’ll get in close and burn ’em out, then get up there and fry that pillbox.”

Culpepper hesitated a second, realized this smart, tough, duty-crazed hillbilly from some dead-end flyspeck south of perdition nobody had ever heard of was dead right, and saw that his own prissy ego meant nothing out there.

“Let’s do it, First Sergeant.”

The Type 92s fired 7.7 mm tracer. White-hot bolts of illumination cut through the mist and the dust. Through the gun slit, you could not see men, not really—but you could sense them, maneuvering a foot at a time through the same chaos. Where the bullets struck, they lifted clouds of black sand.

“There,” said the captain, pointing, and the gunner cranked his windage to the right, the finned barrel revolved on its mesh of gears, and the gun rocked, spent cartridges spilled, the tracer lashed, and in the vapors shapes stumbled and went down amid the stench of sulfur.

“Sir,” someone yelled from the leftmost gun chamber.

Holding his sword so it would not clatter, the captain ran through the connecting tunnel.

“Yes?”

“Sir, Yamaki says he saw men moving off on the left. Just a flash of them moving directly away from our position.” Gun smoke filled the room, thin and acrid, eating at nasal tissues, tearing up eyes.

“Flamethrowers?”

“I couldn’t see, sir.”

Well, it had to be. The American commander wouldn’t move his people directly at the guns. The hairy beasts never did that; they didn’t have the stomach and they weren’t eager to die. They would die if necessary, but they weren’t hungry for it. Glorious death meant nothing to them.

The captain tried to think it out.

He’d either go to his left or right, and you’d think he’d go to his left. There was more cover, the vegetation was thicker, and it was hard to bring direct fire because the ridge was steeper. You were mostly in danger from grenades, but the Americans didn’t fear the Japanese grenades, because they were so underpowered and erratic.

The captain tried to feel his opponent. His imagination of a white man was someone impossibly big and hairy and pink. He conceived of a cowboy or a ghost, but he knew there’d be intelligence guiding it. The Japanese had learned the hard way over the years that the Americans may not have had honor but they had intelligence. They weren’t stupid, they weren’t cowards, and there was an endless supply of them.

It came down to left or right? He knew the answer: the right. He’d go to his right. He’d send the flamethrowers up that way because it was less obvious: there wasn’t much cover, he’d run into spider holes, but he had the skill to overcome the spider holes. It seemed more dangerous, but a smart hand would have the advantage if he knew how to use terrain and was aggressive.

“I’ll take care of it. You men, keep firing. You won’t see whole targets, you’ll see shapes. Fire on shapes. Be samurai!”

“Samurai!”

The captain ran back to the central chamber.

“The little gun,” he ordered. “Quickly.”

A sergeant brought him the submachine gun called the Type 100, an 8 mm weapon whose central design had been stolen from the Germans. It had a wooden stock, a ventilated barrel, and a magazine fitted horizontally to the left from the breech. They were prizes; there were never enough of them to go around. What we could have done with a million of them! We’d be in New York today! The captain had to lobby General Kuribayashi personally to get one assigned to his position.

He threw on a bandolier hung with pouches full of grenades and spare magazines, buckling it tight to his body. Carefully, he disconnected his sword from his belt, laying it aside.

“I want to ambush the flamethrower attack. I’ll intercept them well beyond our lines. Give me covering fire.”

He turned, nodded to a private, who unlatched the heavy steel door at the rear of the blockhouse, and scrambled out.

“What’s your name, son?”

“MacReedy, First Sergeant.”

“Can you shoot that thing?” Earl said, indicating the sixteen pounds of automatic rifle the boy held.

“Yes, First Sergeant.”

“How ’bout you, son? Can you keep him loaded and hot?”

“Yes, First Sergeant,” said MacReedy’s ammo bearer, laden with bandoliers of BAR mags.

“Okay, here’s what we’re going to do. I’m squirming up the ridge. I’m going to check out the draw. When I see a monkey hole, I’m going to put tracer on it. You’re with me in a good prone. Where I put tracer, you put five rounds of ball thirty. Hold tight, stay on my forty-five tracer. Tracer won’t go through them logs the Japs use as revetment, but the thirty will, ’cause it’s moving three times as fast. Your buddy there’s going to feed you mags as you run dry. He’ll switch them on you. You got that, son?”

“Got it, First Sergeant,” said the assistant gunner.

“Now you blowtorch guys, you hang back. We got to clear this out before I can get you up on the ridge and you can get to work. Okay?”

There was a mumble of reluctant assent from his loose confederation of troops clustered just below the ridge, a couple of low, “Yes, First Sergeant.”

“And another thing. Out here, where there’s Japs, I’m Earl. Forget all the First Sergeant bullshit. Got it?”

With that Earl began his long squirm. He crawled through volcanic ash and black sand. He crawled in a fog of sulfur-stinking dust that floated up to his nose and tongue, layering him with grit. He held his Thompson tight like a woman, felt the two BAR gunners with him close, and watched as Jap tracer flicked insolently above. Now and then a mortar round landed, but mostly it was dust in the air, cut with flecks of light, so brief, so fast you weren’t sure you really saw it.

He was happy.

In war, Earl put everything behind him. His dead, raging father no longer screamed at him, his sullen mother no longer drifted away, he was no longer the sheriff’s boy, hated by so many others because they so feared his father; he was nobody but First Sergeant and he was happy. He had the United States Marine Corps as a father and a mother now, and the Corps had embraced him and loved him and nurtured him and made him a man. He would not let it down and he would fight to the death for its honor.

Earl got to the crest of the little ridge and poked his head up. Before him he saw a fold in the sandy soil that led up to the blankness of a higher ridgeline, a rill that was a foothill to Suribachi, which rose behind them, blocking all view of the sea. It was 2/28’s job to circle around the volcano, cut the mountain off from resupply, then inch up it and take out the mortars, the artillery emplacements, the artillery spotters, and the spider holes and pillboxes that dotted its scabrous surface. It had to be done one firefight at a time, over a long day’s dying.

The landscape of the draw seemed empty, a random groove cut in the black sand, clotted with clump grass and bean vines. The odd eucalyptus bush stood out amid the desolation.

Once he would have led men up and all would have died. But like his peers, he had learned the craft of war.

He looked now for gnarled root groupings in the clump grass and eucalypti, for patches of lemongrass, for small, stunted oak trees, for the Japanese had a genius for digging into them, for building small, one-man forts, impregnable to artillery but at the same time inescapable. There was no such thing as a back door. Thus they would die to kill. Retreat andsurrender were terms they did not comprehend.

“You set up, MacReedy?”

“Yes, Earl.”

“On my fire.”

Earl marked the target, thirty yards out, a tuft of vegetation in a crest of black sand that had a too-studied look to it, and he knew a man lurked in a chamber behind the screen of fronds, and he put four rounds of tracer onto it, watching as the neon flickered across the distance and whacked into the green, throwing up clouds of black dust. He was so strong and so salty he could hold the gun with no rise; it never sent .45s careening wildly into space. He could shoot skeet with it and had famously put on an exhibition on shipboard for all the squid officers.

Next to him, MacReedy jacked a heavier .30 caliber burst into the position; these bullets exploded in geysers of angry power when they struck.

“Good work. That boy’s gone to his ancestors.”

Earl worked the slope. His eyes picked out things few others would have noticed; he put the tracer on them, the BAR kids followed with the heavier .30 caliber ball, and in minutes, the draw seemed clear.

“Now’s the hard part. See, the Japs have guys on this side. I mean, facing toward their lines, guys we can’t see. That’s how their minds work, the smart little monkeys. They been at this a while; they know a goddamn thing or two.”

“What’s our play, Sergeant Earl?”

“We’re going to roll grenades down this slope. I’m going to take the BAR. After the grenades pop, I’m jumping down there. I can pick out the monkey holes and lay fire on them. You move over the ridge and cover me with the tommy. Got it?”

“Earl, you’re sure to get yourself killed.”

“Nah. No Nip’s quick enough to hit old man Earl. Okay, I want the gun loaded and cocked. MacReedy, take the bipod off too. You, get your grenades out. Ready?”

“Yes, Mr. Earl.”

“Okay, on my count, pull, pop the lever, then just dump the grenades over the crest. Got it?”

Battle was weather. He ran through clouds of vapor, dust in the air, through layers of sulfur. There was no sun. His boots fought for leverage in the black sand. The thunder pounded, except that it was gunfire. The slope was alive with rounds striking, and it looked like small animals peeping about. Below he could see nothing but dust and shapes scurrying through it, hairy beasts trying to squirm ahead, get within grenade range, always hunted by the whiter tracers his own men fired.

He ran from gun pit to gun pit.

“Keep firing. We’ll drive them back. You have ammunition, water? Any wounded?”

The men were wonderful. All believed in the hundred million, all believed in duty to the emperor, all had already made peace with death and sacrifice, saw and believed in its necessity, and would not bolt or flee; they were the best men on earth. Samurai!

“There, to the left!”

He pointed and the Nambu cranked around, sent a burst skittering through some vegetation, and all were rewarded with a rare sight of an enemy rolling out of the brush limply.

“Search for targets, keep shooting, they will tire of dying and fall back soon.”

Now Captain Yano reached a last shelf. By geographical oddity, a few feet of ridge lay where the far slope was too severe to negotiate and no trenches had been dug. It was wide open. It had to be crossed.

“Captain, be careful!”

“Long live the emperor,” he cried, as if to invoke a higher purpose.

Did he believe it? A part of him did. You gave yourself to it, you accepted your death, even in pain or fire, you embraced the suffering, you longed for the void. You raced through fire, in search of your duty and your destiny.

But another part said, Why?

What waste!

These fine men, they could contribute so much, they die on a crest of black sand on an island of sulfur that held no meaning at all that could be divined. For the emperor? How many of his men knew that the godlike, all-knowing, all-demanding emperor was a recent invention and that for three hundred years had been the puppet-joke of Edo, while in Kyoto stronger, subtler men ruled and only tolerated an emperor as a useful fiction, a figure around which to build distracting (and therefore helpful) ceremonies?

He knew too: the war is lost. All our armies have been crushed. No island has been successfully defended. We die here for nothing. It would be comic if it weren’t so stupid. It’s a racket, a jest, for the seven men who run Japan to chortle at over sake.

But still he ran.

He was visible for no more than seven seconds. The Americans fired quickly, and he felt the hot whisper of bullets pushing the air to the left and right as they plunged past. The earth erupted around him and filled the air with grit that assailed his nose and throat.

The bullet that would kill him did not find him.

He slid to earth behind a hummock, gulped for air, then heard a series of blasts from the draw below.

He slid to the crest of the hummock and watched from a hundred yards out as an American raced down the hill with a big automatic rifle—they had so many different kinds of weapons!—sweeping quickly, sending cascades of bullets into counterlaid spider holes whose existence only the captain himself knew, as he had designed them.

It was over in seconds.

The big hairy beast yelled and gestured and two men came down the hill and another few around it, as they joined in the middle of the draw, and the American ordered them into a hasty line and led them forward.

The captain saw it then: flamethrower.

The last two Americans in line had the flamethrower. One of them wore it on a harness, a cluster of tanks centered on his back, so heavy with jellied fuel that he bent under it and held a tubular nozzle with a pistol grip, which concealed a pyrotechnic igniter, literally a match that when struck would unleash the spurting fuel. They would come up the draw, pivot left, and under covering fire burn out the gun pits. Then the Americans would blow the steel door into the bunker and burn that out too.

The captain reached for grenades. They were absurd things, called Type 97s, unreliable and untrustworthy. Cylindrical and grooved for fragmentation, they were designed with four-and-a-half-second fuses, which meant they either had one-second fuses or six-second fuses, if they detonated at all. You primed them—this was beyond comedy!—by first pulling a pin, then smashing their fuse housing hard against your helmet and driving a striker through a primer to light a powder train.

He almost laughed.

We are the Yamato race and we cannot build a hand grenade to save our lives. The men joked, We can survive the Americans, but…our own grenades?

But the Buddha smiled. He pulled the pin on the first cylinder, smashed its fuse housing against a stone, the striker flew and lit the fuse, and it sizzled to life. He held it one second (so dangerous!) then threw it over the crest. He repeated the process, and heard the first detonate. Possibly a cry was lost in the explosion. The second grenade he didn’t hold, on the sound principle that no two in a row would work properly, but just hurled it, and it was the right decision, for just an instant later it went.

The captain pulled himself over the crest of the draw.

All the Americans were down. One of the boys with the automatic rifle was shrieking hysterically, his left arm bloody. Two were still. The flamethrower operator was trying to regain his feet.

The captain shot him first. He put a stream of five 8 mm Nambu slugs into him, and another burst into the assistant, even though that man was down. He shifted to the automatic rifleman, who labored with the bloody arm to raise his weapon, while behind them his loader tried to grope for a dropped carbine. The captain finished them in one long burst. Then he rotated to the downed leader and put a burst into him. He raced down the draw, went to the flamethrower operator, who unbelievably, still breathed. He fired into his head and tried not to notice and, when that proved impossible, not to feel shame at the impact of the bullets on the young face. Then he pulled his bayonet and sawed the hose through and tossed the pistol-like igniter housing away.

No blowtorches for his men today.

He spun and began to race back to the blockhouse.

Earl somehow regained consciousness. He was not dead. He tried to reassemble what had happened, and finally identified it as either an errant mortar shell or grenades. He shook his head, trying to drive the jangles of pain out, but they remained. His hip throbbed. He looked down and saw blood. His canteen was punctured twice, there was a groove cut in the brass keeper of his web belt where a bullet had spanged off, and a bullet had grooved his side, a slow leakage of blood accumulating on his heavy USMC twill shirt. He looked around.

Gone, all gone.

Fuck, he thought.

Finally met a Jap smart as me. Smarter even, goddamn his little monkey soul to hell.

The draw was quiet, though the noise of the firing was close at hand. The Japanese still held the blockhouse; his flanking thrust had been defeated. He’d gotten four men of Able Company wiped out and himself damn near killed, and only because, now that he thought of it, he must have heard the chink! of a Jap arming his grenade that got him to the ground before the first blast, and he now realized there were two blasts.

He looked about; his Thompson was a few feet away. He picked it up, blew sand out of the trigger assembly, and rotated down the safety. No need to check the chamber for he carried it in combat with a round sitting there, the bolt held back. He started up the draw.

He climbed the crest, pivoted, and could see nothing. Ahead lay a crest line, where a hummock of black sand was anchored by a netting of scraggly vegetation.

He lurched ahead, slipped once, then got around the hummock to find himself a hundred yards or so from the blockhouse. Three gun pits, sandbagged revetments reinforced with palm, held gun crews with riflemen, all working frantically to keep their fire up. The guns hammered away like industrial implements.

Earl didn’t pause a second. It wasn’t in his nature. He had the advantage of surprise, and he was on the first pit before the men realized. He fired a long burst, the gun steamy and jumpy in his hands, and just cut them down.

A man in the second pit, thirty yards farther out, rose to his racket, fired at Earl, and the bullet banged off his helmet, the helmet itself flipping away. Earl fired from the hip, catching him, then raced to the pit, firing, and as he reached it ran dry of ammo and so leaped in, using his gun butt. He drove the heavy thing forward, smashing a Jap in the face, spun sideways, and smashed another. He returned to the first with several savage butt strokes, his heart empty of mercy.

Around him, the world lit up. Nambu fire from the third pit. Earl went down, reached for his own grenade, pulled the pin, and threw it. As he waited for the detonation, he hastened through a magazine change. When the grenade fired off, he rose to see three men with a light Nambu racing his way and he took them down with a raking burst. He rose, ran through fire to the third pit—why he wasn’t killed was a mystery he’d ponder for the rest of his life—and finished the clip on the wounded men who struggled within it. When the gun ran dry, he killed two wounded men with his gun butt, not a thing you’d tell a child about, but a necessary part of the job.

He sat back, exhausted, sucked in air that was heavy with the chemical stench of this goddamned place. He saw the blockhouse lay a few yards away and knew he’d have to blow it. Yeah, with what? No grenades left, no satchel charge, no bangalore torpedo, no flamethrower. Then he flipped a Jap over—the body was so light!—and found a pouch of grenades. He knew the Jap grenades were no good, but maybe a bagful would do the trick. He reached for his Thompson and saw why it had quit. A wedge of sand had jimmied the bolt halfway back. You’d have to scrape for a month to get it cleared.

Okay.

He took a breath and ran to the blockhouse, squirmed along the back of it, his shirt scraping the concrete. He could hear its guns working the slope. He found a chamber, and peeking in, he saw a black steel door.

Earl pressed himself against the wall, took out one of the Jap grenades. With his teeth, he got the pin out. Then he slammed the end of the thing against the wall, felt it fizzle, and watched the dry thin smoke of burning powder pour out of it.

Oh, shit, these things scared him.

He dumped it in the bag, tossed the bag flush against the steel door, and headed back across the sand to the gun pit.

He needed a weapon.

The captain made it back inside. In the dankness, in the darkness, there was a moment’s respite from the storm of the battle. The noise went way down, the glare ceased, the stench of sulfur was supplanted by other stenches.

Someone clapped him on the shoulder, someone hugged him, someone cried with joy.

“I stopped their flame team. Now we’ve got them. They won’t be getting up here this morning. Samurai!”

He handed the Type 100 to his sergeant and went back to his little corner. He picked up his sword, a prosaic blade probably ground out by a machine in the Naval Sword Company, polished on a machine, assembled by a worker. Yet it was strangely sharp and twice men had tried to buy it from him. There was something about it that he couldn’t quite define.

Now he fastened it to his belt by its clip, drew the blade out, and set it before him.

He felt he had done his duty. No one would perish in flames. They would achieve death with dignity.

He picked up a calligraphy brush and dipped it in ink. He thought of Lord Asano in 1702, seconds from his own death by his own hand, bowing to pressures so great as to be incomprehensible.

Asano had written

I wish I had seen

the end of spring

but I do not miss

the falling of the cherry blossoms.

Asano knew what was important: the end of spring, his duty; the falling of the cherry blossoms, the emptiness of ceremony. Then Asano had plunged his blade into his stomach and drawn it cleanly across the midline of his body, cutting entrails and organs, spraying blood everywhere until the mercy of the sword had sundered his neck, ending all.

Now it was clear before Yano. He had to record what happened here, what this place was, how hard these men had fought, how hard they had died. Inspiration suddenly arrived, along with enlightenment, and in a few deft strokes, he sent kanji characters spilling vertically across the rice paper. They seemed to tumble from his brush, feathery, almost delicate, a testament to the artist’s genius amid the slaughter. It was so human.

It was his death poem.

He removed his sword and laid it before him on the small writing table. With the nub of his brush, he pushed out the bamboo peg that secured the grip to the tang. Smoothly the grip slid upward, but instead of taking it off, he wrapped his death poem around the tang and remounted the grip. Then he thrust the peg back through the hole. But he thought, Too loose. With the still-wet calligraphy brush, he quickly applied a dollop of ink to the peg. It would slide into the hole, thicken like lacquer, then eventually harden into a cement bond that would keep the sword tightly assembled forever.

For some reason this small task—in the face of death—gave him immense satisfaction. It meant that his last conscious act had been the act of poetry.

Then the world exploded.

2

THE SCYTHE

CRAZY HORSE, IDAHO, TODAY

There was no why to it, not really.

You couldn’t put it into words. His daughter had said, You have too much time on your hands. His wife had said, You cannot tell that man a thing. Who knew what the people in town said or what the Mexicans or the Peruvians who herded the sheep and mended the fences said, but of the last category, the words muy loco were certainly uttered.

Bob Lee Swagger, nearing sixty, stood alone on a slope in the American West. The property was his own. He had bought it upon discovering, in this new stage of life, an unexpected prosperity. Two layout barns he owned in Arizona, in Pima County, were doing well, managed astutely by a high school friend of his daughter’s, a young woman who loved horses and had a practical streak. So a check arrived from Arizona every month. There were two more layout barns here in Idaho, east and west of Boise, which Bob more or less managed, except that they managed themselves and Julie did all the bookkeeping. So there was money from that too. Then the United States Marine Corps sent him a check every month as well, for all the bleeding he’d done in far-off places nobody remembered. There was a VA disability check for the bad business about the hip, that steel joint that was always ten degrees colder inside his body than the weather outside it.

So he’d bought this nice piece of land on the Piebald River, still a ways out from Crazy Horse, itself still a longer way out from Boise. You could see the Sawtooths, a blue scar across the sea of green that was a valley. The land was serene: no human structure could be discerned. If you looked at the land, under the big Idaho sky piled with cumulus, hawks rotating in the thermals, and you saw the smeary white of the antelope herds, you might feel a little peace. A man who’d done some hard things and had finally come to a land where he could live untroubled with a wife and a daughter would love such a place, even if the daughter was off in graduate school in New York City and he and the wife didn’t speak as much to each other as they once had. But the idea was splendid: he would build a fine house, looking across to the Sawtooths, with a porch on it. All summer long it would be green, in the fall red and gold, and in the winter white.

You earned it the hard way, Bob, Julie had said.

Well, maybe I did. Anyhow, I’m just going to enjoy sitting under a blanket in the mornings and watching.

I wouldn’t bet on that, but if that’s what you say.

But there was one thing. Before a house could be built, the land had to be cleared and irrigated and Bob just didn’t want another man to do that job with a machine and a crew. He wanted to do it himself.

It was called a scythe, an ancient, curved blade, rusted and nicked but still sharp as hell, affixed to the end of a grip with enough bend in it and enough knobs on it so a fellow could get behind it with his weight and strength and swing. What he swung at, he cut. You found the rhythm, the blade did the work, your muscles stretched, your stamina built. There was something nineteenth century about it that he liked, or maybe even eighteenth or seventeenth or sixteenth century.

It takes some time to work a good-size piece of land, and the more he got into it, the more it got into him. It was an hour from his home in Boise, mostly on dirt roads; to save a little time, he’d bought and taught himself to run a Kawasaki 450 off-road bike, and tore across the desert in a more direct route than via the crazy-quilt switchbacks his truck would have required. Then, in jeans and boots and an old undershirt, he’d begin. He’d been at it a month, 197 paces one way, then 197 paces the other, six, seven, sometimes eight or even ten hours a day. He no longer ached, his back no longer throbbed. His body had finally gotten used to, even come to need, the labor. Back and forth, his calluses protecting him, the blade biting the scrawny vegetation, and with each swing, a spray of stalks and leaves flew away, cutting a swath maybe two feet wide. He was halfway done now. Half the field was cut to nubbiness and had died; it could be plowed under and planted. The steeper half still beckoned, a stretch of prairie grass and tumbleweed and cacti and other tough, scrawny, high-desert growers. Yet somehow it pleased him. It meant nothing to nobody, but it meant a little this day to him.

This particular day was no different than any other. Why should it be: sun, sky, brambles to cut, scythe to swing, progress to be made. Up one track, back another, the steady swish of the blade, that swath two feet wide, the feel of the sweat building, the sense of giving himself up against and—

Then he saw the car.

Who the hell could this be?

He didn’t think anyone knew he was here alone in the wild, or knew the strange linkage of dirt roads that got you here. Only Julie did: he figured then that she’d told whoever this was, and so it was all right.

It was a Mercedes-Benz S-Class in black, a very nice car, pulling up a rooster tail of dust.

He watched as it slewed ever so gently to a stop. One by one two men got out.

He recognized one right away: it was Thomas M. Jenks, a retired marine colonel and sometime friend of Bob’s, a biggish wheel in Boise who owned a Buick dealership, a radio station, and a mall or two, very nice fellow, active in the Marine Corps League, a man Bob trusted. The second was Asian. There was something about him that radiated Japanese, Bob thought, but he didn’t know quite what. He recalled a letter that had come a week or so ago, full of puzzling possibilities.

Gny. Sgt. (Ret.) Bob Lee Swagger

RR 504

Crazy Horse, ID

Dear Sergeant Swagger:

I hope this letter finds you happy in a well-earned retirement and I hope you pardon the intrusion, as I know you to be a man who treasures his privacy.

I am a retired full colonel USMC and currently head of the Marine Historical Section at Henderson Hall, Arlington, VA—Marine Headquarters.

For some months I have been working with Philip Yano, of Tokyo, Japan. I have found Mr. Yano to be an excellent man. He is retired from the Japanese Ground Self-Defense Forces, where he was a colonel and a battalion commander, with special duty attachments to a variety of American and British Military Training Schools, including Ranger, Airborne, SpecOps, British SAS, and the Command and Staff College at Ft. Leavenworth, Kansas. As well, he has a master’s degree in business administration from Stanford University.

Mr. Yano has spent the summer researching Marine records as part of a research project regarding the campaign on Iwo Jima February–March 1945. As your father figured significantly in that battle and was one of twenty-three Marines to win the Medal of Honor for actions there, he hopes to discuss this with you. I gather he’s doing a book on Iwo from a Japanese point of view. He is a polite, respectful, and even an endearing man and a military professional of the highest order. I hope you can be of assistance to Mr. Yano.

I am requesting your full cooperation with him. Possibly you would not be averse to sharing your father’s memories with him. He is, as I say, an admirable man deserving of respect and cooperation.

I will put him in contact with you and sometime in the next few weeks he will be in touch. Again, my thanks and best,

Sincerely,

Robert Bridges

Historical Section Superintendent

Marine Headquarters

Henderson Hall, VA

Bob hadn’t felt up to this. When he’d read the letter, he’d thought, Well, now, what the hell? What do I know about it? The old man never talked, just as he himself, years later with tales of this and that when the lead was buzzing through the air, never talked either. That was somehow part of it: you didn’t talk about it.

But he also knew that in a strange way, his father, who fought, hated, killed, blew up, and burned the Japanese for three years in the most horrific way possible, also respected them in the way that only enemies unto death can respect each other. To call it love was to say too much; to call it forgiveness and redemption, maybe too much as well. But call it healing and you’d have it just about right. He had an image of the old man at a drugstore, must have been ’52 or ’53, couple of years before he died, someone said to him, “Say, Earl, them Japs, they’se little monkey devils, huh? You fry them Japs by the bucketful, right?” and his father turned instantly grave as if insulted and said, “You can say anything you want about ’em, Charlie, but I’ll tell you this: they were damn fine soldiers and they stood their ground till the last drop of blood. They stood and fought even when they’s burning alive. No one ever accused a Japanese infantryman of not doing his duty.” Then he felt his father, so voluble and commanding, turn the conversation skillfully to other subjects. There were certain things he wouldn’t share, particularly with folks who hadn’t been out there, on the beaches and the tiny little islands.

He turned to face the gentleman.

He saw a man his own age, square-headed with a neat crop of short gray hair, steady-eyed, stocky where Bob was lanky. Even in the heat and the rugged terrain, the man wore a dark suit and tie and radiated military dignity from every pore.

“Bob,” said Tom Jenks, “this is—”

“Oh, I know. Mr. Yano, retired recently from…,” and then he paused involuntarily, noticing that Mr. Yano’s left eye, though almost the same color as the right, wasn’t focusing even as it moved in coordination with its brother, signifying that it was glass, and Bob then noticed a line running above and beneath it that, though neatly mended with the best skill that modern surgery could manage, was evidence of an ugly, violent trauma. “From his country’s service. Sir, pleasure to meet you. I am Bob Lee Swagger.”

Mr. Yano smiled, showing white, even teeth, and bowed in a way that Bob had never seen except in movies: the bow was deep and deeply felt at once, as if the man were taking pleasure in it.

“I did not wish to intrude, Sergeant Swagger.”

Bob recalled something somewhere he’d heard about the Japanese and their humility and fear of acquiring obligation and causing difficulty and saw how from that point of view it made more sense to drive an hour through back roads than to come up to the house.

“So what can I do for you, sir?” asked Bob. “Some research project about Iwo, is that it?”

“First, Sergeant Swagger, if I may.”

With that he pulled from his pocket a small gift box, bowed, and presented it to Swagger.

“As an expression of thanks for your time and knowledge.”

Bob was a little stunned. He wasn’t much on gifts or bows or the kind of formality that seemed pointless in ninety-degree sunlight in the high desert of a western state, on his own land, when he was damp in sweat.

“Well, I can’t say how nice this is, sir. I certainly appreciate it.”

“The Japanese always give gifts,” said Tom Jenks. “It’s their way of saying howdy and thanks.”

“Please,” said the Japanese fellow.

Bob saw that the box was so precisely wrapped that opening it seemed slightly sacrilegious. But he felt also an obligation and tore into it, marveling at the intricate folded structure of the paper, until finally he got it open, discovered a tiny jewel box, and opened that.

“Well, that is really swell,” he said.

It was a miniature sword assembled with high artistry. The tiny blade gleamed and the miniaturist had even wrapped the grip in individual thread strands.

“The sword is the soul of the samurai, Sergeant Swagger. You are a great samurai, as I know, so I bring this in salute.”

In a funny way, the gift touched Bob. It was so unexpected and, he guessed, quite expensive, for the craftsmanship was exquisite.

“You shouldn’t have. It’s so impressive. Believe me, all that samurai-ing is way behind me. I just run some barns. But you put me in a helpful mood, so whatever it is you’re interested in, fire away and I’ll see if I can’t pitch in. My old man never talked much about the war.”

“I understand. Few do. In any event, as possibly Colonel Bridges’s letter noted, I’ve spent the last few months at Henderson Hall, examining the original documents pertaining to Iwo Jima. Before that I spent almost a year in Japanese defense archives, examining the same thing, though as you might imagine, Japanese records are rather incoherent.”

“Yes sir.”

“I have ended up concentrating on an action that took place February twenty-first, at a place on Japanese maps called Point I-five. It was a blockhouse on the northwest slope of Mount Suribachi.”

“I am familiar with Mount Suribachi and what happened on its northwest slope February twenty-first. Sir, may I say something. Sometimes you don’t want to look too carefully or learn too much about what happens in battle. People do things in battle they wouldn’t dream of doing no other way, time, or place. I speak from experience, sir.”

“I know you do.”

“You might learn something about us or about your own people that would prove upsetting.”

“I understand that too. This isn’t about atrocity, however, or national policies or even about the movement of troops across the landscape, say the Twenty-eighth Marines circling the southern tip of the island to cut off, then assault Suribachi. It’s about something far more intimate. Your father destroyed the blockhouse at Point I-five and killed most of the soldiers. That was a remarkable, courageous act of heroism. I have nothing but respect for it. The battle is interesting to me because my father, Captain Hideki Yano, was an infantry officer in the Japanese Imperial Army, Second Battalion, One Hundred Forty-fifth Infantry Regiment. He was in command of Point I-five, or the blockhouse on Suribachi’s northwest slope. In other words, I believe as the battle progressed, your father killed mine.”

3

THE BLOCKHOUSE

Earl was trying to dig out and master a Nambu Type 96 light machine gun in the nearest gun pit when the grenades detonated. Though he was forty feet from them and they’d been wedged deep in a trench against the steel door of the blockhouse, the concussion still swept across him, punching him to the earth. He fell on a dead soldier, the man’s face beaten in by the butt of Earl’s Thompson. Earl saw the hideous rearrangement of features, the swelling, the shattered delicacies of the face and teeth, the bloated lips—then looked away. You train yourself not to see that stuff. He knew he had to focus. The gun, the gun!

The 96 was no BAR, but enough of them had shot enough lead at him for him to respect it. He looked at it, understanding its principles immediately; machine guns were pretty much alike in most respects. He rummaged around for a pouch of mags, found one, shifted to a new, fresh tin of ammo, locked it in, looked for, found, and locked back a bolt. Now he lifted it, feeling the ungainly slippy rotation of the loose bipod on the end of the finned barrel, and raced back to the rear of the house. If men shot at him, he wasn’t aware of it.

He slipped down. The door was blown asunder and black smoke boiled out of the entrance. It was like the doorway to hell. This is where you needed a flamethrower, for one cleansing stream from outside would search out nooks and crannies, crevices and corners, and take care of business and you didn’t have to crawl in and go from room to room, killing.

He took a breath and entered a subterranean world, fighting the acrid drift of smoke, the stench of latrine and blood and food, the sudden clammy coolness of the underground chamber. It was like entering an insect nest.

He heard the heavy rhythm of a woodpecker from the left and turned, stepping over a body. Bap bap bap bap bap, the pound of the slow-firing heavy machine gun. An entrance yielded a chamber, and indeed three men serviced one of the big Nambu 7.7 92s, concentrating on downhill targets, one locating them, one firing, one feeding ammo strips into the big gun, fighting hard to the end. They hadn’t even noticed the blown doorway.

It was pure murder. Usually you didn’t see it; shapes moved and stopped moving or disappeared. Now he pressed the trigger, felt the hot sputter of the gun, the tracers just swept them away in less than a second, so goddamned easy. It shouldn’t be as easy as with a hose against flowers. The gun in his hand emptied in a spasm and the soldiers never had any idea what happened, they just went down, flipping this way and that, this one fighting it, that one going down hard and fast, this one just slumping, caught and lit in a neon net, the Jap tracers white-blue and hot. It was over in a second.

Earl rotated to his left, stumbled a bit, burned some skin off his forehead on a low ceiling, and moved to the next chamber.

The captain shook spiderwebs, broken glass, fly wings, and dust from his brain. He was in pain everywhere, and when he breathed, only hot stench poured into his lungs and rasped at his throat. He thought he was drowning in an underwater of smoke and fumes. He gripped his skull to squeeze the pain out, but it didn’t help. Where was he, what was this, what was happening?

It was his chamber that had caught most of the blast when the steel door was blown. The big Nambu wasn’t firing; it was tilted askew to the right and the loader was either dead or dying; at any rate he lay on his back, his face and chest bloody, his eyes unseeing. He was gone, some piece of shrapnel to brain or spine, turning off his light in a microsecond of mercy.

It was Sudo of Kyushu.

Your sacrifice wasn’t by fire, he thought. I kept my word.

One of the privates, though, had gone to the gun and was fighting to get it righted and the third man joined him, albeit feebly as he too was seriously hit.

Then the captain heard the sound of fire from close at hand and knew one of the hairy ones had penetrated. He reached swiftly for his pistol but found the blast had torn his belt off. He was defenseless. He looked about. The sword lay to his right.

He bent, picked it up. It was, of course, ridiculous. In this modern age, Japanese NCOs and officers went into battle with these frog-stickers, helpful in executing Chinese partisans and waving in staff photographs and patriotic rallies and little else. Yet throughout the army they were beloved, because they connected to a thousand years of the bushido way of the warrior and conjured up men in elaborate armor or brilliant robes meeting and destroying each other in battles or back alleys for the sake—this was the lie, at any rate—of the hundred million. In the sword was freedom from the gaijin, dignity, spirituality, samurai. The captain drew the sword from its metal scabbard, feeling the friction of metal on metal, and then it sprang free and described a fine, glorious arc across the smoky space as the American approached.

In truth, it seemed to be not much of a sword. It was but shin-gunto,short, almost stumpy, its brightness suspect upon inspection, because the skin was a mass of scratches and hazing, and a bit of edge here and there had chipped off, in some forgotten adventure. The captain had drawn it from resupply as part of his kit when he’d left Tokyo for the Volcanics, and it was one of thousands in a room of reconditioned swords recovered from returning soldiers back from the Sphere’s expansions all over the southern half of the globe in the last decade. Possibly it had been carried by a now-dead man in China or Burma or Malaysia, who knew, who could possibly know?

But it was always weirdly sharp. This one, despite its mundane, even shabby appearance, had a will or destiny toward cutting. You could shave with it, or cut paper with it, and it had a lively quality unlike the heavier, duller sword that had been his first issue in China. It seemed to want flesh; it sought battle, destiny, fate. In some odd respect, he felt unworthy of it, though it was but military issue, presumably manufactured in a plant with thousands like it.

Yet it reassured him, and he drew it back in both hands, above his head, slightly separated for leverage, assuming position jodan no kamai,or “high-level stance,” or even “fire stance,” because his spirit was so strong it meant to burn the opponent, oppressing his resolve. He saw the next second perfectly: the downward diagonal between neck and shoulder (perfect kiroshi, cutting technique), the sword traveling straight without wobble, cutting cloth, skin, muscle, bone, the newly approved seventh kata of 1944, kesagiri, the preferred killing stroke of the diagonal cut, the clavicle stroke. Then the quick withdrawal, followed by chiburi, or that flick of blood removal before resheathing. The ritual was pleasing; it gave him comfort and brought calm to his tumultuous mind. He became one with the sword; he waited.

Earl killed the six men in the central chamber in a single second. It was just like the last: the tracers ate them up, tossed them up and down, and they fell, some mute, some twitchy. This was war: all the bullshit about doing your bit, about the team, about gung ho, semper fi, was forgotten: in the end, it was killing and nothing but.

He withdrew, aware that the gun was either empty or near to it. He diddled, unlocked the empty magazine, and it fell away. He inserted a new one, locked it in, drew the bolt back, slid down the weird hallway, low, burning yet more skin off his bare head, and came to the last chamber.

He knew they were waiting for him.

God help me, he thought, this one last time.

Then he plunged in.

4

A REQUEST

“I don’t know about that exact thing, Mr. Yano,” said Bob. “I do know that in fights things get all mixed up. You can never tell who’s done what. Official reports don’t usually come no place near the truth.”

“I understand that. It could have easily been a shell, a ricochet, a sniper, any of a dozen things, and it doesn’t even matter. I also understand that if he did, it was because it was his duty, because he had no choice, because it was war. But I do know for certain that he was there, that he actually penetrated the bunker. The medal attests to that, as do the witness reports.”

“That much is known, sir,” Bob said. “Battle is a terrible thing, as is killing.” Something drove him to rare confession. “I have been cursed to have seen and done a lot of it. For the Marine Corps, I hunted and killed other men in Vietnam. I’ve thought a lot about it. I can only say, It was war.”

“I understand. I’ve seen some battle too. That’s the way we chose, the path we followed.”

The sun was bright.

“But I am hoping so much that you will understand where my destination lies. I must ask one more question,” said Mr. Yano. “It’s only out of a love for my father as intense as the one you still feel for yours.”

“Go ahead,” said Bob. “I see that’s why you came.”

“There was a sword,” the Japanese said.

Bob blinked, not sure what he meant. Did he mean the miniature sword that he, Yano, had given Swagger just a few minutes ago? That sword? Then he saw: no, no, his father’s sword. His father had a sword that day, of course. The Japs called them “banzai swords” or something like that: he remembered them not from anything his father ever said but from the war comic books he had read religiously in the ’50s. He saw in his mind a wicked, curved thing, with a long, tape-wrapped grip with a snakehead at the end of it. “Banzai! Banzai!” some bearded, cavemanlike Jap sergeant in gogglelike glasses shouted in the comic books, waving it around, stirring his men to a human wave attack. Bob realized his idea of such a thing was probably crap.

“I know young soldiers in battle,” said Mr. Yano. “In the aftermath of survival, they want something to commemorate their triumph, something tangible, that speaks of victory. Who can blame them?”

“I’ve seen it myself,” said Bob. More memories stirred, forty years old, memories he had no interest in sifting through. But the man was right. It happened.

“I know,” said Mr. Yano, “that hundreds, thousands, possibly tens of thousands of swords were taken in the Pacific. Along with Nambu pistols, flags, especially flags, Arisaka rifles, helmets, souvenirs of a fight so hard.”

“Mostly it was guys in the rear who ate that shit up,” said Bob.

“My father had a sword. His death was part of your father’s greatest triumph. I’ve read the medal citation and the after-action reports in the Marine Historical Section and I know how brave he was.”

“My father was an extraordinary man,” said Bob. “I’ve tried my whole life and I ain’t yet come up to his waist. I imagine yours was as well.”

“It is true. But I must ask, Is there a possibility that this sword was part of your inheritance? That you now have it? It was the sort of thing a father passes on to a son. There are far finer swords. But that sword: it would have enormous meaning to me and to my family. I really came to America in search of that sword.”

Bob wished he had good news for the man. He understood that it was more than right that such an event might transpire all these years later, the sword returned to its place of honor with the family of the man who had carried it and died with it. The symmetry of the idea pleased him; it seemed to signify a final closing up of old, raw wounds.

But he had no good news.

“Mr. Yano, I would in a second, believe me. It would please me. For some damned reason, I have this feeling that it would please my father, and that would do me proud.”

“I feel the same.”

“But my father wasn’t a man for trophies. He had no trophies except a forty-five he brought back from the Pacific, and that was a tool, not a trophy. But no flags, no trumpets, no swords, no helmets, not even much chatter. He just put the war behind him and got on to the next thing. He never talked about it. He never wore the uniform again, until the day he died, not even on parade days when some of the other boys did. He wasn’t the sort of man who talked himself up, or tried to remind others of what he’d done. You don’t see that much no more.”

If the Japanese felt disappointment, he didn’t show it, and Bob realized it was not their way to show such things.

“I didn’t think I’d ever heard you say anything about a sword,” said Jenks, who’d been standing idly by while the two conducted business. “Bob’s not a showy kind, and I don’t believe his father would have been either.”

“No, I understand,” said Mr. Yano. “Well, so be it. That is what the gods have decreed. The sword is where it is and that is where it will remain.”

“You sure tried,” said Bob. Then he added, “Possibly there are still some men left in that platoon? They’d be in their eighties now. But couldn’t Marine Historical put you in contact?”

“There are two and I’ve actually talked to both. One in Florida, one in Kansas. But I came up empty.”

“That’s too bad. I’d really like to help. And—hmmm,” he said.

“Yes.”

“Oh, I don’t know. All this talk about so long ago. I am hearing something,” said Bob.

“Hearing something?”

“I’m getting a buzz on something. ‘Sword.’ You say that word, meaning World War Two Japanese sword, I get a little kind of image.”

“A memory, like?” said Jenks.

“Not even that. I don’t know why it would be or what it would be. Somewhere deep down, I have this little bug. Maybe it’s a mistake.”

“Still, it’s something.”

“Mr. Yano, because we’re connected in such a hard way, let me make you a promise. It ain’t much. It’s all I got.”

“I’m moved.”

“There’s stuff in my attic. It was in the house in Arizona; I moved it when I sold that place. I looked through it a couple or so years ago when some business about my father came up and I had to go on a little trip back home. But I didn’t look thoroughly. Obviously, I wasn’t looking for anything having to do with a sword. So, I’ll go back through that stuff over the next few weeks. Maybe get a sense of what’s there. Who knows, maybe there’s a lead of some sort. You came all the way out here to No Place, Idaho, I feel I owe you, soldier to soldier. Also, son of hero to son of hero.”

“You’re very kind. I know you’ll examine until there’s nothing left to examine. Here’s my card. Please accept it, and if there’s any news, you’ll be able to reach me.”

5

THE OLD BREED

The young faces stared out at him. They were so thin, so unmarked, in many cases so unformed, with eager eyes and knobby cheekbones, tan in the tropic sun. Each man clutched a vicious KA-BAR knife, or a Garand or a carbine or a BAR. They were revving themselves up for war, this young marine platoon somewhere in the Pacific, somewhere in World War II. Finally one face in the back row materialized and Bob knew it to be his father’s. It was thin too, but if you looked hard, you saw the pure animal confidence. His father wore the NCO’s weird combination of foreman’s savvy, father’s sternness, mother’s forgiveness, teacher’s wisdom, and coach’s toughness beautifully, and the picture somehow captured a professional at the apex of his game, with a crushed boonie cap pushed back on his head, his teeth white and strong as he smiled, his utility sleeves rolled up, showing strong forearms that seemed to be curled on what Bob thought was maybe (most of it was hidden behind a man in the row in front of him) a tommy gun.

He had no idea when the picture was taken. Maybe before Guadalcanal—no, not with M-1s and carbines—maybe before Tarawa, maybe before Saipan, maybe before Iwo. There was one other too, Bob couldn’t remember, but he knew his dad was one of the few marines who had hit five separate islands and lived to tell about it, though the wound on Tarawa from the Jap sniper would have killed a lesser man.

The photo, old and curled, was one of a few that remained testifying to the war adventures of Earl L. Swagger of Blue Eye, Arkansas, who entered the war a corporal and got out a first sergeant even if wounded seven times. It was a real hell-and-back story. Audie Ryan didn’t have anything on Earl. He fought hard, he almost died; somehow, like little Audie, he came back. He never became a movie star, but instead became a police officer and he got ten more years of life out of the deal.

But that was all. Bob was alone in the attic and it hadn’t been easy digging through this stuff, which had been hastily moved from a house in Ajo, Arizona, never categorized, never examined, just lumped together as junk from the past and shoved up here. The cardboard box—“Buster Brown. Size C7, Dark Brown Oxfords,” inscribed in his mother’s script “Daddy’s Things”—contained little else. The medals, even the big one, were nested together, the ribbons faded, the metal tarnished. Bob thought maybe he should have them polished and mounted, a display to the man’s courage. But his father would have been embarrassed at such show. There were police marksmanship medals, and yellowing newspaper clippings from the month of his death in 1955.

Well, I tried, Bob thought.

He thought of Mr. Yano’s card in his wallet.

Dear Mr. Yano, he imagined the note he’d write, I went through what remained of my father’s effects and found nothing that would help you in your quest. Maybe if—

And then yet another possibility occurred to him.

This here was the stuff his mother had gathered, after the funeral, before she launched into the land of drunkenness. But there was another three years when her sister, Agnes Bowman, a schoolteacher and spinster who had not yet found a man good enough, had come and stayed with them, and Aunt Agnes had raised him, sternly, not with love or tenderness, but out of a grim sense of family duty while Erla June drank herself to death and died before reaching the age of forty. Aunt Agnes was not a giving woman, which was all right. Aunt Agnes did the things that had to be done and didn’t have a lot of time for nursing boys like Bob, who in any case retreated into someplace dark for a few years after his father’s death, and so never made contact with her. Perhaps she was in her own dark place. That was okay; Aunt Agnes provided and guided and paid the bills and fed him; compared to that a squeeze or a hug wasn’t much of anything.

But then Bob gravitated toward Sam Vincent and his big, rambling, loud, smart, funny, competitive, welcoming family and eventually, through high school, lived with Sam, almost as a Vincent. Aunt Agnes saw no purpose therefore and moved away, sending a Christmas card every year.

Bob had visited her after his first tour in Vietnam in 1966 and as an adult discovered a decent, quiet woman, finally married to a widowed schoolteacher, living in Oranda, Virginia, in the Shenandoah Valley. It had been a nice visit, though not much had been said and damned if he could remember—

Goodwin!

Agnes Goodwin, her married name.

He didn’t know why, he hadn’t thought of it in years, but somehow it flew at him out of some lost file in his brain.

On Anywho.com he couldn’t even find an Oranda, nor on any map; he found an old map with the town located next to Strasburg, and identifying the town as Strasburg finally turned up a Goodwin. He made the blind call and located a cousin who knew other branches of the Goodwin family and guided him toward a Betty Frawley, of Roanoke, whose maiden name had been Goodwin and was that person’s uncle Mike Goodwin’s daughter.

“Ms. Frawley?”

“We don’t want none, if that’s what this is all about.”

“No, ma’am, it’s not. I am Bob Lee Swagger, a retired marine, calling from Crazy Horse, Idaho, on some family business. I am trying to locate my aunt, whose name was Agnes Bowman and who late in life married a Virginia man named Goodwin—”

“Aunt Agnes!”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Well, she was a good soul, bless her heart. She married Daddy after Mother died and although I would never be one to criticize Mother, I will tell you those may have been the best years of his life. And she nursed him through to the end.”

“She was good at that.”

“Her end followed shortly after, I’m sorry to say. You were a marine?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“In nineteen sixty-six, did you come and visit Agnes? I was eleven at the time and I have a very distinct memory of a tall, handsome young man who set all the hearts aflutter. He was just back from Vietnam, where he’d won some medals. He was Agnes’s nephew, I believe. Would that be you?”

“Yes, ma’am, though I’m far from handsome these days, if I ever was. I remember that day in Oranda well. It was the last time I saw her. She helped raise me after my father died and my mother—her sister—had some problems.”

“Families in those days pitched in. That’s the way it was. It’s not much like that anymore, but in those days, families helped out.”

“Ma’am, I’m just playing out a long shot here. My father died in nineteen fifty-five, and that’s when Aunt Agnes came and stayed with us, through ’fifty-eight or ’fifty-nine. As I say, it was then my mother’s decline began. Agnes ran the house for a time. I’m trying to gather up any mementos that might remain of my father. He was a marine too, and a law officer who died young. I thought that she might have had some effects, that you might have them, that something there might somehow relate to my father, something I missed or never knew about.”

“Sounds like a man trying to recover his father’s memory.”

“It may be that, ma’am.”

“Well, I think there’s a box somewhere. I’m not sure it made the move with me. It was all such old stuff, but I hated to just throw it out. It was somebody’s life, you just can’t throw it out.”

“Do you have it?”

“If I do, it’s in the basement and I’d have to look for it.”

“Ma’am, I’d be happy to come on out there and help you.”

“Well, I don’t have much to do these days, so I may as well go look for you. You leave me your address and we’ll see what we can find.”

And so, three weeks later, three weeks he’d spent alone on his property swinging that scythe every day, cutting down the brambles and thorns, a big envelope arrived from Roanoke, Virginia.

He opened it that night.

Oh, Christ.

First thing out was a picture of himself, his mother on a rare sober day, and stern Aunt Agnes, at a picnic table somewhere, ’57, ’58. He wore a Cardinals baseball cap, a T-shirt and jeans, and had scrawny arms and legs. “Bob Lee, Erla June, and Agnes, Little Rock, June 5, 1958,” the inscription read, in fading purple ink.

It brought back nothing, nothing at all.

Then came his mother’s death certificate, some yellowed insurance forms, her driver’s license, a bank book with NULL AND VOID stamped across it, a few Christmas cards from neighbors whose names meant nothing, Erla June’s obituary from the paper up in Fort Smith, a small gold crucifix with a pin that his mother had evidently worn, a few more photographs, mostly of strangers, a few more official forms and a few letters, most of them unopened.

There were eight in all. Evidently they’d arrived over the three years Agnes had lived with Bob and Erla June, some addressed to Mrs. Swagger, some to the Widow of Sgt. Swagger, some to Erla June by name.

He opened them, one by one. A former platoon member wanted to express his sadness and talk about the time Earl had saved his life on Guadalcanal. Then there was a schoolmate of Erla June’s, inquiring as to her health and welfare and expressing gratitude. There was a tax bill from Garland County and Bob realized he had finally paid it in 1984. The daughter of Col. William O. Darby, another Arkansas war hero, famous for having led “Darby’s Rangers” in Italy before he died in France, wrote to express her sorrow and offer moral and even financial support in case of family emergencies. Boy, Bob thought, talk about class.

Then, finally, an unopened letter, postmarked Kenilworth, Illinois, October 4, 1959, on creamy stationery with expensive lettering proclaiming the sender’s name and return address, John H. Culpepper, of 156 Sheridan Road.

Gently, he opened the heavy envelope, pulled out an equally heavy, creamy piece of stationery with Culpepper’s name and address tastefully emblazoned across the top.

Dear Mrs. Swagger:

I’m very sorry this letter is so late. I only learned by chance yesterday about your husband’s tragic death four years ago. I haven’t kept up with marines from the war. But I felt I had to express my sorrow at learning of the event. Earl Swagger was a very great man and helped me on my greatest day of need.

I was a young marine captain, and by default became commanding officer of Able Company, 2nd Battalion, 28th Marines during the battle of Iwo Jima. To say I was overmatched is to understate the situation considerably.

Things came to a head on D plus 2, as we called it, when it was my company’s turn to lead an assault on a particularly well-designed and well-defended Japanese emplacement. Left to my own devices, I would have gotten myself and more importantly my men slaughtered, because, quite frankly, I didn’t know what the hell I was doing. (I had used family connections to get myself a combat command, because I just had to fight.)

In any event, Earl, who was the battalion first sergeant, was sent down from headquarters to assist me. He certainly assisted me!

I’m sure you’ve read the citation. I’m proud to say I wrote it and worked hard to get it approved. I think it was my finest accomplishment in an otherwise—between you and me—completely mediocre military career. What he did that day was beyond question one of the great feats of arms in military history. From my vantage point on the slope beneath, he was literally Superman. How many Japanese shot at him we’ll never know, but he never showed a single moment’s hesitation and managed to single-handedly destroy the emplacement. He saved the lives of a hundred men that day!

Anyway, a few days later I was hit, thus ending my adventure in combat. Because I had not been a dynamic leader, I was not the focus of a lot of attention and I was feeling pretty blue on my cot in the hospital tent awaiting evacuation. Who should walk in but the legendary first sergeant himself. I’ll never forget that day! He was a god in that battalion, and here he was coming to visit me.

He said, “Well, Captain, I see you managed to get yourself banged up a bit.”

“Yes, First Sergeant,” I said, “I jumped this way and the Jap knew exactly which way that would be. I was lucky he was in a hurry.” (It was a leg wound.)

“Sir, I wanted you to have this. You were in command that day, you headed up the assault, I was just the fellow who was left standing. So it’s yours. Maybe it’ll cheer you up.”

He handed me something wrapped in cloth, about two feet long. I quickly opened it to discover a Japanese sword, what’s called a “banzai sword,” of the sort the Jap officers carried and all too often used in combat.

He said, “Your boys gave me that when I was heading back to Battalion after the fight. It came out of the blockhouse. Someone took it off the dead Jap officer just before they burned the place out with flamethrowers. That fellow tried to comb my hair with it. I thought you might want to have it.”

I should tell you that Japanese swords were prized war trophies, especially when taken in combat. I could have sold it, and indeed, over the next few weeks many officers tried to buy it off me, one offering $500. But it was one of my treasures.

The truth, however, is that it’s not mine. I didn’t earn it. Earl did, and it was given to me only out of his compassion for young men who’d done their best, even if the best wasn’t all that great, as in my case.

Now I think, What right do I have to have this sword? Please let me send it back to you. I understand Earl had a son. He should have it—though I should tell you, it’s very sharp and one of my own children has already cut himself with it. But it demonstrates what Earl did that day. Please let me know if you’d like me to send it on.

John H. Culpepper

Kenilworth, Ill.

Julie dropped him at the Boise airport, named for a hero of World War II, an aviator. He had a flight to Denver, then a longer one to Chicago, where he would arrive at another airport named for a World War II hero, also an aviator. He had reserved a car.

“I’ll be back tomorrow night,” he said. “Ten fifteen. Do you want me to take a cab home? I know you’ve got a rough day.”

“No, no, I’ll pick you up.” She was still the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen, still straw-blond with some gray in her hair and possibly in her eyes. She was a nurse and now administered a clinic in East Boise, a job she loved and gave herself to. The mother of his only child, she’d taken him in years ago and given him a chance at life when the whole world had seemed set on destroying him. But it was an old marriage by now, somewhat burnished, edging more to friendship and partnership than passion.

“Okay, I’ll—”

“Bob, this isn’t turning into one of your things?” She knew him so well it was a little frightening.

“Well, I don’t think so.”

“I know you. You’re really happiest out in the bush with Donnie Fenn, hunting other men and being hunted by other men.”

She knew Donnie Fenn well; she’d been married to him when he was KIA Vietnam while going to rescue his sniper team leader, who lay with a shattered hip. That team leader was Bob.

“I’m just trying to find a sword for this Japanese gentleman. He seemed like a very decent guy, I’d like to help him. That is all.”

“Yes, but I know your obsessions. You get something in your mind and it gets bigger and bigger and pretty soon you’ve talked yourself into Vietnam again.” It had happened a few times. “Sometimes you can’t help it. Someone comes for you and you must respond. No man on earth responds better or truer.”

“Sometimes I do okay.”

“But nobody is coming for you now. This is what I don’t understand. What you’re doing for this man, it’s very decent. But it’s so much. What’s going on? Why do you feel this obligation so intensely? Why is it so big to you? This isn’t some dry drunk thing, some excuse to go off on a crusade and get crazy?”

“No. It’s something I feel I owe my father. And the Japanese father.”

“Your father’s been dead since nineteen fifty-five. And his since nineteen forty-five. It’s all so long ago. How can an obligation remain to men dead half a century ago?”

“It don’t even make sense to me, honey. I have to do this one. I just do.”

“Just don’t find a way to go to war, all right? The good life is here. You’ve earned it. Enjoy it.”

“I’m too old for war,” he said. “I just want to drink and sleep and you won’t let me drink, so I guess I just want to sleep.”

“That’ll be the day,” she said.

6

THE BIG WHITE HOUSE

He missed it on the first run through Kenilworth, which seemed to be but a mile or so long on the edge of Lake Michigan about fifteen miles north of Chicago. The houses were big, mansions really, and clearly this Kenilworth was a spot where the rich lived, and if they lived overlooking the lake, they must be even richer.

But then he found it: the reason he had missed it was that there was no house at all, only a gateway, sheathed in vines and buried in the shadows of elms. You had to look hard for the numbers 1 5 6 on the pillar. He turned in, guided the rented Prizm a few hundred feet down what seemed a tunnel in the trees, and then at last burst into light at a circular driveway and a big, fine white house, one of those legendary places with about a hundred rooms and tile floors and a six-car garage. It was the sort of place where great families lived, back in the time when there were great families.

Bob parked and knocked, and after a time was greeted by a heavy, bearded man his own age in black, mainly. He was also a drinking man. He had a glass of something brown in his hand.

“Mr. Culpepper?”

“Mr. Bob Lee Swagger, I’m guessing.”

“Yes, sir, that’s me.”

“Cool name. So southern. ‘Bob Lee.’ Come on in. You’re right on time. You said two and two it is.”

“Thank you, sir.”

He stepped into a house that was magnificent, though in a museum kind of way. It seemed to be not lived in but preserved.

“Nice place,” Bob said.

“It sure is, but try unloading it in a market like this. You don’t have six million bucks in your pocket, do you?”

“No, sir.”

“Just a thought. Anyhow, care for a drink? I’m betting you’re a drinking man.”

“I was, but good. Thanks, no, sir. One drink and I wake up three days down the pike in Shanghai with a new wife.”

“That actually happened to me! Well, almost. Anyway, I sympathize. Been divorced?”

“Once. The drinking was part of it.”

“No fun, huh? I try to stay pleasantly lubed all day, at least until all this bullshit is over. I’ll refill if you don’t mind.”

He stopped at a bar, added a slug of Maker’s Mark to his glass and another cube, then turned.

“As I said in my letter, I remember the sword. I cut myself on it pretty badly in the fifties. It was sharp. You looked at it and something started to bleed.”

“As I understand it, the war swords were just meant to kill. Otherwise they were junk. They weren’t like the fancy ones the older Japanese in the flashy bathrobes carried.”

“My arm remembers how sharp it was.”

He pushed up his left sleeve. The scar was long and cruel.

“That there’s a forty-stitch scar, pard,” he said. “My one claim to macho. People look at that and think I’ve been in a knife fight. Have you ever been in a knife fight?”

“I had to kill a man with a knife once, sorry to say.”

“I thought so. I’m not impressing you any, I see. Anyhow, as I said, Dad died some years ago. As the only kid, I inherited the house. He went into advertising after the war, and he did very well. But we were from different planets. He went his way, I went mine. Advertising wasn’t for me. I never wanted to say the word client in my life, so I went into TV. I never had to say client. Instead, I had to say sponsor. Anyhow, I’ve got to sell this place to pay for my third divorce and this one’s a mess. Why are the beautiful young ones so hard to get rid of?”

“I couldn’t tell you that, sir,” Bob said with a smile.

“It’s because they’ve never heard the word good-bye. So when you say it to them, they take it personally.” He laughed. “This one wants my spleen for lunch as well as my dad’s fortune. Amazing.”

“Sounds rough, Mr. Culpepper.”

“Listen, even a genuine tough guy like you would get a cold sweat on this mission. Anyway, if you don’t mind, I’m going to take you to the storeroom in the attic and let you be. Maybe it’s there, maybe it’s not. I honestly don’t know what happened to it. I just don’t have it in me to go through all that stuff. You understand?”

“Sure. My attic’s a mess too.”

“Now—how can I say this? If you find something, you know, private.Uh, intimate. Maybe my dad had a stash of porn or letters from some girlfriend or even a boyfriend or something like that. Somethingindiscreet? Just leave it where you find it, all right? I’m not too interested in what is called the truth. I’d like to remember him as the distant, frozen, grim cadaver he was in life, all right? I’d hate to find out he was actually human.”

“I got you.”

They reached the third floor, the end of a hall, and entered a room. “Anyhow, I’ll leave you two old marines alone. If he didn’t get rid of it, it’s probably still here. Really, help yourself, take your time. The bathroom’s down the hall. If you want a drink, want to break for dinner, anything. I’m here alone with my legal problems and trying to get in contact with a daughter who seems to have run off with somebody calling himself a documentary filmmaker. Have you noticed? They’re all documentary filmmakers these days. If you need me, just holler. It’s your sword, really, more than it’s mine and it would make the old bastard happy to know it finally went to you and then back to Japan.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“Please don’t call me sir. I’m just Tom. John’s boy, Tom, son of theMr. Culpepper of Culpepper, Townsend & Mathers.”

“Loud and clear, Tom.”

“Can I call you Sarge? I always wanted to call someone ‘Sarge,’ just like in the movies.”

“Sure, but the name I answer to mostly is ‘Gunny.’ It’s from gunnery sergeant, a rank only the Marine Corps has.”

“‘Gunny.’ Oh, that is cool. Gunny, go to town!”

So Bob turned and faced what remained of the life of a man who once had commanded, however briefly, Able Company, 2/28, on a far-off place called Iwo Jima, a hell that neither his only son nor even Gunny Swagger, three-tour survivor of Vietnam, could imagine.

Back and back, the boxes took Bob through Culpepper’s life, and a biography somehow formed. Two wives, one much prettier than the other, and younger too, picked up sometime in the mid-’60s, by which time the only child, Tommy—he was evident too, a towheaded fatty, somewhat overwhelmed by his glamorous and successful dad—was in his sullen, shaggy teens.

Finally, an hour in and thirty-five boxes deep, having passed through adventures in advertising, he came to World War II. Presumably there was a box for Yale or Harvard too, wherever the guy went, but the war box held the usual junk, good conduct ribbons, battle stars, the Purple Heart, a few other trinkets, but the treasure was a marine seabook, chronicling assignments and a surpassing adequacy of performance. Bob went through it quickly and saw that yes, originally John Culpepper had been assigned to command a thirty-man marine detachment on the battleshipIowa in 1944. That was really a ticket to survival. That was saying, Rich boy, we’re looking out for you. You get to go home when it’s all over with a couple of Pacific battle stars, a captaincy, some nice stories to tell, and a leg up on all the O’Tooles and Zukowskis who were bobbing facedown in the red surf.

John had wanted to fight. He could have sat it out, but the records showed that late in January, he transferred, at sea, from the Iowa, to the troopship LCI-552, where elements of the 28th Regiment droned toward a date with death in the center of the largest Marine Corps invasion force ever assembled. It certainly was unusual. Possibly there’d been an injury aboard the LCI and a 28th officer injured himself and couldn’t continue duty, so John was shunted in fast. Or possibly John fucked up in some big, hideous way on the Iowa and was sent to the line company punitively. But more than anything, the move had the marks of pull all over it. Happened all the time. In ’Nam, boys would suddenly disappear a month into their thirteen-month tour, called stateside to work in the Pentagon. Somebody had complained to Mommy who complained to Daddy who’d done a congressman a million-dollar favor and so Junior caught the freedom bird home.

But not John Culpepper. He used his pull to get into battle, not out of it.

It couldn’t have been easy. A year on a battlewagon isn’t the best training for something like Iwo and when he got to the 28th the CO wouldn’t know him, the other officers wouldn’t know him, and the men wouldn’t know him. He’d go into the fight without much psychological support, not easy and made harder by far by the peculiar savagery of Iwo.

So John fought on Iwo for a week. On the third day, Earl Swagger came down from headquarters and got his men through the successful assault against the blockhouse on the northwestern flank of Suribachi as the 28th circled and cut off the five hundred-foot tall volcano. Then, a few days later, a shell landed close at hand; the young officer’s legs were shattered. He spent three nights in an aid station and was evacuated by hospital ship. He recuperated in Hawaii, where he married his fiancée, Tommy’s mother, Mildred, a plain girl also from the Boston area. By the time he was duty-ready, the A-bombs had been dropped, the war was over. He got to go home a hero, even if he’d probably never fired his carbine once.

It didn’t matter. He did what he was supposed to, even if he was scared shitless the whole time. That’s what won wars, the thousands of reluctant John Culpeppers, not the two or three Earl Swaggers.

But there was no sword.

Where could it be?

Maybe it got thrown out and off it went to the Kenilworth dump, to rust away to oblivion or be crushed to junk by a bulldozer.

Bob tried to think hard on the issue.

What is the quality of a sword?

Well, its sharpness, but that’s the sword as weapon. Think of the sword as object: the answer is, its awkwardness.

It’s long and thin and curved. You might display it, but it wouldn’t fit neatly into one of those standard cardboard boxes; no, you’d have to wedge it in.

Who’s packing these boxes? Probably some workingmen hired by the surviving son who has suddenly acquired a house he doesn’t particularly want and never remembers fondly, but he’s got to get it into shape, sell it before his wife files for divorce. So someone packs all this stuff, thinking not a bit about it, not engaged in the family’s life, having no special sense of the meaning of a sword taken in battle and—

Bob went to the first closet. No. But in the second one, he found three golf bags, and there, in the third one, amid the sixes and sevens and the drivers and the wedges and the putter was Captain Hideki Yano’s shin-gunto.

“Tom?”

“Oh, yeah, you found it,” said Tom Culpepper, rising from a desk in what had been his father’s study. He had his ever-present glass of Maker’s with him, apparently just recently freshened.

“I did, yes. It was in a golf bag. I thought you might want to have a look.”

“Yeah, I suppose I do. Yeah, that’s it,” he said, taking it, holding it to the light. “Here, let me point out something. See this peg or whatever it is?”

He pointed to a stub a few inches above the circular hilt of the old thing. It seemed clotted with some kind of black tar or something, smeary and gummy. But it also, in the right angle of light, threw up tiny puncture wounds.

“I remember the day I got cut. I’d snuck it out of Dad’s study and we were waving it around, playing pirate or something. ’Fifty-seven, ’fifty-eight, sometime around there. Then we got the bright idea to take it apart. Don’t ask me why. We examined it and it seemed to be held together by this little wooden pin through this hole. See, it runs from one side to the other. That secures the handle to the blade, I’m guessing.”

“I see,” said Bob, who already knew the correct terms from the Internet: the bamboo peg was mekugi, the hole into which it fitmekugiana.

“But it was stuck. We tried to drive it out with a hammer and nail and all we did was dent it. God, when I think of it now, I’m a little ashamed. We had no idea. It was just a big sword thing for killing pirates.”

“You were just kids. How could you know?”

“We never got it out. I hate to remember this thing on the floor and I’m whacking on it, the blade is getting all crudded up on the floor. It’s got some kind of gunk on it. Real thick black stuff. I don’t know if the Japanese officer put it there, or your father, or mine, or someone at the factory, or what. But it’s not coming out easily.”

“No, it’s not. Someone wanted to hold it together. Go on, pull it.”

John Culpepper’s son Tom drew the sword out. It buzzed against the tightness of the metal scabbard, then described an arc across the room as he brandished it.

“Wow,” he said. “This baby still wants to cut something. Here, it scares me a little.”

He handed it over to Bob, who in taking it felt some kind of charge—what? a thrill, a buzz, a vibration—as indeed the baby still wanted to cut something.

You could tell in a flash it was superbly designed for its purpose, a thin ridge running each side of the gently curving blade, reaching the tip—kissaki, he knew it to be called. He felt the blasphemous power of the thing. It had exquisite balance, but the blade seemed something even more, somehow weirdly alive. He waved it just a little and could have sworn that it contained some soft core that pitched forward in the momentum, speeding toward its destination.

He held it up to the light. Indeed, the blade had seen hard use. The steel was dull upon close inspection, a haze of crosshatched nicks and cuts. Small black flecks attacked it randomly. On the edge—yakiba, he knew—almost microscopic chips were missing, whether from small boys whacking it against a tree or a Japanese officer drawing it against a marine’s neck. The handguard—tsuba—was a heavy circle of iron, like an ornate coaster almost. The grip was tacky: the sword was covered in gritty fish skin, then wrapped elaborately in a kind of flat cotton cording that was darkened with sweat or grime, worn in places and frayed.

If you waved it, the sword rattled ever so gently, because, he now saw, the guard wasn’t secured tightly by spacers.

“I remember as a kid you could slice paper with it, that’s how sharp it was,” said Tom Culpepper. “Here, let’s try it.”

He grabbed a heavy piece of stationery and Bob touched edge to paper and felt the sword pause, then slide through neatly. Tom dropped two pieces of paper to the ground.

“I can’t believe it’s that sharp,” he said. “Nothing should be that sharp!”

7

NARITA

You can’t get mad.

You can’t get mad.

Yet it was all he could do to sit there.

It’s a test, he told himself. They’re testing the gaijin. They want to see if I have the maturity, the patience, the commitment to politeness and ceremony to be worth talking to in Japan.

Or maybe, he thought, they’re like cops everywhere: they just don’t give a fuck.

Whichever, the result was the same. He sat in the Narita International Airport police station, forty miles outside Tokyo. It was a stark, functional space with nothing like the swanky, shopping-mall flash of the public hallways on higher levels.

The process had all been set up. Having discovered the sword, he had called the retired Colonel Bridges of the Marine Historical Section, explained all, and Bridges had volunteered to run the paperwork, which was considerable. He had the D.C. contacts and knew someone who knew someone at the Japan External Trade Organization, or JETRO, on the West Coast, which had some mysterious, influential connection with the Ministry of Economy, Trade, and Industry, known as METI, one of those large governmental entities with fingers in many pies. Arrangements were made with customs to let the sword into the country. It would be removed from quarantine immediately to the Narita Airport police department, where a license would be duly issued. Thus with the customs certificate and the license, it was all supposed to be legal.

But something was wrong. Now he waited in the central room, near the desk, with beaten Korean workers, with angry salarymen who’d gotten drunk and acted out and had to be put down with a thump on the head, with grifters and cheats, maybe with the odd minor gangster or two, as gangsters were said to be spread widely throughout Japanese society. They were called yakuza, he knew, “yaks” for short.

But, Wait, wait, wait.

Finally, Ah, yes, you have sword.

His interrogator wore a pale blue uniform with a small handgun—a Smith & Wesson possibly?—in a flapped black holster. He was an unprepossessing man, not one of your beefier cop types.

Yes, sir. The documents are there. I just need the license, and that was supposed to be arranged.

Arranged?

Yes, sir, here’s the letter.

He handed it over.

It’s a relic. It’s from the war. Mr. Yano’s father died in battle and lost his sword. I believe this was it, that it was taken in battle by my father. Mr. Yano came to America looking for the sword. I didn’t have it then and it took me a couple of months, but I think I have it now.

The uniformed officer took the document.

The sword is supposed to be delivered here from the customs office upstairs. It’s all arranged.

Swords are very dangerous. You must wait. I will go check and call your name. Please return to your seat.

And so Bob sat. He thought it would take a few minutes, but the minutes dragged on until sixty of them mounted up, then sixty more. Maybe he could go out, get a book, a newspaper, a cup of coffee, something.

Everyone else in the waiting room had more patience. They could sit without making a sound, without fuss; the passage of time meant nothing to them.

A name would be called out, off they’d go, to be interviewed, deposed, to give a statement, make an identification.

Finally in the third hour a name was called and after a second he realized that it was some sort of approximation of Swagger. It came out “Su waggaa.”

“Yes, here.”

“Ah. Yes. You come, please.”

He went with the officer—a different one, slighter, younger, though in uniform with a little gun in a holster as well—and back through squad and staff rooms, more insurance agency really than cop shop, because there wasn’t the sense of bully-macho, of men who used their weight to require obedience, that you felt in an American variation.

Finally, he was led into a room; a uniformed senior police officer gestured for him to sit down.

“Sorry, we had to do some checking. It’s fine for METI to have plans, but no one here knew a thing. Bureaucracy.”

“I understand. Sorry for the trouble.”

“Called your embassy, had to check with METI, the man there was out to lunch. This is unusual.”

“People don’t usually bring them into Japan. Sure, the swords are so beautiful it’s usually the other way around. Sorry for the problem.”

“Tell me please again.”

Bob went through it, trying to keep his sentences short and clear. His father, Captain Yano, Iwo. The surprise visit, the request. His discovery, his decision to honor his father, Mr. Yano’s father, Mr. Yano and his family. JETRO and METI, his talks with the METI rep in L.A., the letter, the sense that arrangements had been made. He concluded with, “Is there a problem?”

“A small one. You see, this is shin-gunto. You know shin-gunto?”

“Sure. Army sword. I know it ain’t nothing fancy, not like the beautiful swords that are so much a part of the Japanese heritage.”

“Yes. You see it’s not much. Not a beautiful piece by any means, like some. Old, rather hard used. What you don’t see is that we have a regulation forbidding this kind of sword, the army sword, from coming in.”

“That kind of sword?”

“Yes. You see it’s gendaito—”

“Modern.”

“Yes, and so officially it’s not an antique that tells us of our heritage and reflects the skill of our artisans. It’s merely a weapon. We would regard it as we would regard a gun. You know there are no guns in Japan.”

“That’s why I left my bazooka at home.”

“Excellent decision. Anyhow, the gendaito sword, the gun, in Japanese eyes, legally, they would be the same thing.”

“Okay.”

“But I understand and I appreciate. The man who visited you probably wasn’t thinking precisely about this issue. METI wasn’t thinking about this issue, only about necessary import forms, difficulties with customs, that sort of thing.”

“Sorry for the trouble. See, I wanted it to be a surprise. The man I mean to present it to, he doesn’t know I’m here. I only wired him, told him I thought I’d have some good news for him. The reason I did it that way was that when he visited me, he preferred to do it without making an appointment. He didn’t want me going out of my way to arrange hospitality. He was trying to be as helpful as possible. I felt I owed him the same. I knew if I told him I was coming, he’d make a big to-do, he’d meet me, he’d have the house cleaned, all his kids would be dressed up, it would be a major event. I didn’t care to do that. I was trying to act appropriately.”

“I see. I believe you. What I’m going to do is bend the rules a little. I have prepared a sword license for you.”

He produced the document, which looked a little like the Treaty of Ghent, with all its formal kanji characters in perfect vertical columns, utterly meaningless to Bob. It had been stamped dramatically with some kind of red image, and it also had an impressive official serial number.

“See here, where it says ‘year of fabrication.’ By our standards anything that is showa is gendaito, showa meaning from the age of the Emperor Hirohito onward, that is, from nineteen twenty-six onward. So in ‘year of fabrication’ I have written eighteen twenty-five, which puts it in the legally acceptable antique category of shin-shinto, meaning anything from eighteen hundred up to the first year of Emperor Hirohito’s reign, nineteen twenty-six. Given the deep curve of the blade, I am told by our sword expert, that is at least arguable. Therefore neither you nor the man who receives the gift should be in any legal jeopardy. That is what has taken so long.”

“I’m very appreciative.”

“No, it is we who should be appreciative. As I say, I have an officer here who knows a good deal about these things. He understood what a warm gesture of friendship and reconciliation it was for you to return the blade to the family of the original officer. It was his idea how to proceed. He examined the sword very closely. That gesture should not be hindered by stupid regulations.”

“Again, I say thank you very much, sir.”

“All right now. You must keep this license with the blade at all times and I would keep the sword bagged until you make the presentation.”

“I will of course do so.”

“Mr. Swagger, I hope you enjoy your visit to Japan.”

“It is my pleasure, sir. I know I will.”

8

THE YANOS

After a night in a hotel in a part of town called Shinjuku, which he picked at random for economy, after a shower, a western dinner, a walk, a western breakfast, he walked to the train station, through mobs that astonished him.

The city was like being inside a television set. It seemed to be comprised mostly of vertical circuitry, very complex, very miniaturized. He was suddenly transported to somebody else’s future. The reigning design principle seemed to be no wastage. Things were crammed in, built within bigger things, wedged this way and that. Even the alleyways were jammed with restaurants, stalls, and retail shops, each with a worm of neon above it and, of course, a sign. It was a literate society: writing was everywhere, in big signs that counseled certain consumer choices, in the endless series of official designations, of regulations and rulings and serial numbers, or directional indicators.

The Japanese hurtled by him; all were on schedules, no one lagged, all had destinations. The intensity of the crowds was somewhat shocking. At least in this Shinjuku place it was like New Year’s Eve in Times Square 24/7. The crowds seemed organisms of their own. A red light stilled them all, but no other force on earth could, and when the green came on, baby, it was D-day, everybody hitting the beach at once. It was all go, go, go, now, now, now. Most of the men wore suits, most of the women wore suits. He knew they were called salarymen; they worked like slaves, they made the country go, they conformed, they never let loose, they always stayed on track.

You know where that leads you. All that repression, all that discipline, all that pressure to conform, all that rigidity. It builds, it builds, it builds, and so when they blow, they blow. Examples of the blow are rife in history: thus a Nanking, a Pearl Harbor, a kamikaze. No prisoners. Australian pilots beheaded for the cameras. Killing ten enemy soldiers before you go, thus choosing death over life every damn time.

And when the wiring blew sexually, it really blew.

On the JR train to the suburbs, which arrived on the minute, probably the second, he sat next to a fellow who could have been an accountant, a salesman, a teacher, a computer designer—neat suit, horn-rimmed glasses, hair slicked down, unself-conscious, focused, driven. But Bob saw what had the fellow’s interest; it wasn’t the Wall Street Journal but some comic book about bound teen girls being violated by other teen girls with tools that were exactly what they seemed, only bigger, the drawings voluptuous and specific and amplified. It could get you arrested in some places in America; here, a fellow who looked like he understood mortgages read it casually, apparently following the story with some kind of rapture. Bob looked up and down the crowded car and saw at least two other men reading books with brightly colored, almost gaily cartoonized rape scenes on the covers. No one noticed, no one cared.

Last night he’d wandered into a sex zone, a place called Kabukicho, where all this stuff was ramped up ever higher in blue neon, on billboards and videos in store windows, in the dives where the barkers tried to entice visitors into entering. Yet no one talked to him or beckoned him; he got the sense that the Japanese may have a sexual imagination next to no one’s on earth and elaborate means of satisfying it, but it was a Yamato-only thing. No gaijin need apply. The alleyways and unknown byways and unnamed streets of the strange little empire of Kabukicho, lit by an infinite replication of vertically arrayed signs with names like Prin-Prin and Golden Gals and Club Marvel, were coagulated with flesh hunters: they wanted to see it, smell it, stroke it, lick it, suck it, fuck it, or maybe even eat it. It was a carnivore’s glee, a raptor’s urgent need, and its passion amazed him, and maybe frightened him a little.

Now he rode the train with a million or so other souls and got off at a far station, carrying his bag. He checked the instructions written out for him in painful English by the hotel’s concierge, a gentleman of much dignity and precision who had made the necessary phone calls.

He knew: leave the station, find a cab. There wasn’t going to be any driving in Tokyo’s mad traffic, even in the suburbs, made more lethal for Americans by the fact that it required driving on the left, not the right. Why didn’t MacArthur fix that?

The cab was driven by a man in white gloves and was spotless. Even the seats were lined in white doily. Commercial buildings and elaborate buses floated by, and uniformed attendants were everywhere, queuing lines, directing traffic, pointing to parking spaces; again the sense of all the room being neatly organized and partitioned, controlled by some central committee somewhere, so that no odd-shaped parcel went underutilized.

Finally, they found it. It was a big house, set back from other big houses—Yano was clearly well-off—and not nearly so jammed in as were most of the other houses in Tokyo. It was surrounded by an elaborate garden in which someone took a lot of pride.

He checked his watch: 7 p.m. Tokyo time, that seemed about right.

He paid, went to the trunk, took out the canvas travel bag, opened it, and out came the sword wrapped in a red scarf.

He headed up the walk; the big low house with all its wooden crosshatching and the precision of the garden absorbed him. He knocked on the door.

There were sounds from inside, and in a few seconds, the door slid open and there, in a kimono, absolutely astonished, was Philip Yano.

The retired officer looked the same out of a suit as in one: every hair in place, face extremely clean shaven, muscular under the blue-white pattern of his kimono. He wore white ankle socks. His right eye opened in stupefaction while the damaged one stayed flat.

“Mr. Yano, sir, remember me? Bob Lee Swagger. Sorry for barging in like this.”

“Oh, Mr. Swagger!” Yano’s mouth fell open, but he regained control in an instant. “I am honored to have you here. My goodness, why didn’t you tell me you were coming? I was expecting some kind of letter. I am astonished.”

“Well, sir, the more I thought about it, the more it seemed to me that the occasion demanded a personal visit. Both our fathers would have preferred that. It’s my pleasure.”

“Please, please, come in.”

Bob stepped into a ground-level vestibule, removed his shoes, then turned as Mr. Yano quickly summoned the family.

The first thing Bob noticed was a pair of eyes peeping out at him mischievously. A girl of about four peered around a corner. His eyes met hers, and her face dissolved into delighted laughter as she ducked back, giggling. Then she peered around again.

“Hi there, sweetie,” Bob said to the child.

Meanwhile, two strapping teenage boys in jeans and sweatshirts came in, barefoot.

“Mr. Swagger, may I present my sons, John and Raymond.”

“Hi guys,” he said, bowing.

A young woman arrived.

“My first daughter, Tomoe.”

“Ma’am.”

“And the little devil down there is named Miko.”

Again Miko giggled, then buried her face in her mother’s dress.

Bob had an immediate response to her. She was one of those dynamos. She hadn’t mastered her culture’s reticence yet and might never do so. She was, he could tell, a bold, brave child, full of beans, as the old saying went.

“Howdy, little girl,” he called, and she found that very amusing.

“And my wife, Suzanne.”

“Mr. Swagger, sir, we are so honored and pleased—”

“As I was telling your husband, the honor and the pleasure are mine. I hope I haven’t come at the wrong time.”

“No, no, no, please, do come in, it’s so nice to see you.”

There was a lot of bowing and smiling, a lot of awkward but well-meant politeness, but he felt overwhelming warmth.

Yano spoke quickly to his wife in Japanese, then turned to Bob.

“I remind her what an extraordinary man you are, how honored we are to have a marine of such accomplishments visit our humble house.”

“You’re so kind, but all that’s way past. Anyhow, I found this. I wanted it returned to your family.”

With that, he turned the bundle over to Mr. Yano.

“I think that has to be your father’s. It was in the possession of the son of the commanding officer of the unit my father was with that day. I have a later letter from him stating that my father gave him the sword on Iwo Jima, probably February twenty-seventh, nineteen forty-five, in an aid station where he was awaiting evacuation. I found that letter in some effects of an aunt and from that I traced it back to the commander’s family and located his son and heir; I traveled out there and found the sword.”

“I don’t know what to say. It was such a generous thing to do.”

“Well, as I told you, I don’t think I could ever be the man my father was, but I wanted to do something that would honor his memory and your father’s memory. Both were brave men. I hope I have.”

Yano held the thing, feeling its weight, its balance, but still hadn’t unwrapped it. It was as if he was forestalling the moment.

“I do want to warn you,” Bob said, “there’s not much to see. As you said, it’s a military relic, much abused, pretty grimy. The scabbard needs paint, the grip is all loose, the hilt rattles a little bit, the wrapping around the grip is pretty shabby, and it’s missing that little metal loop through the end of the handle where I believe a tassel or something went. The blade has seen hard usage too; it’s all scratched, nicked up, has a few bits missing at the edge. It’s a sword that’s been to war, not one for a parade or a court ceremony.”

“I will put it aside for now. Please, come in and rest, tell us of your journey. Sit, relax, have tea or some kind of juice. I remember that you do not drink, or I would offer you sake. Please, come in and make yourself comfortable.”

He gave his guest a pair of slippers. Bob put them on and followed his host up a set of stairs, down a hall, and into the living room, which was full of western furniture though on a smaller scale.

Yano spoke quickly to his wife, who answered, bowed slightly before Bob—Bob bowed back awkwardly—and asked him if he preferred bottled water, tea, coffee, or juice.

“Ma’am, the bottled water would be fine.”

She spoke quickly to the daughter Tomoe, who hustled out and returned in what seemed like seconds with a tray and various beverages.

Yano maneuvered Bob into what had to be a preferred seat and Bob knew enough to refuse twice—“No, no, really”—before acceding to the request. He was immediately to the left of an alcove in which family mementos were displayed: certificates of accomplishment, photographs of Yano in uniform at various military installations, pictures of the boys in baseball uniforms, and of the older girl at graduation—as one would find in any American officer’s home. Down in the corner, Bob saw a sepia photo of a man in a tight tunic with a military cap rigidly in place over a clean-shaven head; that had to be Mr. Yano’s father.

Bob was asked about his trip and he had one story to tell, only one, but it got a laugh.

“The worst part of the flight was getting through security.”

“Yes, it’s very bad now.”

“Well, for me it’s always an adventure. I light up a metal detector like you wouldn’t believe. Sirens go off, bells ring, guys drop down on ropes. No, I’m exaggerating, but I have a metal hip and so I always make the detectors crazy. So I’m always hauled aside and gone up one side, down the other. It makes everybody nervous. I’m sure if he knew how much trouble it was going to cause, the guy who shot me would have picked another target.”

Yano laughed, spoke quickly in Japanese to his obedient sons. Bob thought he picked out a word that had to be “Vietnam” in a Japanese accent.

Then each of the boys identified himself: Raymond, seventeen, played baseball, was going off to Chuo University next year to study electrical engineering. John, fourteen, also played baseball, was in his second year of junior high school, wasn’t sure what he’d study in college.

Tomoe, nineteen, was at Keio University, in premed. She was a grave, beautiful girl who didn’t talk at all and seemed to have been unofficially designated the hostess. It was as if the family was well drilled on jobs and responsibilities: the two boys were audience; Tomoe was staff and logistics; Suzanne, the wife and mother, was benevolent godmother; and Philip was master of ceremonies, host, and interpreter. He alone spoke English with precision, Suzanne was second, and for the older boys and Tomoe English was largely theoretical. Meanwhile, the adorable little Miko was as unself-conscious as a wood sprite, giggling and mischievous. She seemed to have conceived some unique attraction to Bob, and he noted that she sometimes stared at him. When he winked at her, she dissolved in laughter.

She whispered something to her mother.

“Swagger-san,” said Suzanne, “my daughter thinks you are the Tin Man from Wizard of Oz.”

Everybody laughed.

Swagger remembered the character from the movie he’d watched with his daughter many years ago. He saw the tall, glowing, strange-looking fellow with a gigantic tin chest and a funnel on his head. He must look like that to the child.

“Some mornings I feel like I could use some oil to get my joints working,” Bob said, “so maybe she’s onto something. Sweetie, I ain’t made of metal, just skin, like everyone else.”

But Miko had decided. Swagger was the Tin Man.

The family sat completely intent on Bob. The Japanese were well schooled in hospitality, and as they took the gaijin in, the language barrier quickly seemed to melt away.

Soon enough Miko decided she wasn’t getting enough attention. At a certain moment she assaulted her father like a linebacker seeking a quarterback and scrambled up to his lap.

Everybody laughed.

“She is a little cannonball,” said Philip Yano. “A late arrival to our family. Most unexpected. Now much loved.”

She looked over at Swagger and stuck out her tongue, then, laughing merrily, buried her face in her father’s chest, squirming mightily to find comfort until she grew bored, at which time she’d assault another family member.

Through all this, the red bundle sat on the sofa, next to Mr. Yano. Never once did he address it, glance at it, seem to relate to it at all. For all intents and purposes, it did not exist.

But at last it was time.

“Mr. Swagger, may I take you to my shop and we will examine the sword there?”

“Yes, absolutely.”

Mr. Yano spoke quickly to his daughter in Japanese.

“I ask Tomoe to accompany us and take notes,” he said. “That way I have a record of my first impressions that I may later consult.”

“Of course.”

Bob followed Mr. Yano downstairs. The tiny room they entered was scrupulously neat and on one side were seven Japanese swords of various lengths and curvatures, in brightly lacquered scabbards, or saya, as the Japanese called them. On another wall were shelves with a variety of texts on swords. On the bench were stones, a small hammer, a few bottles of oil, what looked to be some sort of powder puff, various tools, and rags, all neatly folded.

“I see you’re serious about the swords.”

“I’m trying to learn the art of polishing. It’s very difficult, and I haven’t really the patience for it. But I labor on, thinking, If I know this, then I really know something.”

“I get you. Sometimes it’s best to lose yourself in the tiny. It keeps the world out; at the same time, it is the world.”

The father translated for the daughter, who replied swiftly enough.

“She says you must have been Japanese in an earlier life. It would explain much.”

“I’ll take that as a compliment.”

“And so you should, and now to the sword.” He confronted the red bundle before him on the desk.

“These things have been an obsession in our country for more than a thousand years, literally,” said Philip Yano. “A westerner might say it’s just a piece of steel. But you see in it all our pathologies: our love of courage but also our love of violence. Our sense of justice but also our willingness to kill. The rigor of our society, the corruption of that rigor. Discipline, skill, but also tyranny, even dictatorship. I have been studying them hard for a year now, ever since—well, ever since retirement. Yet still I know almost nothing. There are men here who have given their lives over to the study of such things.

“Now you have given me the ultimate moment in my life. The studying I’ve done the past year now has formal application not merely to the nation and the culture but to the family. Really, my friend, I can’t thank you enough or honor your generosity more highly. I am eternally obligated.”

“It’s one soldier reaching out to another soldier to honor two other soldiers, who happen to be their fathers. We put in enough time in shit-holes to have earned this little moment. Let’s enjoy it.”

“And we shall.”

He opened the bundle and the object lay before him, battered, worn thin in places, drawn through history.

He spoke to his daughter, who recorded assiduously; then Yano translated for Bob.

“I see shin-gunto furniture of the ’thirty-four issue, absent tassel, but the scabbard is metal, meaning the ’thirty-nine variant, and so not original to the furnishings. Hmmm, wear on the wrappings, some grime, possibly my father’s sweat and a bit of his blood. Or someone else’s blood. Looking carefully at the peg, I see traces of some black, gummy substance, tar perhaps, perhaps ink. I see marks of recent pressure, and the seal of the gummy material has been broken. The gum or ink just under the rupture of the broken seal is of a darker texture, suggesting that it was shielded from the light until quite recently.”

“What’s that mean?” Bob asked.

“I don’t know. I have no idea. I suppose someone tried to hammer out the pin.”

“Tommy Culpepper told me that when he was a kid, he and his buddies did try to get that out; they wanted to take it apart. But they didn’t have any luck.”

Mr. Yano said nothing.

Finally, he said, “All right. The blade.”

Almost gingerly, he reached down and removed the sword from its scabbard and laid the weapon on the bench.

“Koto?” his daughter said.

“Possibly a shinto imitation of koto,” he said.

“It looks koto to me,” she said in English.

“Yes. Yes, it does. Maybe—” and he paused.

In the little room the silence grew as the man studied the sword, clearly perplexed, perhaps even disturbed. His face became mute to expression, his eyelids seemed suddenly to acquire weight and density, and his breathing became almost imperceptible.

Finally, he said, “Most provocative. Unlikely, but most provocative.”

Then he turned to Bob.

“What is it you say: the plot thickens?”

“Yes, sir. Meaning things just got more complicated.”

“Indeed. In the war, Japan needed blades. Two companies were set up to manufacture blades, in the hundreds of thousands. Those would be the blades called shin-gunto, judged today to be of no consequence except as souvenirs. I had always assumed that my father would have had such a weapon. Most did, or at least many did. He probably himself believed that.

“But at the same time, other likelihoods existed. Many older blades were turned into the military out of patriotic commitment by enthusiastic families, and they were rather cavalierly desecrated by the sword manufacturers, who after all were not artists but humble factory workers. Their exquisite koshirae—that is, their fittings, the handle, the hilt, the tsuba, and on and on—were simply dumped. It would make certain men weep to think of all that artwork, that craft and skill consigned to the dump pile. The swords were shortened from the rear to bring them to the prescribed length—that is, the tang was cut off and with it was lost much of the inscribed information from the original smith, information as to the date of smelting, the lord for whom the work was done, how the blade cut, perhaps even giving the sword a name or offering a prayer to a god of war. Part of the original lower blade was ground off to lengthen the tang, a new hole was drilled in the grip, and the military mounts were put on. The whole thing was shoved into a metal scabbard and sent to—well, wherever the Sphere was operating, be it China or Burma or the Philippines. And thus a masterpiece was effectively hidden in a wartime disguise.”

“Is that what happened here?”

“I don’t know. It’s not impossible. Clearly this is an ancestral blade, shortened for wartime use. By shape and grace, as my daughter has noted, it appears to be koto—old. Koto blades were generally thinner and more graceful and sharper, meaning livelier in the hand than shinto blades. Koto means ‘old’ as in—well, it differs, but roughly ‘old’ as in before sixteen hundred. Of course there are complexities. Possibly a shinto smith—that is, someone after sixteen hundred—merely duplicated the shape of the koto blade. It happened frequently; the swordsmiths, after all, were merchants, they did custom orders, they responded to market forces, they tried different things.”

“So you’re telling me this sword might be some kind of antique, a historical artifact. Would it be valuable?”

“Very possibly, not that we could ever sell such a piece. It is ours, it is of our blood. It is my father’s. What I’m telling you is that it might be, ah, interesting. Meaning of interest to more than just our humble Yano clan. Interesting to scholars, interesting to historians, interesting to the nation and the culture. What is far more provocative is the sword’s heritage, what we can learn of it from what’s left of its tang. If that looks promising, we might have the sword polished. I’m not good enough to attempt it. It’s a time-consuming discipline only practiced by a few at the highest level, but if the sword has secrets, a polishing will liberate them. We’ll see its soul if we polish it.”

9

NII OF SHINSENGUMI

Nii of Shinsengumi was an obedient samurai. He obeyed his great lord Kondo-san in all things. He would die for Kondo-san. Kondo-san, after all, had seen talent in the wild street-boy, aggression, perhaps even a future. Many hoped for such a thing, but it had actually happened to Nii. Nii was taken from nothingness into Shinsengumi. He finally belonged to somebody, to something; he was no longer an orphan, dirty, laughed at by other children. His fluffy body hardened under discipline. He learned things that astonished him, and his faith in himself grew appropriately to his love for his great lord.

He was still young, but in Shinsengumi, all things were possible. The group was comprised of the best men, and though its discipline was severe, the pleasure and the privileges attendant upon joining such chosen ones were omnipotent.

He learned the katana, the long cutting sword, its intricate economy of force and power, its strength and its grace. Applied correctly, with judgment and experience, katana could cut through anything including bodies, fully, one side to the other. He imagined unleashing it: the swing, the thunder of the cut, the spewing, jetting blood, the scream of the stricken, his stillness.

He learned wakizashi, the shorter, personal defense sword. It was an indoor sword. It would not catch on ceilings or doorjambs, and yet it too had almost the same power as katana. No one could stop it if a determined Shinsengumi applied it; he saw short, harder cuts, the slack stunned look of the cut, dissolving into pain, a cough that issued blood, the collapse to the floor like a sack of grain.

He learned tanto. Tanto was short, and without nearly the curve of katana and wakizashi, for it was not made for cutting but for thrusting. If he put his strength behind it, Nii could shove it deeper into a body than anyone in Shinsengumi. He could easily reach the blood-bearing organ and he knew exactly where to pierce: down, through the shoulder on a slight angle, into the pumping heart. Or up from the back, next to the spine, seven vertebrae from the neck up, again piercing the heart. Pierced, the heart would yield its treasure in seconds; the body it sustained would go instantly soft as if its knees had melted, its eyes would roll up into its skull and it would fall without discipline to the floor, frequently shattering teeth when it landed. The blood would pool like an ocean.

But tanto held another possibility. Disgraced or surrounded, in tanto lay a hope for dignity. Nii of Shinsengumi knew what he must do to spare himself the shame and sustain Kondo-san’s affection forever. He knew he could do it too; he didn’t need a second.

He’d ram the blade fiercely into the left side of the pit of his own stomach, a minimum of three inches, more likely four to five. Better yet, six, though not many could force themselves to push for that long. Then one would smartly draw it across his belly, just under the navel. Tanto was always kept sharp for that purpose. His guts would slip out wetly amid a flood of blood, shit, urine, and other substances. It was said that one had eight seconds of consciousness after the blade reached its point of arrival. They would be an interesting eight seconds. Would one scream? Would one beg for the pain to stop? Would one be unmanned?

Not Nii of Shinsengumi. He could not disgrace himself before his lord. He would be silent, for in his pain would be the sheer rapture of a warrior’s pure death. That was the way of the warrior. Death was the way—

The music on his iPod stopped.

Damn, the battery was running down. Again! He had the worst iPod! It always let him down.

He’d been listening to Arctic Monkeys live in concert at the Brixton United football stadium, the great song “Whatever People Say I Am, That’s What I’m Not.” The beat had him really pumped up. He’d felt it to his bones.

Aghhhh. It would be a long night without Arctic Monkeys. He reached for and lit a Marlboro. He sat in a sleek Nissan Maxima, jet black, five on the floor, half a block down from the Yanos’ house.

His job was the American; he would stay with the American, and he would call in and report to Kondo-san any movement or change in plans. He’d stay the night if he had to.

He had a Chinese-made wakizashi in saya wedged into his belt diagonally up his back; he had a Smith & Wesson Model 10 .38 Special. He wore a black Italian shirt, a black Italian suit, a black Italian hat, and a pair of extremely expensive Michael Jordan Nikes. He wore Louis Vuitton sunglasses, which had cost him more than 40,000 yen. They were really cool. He wore his hair in a glistening crew, held taut and bristly by Yamada Wax. It was perfectly trimmed. He was twenty-three, strong as a bull, and ready for anything. He had chosen death.

Nii of Shinsengumi was a very good samurai.

10

BLACK RUST

“The rust,” said Tomoe Yano in English. “Look at the rust, Father.”

“Oh, what beautiful rust,” said Philip Yano.

Bob thought, Are they nuts?

“That’s koto rust. No rust is so black as koto rust.”

“Beautiful, beautiful black rust,” said Philip. “Oh, so beautiful.”

Wearing rubber surgeon’s gloves, the father disassembled the sword. He used a small hammer and a pin, perfectly sized, to drive the bamboo peg out of the grip. It popped out effortlessly. He tracked the little nub of bamboo down as it rolled on his bench, then stared at it.

“Shinto, at least. Maybe original, maybe koto.”

“Then why so easy? It just fell out.”

Bob remembered: the peg had been stuck. But he didn’t say anything; what did he know?

“I don’t know. Maybe it was disassembled recently. I can’t say. One of many questions. This is very interesting.”

Philip Yano slid the grip off, then carefully disassembled the guard—tsuba, Bob knew—and several spacers, seppa, and finally the collar, habaki, and laid out the parts symmetrically on the bench, blade at the bottom of the formation, grip above, hilt laid flat, and four spacers.

Then they saw a piece of paper folded tightly about the metal of the tang.

“The paper,” the young woman said gravely.

“Yes, I see it.”

“Father, pick it up. See what it is.”

“No, no, not yet. Pen ready?”

“Yes.”

He spoke in a swift blizzard of Japanese. Then he translated.

“The tsuba—that is, guard—is government issue, the model of ’thirty-nine also. So when it found its new scabbard, it was rehilted, this is what I tell Tomoe. Spacers—seppa—also military issue, as is habaki, nothing special. Two holes, indicating it has been cut down, but we already knew that.”

“The rust,” Tomoe said.

“What is it with the rust?” asked Bob. The tang itself was swallowed in black erosion, so much so a fine black dust had fallen on the bench beneath it.

“The blacker the rust,” said Philip Yano, “the older the blade. What it means, Swagger-san, is that this sword is at least four hundred years old. Somehow it ended up in the military furniture of nineteen thirty-four.”

“Is that uncommon?”

“It happened.”

“So it’s not a blade manufactured by machine in some factory in the forties. It’s much older. It’s a real samurai thing. That is why it’s so sharp?”

“Exactly. Think of some genius in a small shop in near-feudal times—before the year sixteen hundred—working at a forge, turning the orange metal in upon itself time after time, taking two or three different orange pieces and hammering them together after each had been folded over twenty times, beating them into a shape, then quenching them in cooling clay. Then he began filing, shaping, sharpening. It’s three kinds of steel, soft for the spine, which gives it weight and flexibility, a liquid feel; softer still in the core, more pure iron, more flexibility; and a sandwich of harder, tempered steel—yakiba—for the edge, sharp, to cut through armor, flesh, and bone and get deep into the body. Oh, it’s a war sword all right, and if my father carried it on Iwo Jima, he wasn’t the first soldier to sling this beauty about, not at all. It’s old, it’s venerable, it’s been to the dance many a time. Born in fire, cooled in earth, destined for blood. Maybe the inscriptions will tell the story.”

He indicated the line of Japanese characters deeply chiseled in the tang, as the maker of the blade those centuries ago accounted for himself and his creation, and explained for whom he had toiled.

“Can you read the inscriptions?” asked Bob.

“That’ll be the fun part. There were thousands of koto smiths, and we will have to track through the records and find who made this sword. We will be able to learn the smith, maybe even the lord. Then we’ll look at history and begin to assemble a biography of this blade. Where it went, what it did before it somehow came to my father, and then yours, and then their sons.”

“It all has meaning,” said the girl. “Father, read the nakago for Swagger-san.”

“Nakago is the rusted tang under the hilt. Even it is full of tantalizing communications from the past. It’s suriage nakago, or possibly an o-suriage nakago. That is, it’s right on the edge between ‘shortened’ and ‘greatly shortened,’ the determining factor being how much of the signature is left. Usually, the butt end, even when shortened, retains the shape of the original. It was as if the desecrator were paying homage to his superior. This style is called Iriyama-gata, which places it sometime in the sixteenth or seventeenth century. The cutting-edge side of the tang is at an acute angle to the bottom end of the shinogi line; the other side runs either straight or at a slight upward angle to mune.”

Lost me, Bob thought.

But he guessed Philip Yano was telling him the very shape of the end of the tang held clues to its origin.

“You sure know this stuff.”

“I know nothing,” said Yano. “There are many to whom this language is as supple and expressive as poetry. I struggle, doubt my knowledge, wish I knew more, curse myself for not knowing yet.”

“But do I get the bottom line? That this is a very old blade, and it could have some meaning beyond your family? Experts should examine it.”

“That’s right. It may be nothing. Not every old blade was used by Musashi Miyamoto, just as not every old Colt was carried by Wyatt Earp. So the odds are very small. But still…they exist. Remember, someone always wins a lottery. I will learn what I can before I make any consultations. It’ll take me longer than it should, and it is foolish, as many could know in a flash. That’s all right, though. It’s time spent with my father.”

“The paper,” said the girl.

“Yes, finally.”

“It looks like some kind of note,” Bob said.

“This is why I fear it. It is possibly a death poem. We do that, we Japanese. It is because death is so welcome to us, that we reach to embrace it and celebrate it with poetry.”

“Yet you hesitate, Father,” his daughter said.

“Suppose it says ‘Dear god, save me, I cannot stand this anymore.’”

“Then it proves your father was human,” said Bob. “I’ve been shot at a lot, and my thoughts have been ‘Dear god, save me, I cannot stand this anymore.’”

“Swagger-san speaks a truth, Father. You must face it. You must reach out to your father.”

“Do you want to be alone?”

“No, no,” said Yano. “Much better to be with one I love and one I respect.”

He took the paper off the nakago, shaking it so that an ancient fine powder of black oxidized steel fell away.

He read it, and began to weep.

His daughter read it, and began to weep.

Bob thought it best to say nothing, but the girl looked over at him, the tears running down her face.

“I think it’s for all the boys of Iwo Jima,” said Philip Yano, “no matter the color of their skin.”

He read:

Above the volcano

a moon over hell

lights the faces

of the doomed and dying.

Soldiers buried in black sand

on the black island

await their destiny.

We are the broken jade

of Sulfur Island.

11

STEEL

On Tuesday night, the boy Raymond had a baseball game and got a single and a double. He played left field, appeared to have a sound arm and an instinct for the ball. On Wednesday, the daughter Tomoe had a recital; she played the cello, and to Bob at least, she was superb.

It wasn’t that the kids were so well behaved and such high performers that so thoroughly attracted him, or even that the darling little Miko reminded him of his own daughter, Nikki—Y2K4 she had christened herself when young. It was that in some way the family unit was like an idealized Marine Corps. Everyone knew his duties and did them; there were no rogue neuroses, no raw egos, no angry resentments; if there were, they were held so far inside that they were never seen and never blew. But the Yanos laughed a lot and seemed genuinely to enjoy each other’s presence, to the exclusion of the world. He really felt happy among them.

“No, I’ve enjoyed it so much, and you’ve been so hospitable. But I have to go; I have a life back in the States.”

“I had hoped to have news for you on the sword before you left,” said Mr. Yano. “I have exhausted all my books and have begun to make inquiries. There are many antique volumes from the nineteenth century, with much information. The Book of the Sword was published in many editions in the last one hundred years. The best collection is in Osaka at the university there. I had planned a trip; you would enjoy that part of Japan.”

“I’m sure I would; I have a wife and daughter, however, several businesses to look after, and remember that field I was cutting? I still want to finish that damned thing. Remember, I’m the Tin Man. Chop chop chop.”

“I understand.”

On the last night, he and Philip Yano sat up after the family had gone to bed. Yano drank sake from a ceramic bottle, in a little flat cup. Bob had tea. It was time to talk of that which united them and made them trust: war and wounds.

“How is the hip? Is it painful?”

“You get used to it. It’s always ten degrees colder than everything else, and as I said, getting through airport security is a mess. It’s not so funny now.”

“You have other wounds?”

“I seem not to be able to get out of the way of little pieces of flying steel. I have been shot and wounded a variety of times. That one was the worst. It took a friend from me, I am sorry to say, and he was a boy who would have given the world many gifts, so I mourn for him still. The other wounds sting sometimes, but it ain’t nothing I can’t live with.”

“My daughter says you sleep poorly.”

“Sorry, hope I didn’t scare nobody. My dreams aren’t the softest. I took many lives. I thought I was a big samurai. And for what? Nothing I can lay a hand on. Well, something called ‘duty.’ I ain’t smart enough to define it, but I felt it then, and goddammit, no matter what, I still feel it. They ain’t takin’ it away.”

“That is the burden of the samurai, that commitment to duty. That is why we are only happy among other samurai, who have taken lives, seen blood and ruin, tasted defeat and bitterness. No one else can truly know. They can guess; they cannot truly know.”

“I’d drink to that if I was still a drinking man. I have to ask you, Philip. Your eye. You don’t talk of it. But I recognize scar tissue when I see it.”

“Oh, that. Really nothing. Iraq.”

Bob thought he misheard. Had he been drinking? Did the guy say Iraq, where the marines were still fighting?

“I thought that was our little pile of bad news.”

“Japan, in a spirit of support, sent small numbers of noncombat support troops, nominally guarded by Dutch combat troops, assigned engineering duties in a town in the south called Samawah. But you know the thorough, boring Japanese. We didn’t quite trust the Dutch, and so secretly a small unit of paratroopers was sent as actual security. It was my honor to be selected as commanding officer. They even postponed my retirement. Normally, you must leave at fifty-five, but because they trusted me, they asked me to stay in uniform through the assignment.”

“You must have been a superb officer. That’s not a job they give to second-raters. But I already knew that.”

“I worked hard but of course have no genius for it as do you. You were a hero, I was an officer who tried his best. On the third of February, two thousand four, an IED went off next to a Japanese troop carrier, which was pitched over and started to burn. Some men had difficulty getting out. As commanding officer, it fell to me to make the effort. We did in fact get them all out, but not before one of those RPGs detonated nearby and my face was sliced open, my eye destroyed. That was it. Thirty-three years of service, ten seconds’ worth of action, and a career-ending wound. So it goes. I did what I could, I got my people out, and I trust that the men remember me with respect.”

“Getting blown up in somebody else’s war ain’t no picnic.”

“The funny thing was that since we didn’t officially have combat troops in the engagement, my eye wasn’t officially damaged. However, my eye disagrees with that assessment. In any event, it was enough to serve.”

“Well, your father would be proud of you. He would salute you, if nobody else did. And so would mine. They knew.”

“You are very kind. Now I have a gift for you.”

“Oh, really?”

“Yes, very Japanese. Perhaps it will mean nothing. But it’s a credo to live by, as in our ways, we both have, after the ways of our fathers, who were the better men.”

“Yes, by far.”

Yano left and came back with a carefully wrapped package, which looked like a book or something book-size.

“Should I open it now?” Bob asked.

“Yes, as I must explain.”

The paper had been so perfectly folded that Bob again felt like a desecrator. Inside the ruptured nest of paper was an oblong frame in some ancient wood. Turning it over, he came across a series of Japanese characters in beautiful calligraphy, running down the center of a piece of yellowed rice paper. Looking at it, he felt something in the brushstrokes: lightness, deftness, precision, artistry, like falling water or the color of leaves.

“It’s beautiful,” he said.

“The calligraphy belongs to the man called Miyamoto Musashi. He is regarded as Japan’s greatest swordsman. He fought over sixty duels and won them all. He is revered though for his wisdom; he retreated from the world and wrote The Book of Five Rings, his guide to the sword and to life. To him, the sword was life.”

“I see,” said Bob. “A professional.”

“Yes. Samurai. Warrior. My father, your father, the same. So I give this to you. No, it’s not original, for that would be priceless, but the calligraphy was done by hand by a superb local after Musashi.”

“Please tell me what it says.”

“He wrote this in sixteen forty-five. The old one knew. He says, ‘Steel cuts flesh / steel cuts bone / steel does not cut steel.’ Do you see?”

Bob saw.

“The rest of them: they are flesh and bone. They will be cut. The regular people. The sleepers, the dreamers. The soft. We are the hard. We are the warriors. We cannot be cut. That’s our job. And that’s why they need us in ways they can’t even imagine,” said Philip Yano.

12

SAKE

Nii of Shinsengumi stayed with the American all the way out. The man took a taxi from the Yanos’ after a bright morning’s formal good-bye in the front yard, but not to the station, as you might expect, but to Yasukuni, the shrine dedicated to the fallen of Japan’s wars.

It wasn’t a place most westerners went to. While the taxicab with his luggage sat racking up the yen in the parking lot, the American went into the shrine and stood humbly before the altar for some time. Nii wondered, What the fuck is this all about? It made no sense to him whatsoever.

Then the man walked the grounds. He was a gaijin and others avoided him, but he didn’t seem to notice or care. He walked about slowly, with that odd trace of a limp, again as if trying to make communion with something immaterial. He stayed longer than the young yakuza could imagine anybody staying. He stood under the soaring steel torii gate that seemed to reflect the spirit of the samurai who died in battle. That it was steel, and not wood like the many conventional Japanese gates, seemed to mean something to him; he touched it several times and looked at it as though it communicated a certain meaning. Then he walked the broad concrete promenade all the way to the white and timbered shrine 250 yards from the gate. He examined the screen of serene trees that cut this place off from the craziness of Tokyo. He went to the shrine, looked in, possibly meditated—who could tell with gaijin?

But finally he returned to his cab and the driver fought through traffic to a JR station. Nii simply abandoned his car on a wayside street—it would be towed, of course, but was easily retrievable—bought a ticket from the machine on the JR Narita express, took up a position down the aisle, and watched the American go all the way to Terminal 2, forty miles outside Tokyo.

The gaijin was in the JAL line, with his two light bags, casually dressed in jeans and a tan jacket over a polo shirt. His body betrayed no impatience; he waited his turn in line, presented his documents, turned over his luggage. Nii watched from afar, as the American went through security, and watched a little drama transpire as the American was pulled out of line, examined closely by inspectors, had a sensing wand waved over his body time after time, had his papers examined by three different levels of bureaucrat, and finally was waved clear. That was the last he saw of him, a tall stranger with a bland, blank face, not one of those mobile, yappy monster faces the hairy beasts were so known for. The man’s eyes were strangely powerful—that meant bad luck for enemies, the suspicion went—as if the man held a fund of secret knowledge.

But for now Nii of Shinsengumi was done. The perfect samurai, he took out his cell and called headquarters to report in. They told him to get back fast. Tonight was the night.

Now it was over. He had his boarding pass, his bags were checked, he’d board the plane in an hour, happy he had an aisle seat. He was headed to the departure gate. The flight would last fifteen hours, but he’d be fine through dinner, then he’d take a pill, and when he awoke they’d be landing in LAX. Then it was an hour or so and off to Boise.

He felt good. He’d gotten some satisfaction at last. He felt the old man would be pleased. He’d repaid the debt, the obligation, as best he could.

Hey, old man, I’m still trying to do what you’d want me to do. Sorry you ain’t here to see it.

Too bad he wasn’t a drinking man anymore. He had an ache in his gut for it. He felt so good he wanted to commemorate duty and closure and pay homage.

The more he thought about it, the better an idea the drink seemed. Just this once.

No sirree. So sorry, Charlie. Nada.

You take one of those and you float away on the tide and god only knows where you come down. It had happened before.

He had spent most of the seventies drunk, going through jobs, pain, a wife, a couple of houses, the patience of his friends, the respect of his peers, almost pulling the trigger on his sorry self a dozen times. Then, somehow, he beat it, by giving everything up. He couldn’t take the world. He couldn’t take the memories. He had to leave both. So he lived like a monk, among rifles, a dog, hills, and trees, an exile, speaking to no one, reading, shooting, walking, caring for the dog, making do on a tiny retirement, trying somehow to recover what he had lost.

He could have lived that way forever. But things began to happen. It was a busy time for a while as he was forced to recover skills he thought long gone. They weren’t gone. He still had a little something that could get him through, and the terrible thing was, that was really his best self. The Swaggers were men of war. They were warriors. Nothing else. Could add and read and make polite for a time, but that wasn’t them. That sure wasn’t Earl with his duty-craziness, whether he was walking in through the high tide and blue-white Jap tracers off Tarawa or stalking the cornfields of Arkansas for armed robbers. And that wasn’t Bob, three tours in ’Nam, America’s second-or third-or fourth-leading sniper depending on who was telling the truth.

So why would you want to drink?

You do not want to drink.

It is unnecessary.

I have a beautiful wife, I have a beautiful kid, I’m building a house where I can look across the meadows of the valley to a purple range of mountains, and whoever thought I’d have that? What old snipers get that? You hunt men and watch them flop and go quiet through the scope close on a hundred times, maybe you get so far out you don’t ever come back.

I am back, he thought. I don’t need no help.

But then he thought, Goddammit, I did something for my father today. That pleased him immensely. He remembered the old man from so long ago: the father who didn’t hit him. All the other kids, damn, they’d say, Lord almighty, my father tanned my hide yesterday but good. Wooiee, hurt so bad, I ain’t never missing on sloppin’ them hogs again. But Earl Swagger never hit him, not once. Years later he asked his mother on a rare sober day why.

“’Cause his daddy whipped both his boys so hard he left scars. Your daddy thought that was the coward’s way, man beating on boys, and he stuck to that rule. That’s the kind of man your daddy was, and Lord I miss him so.”

Bob missed him too: he remembered the old man in the black-and-white state police cruiser in June of 1955 pulling out of the farm. He didn’t look back, but he caught his son in the rearview mirror and raised a hand, and Bob waved back. “Bye, Daddy, bye.” The old man was dead two hours later. Bob was nine.

So he thought, I have done something my father would have liked. If he’s up there, he’s smiling. I paid off an Earl Swagger obligation, the last one in the world, and I have served the old man. If anything calls for a drink, that does.

And so he wandered out of security and went up into Narita’s flashy mall of restaurants and souvenir shops and duty-free jewelry places and found a little bar, almost French-looking, not Japanese at all, all brown wood and brown bottles, the whole place with the comforting feel that only a bar can give a thirsty man. He slid to a stool and caught the eye of the young man behind it in a white coat, and said, “Could I have a sake, please?”

The kid smiled. He looked like so many young men Bob once knew, even if this one was Japanese.

“Sure,” the youngster said, speaking his English well, almost without accent. “You want it heated?”

“How do y’all drink it? I saw a fellow who drank it out of a little ceramic pan, like. A tiny, flat little glass thing.”

“Oh, we drink it that way. But we also drink it in a square wooden box called a masu. Want to try that? We even heat it! Yep, I can fire it up in the microwave if you want, sir. That’d make you a Japanese through and through.”

“Son, I don’t think your beautiful country is ready for the likes of me. Nah, I’ll have it like my friend Philip Yano, straight, but in one of those little flat deals.”

“Coming up.”

The boy pulled a large bottle off the shelf, unlimbered a kind of flattened dish about half an inch high, and poured just a small jolt of the clear fluid into it.

Bob held the odd cup up, sniffed it. It had a medicinal quality. He thought of all the time he’d spent in hospitals, too much time, and fluids that had come out or gone into him, or that burned when some orderly put them on his ruptured flesh.

“Semper fi,” said Bob, “catch me if I fall now.”

“What do you think?”

“Hmmm. I see how you could grow to like it. It’s all right.”

It had a biting odor to it, then in the throat a kind of subtle sweetness, not overpowering, with a hint of fruit, but it left an afterburn as it went down, suggesting the presence of fire under the sweetness.

“Another?”

“Hell, why not. I’ve still got an hour before my plane and I’m not going to do anything on the plane but sleep the Pacific away.”

He semper-fied the second one down, then had one for the road, one more for the Corps, one for the dead of Vietnam, one for the dead of the Pacific, one for the living, one for the thought-they-were-living-but-were-dead, and one for the hell of it. Somewhere in there he wondered whose feet were on the ends of his legs, and meantime the boy responded to him, as boys did to men who clearly knew their way about the world, as many young marines had, and bought him another. He then had to buy the boy one, it made perfect sense. Then of course he had to go to the bathroom and he got directions, found the room, and went in to discover what he already knew, the Japanese bathrooms were like science fiction, and somehow on their own they stayed perfectly clean. He negotiated that transaction, then checked his watch, realizing it must be time to board. He headed to the departure gate.

Then he made a disturbing discovery. They’d come and changed the airport while he’d been sitting at the bar. It was now a different airport, and the more he tried to find his gate, the stranger it got. He noticed he’d tired considerably, probably from carrying someone else’s feet around, and decided to take a rest.

He awoke as a janitor shook him, but quickly went back to sleep, and awoke a second time to find a policeman shaking him, looking stern.

Lord, what a headache! It felt as if someone had put his head in a vise and a couple of sumo wrestlers had put their full weight against the tightener.

Then he thought, Hell, I am not on an airplane.

He looked at his watch.

It was 6:47 a.m. Tokyo time.

The plane was long gone.

He sat there for a second, aware that his life had just gotten extremely complicated.

Oh, you stupid fool. You moron. You cannot ever touch even the first drop or this is what happens.

He looked up and down the airport, saw that somehow he’d taken a wrong turn out of the bathroom and compounded that error with other errors and ended up in a wrong corridor. He tried to map out what he had to do: return to the main terminal, get in line, turn in his unused boarding pass and ticket, get himself rebooked on the next available LAX-bound flight—how much would that cost?—call Julie and let her know, then get something to eat and hunker down. He’d have to catch up with his luggage at LAX and the anger he now felt was because of the possible loss of the calligraphy Philip Yano had given him: Steel cuts flesh / steel cuts bone / steel doesn’t cut steel.

You idiot.

Next thought (his mind was moving so slowly!): maybe there was a way to rebook without leaving the departure terminal, which would spare him the nonsense with security.

So finally he got up and decided on a first course of action: coffee. Then food. Then he’d be ready to face the ordeal his own stupidity had created.

So he walked the terminal and, in ten minutes or so, indeed found a JAL office and counter. Unfortunately it wasn’t open yet. It opened at eight, still an hour and a half off. Down the way, he found the flashy international departure mall, and soon enough a Starbucks, and managed to talk the young men behind the counter into firing up a coffee for him, though they weren’t technically open. The new USA Today International was out, so he read it, then an International Herald Tribune and an Asian edition of Newsweek.

Eight o’clock rolled around; he went back to the JAL counter, was first in line, turned in the boarding pass and ticket, gave a somewhat vague description of his adventure with the sake and the bathroom, and without difficulty was rebooked on a 1 p.m. flight to LAX; he even got another aisle seat. There was no problem with his luggage; it would be held at U.S. Customs at LAX. She even smiled at him.

Then he found an international phone, called his wife, who was out, thankfully. He left a message and decided it was best to tell the truth; she’d be unpleasant for a week, but in the end it was better than a pointless fib.

Now, by nine, he was done and caught up and only had to wait another few hours.

I won’t be sad to leave this damn airport.

He sat down, took his load off, and decided on another course of action. He found that Starbucks, waited in a long line, got another cup. The place was crowded so he wandered into the terminal and found a seat.

That was when—it was 10:30 a.m.—he noted an image on one of the television monitors. It took a while to organize in his slow-moving mind: it ran from something vaguely familiar to something sharper until finally it became knowable.

It was Philip Yano.

Then came a family portrait of the Yanos, one that he’d seen in their home. Philip, Suzanne, the grave doctor-to-be Tomoe, the sons Raymond and John, and finally the little sweetie, Miko.

Then the house in which he’d spent such pleasant hours—in flames.

Bob simply sat there, trying to make sense of it, trying to get it organized in a way he could deal with.

He turned to the person next to him, a Japanese man in a suit.

“Sorry, sir, the TV. What does it say?” he blundered, not even remembering to ask the man if he spoke English.

But he did.

“It’s very sad,” the man said. “He was a hero. A fire. He, his family. Wiped out.”

13

KONDO ISAMI

He was in his shop. His family slept above him, but late in the night Philip Yano was alone with his father’s blade before him.

It lay, with its broad curvature, its obscured hamon where hard cutting metal met soft supporting metal, its mesh of scratches, burrs, blurs, spots of rusts, chips, and ware, on the bench before him. The light gleamed dully on its surface, showing its imperfections, with stains of toxins running riot, radiating stench and miasma.

What secrets do you hold? he wondered.

Should I invest six months and 15,000 yen per inch to have you polished? And suppose that reveals…nothing. Suppose you’re a tired old hag of a blade, polished so many times that now you’re brittle and will shatter at the merest breath. You yearn for oblivion, and another polish—the tenth, the fiftieth, the five hundredth?—would just take away more of you, make you weaker and yet more nondescript.

I would waste my money, my time, and my spirit on you.

He tried to accept what lay before him: an unremarkable ancestral blade created sometime in a forgotten past by a smith of no particular talent. You were all right. You served: a war here, an execution there, maybe a duel, an ambush, a plot, maybe politics and ambition and strategic planning, an Edo or Kyoto ceremony or two, and finally, hundreds of years after your birth in fire and clay, you were clapped in military furniture and went off to war and ended up briefly in the possession of a forgotten officer named Hideki Yano, who died on Sulfur Island in service to—well, to what? His forgotten ancestors. Of what significance could that be? Almost none: it’s the story of a million other blades and a million other men.

You have your father’s blade. It’s enough.

And yet…and yet…

It’s so old. It’s koto at least, made sometime in the 1500s. It’s unusually, even mythologically, sharp. Even now, centuries later, when Swagger-san and I throw paper against it, it cuts deep, fast, and straight.

He thought of a story:

A disciple of Japan’s greatest swordsmith, Masamune, believes he has finally made a better blade than his teacher. Being vain and ambitious, he demands a competition.

The old man resists but ultimately relents.

The young man’s blade is placed in a stream. Things drift down: it cuts…everything, twigs and leaves and fish. It cuts garbage and paper and bubbles. Everything that floats it sunders.

Then the old man’s blade is placed in the water.

It cuts…nothing.

Whatever floats to it is magically diverted.

After a time, the young man exults.

I have won! My blade is better! My blade cuts everything, his nothing!

Old Masamune pulls his blade from the water with a smile.

Admit it, Master, says the young man. Mine is better. It cuts everything.

Old Masamune walks away, satisfied.

The young man sees a priest, who has watched the action.

Priest, tell him how much better my blade is. Make him see.

No, says the priest. His blade knew the way. It saw nothing that had to be cut. It brought no harm into the world. It has come to help the world; it is a blade of justice. Your blade, on the other hand, cut everything without discrimination. It is an evil blade. It has no morality. It should be destroyed.

Yano looked at the dull thing. He had a premonition, like a chill, as if an oni, a demon, had passed through him. It is an evil thing, he thought.

The young swordsmith’s name was Muramasa, and his blades acquired a reputation; there was something evil about them, they yearned for blood, whoever wielded them became a great killer but died by the blade as well. The blades had a particular hunger for the shogunate’s blood; over the centuries Muramasa blades accounted for several deaths in the Tokugawa family and were finally banned. Those that could be found were gathered up and destroyed; only a few remained. Could this be a Muramasa blade?

He had never seen a blade cut so straight, so clean, so quick.

The American didn’t understand it, the child Tomoe didn’t understand it. But he did.

It cut like a legend. It cut everything. It wasn’t Masamune’s blade, it was the young man’s.

He looked now at the tang.

The kanji lettering, each unit a visual poem in itself, climbed the shaft of the metal, blurred by age, subtlety lost in rust, its history written in the holes—three of them—that were drilled each time the blade acquired a new owner-warrior, until finally some dreary mechanic in the Naval Edge Company in Tokyo in 1941 or so clamped it in a set of fixtures, lowered the grinder, and punched a final hole through it, before burying its secrets in the cheap metallic furniture of the shin-gunto-issue 1939 trappings. If it had ever been sublime, it was now banal.

He examined the inscripted lettering and for hours looked in the volumes he had on hand.

There was Zusetsu Toso Kinko Meishuroku, of the limited edition of 1,200. There was Sasano Masa’s Tosogu No Kanshu, Kajima’s Tsuba No Bi, and Ikeda Suematsu’s Kano Natsuo Meihin Shu, not that this smith was a gendaito like Natsuo, but possibly Natsuo had gotten an idea from him, and Yano might have recognized it in the steel. Kanzan Shinto was also there, for the same reason, as Nagayama’s The Connoisseur’s Book of Japanese Swords.

At the university, he would have access to Koson Oshigata, Umetada Meikan, and the first half of Shinto Meijiro, and possibly there was something there. However, almost entirely lacking would be references to the run-of-the-mill koto smiths whose swords form the bulk of most collections, and possibly the answer lay there.

There was one possibility: a book called Koto Bengi, which included a lot of lesser smiths, with surprisingly accurate reproductions and details of chisel strokes that enabled checking for forgeries. The years from 1345 until 1590 were represented; rubbings that had been taken from almost-new, unrusted tangs yielded clear reproductions.

But who had it? That would take some digging. It had never been reproduced, but if any book held the key, it would be that one.

Then a thought occurred to him.

He went to his computer terminal, swiftly logged on. He checked e-mail and saw nothing, not that there was ever anything, and he went to Google in English. He typed in “Koto Bengi” and the system searched the computer universe and churned out ten possibilities.

Hmmm, one was an online encyclopedia, another few conventional sword-for-sale sites where blades were traded to wealthy Americans at only a 700 percent markup; a few others were indexes or rings that connected to still other sword sites; and a few led to shops offering books or sword memorabilia or small sword accessories like meuki, the metal inlays for the grip, or seppa, spacers, or kozuka, the small sub-sword blades that were sometimes inserted into the saya.

An hour into his search he came upon a small store in Tulsa, Oklahoma (!), calling itself the Samurai Shop. He looked briefly at the overpriced but clearly genuine swords (many were papered, meaning they’d been examined and certified by the Japan Sword Association), then finally clicked on “Books” and called up a list of volumes. Halfway down the list he found it: Koto Bengi, 1823 edition, very rare, good condition, spine weak, spots on cover, $1,750.

For $1,750!

Certainly there was a Koto Bengi in Japan that could be examined; a library would have one in its collection, or a shrine.

Samurai had become international and you were just as likely to find rare artifacts in the American Midwest or the Scottish highlands or the Italian peninsula as anywhere in Japan. The collectors were like swarming insects: they came, they bought crazily, they resold, and many of them learned. That was the oddest thing: many of the most knowledgeable men in the world on blades were not Japanese at all. Here, a sword scholar in Japan in 1823 had examined blades of the late 1400s through the year 1600, had meticulously redrawn or taken rubbings of nakago for a volume that survived a tumultuous 184 years of war, strife, revolution, and extreme violence and had ended up in a store in Tulsa, Oklahoma, where a clever merchandiser displayed it on something called the Internet. Now it flashed back across time and centuries to a retired soldier in the suburbs of Tokyo!

The website for the Samurai Shop displayed the cover of the treasured old volume and its title page, and there were further icons for “Random Pages” and a lengthy description.

All right, he thought. I’ll play your little game, Mr. Oklahoma Samurai.

He clicked on “Random Pages,” and one by one, a set of pages flashed before his eyes.

And then he stopped. He realized as he looked at the tang of a long-lost blade that it was his sword. That was the Yano blade.

Yes, that was it.

It had to be.

The tang on the computer screen was longer, of course, because the barbarians of the Naval Edge Company preparing for the Sphere’s mad war had not yet sheared off half the kanji lettering.

But Yano looked closely at the very end of his tang, and there indeed he saw the nub of three letters that had been rudely cut by the band saw or the file. They matched perfectly.

The computer screen showed the complete and undistorted tang of the very blade he held before him in his rubber gloves; he had its pedigree, its smith, the lord or house for whom it had been prepared, the results of its cutting test, the—

He saw with a quick pang of disappointment that it was not a Muramasa blade. No, how could it be? That’s a one-in-a-million shot, like a lottery ticket paying off big. He wasn’t familiar with the smith’s name, which he read in its two kanji, one for nori and the second for naga, thereby a yeoman called Norinaga, possibly of the Yamato school (the blade looked Yamato). But Norinaga-san, you’re one of thousands. This happens to be your sharpest blade; you should be proud.

But then he noticed another thing, a small indentation on the hilt, almost too small to see against the dapples of the black rust and the rise and fall of the rough unpolished old steel.

He got out a jeweler’s loupe and studied the mark carefully, turning it in the light.

It was a symbol, not a kanji, what is called a family crest, in Japanese a mon.

Taking up a pencil and a sheet of paper, he drew what he saw, and when he looked at it, it astounded him. It looked like a naval propeller, three-bladed, mounted on a hanging medal of some sort. It puzzled him, the contemporariness of it. It was some device an Imperial Navy torpedoman would have worn. It seemed to have nothing to do with the seventeenth century.

He went from there to his Mon: The Japanese Family Crest, assembled by one of the western pioneers in Asian arts, a strange California man named Willis M. Hawley, who dedicated his life to all things samurai. Hawley was one of the few westerners admired by the polishers and sword makers of the ’50s and ’60s and his specialty was the encyclopedic. He alone in the West would have the patience to collect and classify thousands of Japanese mon.

Yano sighed. It would take him hours to track through the pages and pages of symbols. He looked at his watch. It was so late. He should be in bed.

And then he thought: Well, start. Just start. Then tomorrow, do some more.

But it turned out the book was organized not alphabetically but by pattern. He slid through the pages, looking at the eighteen or so renditions of patterns in stark black-and-white, seeing such images as the ever-popular chrysanthemum, the persimmon, the melon, the arrowroot, the Chinese bellflower—but of course no torpedo propeller. But there was a maple, a chestnut, the hawk feathers, the roll of silk, the rabbit, the bat, the dragonfly, the arrow notch. Then—the torpedo propeller! No, no, it was the military fan. It was a fan!

He quickly turned to page fifty-nine, found eighteen variations on the fan, none of which matched, went back a little and found dozens of other fan shapes—the cypress fan, the feather fan, the folding fan, the hemp fan. He applied his tired eyes to each three-bladed symbol, until there it was. He compared the three images over and over again. The slightly fuzzy image in the loupe, brought out by the correct angle into the light, built of tiny chisel marks four hundred-odd years old; his own much larger but necessarily cruder rendition of it in pencil on the white sheet; and Hawley’s bold black-and-white variation, barely an inch by an inch, but nevertheless bone clear: three blades, mounted atop some kind of V device that he now saw represented the fan. Who knew what the three propeller blades meant? It didn’t really matter, now that he had found it. He tracked over to the kanji name of the family, then the romanized version…

It was the House of Asano in Ako.

He sat back, astonished. His heart began to pound.

It was from the house of the most famous samurai in history.

Yet elation was not what he felt.

A ghost returned. If the blade could be rooted in the Asano house and its bloody history, and if the name Norinaga could be likewise linked to Asano, then suddenly the blade was of inestimable worth, but to Yano what mattered was the glory: this would be the rare “cultural treasure,” worthy of careful restoration and display in the great museums of Japan. Its provenance associated it with a plot, a raid, a fight, a death, then the mass seppuku, belly splitting, that perfectly summed up the samurai ethos and represented at its purest and highest what the samurai meant to Japan and to the world.

He thought, How could—?

But it was more than possible. His mind ran through possibilities. The blade is stolen or lost somehow after it is confiscated from whichever of the ronin carried it on that bloodiest of all samurai nights, and no one, for a hundred years, realizes its meaning, as the story is devoured by other stories, just as violent, just as bloody. But then in 1748 comes the puppet play Kanadehon Chushingura, Treasury of Loyal Retainers, which popularizes the story and becomes the basis for many kabuki plays. But it is the woodblock artists who make the story immortal, among them Utamaro, Toyokuni, Hokusai, Kunisada, and Hiroshige. However, the most famous are those by Kuniyoshi, who produces eleven separate series on the subject, as well as twenty triptychs.

By that time the sword is lost: it floats from family to family, from sword shop to sword shop and somehow is turned in to the government in a spasm of great patriotic fever, along with a hundred thousand other blades, and it is hacked and shortened and ground and machine-polished—buffed, buffed!—and sent off to war, where it has its further adventures, ending up finally in his father’s hands and then in an American’s hands. And now it’s back.

Yano felt fear.

It wasn’t a fortune he had discovered but an immense responsibility. The sword wasn’t just worth millions but was an artifact of the nation. That made it worth killing for. It was leverage, it was status, it was fame, it was…

If anyone knew.

That was the key question: Did anyone know? Who would know?

Then he heard the glass break.

He waited, breathless. His heart began to pound again.

He heard a cry: “Hai!”

It was a war cry.

He reached for the only intact weapon close at hand: a shin-shinto katana from 1861.

Nii listened.

“Young men of Shinsengumi, this is your blooding. Is this for you? Have you the steel, the strength, the determination? Or are you one of them, one of the dissolute?”

Kondo-san spoke quickly and fiercely.

“Do you hang out in the malls and paint your hair blue and your nails black? Do you dance to barbarian rapture, and pierce yourself with gewgaws? Do you have sexual congress like a rabbit, without meaning, rutting in alleyways and gymnasiums? Do you fill your system with drugs and live your life in a blur of pleasure? Or are you hard and resolute, men of bushido, men of courage and commitment? Are you samurai?”

“We are samurai!” came the cry.

The four of them were in the back of a truck. It was 4 a.m., in the quiet suburbs of Tokyo. They were parked in front of the Yano house. They wore black hakama kendo trousers and jackets and black tabi over black tabi socks, which isolated the big toe so they could wear the zori sandals. Each carried sharp Chinese-made wakizashi and katana, the two swords, and each carried a silenced Glock 9 mm.

“Then, my children of the spirit, you must go!” said Kondo, and the four felt the excitement rise and crest.

Noguma was first, Muyamato second, he, Nii, third, and Natume fourth. They leapt from the truck and advanced in low, stealthy strides to the house.

The door was locked.

Noguma kicked it in, and as he kicked it, performed nukitsuke, the drawing cut, except there was no one to cut. Meanwhile, the others unlimbered their swords, possibly without the grace and beauty of Noguma, who had practiced this move a hundred thousand times. It was truly unfortunate that nobody was there to absorb his elegant energy.

He ran into the house, shouting, “Hai!” and looked for something to cut. There was nothing.

But downstairs he spied light.

“Hai!” he shouted again, and raced down the steps to the corridor, followed by Nii, while the other two went upstairs.

As Noguma ran along the corridor, he saw a man step out of a door with a sword and he raced toward him, full of lust for blood, full of energy, and executed a perfect kirioroshi, that is, downward cut, fully expecting to sunder the man from tip of crown to navel.

Alas, the man adroitly sidestepped and slipped with oily speed into ukenagashi, or “flowing block,” which enabled him to slide off into a horizontal attack and lay his blade’s edge at full force into Noguma’s guts through the navel, the side, almost to spine, cutting through to the core, slicing entrails and organs and everything else in the way, then withdrawing on the same plane so as not to ensnare the blade, and poor Noguma fell spurting, for the body is really nothing more than a thin bag of blood, and when it is ruptured, it empties rather quickly.

Brave and determined, Nii meant to unleash kirioroshi on his target and raised his own sword but the man was too fast and drove forward with the hilt of his already-raised weapon and hit Nii under the eye with a thunderous blow, pounding illumination and incoherence into his skull, and he slipped in pain, then lost all traction in the lakes of Noguma’s spewing blood, and went with a crack to the floor.

Yano cut down the first man in an elementary college kendo move he hadn’t realized he still knew, and the blade bit deep but with stupefying ease, and he didn’t even have time to mark it as his first kill, for now the only thing in his mind was his family.

He continued through on the same line, minimizing motion, and drove the hilt of his grip hard into the face of the squat second man, sending a vibration through his weapon. He drove a huge gash into the muscleman’s face, and watched him spill out of the way as well, with a possible skull fracture.

A third was before him, and he coiled around into the power-stance position, elbows back and cocked, and deployed kirioroshi, but this fellow was far trickier, parried the blow, and slipped off and by Yano.

The father turned as the man flashed out of the way. Yano lifted again, then realized he’d been cut bad. His legs went, his knees went, he slid down, down, down until he lay flat on the floor, staring up.

Above him, he saw his antagonist perform chiburi, the ritual flicking of the blood off his blade, then noto, the ceremonial resheathing in saya, a smooth ballet of practiced moves, then lean forward. He had a square, fierce face, eyes bright with exultation, a mouth so short and flat it expressed nothing at all. Yet it was familiar. Who was he?

“Why?” Yano asked. “God, why?”

“Certain necessities,” said the man.

“Who are you?” Yano said.

“I am Kondo Isami,” said his victor.

“Kondo Isami has been dead a hundred years. He was a murderer too.”

“Where is the blade?”

“Don’t hurt my family. Please, I beg you—”

“Life, death, it’s all the same. Where’s the blade?”

“You piece of shit. Go to hell. You are no samurai, you are—” and then he coughed blood.

“Die well, soldier, for you have nothing else left. I’ll find the blade. It belongs to me, because I was the strongest.”

With that he turned, leaving Philip Yano in a pool of his own blood in the darkness.

14

RUINS

By the time he arrived by taxi, it was all over. The last of the TV trucks was pulling out. There was a crowd but by now it had thinned. People stood about listlessly, aware that the show was almost over.

The house smoldered. In a few spots, raw flames still licked timbers, but mostly it had fallen in on itself, a black nest of charred spars, half-burned boards, broken porcelain fittings, blackened flagstones. The odor of burning hung thick in the air.

The garden was a riot of smashed plants, footprints, the treads of tires where the fire engines had pulled up. A few shingles lay around, a few pieces of broken, scorched furniture.

He ran to the yellow public-safety tape. A few cops stood by, not particularly interested in the situation, in their navy-blue uniforms with the tiny pistols in the black holsters. Beyond, Bob could see some sort of conclave of investigators, men in suits or light jackets who had gathered at the sidewalk that once led into the Yanos’ vestibule. The whole scene felt moist, somehow, from all the water spent to fight the blaze; the ground was soft, in places muddy, the water pooled into puddles.

Bob pushed through the crowd, no longer really interested in the rules of politeness that defined the culture of Japan. He didn’t care about the polite mob of witnesses.

He ducked under the yellow tape that cut off civilian world from public-safety world and immediately attracted the attention of first one, then a second cop, and finally a third.

“I have to see the investigators,” he said.

“Hai! No, no, must wait, must—”

“Come on, no, who’s in charge? I have to see the—”

Somehow weight was applied to him. The Japanese uniformed officers were amazingly strong given their height, and with three of them gathered and more assembling, and the investigators looking his way, he felt the urgency of the collective will: go back, do not make a disturbance, you have no place here, you are not a citizen, do not interrupt, these are our ways.

“I have to see the man in charge!” he yelled. “No, no, let me through,” and he squirmed away and quite logically, it seemed to him, made to approach the investigators or executives or whatever they were. “I have to explain. See, I knew these people, I had business with them, you will want my testimony.”

It seemed so logical to him. All he had to do was make it clear.

“Does anybody here speak English, please?”

But for all his good intentions, he seemed to excite nothing but animosity on the part of the Japanese, who appeared not at all interested in his contributions.

“You don’t understand, I have information,” he explained to two or three of the men who were forcing him back. “I need to tell people something, please, don’t push me, I have to talk to the man in charge. Don’t touch me, don’t shove me, please, no, I don’t want any trouble, but don’t touch me!”

The Japanese barking at him seemed to be spewing gibberish, and their faces gathered into ugly, monkeylike caricatures, and he experienced the overwhelming melancholy that they really didn’t care and it infuriated him, and just at this moment, someone pushing on him slipped, a hand broke free and accidentally smashed hard into his chest, and the next thing he knew, he shoved back.

He swam to consciousness. He was in some kind of ward, his head felt like a linebacker had crushed it against a curb, and he was sore everywhere.

He tried to sit up, but handcuffs on one wrist had him pinioned to the bed frame.

The room was pure white, brightly illuminated. How had he been unconscious in such a place?

A slim Japanese woman in glasses and a business suit stared at him. She looked about thirty, which meant she was probably closer to forty, and sat across the room in a shabby, plain chair. She was reading Time magazine. She had beautiful legs.

He put his free hand on his forehead, felt its heat, then ran it down to his chin, which was sheathed in whiskers, two or three days’ worth. Yet he was clean. The Japanese had beat him unconscious, then in their thorough way cleaned him, sedated him, stitched him, and committed him.

“Oh, hell, where am I?” he said to no one, blinking at the brightness of the light, feeling deep pain behind his eyes.

He tried not to think of the loss, but the more he denied it, the more it hurt. An image of the perfect family came before his eyes, the little Yano unit, each committed totally to the other, the love that was duty that held them together.

It was all terrible, but the worst was Miko, the child.

Who could kill a child? he thought, and he felt killing anger rise and knew it would kill him before it would kill anyone else. The grief was like a weight on his chest, trying to squash all the oxygen from his lungs. He thought he might have a heart attack.

“Is there a nurse?” he said.

The woman looked at him.

“Sorry, do you speak English?”

“I was born in Kansas City,” she said. “I’m as American as you. My dad is an oncologist and a Republican and a two-handicap.”

“Oh, sorry, look, please get me a nurse or something. I need another shot. I can’t, it’s—it’s just, I don’t know.”

“Just relax, Mr. Swagger. You’ve been heavily medicated for three days now, I don’t think you need more medication. Let me call a doctor.”

She punched a button on a science-fiction control panel next to his bed, and indeed in a few seconds a staff doctor in a white coat with grave Asian seriousness came in. Pulse taken, eyes checked, head wound examined, Bob passed muster.

“I think you’ll be okay,” the doctor said to him in English. “You’re a pretty tough old bird. You have enough scars.”

“Really, doctor, I’m fine, it’s my—I need a sedative or something. I’m feeling very bad. I just can’t lie here. Can you get someone to release me?”

“The cops don’t want you free,” said the young woman. “The Japanese have very strict rules about certain things and you broke all of them and even invented some new ones.”

“I was a little out of my head. Come on, doctor, please?”

“Sorry, Mr. Swagger. You’re going to have to come to terms with it sooner or later. What you need is relaxation, peace and quiet, a good therapist, and your own country, your family, people you love and who love you.”

“I’d settle for an aspirin. Some kind of sleeping pill would be better.”

The doctor spoke in Japanese, then said, “I’ll give you aspirin for the pain.”

A nurse brought a tray with three white pills and a glass of water; Bob gulped them all.

Suddenly he was alone with the woman.

“You’re from Kansas City?”

“Yeah. I’m with the American embassy here in Tokyo. My name is Susan Okada. I’m head of the Bob Lee Swagger department. We specialize in deranged war heroes.”

“How’s business?”

“It was crappy for the longest time. Now it’s finally heated up.”

“Where am I?”

“The Tokyo Prison Hospital.”

“Jesus Christ.”

“Yeah, it sounds so nineteenth century. You’ve been here for three days. Your wife has been notified.”

“She’s not coming, is she?”

“No, we didn’t see the need.”

“I just don’t—Ah, Christ, I don’t know what to say.”

“Well, we need a statement from you. Then we’ll get you to Narita and off you go. The Japanese won’t press charges.”

“I didn’t do anything.”

“That’s not how they see it. They have you for assault, disrespect for a police officer, public drunkenness, disturbing the peace, and worst of all, for not being Japanese. They’ll put you away and forget about it. They’re not that interested in your version of things.”

“Oh, Christ. My head hurts. God, I feel so awful.”

“Have a drink of water. I could come back tomorrow, but I think you’d be better off to get this over with. The sooner you do, the sooner we get you out of here.”

“All right.”

She opened her briefcase, got out a digitized tape recorder, and moved close.

“All right, the whole story. Your involvement with the Yanos, start to finish. How you ended up punching cops at the scene of a fire.”

“At the scene of a murder. Okay…”

He told it, not enthusiastically or well, but doggedly, the whole thing, the visit, the sword, his drunkenness at the airport, his discovery the next morning, his arrival at the site, his recollections of the troubles there.

“I don’t recall hitting anybody. If I did, he hit me first.”

She put the tape recorder away.

“That doesn’t matter,” she said. “Anyway, I’ll have this typed up. Tomorrow, you sign it. I’ll have you on the one p.m. JAL to LAX and booked through to Boise. All right?”

“No, not all right.”

“Work with me on this, okay, Mr. Swagger?”

“You have to tell me. What is going on? What is happening?”

“The Tokyo police and the arson squad are investigating. We don’t know much, we don’t have good sources with the cops. And it’s not what is diplomatically classified Official American Interest, so they’re under no obligation to answer our queries.”

“Ms. Okada, six people, a family of decent, normal, distinguished, happy people, were wiped out. Were murdered. There’s such a thing as justice.”

“The Japanese haven’t confirmed anything about murders. The official line has to do with an unfortunate fire, a tragedy, a terrible, terrible—”

“Philip Yano was an extremely capable professional soldier. He was a paratrooper, for god’s sake, the elite. He’d been under fire. He’d commanded men under fire. He was one of the best in his country. He was trained to handle emergency situations. If his house caught fire, he would have gotten his family out. If he didn’t, something is very, very wrong. That, coupled with my presentation of a sword that he believed might have been of some value, adds up to a very complex situation, requiring the best of law enforcement efforts and—”

“Mr. Swagger, I am aware you are a man of some experience in the world and that you have been around the block more than once. But I have to say that in Japan we are not going to instruct Japanese official entities how to do their job and what conclusions to reach. They will do what they will do and that is it.”

“I cannot leave six people dead in—”

“Well, there is one thing you don’t know. There is some very good news. The child, Miko Yano. She is still alive, Mr. Swagger. She was at a neighbor child’s that night. Praise be to Buddha or Jesus H. Christ for small miracles, but Miko made it through the night.”

Narita Terminal 2 again.

The embassy van, driven by a uniformed marine lance corporal, scooted through the traffic, carefully found the lane to international departures, turned into a gate where a magnetized card reader permitted swift VIP access.

A police car, with two grumpy Japanese detectives, followed but did not interfere.

“They really want you gone,” said Susan Okada, sitting in the back with Bob, who was now rested, shaved and showered, and dressed in clean clothes.

“That’s fine,” said Bob. “I’m going.”

The van pulled up, and Bob and his new pal Susan got out, took an escalator up, and went through the vast gray room where the ticketing desks were. All the paperwork had been taken care of; he was waved through security, so there was no comic scene about the steel hip. And soon enough he was in the departure lounge at the gate. Through the window, he could see the vast, blunt nose of the 747. The plane would board in a few minutes.

“You don’t have to sit here with me,” he said. “You must have better things to do.”

“I have lots better things to do. But for now, this is my job.”

“Okay.”

“I’m on the drunken idiot patrol. I have to make sure a certain guy doesn’t tie one on and end up in the hoosegow again. You get that.”

“I get that. No drinks ever. I get that. I only fell off the wagon once in years and years. I am a good boy. I thought I had the drinking beat.”

“How do you feel?”

“All right.”

“All kinds of people wanted to be here. The commanding general USMC Western Pacific wanted to be here. Evidently you know him.”

She gave a name.

“He was a battalion executive officer my first tour in Vietnam. ’Sixty-six. Good officer. I’m happy he did so well.”

“Well, he wanted to make sure you were well treated by everyone, that this went smoothly. I saw your records. I see why they think so highly of you.”

“All that was a long time ago.”

“We have a minute. Let me speak with you frankly.”

“Please do, Ms. Okada.”

“I am so frightened you will try to make something of this tragedy. Yeats said, ‘Men of action, when they lose all belief, believe only in action.’ Do you see what he was getting at?”

“I sound like a country-western hick, ma’am, and now and then I break a sentence like an egg, but it may surprise you that I am familiar with that quote, and I’ve read them other guys too, Sassoon, Owens, Graves, Manning, a whole mess of writers who thought they had something to say about war and warriors. I know who I am and where I fit in: I am the sort of man people like to have around when there’s shooting, but otherwise I make them very nervous. I am like a gun in the house.”

“Well, I don’t know about that. But you know where I’m going. You can’t let this become some kind of crusade. You can’t come back. You don’t know the rules here. The rules are very, very strange, and you could get yourself into a lot of trouble and make a lot of trouble for a lot of other people. You must make peace with what happened: it’s a domestic matter, the Japanese will handle it. There have been allegations of criminal behavior but no findings yet. You have to play by their rules. Do you see what I am saying? The Japanese have kicked you out and never want to see you again. If you come back, there won’t be a second chance. You could do hard time.”

“I hear you.”

“It may seem unjust to you, or unbearably slow, or corrupt, even. But that is the way they do things, and when you try to change their system, they get very, very angry. They are their system, do you see? And you can live here for years and not understand it. I don’t fully understand it.”

“Will you keep me informed?”

“No,” she said, looking him in the eye. “It’s not a good idea. Put it behind you, live your life, enjoy your retirement. You don’t need to know a thing about it.”

“Well, you tell the truth.”

“I’m not a bullshitter. I will not ‘keep an eye’ out on things. I want you to let it go. Let it go.”

“What about the girl?”

“She will be taken care of.”

“I have to—”

“She will be taken care of. That’s all you need to know.”

The flight was called.

“Okay,” he said. “It’s against my nature, but I will try. But since you don’t bullshit, I won’t bullshit. I feel obligated here.”

“What do you mean? You couldn’t have known—”

“It’s a war thing. I’m a war guy, he’s a war guy. His dad, my dad, war guys. Us war guys, we’re all connected. So I picked up an obligation. It’s something ancient and forgotten and not in existence no more. Lost and gone, a joke, something from those silly sword-fight movies. Something samurai.”

She looked at him hard.

“Swagger, what men in armor believed five hundred years ago is of no help or meaning anywhere in an American life. Forget samurai. They’re movie heroes, like James Bond, a fantasy of what never was. Don’t go samurai. The way of the warrior is death.”

15

TOSHIRO

What was samurai?

It wasn’t bushido, the way of the sword; he read books on that and found nothing that really helped. It wasn’t any of the other things—calligraphy, computers, automobiles, screen paintings, woodcuts, karate, Kabuki, sushi, tempura, and so forth, at which the Japanese had such eerie talents. And it didn’t just mean “warrior.” Or “soldier.” Or “fighter.” There was some additional layer of meaning in it, something to do with faith and will and destiny. No western word equivalent seemed to quite get it or express it.

Part of it was that kind of man, fascinating in himself, samurai. He wore a kimono. He wore wooden clogs. He had a ponytail. He carried a batch of blades. He would fight or die on a bet or a dime or a joke.

He was lithe and quick and dangerous. He was pure battle. He was USMC NCO material to the max, hard, practical, dedicated, if not exactly fearless then at least in control of his fear and able to make it work for him. If samurai was to be understood, it would be understood through him.

Bob watched movies over and over. He had a hundred of them, not just the ones the smart boys said were great like The Seven Samurai and Yojimbo and Throne of Blood and Ran, but movies nobody ever heard of in the West, like Sword Devil and The Sword That Saved Edo and Hanzo the Razor and The 47 Ronin and Samurai Assassin and Harakiri and Goyokin and Tale of a Female Yakuza and Lady Snowblood and Ganjiro Island.

He watched them on a DVD player in an apartment in Oakland, California, with bare wood floors, a thin mattress for a bed, and nothing else. Each morning he rose at five, ate a breakfast of tea and fish, then went for a six-mile run. He came back, watched a movie; then he read for an hour, on swords, on history, on culture, books he understood, books that seemed bullshit, books even on calligraphy. Then he ate lunch in one of a dozen Japanese restaurants nearby, because he wanted to be used to them, to their smell, their language, their movements, their faces; then he returned home at two, rested, watched another movie; then he went out to dinner, sushi usually, sometimes noodles, occasionally Kobe beef; after nightfall, another two hours of reading, then another movie.

There had to be answers in there somewhere.

Bob had never seen such grace. Their bodies were liquid, so malleable, so changeable, so flexible in subtle, athletic ways that defied belief. They could run and dodge and dip, pivot, feint, stop, change direction fast, all in wooden clogs. They carried the swords edge up in scabbards that weren’t even secured to the belt; in fact, indoors they took the long sword off and carried it around like an umbrella. Yet he noticed: no matter the movie, when they sat on the hard floor, they put the sword in the same place, to the left of the knee, blade outward, hilt just at the knee, grip angled at 45 degrees before them. They never deviated. That was the thing, the core of it: no deviation.

And they were fast. He’d never seen such speed. It was like they were oiled, and when they moved, they passed through air and time at a rate other mortals could barely comprehend. It began with some kind of draw, an uncoiling with blade, so that the sword came out and began to cut in an economy of movement. Sometimes you couldn’t even see the cut it was so fluid; sometimes it was a thrust, but more usually it was a cut, conceived from a dozen different angles, the cut hidden in a turn or a pivot, dancelike but never effeminate, always athletic. And always the conventions: the samurai usually fought against three or four at a time, and often when he would cut, the cut man, feeling himself mortally wounded, would simply freeze, as if to deny the end of life and stretch the final second out over minutes. The samurai would resheathe with some kind of graceful mojo, the sword disappearing with a piston’s certainty into the scabbard, then he’d turn and strut away, leaving behind a collection of statuary. Then they’d topple, one after another.

Was that, somehow, samurai?

In one movie, a guy fought three hundred men and beat them all. It was funny and yet somehow just barely believable. Was that samurai?

In another, seven men stood against a hundred. It was like a Green Beret A-team in Indian country in a war he knew too much about, and these guys were as good as special forces. They stood, they died, they never cried. Was that samurai?

In another, an evil swordsman became possessed of the sword; he couldn’t stop killing, until finally he perished in a blazing brothel as his enemies closed in, but not before he cut down fifty of them. Was that samurai?

In still another, a father avenged himself upon a noble house that had urged his son-in-law to commit suicide with a bamboo sword. The father was swift and sure and without fear; he welcomed death and greeted it like an old friend. Was that samurai?

In still another, a brother, mired in guilt, returned home to face his sister’s husband, who had advised him in aiding the clan and ultimately massacring a peasant village. The hero paid out in justice, finally. Was that samurai?

In another, a man said, “Sire, I beg you. Execute us at once!”

Was that samurai?

In still another, a man said, “I am so lucky it was you that killed me!” and died with a smile on his face.

Was that samurai?

In most of them, the brave young men were drawn to death; they would die for anything, at the drop of a hat.

How the Japanese loved death! They feared shame, they loved death. They yearned to die; they dreamed of dying, possibly they masturbated to the idea of their own death. What a race of men they were, so different, so opaque, so unknowable…yet so human. Samurai?

Sometimes the westerner in him got it. At the end of The Seven Samurai, the three survivors head out of town, the battle over; they turn and look back to a hill and on the hill are four swords, points down, thrust in the ground, next to four rough burial mounds. A wind whistles and blows the dust across the hill.

He got that one: he’d seen enough M-16s bayonet-down in the dirt, as the squad moved on, and the weight of melancholy of young men lost forever, of heroes unremembered, of comrades who died for the whole, was an ache that never went away.

But some of the stuff was so strange.

In one, the hero, a dour samurai who wanders the landscape with his kid in a baby carriage, kills a guy and the dying man says happily, “At last I got to see the Soruya Horse-Slaying Technique.”

He had really wanted to see the hero’s sword-fighting skill; it was worth his life to see it, and he felt privileged even as he bled out!

One day there was a knock on the door. He answered it and discovered a beautiful young woman, serene, poised, possibly a little annoyed. It was his daughter.

“Hi, sweetie. What are you doing here?”

“The question is, what are you doing here?” Nikki said.

“I guess Mommy gave you the address. How is she?”

“She’s fine, she contends. That’s her talent.”

“Right.”

Nikki walked in as if she owned the place. She was wearing jeans and a ponytail and cowboy boots. She was twenty-three and in graduate school in New York to be a writer.

“You were going to come visit, remember?”

“Yeah, well, you know Pop, sometimes the old goat forgets.”

“You never forgot a thing in your life. Daddy, what on earth? I mean, really? This Japanese thing? What on earth?”

She looked around: the kanji composition that he had received from Philip Yano hung on one wall and on the other was a brush painting of a bird called a shrike sitting on a twisted piece of limb. There were piles of books, a huge TV and DVD player, and a hundred-odd DVDs, most with kanji lettering and pictures of lurid men in ponytails on them.

“Do you want a Coke or anything?”

“How about some sake? Wouldn’t that be the beverage of choice?”

“I’m not drinking again.”

“Well then, you’ve apparently managed to go insane without the booze.”

“Opinions vary on that issue.”

She sat down next to the wall.

He sat down across from her.

“What’s with the bird?”

“It was painted in the year sixteen forty by a man named Miyamoto Musashi.”

“And who was he?”

“A samurai. The greatest, many say. He fought sixty times and won them all. I like to look at it and think about it. I like to try to understand the flow of the strokes. He also wrote the kanji over there. Do you see it?”

“What does it mean?”

“It means ‘Steel cuts flesh / steel cuts bone / steel does not cut steel.’ It was given to me by Mr. Yano the night he and his family died.”

“God. Do you understand how nuts you sound? Do you understand how upset Mommy is?”

“There’s plenty of money for her. She shouldn’t have any problems.”

“She has one huge problem. A husband who’s gone crazy.”

“I’m not crazy.”

“Tell me. Tell me as if it makes any sense at all. What is going on here?”

“Sure, okay. You’ll see, it’s not so nuts. It’s all about swords.”

“Swords.”

“Japanese swords. ‘The soul of the samurai,’ or so they say.”

“It sounds like you’ve started to believe all those screwball movies you have lying around.”

“Just listen, all right? Hear me out.”

He narrated, as plainly as possible, the events of the last few months, beginning with the arrival of the letter from the superintendent of the Marine Historical Division and ending, essentially, the minute before she knocked on the door.

“And so you never returned to Idaho? You came here instead, and took up this life.”

“I have principles for a hard job. One, start now. Two, work every day. Three, finish. That’s the only way you get it done and any other way is a lie. So when I got off that plane, I thought, Start now. Now. So I started.”

“What on earth are you planning next?”

“Well, there’ll come a time when I feel I’m ready. When I’ve learned enough to go back. Then, somehow, I’ve got to look into things, I have to make sure that some kind of justice is done.”

“But—correct me if I’m wrong—you have no evidence whatsoever there was some foul play in the case of these poor people. I mean, fires do happen, families do die in them. It happens every week.”

“I understand that. However, Philip Yano had an idea that the blade I brought him had some historical significance. Now, reading about this stuff, seeing how important swords still are to the Japanese, how they still dream about the damned things, how they study and practice with them, it gets damned interesting.”

“How much are they worth? Top end?”

“It’s not money. There would be a lot of money, yes. But to the Japanese the sword ain’t about money.”

“Don’t say ain’t.”

“I’m trying. It keeps creeping in. Okay, the sword isn’t about money. It’s more important than money. They have some peculiar beliefs that you would find very strange. I found them strange too. But as I learn about them, they begin to make a kind of sense. You can’t think about this as an American would. It’s a Japanese thing. It has to do with the meaning and the value of the sword, and the prestige a certain sword would have.”

“Now here’s what someone else would say. A clinical psychologist, for example. He’d say, There was a man who was vigorous, heroic, and extraordinary, but also stubborn, obsessive, and somewhat self-indulgent. Even narcissistic. He loved the warrior reflection he saw in the mirror. He never talked about it, but he loved it. He loved the silent respect he got everywhere in life, and the way his presence could quiet the crowd with a single harsh glance. But then he got old, like all men. Suddenly, he’s facing retirement. He secretly doesn’t want to sit on that porch. And watch the seasons change and count his money. He wants a mission. He wants something to define his warrior life. He’s not the sort to go fishing. So something comes along, and using his considerable cunning and intelligence, he insists on seeing reasons, patterns, clues, hints, all kinds of things that he fancies only he, in all the world, not the professional investigators, not the fire department arson squad, none of them, can see. And it adds up to conspiracy, plots, murder, exactly the sort of thing that demands forceful action from a forceful man, a warrior. And he happens to be that forceful man. He happens to be that warrior. Do you see where this is going?”

“I’m sorry you see it that way.”

“There’s no other way to see it. Oh, Daddy. You’re too old. You’re slow, you’re old, it’s over. You were a great man; you can be a great old man. But don’t be the man about whom they say, No fool like an old fool.”

“Sweetie…let’s go get some dinner or something, okay?”

“Yes, in Idaho.”

“No, here. We’ll get sushi.”

“Ugh. Raw fish. Please, anything but that.”

“I have to tell you this. There are obligations here you don’t know anything about. Deep, family obligations. Long story, no one would care, except me. But…obligations. This goes a long way back, and my father in the war, and the Japanese he fought.”

“I wish your father had never won that medal. It has haunted you your whole life. You don’t owe the Japanese he killed a thing. It wasn’t your war.”

“Honey, it was.”

“You’ve seen too many of these silly movies where guys in bathrobes, flip-flops, and ponytails cut each other’s heads off.”

“Maybe so. But to me, it feels like I’m going home.”

“Just promise me one thing: you won’t grow a ponytail.”

After that, it was pleasant, but Nikki felt her father’s need to return to his obsessive course, and so after dinner—she got through the sushi, somehow—she left, leaving him to his self-decreed mission.

His days were the same. The next development was the arrival of a package with a blue label, marked SAL, from Japan, wrapped in that perfect Japanese way.

Had he ordered something? Some book, some pamphlet? He’d bought a lot of weird stuff off the Internet, out-of-print books, Japanese sword exhibition catalogues, guides to sword fighting. But no: it was a thin package of copied documents, official in nature, no source given; they were typed in kanji with utmost precision, and included hand-drawn diagrams, badly Xeroxed and difficult to read. The whole thing had a spy quality to it; it seemed somehow illicit, the product of a penetration.

He’d have to have someone read it to him but he knew well enough what his anonymous donor from a Tokyo post office had sent him: it was the Yanos’ autopsy report.

16

KIRISUTE GOMEN

Nii handled the negotiations because, even among the most trusted, most senior of the 8-9-3 Brotherhood, Kondo Isami would not show his face.

Nii met with Boss Otani in the latter’s office suite, a corner of a tall building in West Shinjuku, the fifty-fifth floor. The office was luxuriously appointed as befitted a man of Boss Otani’s accomplishment: he controlled much of the action in Kabukicho, more than a hundred clubs. He employed in his main group and in several subgroups one hundred of the fiercest yaks in all of Tokyo, men who would die for him instantly. He owned a controlling interest in three gambling syndicates, the north and west sides of the Tokyo amphetamine franchise, and more than a thousand prostitutes. He himself had killed many times on the way to his current lofty position.

It helped, of course, that at one time his ascent had been blocked by a certain ambitious boss in another organization, who could not be reached and who waged a terrifying war on Boss Otani. This man’s gang of killers had left Boss with the hundred-stitch scar that ran from his nipple to his hip. It was then that the boss made the acquaintance, anonymously, of Kondo Isami of Shinsengumi. In a week, the boss’s rival dropped by for a tête-à-tête. Boss Otani did most of the talking, for of the two têtes, his was the one still attached to a neck.

In black suit and somber mien, young Nii tried not to pay attention to the Tokyo skyline, which stretched to the horizon outside the fifty-fifth-floor window. It was, nevertheless, truly magnificent, the double towers of the Tokyo municipal government buildings, the fabled Hyatt hotel made famous in a movie, the cheesy Washington Hotel, which Boss Otani partially owned.

“Man or woman?” said the boss.

“It doesn’t matter, Oyabun,” said Nii, careful to use the term of respect.

“What does matter?”

“Corpulence. He wants a tubby one. He likes a certain density of flesh.”

“What happened to your head, young man?”

Nii’s left eye was still swollen shut. It looked like someone had puttied a large grapefruit to the left side of his face and the grapefruit had begun to rot and turn weird tones of purple that were shot with veins of red and smears of green-blue.

“It was unfortunate,” said Nii. “I forgot to duck.”

“I hope whoever had the temerity to strike such an important man paid for it.”

“He did. Most quickly, Oyabun.”

“Were you the author of this justice?”

“No sir. Kondo-san himself was. It was magnificent. I have never seen such speed.”

“Did you learn from Kondo-san?”

“I believe so.”

“You are quite lucky to have encountered such a wakagashira, a young boss, so early in your life. Study hard, kobun. Acquire knowledge and experience and give yourself over. You will prosper, or die gloriously.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“Anyway, a fat one?”

“A jelly-belly. You can see why.”

“Yes, of course.”

The older man, whose face looked like a Kabuki mask shaped to express decadent rage, punched an intercom button, and another man in an exquisitely tailored black silk suit, came in. He wore horn-rims and had neat hair. He bowed deeply before his employer and spiritual leader.

“Yes, Otani-san?”

“I require a woman.”

“Certainly, Otani-san.”

“She needn’t be a beauty. She needn’t be a top producer. In fact, it’s probably best if she’s not. She should, of course, be a guest worker. She should have no family in this country. She should have no reputation, no charisma, so that when her circumstances alter, her absence does not cause comment. She must live alone, she must work a very late shift. She must have no bad habits or infections of any kind.”

“There are dozens of such candidates. Alas, none of them live alone. At the rate they are paid, none can afford to live alone. Plus, one of every group, sometimes two, must report secretly to their bosses.”

“I understand. So be it,” said Nii. “He would consider it an acceptable risk.”

“Yes, and if there’s fuss, the remaining hens can be plucked too.”

“At the Club Marvelous, the guest workers are Korean ladies. They tend to corpulence and keep to themselves when not in the club. One of them should suffice. What is the timing to be, sir?”

“Nii?”

“Oh, sooner rather than later. He wants this cutting test done, and then the restoration must begin and that will take some time. We must be ready by December.”

“Did you hear?”

“I did,” said the factotum. “I will supply name, time, route home. I assume Kondo-san prefers his pleasure at night? Things are much easier to arrange at night. We own the night.”

“He would prefer daylight, of course,” said Nii, “for more exact details are revealed. But he understands the impossible cannot be done. Night is acceptable.”

“Who disposes?” said Boss Otani.

“It’s certain to be unpleasant. Perhaps the testers should provide disposal,” said the factotum.

“Nii?”

“Yes. We’ll dispose.”

“Good. Then it is settled.” He addressed Nii. “Tomorrow you call the Club Marvelous and the manager will supply you with the details.”

“Kondo-san thanks his friend and mentor,” said Nii.

“I would do any favor for Kondo Isami,” said Boss Otani.

The Korean woman left much later than her sisters. They got off at five and walked, en masse, to the subway station at Shinjuku. It wasn’t the danger, for Kabukicho was patrolled by police and yaks, both intent on crushing disturbances, who kept the crime rate to almost nil. However, unpleasantness could occur if a single woman met a group of men. Westerners were the worst, especially the Canadians and the Texans, though Germans occasionally acted out as well, and some nasty Iranians might be encountered. If the men were drunk and horny and angry, and had received the age-old message “For Japanese men only” in many bars, it could be awkward for everybody and end with teeth knocked out, eyes blackened, feelings ruffled.

But on this night the woman, a corpulent enough country girl from outside Pusan, had been stopped unaccountably by her boss. She had been quizzed about another girl, who was suspected of sleeping with westerners on her own (rare) spare time. All proceeds must be generously shared with management and a strict no-freelancing rule was enforced.

But this woman did not room with the suspect, so what was the point? It made no sense to her and cut into the five hours she had off, and she had now missed the 5:40 a.m. train and another wouldn’t depart until 6:10 a.m.

She hurried alone across the splotches of illumination, the dark shadows of Kabukicho, as dawn approached and another night of expensively purchased sin put itself to sleep. She headed east down Hanazono Dori, heading toward Shinjuku station. Her cheap wood-soled sandals clattered on the empty street as she rushed, the clubs now mostly deserted, the barkers gone, the sailors headed back to the harbor, the airmen to the air bases, the tourists to their giant hotels. It was the hour of the hare.

The street, which drew its name from a shrine a few blocks behind her, was featureless in the low light. She didn’t like this part of the walk; she focused on the brighter lights of a major cross street ahead.

And then she saw—hmmm, a blur, a move, some kind of disturbance—and, with it, heard a rustle, a shift, a clunk, some weird night noise that had but one characteristic, that it didn’t belong.

She turned, looked back into the blur of countless vertical signs, brightly lit from within, blazing into infinity. The rain spattered on her glasses. She drew her cheap raincoat more tightly against her, annoyed that it was useless against the sudden chill. It was probably nothing, but she felt that someone was waiting for her just ahead. You could never be sure, and she had so much responsibility, she could not afford to be robbed or injured. She hurried back along Hanazono Dori, hoping to get to a large avenue that would still be populated, like Yasukuni Dori.

And where were the cops? Normally, she hated the police cars, particularly the sullen young officers who looked at her as if she were a member of the herbivore kingdom, but now she wished she saw the red light of official presence. Nope, nothing. Not far off she saw the jagged skyline of East Shinjuku, lit with spangles of illumination, promising a new world order or something.

Her life was crap and would never be anything but crap. She worked for next to no money under tight supervision, giving hand jobs and blow jobs and greek the night long. She had absorbed enough Japanese sperm to float a battleship. On a good month, she scraped together a few thousand yen to send back to Korea, where her mother, her father, and her nine brothers and sisters depended upon her. She suspected that it was her father who had secretly sold her to the Japanese man, but family loyalty was nevertheless something she felt powerfully, a Confucian conceit that gave everything she did the faintest buzz of virtue. It meant that in the next life she would be something higher, better, easier.

She turned back, to check again. It was then that she saw the two men. They were in the shadows, moving stealthily, matching her movements, but when her eyes fastened on them, they froze, almost melting into nothingness like skilled Red guerrillas. She stared and in seconds lost their outline. Were they really there? Was she dreaming this?

“Hey,” she called in her heavily accented, grammatically fractured Japanese. “Who you? What want? You go away, you no hurt me.”

In the beautiful Korean of her consciousness, she was far more articulate: are you demons come to take me? Or drunken, fattened American fools who want a free greek fuck to brag about on the flight home? Or young, angry yaks, annoyed that the boss thinks so little of you and therefore look for someone upon which to express your rage?

But they were so still they seemed not to be there. In a second she had convinced herself that it was her imagination. It was punishment for thinking unkind thoughts about her father.

She turned and headed again down Hanaz—

She heard a sound. There were two men behind her. But she was not stupid or panic-prone. She did not scream and run hopelessly into the middle of the street. Instead she accelerated her pace just enough, tried hard to give no sign that she knew she was being stalked. She tried to think. The streets were dark and it was still half a mile to the bright lights of Shinjuku Dori. They could overtake her at any point.

She looked for a sudden detour. She could head for either the Lawson’s convenience store or the Aya Café, both of which were open twenty-four hours a day. She could maybe find an alleyway. The prospect of getting home had become meaningless. She cared only to survive the night and if she had to lie in garbage behind some horrid club, she would do that. A better plan was to find one of the all-night joints, where she could nurse a few cigarettes until seven. It would then be pointless to return home. She could spend a couple of hours in the club, then go back on. It would be hard, but she would get through it.

She came upon an unlit little promenade ahead, not far from a section of fifties bars called the Golden-gai. There was no overhead and she thought if she darted down it, the two men following wouldn’t see. By the time they’d gone beyond it and returned, she’d be out at the other end, on Yasukuni Dori.

It was called Shinjuku Yuhodo Koen, an anomaly in Kabukicho, a curved, flagstone walk set almost in a glade, two hundred yards behind Hanazono Shrine, lined with trees on either side, almost unknown to the general public and certain to be deserted at this hour. It was dark enough to hide or to not be seen. It was ideal. She darted into it, opened up her gait, and prayed that she had dumped her stalkers.

Since the promenade was narrow and the trees close, he would use kesagiri, a cut that began at the left shoulder and drove downward on the diagonal, splitting collarbone, the tip of the left ventricle, left lung, spine, lungs, right lung, liver. Well delivered, it sometimes flew through the curls of the intestine to exit at the right hip just above the pelvis. It was a good test for the blade, which in casual experimentation had proven astonishingly sharp. Old Norinaga knew his business, back there in his darkened hovel in 1550 or whatever, working in the light of the bright fire, as in an anteroom of hell, folding and refolding as his crew of young hammerers laid their strength and will into the glowing chunk of steel and iron.

It was an unusually heavy blade, signifying that it had not been polished often, which meant it had a certain structural integrity. Not much of it had been stoned off in the 450 years since its forging. No hairline vertical cracks, invisible to the eye, ran through the hamon. No niogiri and no breaks in the nioguchi. No ware, no bubbles, no acid damage. It was merely scratched dull by a half century in a scabbard and before that however many years of mundane military duty and before that, who knew? All that was known was what it had accomplished in 1702. He had remounted it, hating the esthetics of the junky army furniture of 1939. Now it wore a simple, pure shirasawa, a wooden sheathing and a wooden handle that assembled neatly into one curved airtight wooden object, almost like a piece of avant-garde sculpture. The shirasawa was called a blade’s pajamas. It was a storage mechanism, not a fighting or a ceremonial one and it meant no tsuba had been affixed, for the tsuba, the handguard that kept the fingers off the sharpness of the blade and caught opposing blades as they slid down toward the hands, was a fighting accouterment or—many were extraordinary works of art in their own right—an esthetic device. But he expected no fight tonight.

They could see her. She diverted down their little lane, a stout woman still fifty yards off, slightly spooked, moving too quickly, aware that she was being followed, unaware that she was being driven. She wore a cheap cloth raincoat, a scarf, and glasses. Even from this distance, her wooden-soled sandals made a distinct click on the pavement.

“Now, Nii,” he said. “What did Noguma do wrong?”

“He was too big in his cut,” said young Nii, crouched beside him. Nii had the plastic garbage bags with him. His was the most unpleasant task of the night.

“Yes, he thought he was in a movie. When he stepped forth, he was consumed in drama. I believe also he stopped to think. At that point it is too late to think. You must be an emptiness.”

“Yes, Oyabun.”

“There is no thinking, no willing. Both take time. Time means death, not for your opponent, for you. Do you read western literature?”

“I listen to western music.”

“Not quite the same. I think of Conrad. He said something so brilliant it is almost Japanese. Musashi could have said it. Or Mishima. ‘Thinking,’ he said, ‘is the enemy of perfection.’”

“I understand,” said Nii, who really did not. It was still memorization for him. You did this, then you did that, then you did another thing, all in sequence, and if you did one out of sequence, you got yelled at. But of course all the time you were thinking, your opponent was cutting.

“Be empty, Nii. Can you be empty?”

“Yes, Oyabun.”

The woman felt confident now. Another ordeal had passed. She was down the dark promenade and had stopped twice. The two followers had missed her detour. She was alone. It was all right. She would survive another night in Kabukicho. She would get another glorious day in that adventure known as her life. She would send another 15,000 yen back to—

He moved so silently, so speedily, he could have been a ghost.

“Hai!” she said.

He materialized out of the trees to the right of the promenade like a giant bat, smooth and dark, in flowing garments, his face almost Kabuki white, like a demon’s, yet at the same time so graceful were his movements she could not tear her eyes from him. She knew she was dead. He was a dancer, a magician of the body, a hypnotizer in the fluid, swooping flow of his body as his arms came up. She stared at him, somehow calmed, and there was a frozen moment when she looked into his eyes and felt the compassionate touch of another human mind and then he—

Arctic Monkeys screamed. Nii simply watched in the dim light and could not look away.

He saw the oyabun appear in front of the woman so smoothly and so evenly there was no aggression in the move and in some way the woman was not frightened. There was no terror. So charismatic was he that he somehow blinded her and took her into death as if it were a deliverance. She seemed to welcome it as a purification.

His arms went up into kasumi gamae, the high-right stance, the elbows near, the arms almost parallel, the sword cocked and coiled behind his head, the hands apart on the grip, one up close to the collar, one down low on the very end. He paused, musically almost, as if to obey the ritualistic demands of the drama. Then the strike and its parts: elbows apart came together as he unleashed downward, the blade flashing high over his head, then plunging downward, as the palms rotated inward. The left hand provided the power, the right the guidance as force was applied along the full edge.

Nii watched: the blade drove on an angle through her with almost utter nonchalance, as if she were liquid, driving across the chest on an angle toward the hip, speeding up as the force continued, but it was so sudden and surgical that she couldn’t scream or jerk or even begin to comprehend what was happening to her.

Just as easily, just as quickly, he got through her, driving the sword edge through the inner landscape of her body, feeling the different textures and elasticities of the blood-bearing organs, the crispiness of the spine as it split, the tightening of the gristle of her intestines, the final spurt through the epidermis from the inside out. Astonishingly, almost illogically, her left quarter, the whole thing, arm, shoulder, neck, and head, slid wetly off the cut and fell to earth, little filaments and gossamer connections breaking as it went, her face with still a look of astonishment, leaving her other three-quarters erect for just a second. A jet of black spurted from the hideous opening of the cut that had become the leading edge of what remained, and when the knees went, clumsily, the whole awkward thing fell to earth, and instantly the blood began to pool blackly in the dim light.

“Yes,” said Kondo Isami. “It’s very sharp still.”

Nii said nothing.

“Now, little Nii. Get this mess cleaned up and disposed. And say a word over her when you bury her. She was good cutting.”

It was called kirisute gomen, meaning “to cut down and leave.” It was the right of every samurai, according to article seventy-one of the Code of 100 Articles of 1742.

17

INO

“He says,” said Big Al, “that it’s not an official form, it’s a draft. It was just typed from notes.”

“So there’s no way of telling if it’s authentic. It could be a forgery.”

They sat in an office behind Sushi Good Friends, a profitable restaurant owned by Al Ino. Al also owned three other sushi restaurants, two strip malls, a couple of pizza joints, two Hair Cutteries, three gas stations, and two McDonald’s around Oakland, a few more in San Francisco, and one or two way out in Carmel County. He was a retired master sergeant, USMC, whom Bob had found through a contact in Marine HQ, under the category Japanese language specialists, as Ino had spent twenty-four years in Marine Intelligence, most of it in Japan.

“He doesn’t think so.”

“Why not?”

“Because he says that although it’s not an official form it is organized like an official form. He’s seen a lot of coroner’s reports. He was a homicide detective in Osaka for eleven years, Gunny.”

The “he” was the father-in-law of one of Al Ino’s sons, who had retired to America to be close to his daughter. Al said he was a top guy who knew Japanese crime up one side, down the other.

“That’s Osaka. Maybe they do it different in Tokyo.”

“Trust me on this one, Gunny. They don’t do it different in Tokyo.”

“Gotcha.”

They were discussing the document Bob had received a few days earlier, shipped by SAL, the big Japanese shipping company. It had turned out quickly enough that the return address was phony, as was the name of the shipper, one John Yamamoto.

“It seems like—”

“They’re Japanese, Gunny. They’re very careful. Every i is dotted, every t crossed at every step. They’re thorough, methodical, and they have infinite patience. They work like dogs. That’s how I ended up owning half of Oakland.”

Bob looked at the document. It was thirty pages long, column after column of kanji characters arranged vertically on the pages, with never a strikeover or erasure, now and then a crude stick-figure drawing with arrows or dotted lines signifying this or that mysterious pathology.

“No names?”

“No names. Just scientific fact on the burned remains of five humans found in the Prefecture of Tokyo at such and such a time at such and such a place. Five dead human beings, and some remarks, some oddities, some things he couldn’t figure out.”

“I’m not sure I can get through this. I once had my own father autopsied, if you can believe it, and I got through that. I’m not sure—”

He trailed off. He needed a drink. A splash of sake would taste so good. It would calm him just enough. Al Ino was a drinking man and Bob could see a whole rack of bottles on a cabinet on the other side of the office. In any one of them, paradise hid.

“Well, it’s pretty hard stuff,” said Al. “Maybe I could submit a report to you, Gunny. You could look at it at a better time.”

“No, I’ve got to do this. Just tell me. Is it bad?”

“Well, here’s one thing I’ll bet you didn’t know. Whoever the oldest male victim is, he got one of them.”

“Huh?”

“Yeah, there was a lot of blood soaked into his trousers, and they didn’t burn because they were so wet. The blood typology and DNA matched nobody in the family. Does that make you feel any better?”

Bob was surprised: it did.

Here’s to you, Philip Yano. You were tough at the end. You defended your family. You went down hard. You cut.

“Is it a surprise?”

“Nah. He was pure samurai. That’s how he’d go.”

“Good news, bad news,” Al went on. “Good news. I suppose, some mercy on a cruel night. The family members were shot. Nine-millimeters, head shots, once, twice. Someone went upstairs silently, from room to room with a pistol, and put them down. So there was no pain, there was no torture, there was no rape.”

“Only murder,” said Bob glumly.

“The ‘young female’ was shot twice, once in the jaw, once in the head. She must have risen, he got her as she was getting up, then he stood over her as she was still breathing and fired again. The others, the boys and the mother, it was clean.”

Bob put his head in his hands. God, he needed a drink so bad! He thought of grave Tomoe and what she would have brought into the world as a doctor, with her care, her precision, her commitment to obligation, her love of her father and mother. Shot in the face, then in the head. Lying there as he came over, she probably understood what was happening, what had happened to her family.

“Is there more?”

“Unfortunately. Gunny, are you all right?”

“Let’s just get this over with.”

“The bad stuff.”

“If being shot in your bed is good, then…go on.”

“They were cut.”

Bob blinked.

“I’m sorry.”

“Not ‘hurt yourself shaving’ cut. Not ‘hell, I cut my finger’ cut. No. They were cut. Cut.”

“Christ.”

“I translate, roughly.”

Al picked up a sheet of paper out of the document that he had highlighted with a yellow Magic Marker.

“‘All limbs and necks were severed. Torsos were sundered diagonally and horizontally. In two cases, pelvic bones had been cut through, seemingly with one clean stroke. In another case, rib bones were sheared in two at roughly a forty-five-degree angle to the spine. All spines were severed. The instrumentation in dismemberment appeared to be a number of heavy, extremely sharp sword blades. The cleanness with which the bones were separated at the site of each incision suggests a weapon traveling at considerable velocity, as if at the end of a stroke of an extremely powerful right-handed man. Several less forceful cuts were also noted; in some cases, bones were merely broken and not fully separated, suggesting men of less intense musculature.’”

“His students.”

“Yeah. Hmmm, let me see.” Al rose, walked to a bookshelf, and pulled out a volume. It was called The Japanese Sword: The Soul of the Samurai, by Gregory Irvine.

He flipped through it.

“Yeah, there’s nothing arbitrary about the cutting that went on that night. It followed prescribed methodology of seventeen ninety-two. Here, look at it. That’s any one of the Yanos.”

Bob looked at the page, trying to keep his rage buried. Rage was not helpful. Rage got you nothing but dead in a hurry.

“It’s a cutting scheme according to the Yamada family,” said Al. “It illustrated the various prescribed cuts that could be carried out when testing a sword on a corpse.”

The line figure depicted a body wrapped in a jocklike towel, with the various dotted lines signifying cuts through center mass. It was headless, and helpful lines pointed out the proper angle through the shoulder on each side of the shorn neck, through the elbow and the wrist and latitudinally across the body from under the arms all the way down to beneath the navel.

“Okay,” said Bob, “that’s enough.”

He needed a drink.

18

THE SHOGUN

The Shogun liked to meet at the Yasukuni Shrine. He felt at home there, where the spirits of Japan’s many millions of war dead lay consecrated, amid the woodlands and the forests where only rarely could a gaijin be seen, and then never one mad with cameras, hungry for Japanese pussy.

He was surrounded by bodyguards, for, of course, he had many enemies.

But it was generally a quiet place, away from the hum and throb of his many organizations, his obligations, his many lords and lieges, all of whom waited for order and direction, his responsibilities, his pleasures, his orchestrations, his plotting, his aspirations. So he could walk and enjoy, from under the steel torii gate that towered over the promenade, which ran two hundred or so yards to the shrine itself, the classical structure of timber and whitewashed stone, ornate and serene at once.

Kondo joined him precisely at 3 p.m.

“Kondo-san,” the Shogun said.

“Lord,” said Kondo, who in street clothes and unarmed appeared to be nothing extraordinary. He was a square, blocky man in his mid-forties whose awesome muscularity was hidden beneath his black salaryman suit, his white shirt, his black tie and shoes. To look at his masculine face was to suspect nothing; no one could know what lay behind his opaque dark eyes. He was neither handsome nor not so handsome; he was in all ways anonymous and therefore unnoticeable. If with sword in hand he was a beacon of charisma, without one he could have been an actuary.

Kondo bowed from the neck and head, keeping the body taut, the feet close, the hands straight against the seam of the trousers. (Musashi’s rule no. 8: Pay attention to trifles. Thus everything, even the bow, had to be perfect.)

“Come walk with me. Let’s talk,” said the Shogun.

“Of course, Lord.”

“I suppose I should ask for a report.”

“Yes, Lord. The blade is as reported. It is absolutely authentic. It is the real thing, that I know. I have felt its power.”

“You used it, then?”

“I knew my lord would understand. I had to know the blade, and to know a blade one must kill with it. And now I know the blade.”

“Was it risky?”

“No, Lord. It was well planned. The woman was alone; she had no relatives. She was a Korean prostitute working in one of Otani’s clubs. It worked out very well.”

“You say it cut well.”

“‘The moon in a cold stream like a mirror.’”

“That well, eh?”

“Musashi himself would have been well pleased.”

“I hope we haven’t lost too much time.”

“Lord, I have made arrangements. Even now the blade will go to old Omote, the best polisher in Japan; then it will go to Hanzaemon, who makes koshirae like no other man alive; then finally, to Saito, the saya maker, again the best. Normally these men take forever, if at all. They will work quickly, however, for the Shogun.”

“Excellent. I trust you in these matters.”

“When it is done, it will be magnificent. When you make the presentation—”

“You must understand how important this is,” said the Shogun. “What is at stake. I stand for a certain Japan. That Japan must be protected. I am that Japan even as I protect it. I cannot lose my power, and the presentation of the blade will guarantee my position for years and years to come, plus win me the adoration of the masses.”

Kondo had heard this speech many times, but he pretended, for the sake of everybody, that he had not. “If you play your cards right,” he said, “it might even win you the Supreme Order of the Chrysanthemum from the emperor.”

“Hmmm,” said the Shogun. “I think the Supreme is a little much to hope for. But one of the lesser badges. That would be very nice.”

“Lord, I promise you. I am your samurai, to you I am pledged, and I will make this thing happen. I will not fail you.”

“You too stand for the old ways, Kondo-san, and I will never forget it. With you at my side, I can do anything. You give me strength. You, too, are Japan, the old Japan.”

“My reward is your happiness.”

“Is that so?”

“Well, your happiness and the four million dollars you’re paying me.”

“Four million buys a lot of loyalty.”

“It bought mine, I’ll say.”

“All right, then. The blade is secure. No suspicion attaches to you or to me. The blade will be restored and I will make the presentation and the people shall love me and my position and my clan’s importance will be guaranteed. Imperial will go away and die. The Americans behind it will go away and die. We will have won a great culture victory. Our Japanese art will stay forever Japanese.”

“I pledge myself.”

“Excellent.” The Shogun checked his watch. “Now I must hasten. I have a crisis to attend to. You know, Kondo-san, all this rough business, all this maneuvering and plotting and violence, I hope it never affects the artist in me.”

It wasn’t the boy, it was the teacher.

It wasn’t her clothes: her clothes were perfect. She had on low heels, a pair of panty hose from Tashiroya, a severe skirt cut just to her knees, a white silk blouse, some very nice pearls, and a conservative jacket. She wore glasses—the glasses were so important!—and her hair was up, pinned securely. Her makeup was exquisite.

It wasn’t the set. It looked exactly like any other classroom: the phalanx of desks, the chalk-frosted blackboards, the maps, the flag on a pole in the corner. It had the dusty, shabby look of thousands and thousands of classrooms and any Japanese male would grasp its essential reality in seconds.

It wasn’t the lighting. Technically, his people were very good. Here, for example, at the casual pinnacle of their professionalism, they had duplicated exactly the pale wash of the ubiquitous high school fluorescents, though with enough soft underlighting to give everything within it a kind of white, dull gleam. For some reason, some magical reason, in this bath of lucidity, flesh itself took on an almost alchemical palpability. Even as each detail was revealed, each flaw, each hair follicle, the end product never looked raw or sordid. It had a kind of majesty to it, classically Japanese (as were all the other motifs) as if delicately painted on a silk scroll by a master in a satin kimono sometime in the koto age.

It wasn’t the director, an old pro, it wasn’t the camera, the stagehands, the experience level, it wasn’t any of these things, but it took the Shogun’s expert eye to see in a second what the problem was. It was the actress.

“Sakura-chan,” he spoke gently to her, “I know this is difficult. But the transition is so important. You have ripened into womanhood. Your flesh has acquired gravity, density, solidity, and amplitude. You have a woman’s body. Your eyes have wisdom, your beautiful face has knowledge, your hair a silky glisten. Our makeup people have transferred your already shocking beauty into something beyond shock; you are truly mythological. Do you hear, my dear?”

“Yes, Oyabun,” said the beautiful young woman chastely.

“But I see from the rushes that something is lacking.”

“I understand.”

“You are holding back.”

“It is difficult.”

It was difficult. Sakura had been in the business three years and was a star. She had a following, was a celebrity, had several magazines and photobooks devoted to her, could get a good table in any restaurant in any city in Japan. The Shogun had invested a great deal of money in her, had her dentition fixed (she’d had a gap between her two front teeth), sent her to the best dermatologists, the most sophisticated manicurists and pedicurists, hired a trainer to develop the muscles of her already willowy, utterly desirable body.

“I understand how difficult it is,” said the Shogun. “Shirley Temple couldn’t do it. Sandra Dee couldn’t do it. Some even believe that the great Jodie Foster hasn’t done it. It is the hardest thing there is. Only Judy Garland was able to do it cleanly and completely.”

“I am trying so hard.”

Her problem: Sakura, in Schoolgirl Sluts nos. 3, 9, 17, and 26 (26 had been a huge hit!), had always played a victim. She had come up the hard way, through entry-level bukkake roles, moving on to her specialty, the schoolgirl rape victim, moving boldly to the geisha motif and quite successfully into a series called Cutie Rangers, where in polyester sci-fi outfits with holes cut so that her perky breasts showed constantly, she moved product in the millions. But her breasts had simply gotten too big and beautiful to continue to play in kilts and ponytails. She had to become an adult woman or she was through.

It was the third day of filming Woman Teacher in Black Sakura and it wasn’t going well.

“Possibly you try too hard, my dear,” he said tenderly.

“I miss the pixels.”

It was like working without a net. In all her other films, Sakura had been pixellated: that is, in postproduction, a computerized mosaic had been appliqued over her most private parts and the most private parts of her male costars. Of course it was psychological, for on the set, all things were displayed routinely, but somehow knowing that at a certain point the delicate obscurity of the pixellated smear would be applied and that one’s most intimate areas were to be protected had helped liberate her to the incredible frenzy that her directors and her millions of fans so admired.

But at a certain point in an actress’s career, she had to move beyond the pixels and enter the world of 100 percent nudity. Such product was of course technically illegal in Japan, by mandate of the Commission of Motion Picture Codes and Ethics, but since the commission was under the control of the All Japan Video Society (AJVS) and since the Shogun was president of the AJVS, in fact its dictator, he could sell such product without fear. He was both the criminal and the police in the issue. It was good work if you could get it, and he had gotten it.

“My darling. You know that the essence of chijo is honesty. You have to move into chijo, you have to put pixels behind you and share the beauty of your womanhood with all Japan.”

And chijo was the essence of his empire. Chijo: “lewd woman” or “slut woman.” It was based on a counterintuitive fantasy, that behind those demure Japanese women, soft-spoken and polite, hardworking and demure, all delicate beauty and exquisite wardrobe, there lay a demon of sexual flame.

The Shogun had been the first to see this. The teacher, revered and feared, so central to the Japanese culture and the Japanese tradition: yet behind her classical looks and reserved dignity lay a wanton, a debauchee, who would assault her students, demand sexual surrender from them, force them into girls’ clothes, literally rape them in all possible positions.

It started with teachers, moved quickly to the other figures of authority: airline hostesses, office ladies, nurses, campaign girls, even finally, as they grew older, the surprising “mature housewife” category.

He had tapped a vein. The money just poured in. The hunger out there was amazing.

“Think of it this way,” he said to the troubled young beauty. “We have our Japanese ways. The world, particularly the Americans, hunger to dominate us. They would change what we do, and destroy us. Not with atom bombs and firestorms, but with their culture, their crude, aggressive, unknowing ways. You, you little Sakura, you must stand against that. You are not merely an actress, you are a frontline soldier, a samurai, in the battle against America. Do you see, my dear, why it is so incumbent upon you to find within yourself that samurai spirit, to display it before the cameras, to let us distribute it, to become full chijo. Really, chijo is the samurai of the flesh.”

The girl Sakura delivered a boffo performance.

19

DR. OTOWA

It was through the good auspices of the retired Lieutenant Yoshida of the Osaka Homicide Squad that the distinguished Dr. Otowa agreed to see Bob Lee Swagger. Dr. Otowa, with graying temples, was well tailored, articulate, and multilingual. He did not know Lieutenant Yoshida, but upon receipt of a letter, a quick call to people who would know (and Dr. Otowa was very well connected) proved Yoshida’s bona fides as a first-rate man, almost a legend, who had retired to Oakland, California, to be near his daughter, who had married an American of Japanese ancestry.

The two men met in Dr. Otowa’s office in the Tokyo Historical Museum, a shrine of antiquities that looked like a cathedral, grand and somber, enshrouded in its own parklands near Ueno, where the doctor was curator of swords, with a specialty (and worldwide reputation) for the Bizen smiths of the fifteenth century. His office, appropriately, was a room of blades: they glinted brightly from their glass cases, wickedly curved constructions that represented to many the highest and most articulated accomplishments of the Japanese imagination for more than a thousand years. The museum had one of the best collections in the country, only a small portion of which was on display to the public.

“Mr. Swagger, would you care for some sake?”

“Thank you, sir, but no. I’m a drunk. One sip and off I go.”

“I understand. I approve of self-control. Now, Lieutenant Yoshida’s letter said there had been some sword thefts in the United States, blades worth many thousands of dollars. A killing as well. As a westerner, you wonder, How could a piece of steel made five hundred years ago for slicing up brigands and executing conspirators and splitting one’s own bowels be worth killing for all these years later?”

“I know the swords are works of art. They can be incredibly valuable. That would be worth killing for just on the profit motive.”

“So you are here to find out about the market. But surely you have seen men kill for insignificant sums.”

“For quarters. For pennies. For harsh words, bad jokes, and cheap gals. Men will kill for anything and nothing.”

“You know a thing or two, I see.”

“But I do believe there was some craft here. The killer had to know about swords. Possibly he represented or was himself a high-level collector. Possibly he meant to hold the blade ransom as you would a child. Perhaps…well, I don’t know. But I’ve checked and the very best sword might go for two hundred thousand dollars. Would that justify such a crime?”

“Possibly it was a historical blade. It had validated provenance and was associated with something extraordinary. That would accelerate its value exponentially. That would be something on the order of Wyatt Earp’s Colt.”

“Wyatt Earp’s Colt sold for three hundred fifty grand. That’s a lot of money.”

“Swords mean more to the Japanese than guns to Americans. Such a sword might go for ten times as much here. Say, three point five million. That’s worth killing for easily.”

“Yes, but the more famous the blade is, the harder it would be to sell for a profit. You could steal Wyatt Earp’s Colt or even the Mona Lisa, I suppose, but who would you sell it to? That’s why the idea of a crime for profit seems not to fit here. Maybe just having it would be enough, but still…it doesn’t make sense.”

“Possibly not to an American. Possibly to a Japanese,” said Dr. Otowa.

“I have to hope I can make sense of it. If not, I’m pure out of luck. I have to presume some sanity and logic behind it, sir.”

“Fair enough.”

“So let me ask this. Is there one sword? By one, I mean something like a grail. Maybe its beauty, maybe its history, maybe both. It exists only in rumors. It’s never been verified. But if it came to light, it would shake up everybody. I mean a sword so special that…well, I don’t know Japan well enough to say. But it would translate into instant power, prestige, attention, something more valuable than money. Something really worth killing for?”

“Killing not merely a man, though. Killing a family? A wife, a husband…”

Swagger sat back and squinted at the doctor. “Hmmm. You saw clean through my little game.”

“Mr. Swagger,” said Dr. Otowa, “I am in regular e-mail contact with blade societies, collectors, and curators all over the world. If a man was killed in America and a rare blade stolen, I would know. On the other hand, several months ago, a man named Philip Yano and his family were destroyed not twenty miles from where we now sit. It was very puzzling, very sad. The next morning an American made a scene at the site of the crime, claiming before witnesses that he had given Yano a rare sword that had been stolen. For his efforts, he was rather unceremoniously asked to leave the country. The investigation concerning Philip Yano has stalled and it seems that nothing is being done, as if certain police officials believe some crimes are best ignored. Now there is an American in my office seeking to discover something about what blades would be worth murdering for. It wasn’t a hard connection to make. I don’t see how you got back in the country, though.”

“I have a very good fake passport in another name.”

“You realize what will happen to you if you are caught illegally on Japanese soil.”

“I know it will go hard.”

“Yet you risk that?”

“I do.”

“The way of the warrior is death. It is not fifteen years of masturbation in a Japanese prison.”

“I will do what I must do.”

“Mr. Swagger, I suspect you are a capable man. You had the sponsorship of Yoshida, who would not lend use of his name to a criminal. So the misrepresentation itself speaks of your righteousness.”

“I only mean to see this thing out, sir.”

“I’m going to tell you a story. I’m going to tell you the story of a sword. Of a sword worth killing for, a sword worth dying for, a sword that would make its possessor the most important and revered man in Japan. Are you ready?”

“I am, sir.”

“All right, Mr. Swagger,” he said, “let’s begin. Now, so that you understand, let me give you something to hold on to.”

He went to his wall display case, unlocked it, and took out a weapon.

“Katana. Sixteen fifty-one, used by a man called Nogami.”

Swagger took the thing.

“Go ahead, take it out of the saya. Don’t worry about etiquette now. Just pull it out and don’t cut a finger or a leg off.”

Swagger pulled it out. It was heavier than it looked. It had a strange electricity to it.

The blade wore a slight curve, was dappled along its edge, where the harder steel that cut met the softer steel that supported; a groove ran up one side, and the tip was a unique orchestration of ridges upturned to a chisel point. Why was it like that? Why wasn’t it just a point? There had to be a reason. These people studied cutting and stabbing, made art and science out of them; they knew the sword and no implement in history had been so engineered as a Japanese sword.

The handle was long enough for two hands and then some, but the whole thing could be used one-handed if necessary.

It wasn’t beautiful. No, it looked like a weapon, like, say, an M-14 rifle, perfectly, exactly functional, meant to do one thing very well and built by people who cared about nothing but that one thing.

In his hands, it seemed to come to life. What had Tommy Culpepper said? Oh, yeah: it wants to cut something. It did. It yearned for flesh. A gun was different; you grew used to it, and it became a tool. But the sword thrilled you each time you picked it up.

He stood and waved the blade artlessly through the air, feeling the slight thrum as it gathered speed and momentum. The grooves made it sing a bit as it sliced left and right.

“Let’s begin with snow, Mr. Swagger. Snow enters the Japanese imagination by chance on a cold night in what the old calendars call December seventeen-oh-two, but which is by ours January thirty-first, seventeen-oh-three. Think of a column of men, forty-seven of them, trudging through the dark city then called Edo, through the whirling blizzard. They are hunched against the cold, but the weather is not on their minds. Vengeance is.”

Bob saw snow. He saw men jogging through it, swords such as this one slung, heads down, breaths blowing steam into the dark night air. It could have been Russia, it could have been the Chosin Reservoir, or it could have been Valley Forge. It could have been anywhere men fought for what they believed.

“They look like Green Berets or Russian Spetsnaz or Brit SAS. They wear camouflage, jagged patterns on their kimonos. Each carries two murderously sharp swords, as well as, somewhere, a shorter tanto, just in case. Most carry yari, our word for spear. Each of them has been training his whole life for this. No commando team in history has had more talent, skill, will, and violence at its disposal.

“Who have they come to fight? The story goes back two years. The shogun—military dictator, the true power in Japan—required that his lords spend every other year in Edo servicing his court in elaborate ceremonial duties that were the court’s entire purpose. I know how foolish it sounds: think how brilliant it is. He wants them consumed with worry over the ceremony, far from advisors and sycophants, so that they won’t plot against him. It’s the time of seppuku. If a lord makes a mistake, if he violates a law, if he crosses his legs wrong or wears the wrong hat—”

He made a gesture, drawing his firm hand in a fist across his belly.

“In seventeen hundred a young lord from the House of Asano, in Ako, was called to Edo for his turn in the court. He was—well, opinions differ. A man of probity and strength, a great man who wouldn’t kowtow, who hated corruption, effeminacy, bureaucratic infighting, all the propensities of headquarters. Or was he a silly fool overmatched, outwitted, and ultimately destroyed? He may have been a mediocrity, a retardate, a crusader. Opinions vary. What’s important is that for some reason he will not play the court game, which is bribery. The most important figure at the court is the master of tea ceremonies—essentially the shogun’s social secretary, secretly controlling everything. His name is Kira. He has seven other names, but we call him Kira. He’s easy to get along with. Just give him a lot of money.”

“Asano won’t.” The circumstances were familiar. Bob had seen movies more or less covering them.

“No, possibly out of idealism, possibly out of stupidity, possibly out of naïveté. Kira is furious. Kira, by the way, is ambiguous. Some see him as a decadent libertine, a partaker in the pleasures of the Floating World, a seducer of young maids. Others see him simply as a man guarding the traditions he had inherited, under no obligation to reform. He did as he was taught. In his way, he was obedient to the dictates of his lord too. Thus, angered and insulted by Asano’s refusal to bribe him, he declares war on Asano, but not with blades. He shames the younger man, he gossips about him to destroy his reputation, and remember, to the Japanese, reputation is everything. The pressure on Asano is incredible. If he makes a mistake—” He made a sound like a belly slitting. “And Asano one day breaks down. In a fit of rage at some insult or other, he pulls his wakizashi—short sword—and lurches after the much older man in a part of the shogun’s castle called the Pine Corridor. He manages to cut Kira twice, once on the forehead, once on the shoulder.”

Bob looked at the weapon.

“Asano has violated court etiquette; he has pulled his blade in the shogun’s palace. It’s an instant death sentence. Say what you will for Asano, he died with far more dignity than he lived. He wrote a poem in the seconds before: ‘I wish I had seen / the end of spring / but I do not miss / the falling of the cherry blossoms.’ Then he cut his own guts out.

“The shogunate confiscates his property, his mansion, and it drives all his retainers out. Now they are shamed, they are unemployed, they have nothing.”

“You know, I think I saw some movies about this. I never quite understood them, I now realize, but I know what happens. The Forty-seven Ronin. They visit Kira two years later. The government has abolished the clan, confiscated its property, and driven them out to the countryside, but they weren’t quite done. One night, they came to call.”

“When it was snowing. Correct. Come look at this and bring the sword. I want the sword in your hand when you see this.”

The two men rose, and Dr. Otowa took Bob over to a woodcut on the wall.

“The greatest Japanese warrior artist was Utagawa Kuniyoshi. He portrayed that night and the men who took part dozens of times, and from him come all our images of the event, even if he was working in the nineteenth century, one hundred sixty years after the fight. This is his triptych entitled ‘Attack of the forty-seven Ronin on Kira’s Mansion.’”

Bob looked. He saw war, familiar enough. A melee, a whirl, a crazed mess, no rules, no coherence, men in desperate postures, faces grim, driving forward with the long spears and swords, just like the one he held.

“See that one there,” said Dr. Otowa, pointing to a dominant armored figure in the center of the battle, with the longest spear, urging his men on with some sort of horsetail switch. “That’s Oishi, the senior retainer of the House of Asano. He is the hero of the story. He is the man who planned and led the attack, who held the Ronin together, who coordinated intelligence reports, who laid out the final strategy. He knew he was being watched by the shogun’s secret informers so he went so far as to leave his wife and go live in a brothel, pretending dissolution to mislead the spies. Or that is what is said. Maybe he just needed an excuse to leave the woman and live it up with the geishas until the day came.”

“Wouldn’t be the first time,” said Bob.

“Not at all. Oishi divides his men into two groups, assaults through the snow. One man is assigned to cut the bowstrings of Kira’s bodyguards, so there’s no way they can get their big weapons into play. Then it’s man on man, sword on sword. A fellow named Horibe Yosube was the best swordsman; he was accompanied by his father-in-law, Horibe Yahei, who was seventy-seven. Many of the men were old. The youngest was Oishi’s son, who was seventeen. But it is Oishi we are interested in.”

“He killed Kira.”

“Yes. After all the killing was over, they found the vile Kira hiding in the charcoal shed. Oishi knew him because of his age and the scar on his forehead. He ripped the old man’s jacket off and found the second scar on the shoulder. Oishi offered him the tanto. Kira was no samurai. He declined. Oishi beheaded him with a single stroke from his wakizashi, which was the blade that Asano had used to disembowel himself. Now that sword, Seppuku of Asano, then Beheader of Kira, that is a sword Japan would love to have. What happened to it? We don’t know. We only know that it was made a hundred years or so earlier by a smith named Norinaga in Yamato.”

“I see.”

“No, no, you don’t, because I haven’t finished the story. The world would understand the story I’ve told you. Loyalty, courage, violence, justice. What a primal narrative. How satisfying. Now, however, comes the Japanese part. The Forty-seven Ronin? Did they run and hide? Did they sail to China and Korea and change their names? No. They marched in formation to Sengakuji Temple, where their lord was buried, washed the head of Kira, and turned the head over to the priests. Then they turned themselves in to the shogun and awaited judgment.

“There was much debate, but in the end, all of them, all of them, were ordered to commit seppuku, and all of them did. Here’s the truly Japanese part: they were happy to do so. The story isn’t a tragedy, it’s got a happy ending. The Forty-seven, within a year, had been ordered by the shogunate to split their bellies, and on a single day, an orgy of belly splitting took place. That is why we remember them. That is why hundreds of people go to Sengakuji Temple here in Tokyo every day to visit the graves and burn incense to their spirits. That is why there is a big festival on the fourteenth of December—to commemorate the night Oishi cut the old man’s head off. That’s the sword. That’s the one. It’s just like the one you hold in your hand now.”

Bob looked again at the weapon.

“Could it somehow have ended up shortened, remounted in ’thirty-nine shin-gunto furniture, and carried in World War Two?”

“There’s no reason at all why it couldn’t have. It was lost. It could be anywhere, it could be nowhere.”

“What would verify it?”

“The shape of the blade and the structure of the ridges and the nature of the hamon would place it in the right time frame; then if enough was left on the tang, the presence of Norinaga’s name and the Asano crest would complete the triangulation. None of the other Ronin had swords by Norinaga. Oishi had Asano’s wakizashi and katana, with a white cord around the koshirae. Only Oishi carried Norinaga.”

“And if you had that sword—what would you do with it?”

“Possession of Beheader of Kira would be a totem of samurai purity that would propel its owner to instant fame. Its recovery would electrify Japan. I’d donate it to my own museum and display it to the people of Japan. It would be a gift to the nation. The nation would rejoice. Or most of it, anyhow.”

“What would the man who wiped out the Yanos do with it?”

“I don’t know, Mr. Swagger. I don’t know. But he certainly wouldn’t give it up easily. Mr. Swagger, do you understand what you’re getting yourself into?”

“I suppose I do.”

“Do you have a plan?”

“I have a lead. A policeman, said to be an expert, examined the sword I brought into the country at the airport. He was the only one who saw it. He had enough time to make an impression of the tang. When I examined the sword in America the mekugi was cemented in place. Yet when I watched Yano examine the sword, that pin popped right out. So someone had disassembled the sword; it could only have been that policeman, who had it in his custody for three hours. That was the only time it was out of my sight. He won’t want to talk with me, but that’s too bad. I will learn of a next step from him. I will pursue that next step. In the end, I will find who stole the blade and I will retrieve it, no matter what.”

“These people will come for you.”

“I have been at risk before.”

“Yes, I realize. In the military.”

“Yes, sir.”

“This is different. It’s not war, it’s more intimate. Are you armed?”

“No. I’m sure I could get a gun.”

“Yes, but if you were caught here without a passport and with an illegal gun…I hate to think of the consequences. Possibly you should hire a bodyguard.”

“He’d just get in the way.”

“Do you have any martial arts skills?”

“I know a trick or two. I was in the Marine Corps for fifteen years and took a few unarmed combat courses there. I’m not afraid of violence.”

“Fear has nothing to do with it. The bravest untrained man facing the most cowardly trained swordsman would die in a tenth of a second. Do you know the sword?”

“No.”

“If a skilled man came at you with a sword, what would you do?”

“Well, I suppose I’d go into the OODA loop: observe, orient, decide, and act. That’s the core of—”

“You would die, Mr. Swagger. That’s all you would do. Look, I’m sure you’re a very brave man. But get some instruction. Learn some fundamentals, at least, if you’re determined to explore these dark Japanese alleys. They are unkind places for the uninitiated.”

“I hear you.”

“There’s no way you could pick up what some have studied for a lifetime. But at least you’d have some sort of a chance if assaulted.”

“I’ll consider it.”

“Here,” he said. “Here’s the number of a fellow in Kyoto. I will call him and tell him of the gaijin who thinks he’s Toshiro Mifune. He and I will have a good laugh. We were kendo competitors many, many years ago. We pelted each other bloody over the decades. He trained my son. He’ll see you, as a favor to me, even if only to be amused. You should spend a week with him and listen to what he has to say. Or you should go home. Those are your only choices. ‘Steel cuts flesh / steel cuts bone / steel does not cut steel,’ as Musashi said. Become steel or get cut, that’s the world you’re entering.”

20

THE YOUNG MEN

Bob left the august building and headed through the parklands where dozens of brightly colored stalls, selling books and DVDs and yakitori, had been set up. He saw a cop car and thought, Do they know who I am? Am I being watched?

The trip in had been easy enough. Al Ino, through his intelligence contacts, was able to come up with a passport for Bob; soon enough, that led to a whole new identity, complete with driver’s license, Social Security number, and fake pictures in his wallet; he sold some bonds and put $100,000 in a fund in the name of a Mr. Thomas Lee, of Oakland, California, traveling money accessible anywhere in the world with credit card and PIN number. It went without a hitch; Bob Lee Swagger didn’t exist anymore.

Now that he’d done the first thing, he had to figure out how to locate the cop at the airport, how to approach him, how to secure his cooperation.

Yet already he was exhausted. Where had his energy gone? Was he too old for this? And a week of sword lessons: what could be learned in a week? What was the point?

He looked about for a western-style restaurant. He walked for a bit, leaving the somber, grand building and its parklands, and entered the crazed utopia of modern Tokyo. In time he found a Starbucks and went in and bought a seven-dollar cup of black joe.

Gradually, the Starbucks began to fill up. The coffee was hot and strong, and he began to—

And that’s when he noticed. The restaurant had filled up quickly enough, but with the same man. He was about twenty-five, all twenty-five of him. He wore his hair in a crew cut with a butch wax front fence; he was muscular, alert, oblivious, and yet at the same time aware. He wore square black-framed sunglasses, chinos, and a white polo shirt. They didn’t pay any attention to the lanky, older gaijin sitting there, but very quietly and skillfully surrounded him. Then Bob noticed they’d each ordered a single cup of coffee.

Oh, shit, thought Bob. I don’t like this at all.

One of them seemed to amble by, then, with a certain nonchalance, slid across from Bob. Not a word was said, not for a while. Finally the young man looked over and smiled and said, “Hi.”

“Hi,” said Bob. “Do I know you?”

“No, but I know you. Thomas Lee, isn’t it?”

“What is this?”

The young man took a sip of his coffee.

“This Starbucks, really good, huh?”

“It’s okay. What is this? Who are you?”

“A friend, I guess.”

“I don’t have any friends. I’m a mean old bastard.”

“Not that kind of friend. The other kind. As in, we have the same enemies, so we should be friends.”

“Are you a cop? You look like a college tennis player.”

“Relax, Mr. Lee. Enjoy your coffee. I just think that when you finish, you should come with us.”

“Why would I want to do such a thing?”

“Because, as I say, we’re friends.”

“You say. I get in a car with you and the nine-millimeters come out and it’s all over for me.”

“Guns are illegal in Japan. Let’s put it this way: we can help you. We have the same goal.”

“Prove it.”

“All right. Your name isn’t Lee. It’s Swagger. You’re an ex-marine, a war hero, known in some circles as quite capable, something of an operator. If you get caught here on that bad passport, you are in deep trouble. We know all that. If we wanted to take you down, we could do it with a single call. Yet we do not. We are nice to you. We like you. Look, let’s do it this way. I’ll leave, all the men here will leave. You come out when you’re ready. Satisfy yourself that no one’s around, no one’s coercing you, that it’s entirely up to you. Then cross the street and you’ll see a tan van. I’ll be sitting next to the driver. Come over, get in. We’ll drive you to an interesting place and you’ll meet some interesting friends.”

He rode in utter silence for about an hour. Then the doors opened but didn’t reveal the bright light of outdoors. His “friend” leaned in.

“This way, Mr. Swagger.”

Then he heard a strange sound. It was a hollow, vibrating thunk or clank. It was a wood sound and he figured after a bit that people were banging sticks together, sometimes quite rapidly, in dizzying patterns.

He was in a vast interior space under a vaulted, curving roof, and saw that it was a hangar of some sort. As his eyes adjusted, he quickly made out that it had been converted into a gigantic dojo. Everywhere, young men whacked at each other with katana, wooden of course, exhibiting a great deal of elegance and power. Most wore the hakama pants and shinshaga jacket of kendo, and the armor and masks of that game, but a few, either brave or fools, either too nimble to be held back by the armor padding or in punishment for an infraction, went at it with unprotected faces and bodies. They were really good.

He turned and saw his “friend” had joined two men wearing uniforms that had to belong to Japan’s Self-Defense Force.

“What is this, gym class?” he asked.

“Not exactly, Mr. Swagger,” said the leader of the group.

“Don’t know where you get your information. My name is Lee,” he said. “Thomas Lee. I have papers to prove it.”

“That’s not what Lieutenant Yoshida said.”

Oh, great, thought Bob.

He walked over, joined the officer, and the four of them walked between mats until they reached a conference room. They all took seats around a large table.

“Yoshida didn’t betray you,” the officer in charge said. “He was helping you. Yoshida informed us because he knew that you and I shared the same objective. I knew about your impending arrival before you even got the tickets.”

“All right. Who are you?”

“I, Major Albert Fujikawa, Commanding Officer, Third Battalion, First Airborne Brigade, Eastern Army, Japanese Self-Defense Forces, ground division, welcome you to Japan. The young man in civilian clothes is my executive officer, Captain Tanada, commanding officer of my Recon Company. As you might imagine, the bigger fellow is a sergeant, Master Sergeant Kanda. We welcome a retired gunnery sergeant, United States Marine Corps.”

“Well, aren’t you well informed? You even know my old rank. Al Ino tells Yoshida, who tells you; you make inquiries and get all my bona fides.”

“Something like that.”

“But now I get it,” said Bob. “You’re Philip Yano’s guys.”

“We were with Colonel Yano for many years. In Samawah, I was the one the colonel pulled from a burning Bradley vehicle. I’d be dead if it weren’t for him.”

“He was a very fine man.”

“He was indeed.”

“He and the kids and his wife deserved better than they got,” said Bob.

“Nobody deserved what the Yanos got. And that is why you’re here.”

“No one seems to be doing a goddamned thing about it!” Bob said in frustration. “That don’t sit right with me.”

“Mr. Swagger, your anger, your loyalty, your fury, your drive, all that is indeed commendable. However, it is time to face some realities. You have almost no knowledge of Japan. You don’t speak Japanese, you don’t understand our values, our traditions, the way our society is put together.”

“I’ve seen a lot of samurai movies,” said Bob.

“Oh, excellent,” said the major. “Did you see the one where the fellow outran the horse?”

“As a matter of fact, I did.”

“Or the one where the samurai defeated three hundred men in a village?”

“Yeah, I saw that one too. I also saw the one where the gal cuts the guy’s head off, but he don’t notice until he turns around and his head stays in place. But I also saw a lot of stories about lone men doing what they had to do and getting the job done, even if it cost them their lives. That was the lesson I took.”

“You know nothing of our politics, our corporations, our sexual tendencies, our strange relationship with the samurai past. Can you name a single city in Japan besides Tokyo, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki?”

“I think there’s one called Kyoto. Oh, also the one where they held the Winter Olympics that time.”

“Do you know if you are allowed to have sexual relations with a geisha?”

“I have always wondered about that one.”

“Do you know how to tie an obi?”

“No.”

“What is the Diet? What is the name of the emperor? What is the name of the majority party? Do you know what a prefecture is? What is the difference between a shogun and an emperor? What is the family name of the great shogunate clan? Can you name a famous film director who did not make a single samurai movie? Do you know how many people we lost in World War Two? Do you know how many people were burned to death in a single night in Tokyo?”

“No. I don’t know any of that.”

“Do you know our justice system? Do you understand the structure of the yakuza, their traditions, identification marks, tendencies, and traditions? Do you understand the difference between our National Police and the Prefectural police and how they interrelate?”

“No. I take the point. I am ill equipped for this job. I will get in the way. I will fuck things up. Is that what you brought me here to tell me?”

“Actually…no. All those reasons are, in fact, why you are the one man in Japan who might succeed at this job.”

Bob’s mouth fell open. Had he heard right?

“I don’t—”

“You see, we have a tight little island here. Rules, boundaries, traditions everywhere. Do you want to understand the Japanese, Mr. Swagger? Look at a kimono or a hakama and see how it is a galaxy of knots, all different, all perfect, all strategically placed. That is why the swords never fall out of the sashes in the movies. No westerner could tie any of those knots; every Japanese could tie all of them blindfolded. So we are caught up in our own knots, Mr. Swagger. We need a westerner who can cut through knots. Fuck the kimono, fuck the obi, fuck the way saya fits in the obi, fuck all that shit. Cut through it. Find out who killed Philip Yano and why.”

“So you want to…help me?”

“By law, those of us in what passes for a military are forbidden from taking part in domestic affairs. The penalties are extreme; we are watched constantly. We represent a Japanese tradition that many Japanese have been taught to be ashamed of and cannot face. So they hammer us into insignificance. But you, Mr. Swagger, are uninformed, undisciplined, unaware. You can go anywhere and ask anything. You are true ronin. Masterless samurai, owing nothing to nobody. You really are Toshiro Mifune.”

“Don’t know about that, but I will try my damndest.”

“I believe you. All right then, you’ll have a number. We will staff that phone twenty-four hours a day. If you get in trouble, if you need help, if you need logistics support, intelligence, we will provide it for you. In the meantime, we’ll go our separate ways, seem to lose ourselves in the minutiae of meaningless existence as we have since Philip Yano and his clan were slain. I’ll even divorce my wife and move into a brothel. Well, no, I won’t.”

“Believe it or not, I catch the meaning. Otowa mentioned that story.”

“He would have, yes. Our retainer has been murdered, our clan destroyed. We will settle that account, Mr. Swagger.”

“But there’s a bargain that must be made. I will be part of that fight. That’s the bargain I’m making with honorable men, right?”

“All right, Mr. Swagger,” said Major Fujikawa, “you have your bargain.”

“Now,” said Bob, “let’s see if you’re as good as you say you are.”

“Go ahead,” said the major.

“At Narita, there’s a cop who’s the station’s sword expert. Someone they call to deal with sword matters, importation, exportation, ignorant gaijin who bring stuff in or out without doing the necessary paperwork, that sort of thing.”

“Yes. It is logical.”

“He’s the guy. He’s what this thing pivots on. He’s dirty. He has to be. He understood in a second the potential value of the sword I carried, he made the phone call, he’s the one who made the whole thing happen. I have to have his name and address. I start with him.”

21

THE COP

Someone in the unit had a brother who was a cop at Narita, and in a few days, Major Fujikawa called with a name—Kenji Kishida—and an address. Bob intercepted him at Narita. He was the one on the brand-new Kawasaki 400, a gleamy red dream machine, bigger than all the other bikes. Obviously, he’d bought it with his yakuza windfall for finding the sword.

When he arrived at and departed from the station lot, parking and locking his bike in the gated compound, Bob watched from the coffee shop, where he could sit unobserved reading a newspaper. Kishida moved with an awkward limp. He didn’t have the agility, the rangy grace of a young man, nor was he muscle-bound like others who spent lots of time in the gym bulking up.

This fellow wore a suit, suggesting he was a detective or an administrator, and in his bright red-and-black helmet with its darkened fullface shield he looked almost ridiculous, like a hybrid beast, part salaryman, part knight in armor.

Bob monitored the man’s apartment house for a few days, until he was satisfied Kishida had no wife and kids at home.

The next week Bob noted that his candidate was working the midnight shift. One morning at 4 a.m., Bob pulled into Kishida’s apartment building’s parking lot, riding an identical Kawasaki 400, Metallic Majestic Red, that he’d bought in the name of Thomas Lee. He’d spent afternoons coming to terms with the left-hand driving. He was swaddled head to foot in racing leathers, and wore the exact red-and-black helmet with darkened visor that Officer Kishida wore. He pulled into the stall that Kishida always took and even aped the candidate’s slight limp, his old guy’s demeanor.

He entered the building, nodding at a sleepy night watchman at the desk who thought Bob was the officer, took the elevator up to the right floor, walked to the apartment, bent over, and attacked the lock with a credit card. There was no heavy security system, no deadbolts or electronic monitoring. The lock yielded in a split second. Then he was in.

The apartment, of course, was trim and neat. Three pairs of black shoes and two pairs of sneakers with shoe trees in them were lined up in the foyer. Bob went to the bookcase and saw many English books; Kishida spoke English. The books were all about swords. Most were in Japanese, several in German, and several in French. All were arranged by nationality, then alphabetically. He pulled one out at random and found it copiously underlined and with margin notes. On the inside cover were precise notes taken in a fine kanji hand, running up and down the page, indexed to page numbers. He pulled two other books out and found them equally dissected.

No dirty dishes were in the sink in the small kitchen, and the refrigerator yielded no germy sushi, no moldy noodles. There was a six-bottle carton of Sapporo, and three cans of that famous Japanese drink, Diet Coke. Next to the refrigerator was a half-open bottle of Ozeki sake.

Bob moved to the bedroom. It was nondescript, with Musashi’s famous shrike hanging on a scroll over the futon, which was flat and neatly made up. Against the opposite wall was a large TV and DVD player. In the closet were uniforms, shirts and ties, and two civilian black ties and black suits. Then polo shirts, a few pairs of jeans and chinos, all neatly pressed. Each hanger was exactly one-third of an inch from the next.

Closing the door, he went to the low stand next to the futon and opened it. There he found on one shelf, again alphabetically arranged, the crème de la crème of samurai DVDs, mostly Kurosawa but also several other top-line films he had seen, including Samurai Rebellion, Harakiri, Band of Assassins, and When the Last Sword Is Drawn. Beneath, neatly stacked and alphabetized, were porno DVDs, from a company called Shogunate AV. Shogunate AV seemed to specialize, as near as Bob could figure out, in something that might be called “teacher films,” for each of the covers showed an attractive young woman in her mid-twenties in a business suit and glasses lecturing a batch of boys. In subsequent shots she was stripping for them, they were touching her, she was servicing them, all in the classroom, where higher mathematics had been chalked on the blackboard.

Jesus, he thought, who came up with that?

He left the porn stash and went to the desk. Indeed, the still shiny owner’s manual to the top-of-the-line Kawasaki 22R400 bike lay on the desk, and it too had been scrupulously studied, underlined, and annotated, all in a precise kanji hand.

Where were the swords? This guy would surely have swords.

He never found them, but he found a vault in a living room closet. That’s where they’d be, this fellow’s small, proud collection.

Bob went back to the desk and found a photo album: our hero in kendo outfit through the stages of his life, young and proud, a winner of some local tourneys, a man in his twenties lean and dangerous. A woman appeared in some of them, but then she disappeared. Divorce, death? In the more recent photos, the swordsman had become a coach and posed with a group of younger kendo warriors.

Then, in a drawer, Bob found what appeared to be a pile of bills. They were all addressed to Kenji Kishida, of 1-23-43 Shintoyo, Apartment 633, Chiba. Many were in kanji, a few, from Citibank, were in English and Japanese, and many said the same thing: they appreciated his recent settling of debts and they thanked him very much.

There it was. The guy was bankrupting himself buying swords he couldn’t afford. Then the dream sword is presented to him in the middle of a business day. He recognizes the Asano crest and the swordsmith’s signature, he reads the shape of the blade, puts two and two together, and recalls that somebody in the last few weeks wants an astonishing sword. He knows the number. He takes the sword apart. He makes his tang imprint, makes the call, faxes the imprint, and connects them to Bob. It takes a couple of hours to set up a tail. Bob’s sitting there like a fool; when he leaves, he has no idea he’s leading the killers to the Yanos.

A week later Detective Kenji Kishida receives an envelope full of cash. He can settle his bills; maybe he buys a sword he’s longed for and it reposes right now in the vault. He’s got a little extra. He always wanted a bike. Why not? Who will notice? He probably never connected it with the Yanos. It was just a little favor of the sort a mildly dishonest cop might do for someone in power.

The officer did not go to work Saturday. He arose late and finally went to his bike about eleven in the morning. He had full racing leathers on and looked like a ’cycle knight. He examined his bike with a great deal of pleasure, checking connections, lubricants, this or that tube or pipe or cable. Then he put on his helmet, climbed aboard, keyed the engine, kicked up the stand, backed out. With a lurch—he had clearly not yet mastered the subtleties of the handle-grip clutch and the foot shifter—he shunted into motion.

Bob caught the tail end of this drama, as he’d been circling the blocks in a figure-eight pattern to keep the parking lot observed, figuring it would only be out of sight for seventy seconds out of every two minutes, and when he came by, the man had mounted up. Bob slowed, tracked him as he moved through the lot, let him join traffic, and followed a good three hundred yards behind.

Kishida threaded his way through the traffic, still clumsy and jumpy on the gears, edged his way through the suburbs of the small city of Narita to the Kanto Expressway, where, ever so tentatively, he finally got up into the higher gears and was soon humming along at 100 kmh. It never occurred to him that he was being followed, and even if it did, he probably wouldn’t have had the confidence to take his eyes off the road before him. So Bob slipstreamed along without much difficulty.

Then Kenji Kishida either tired of the strain of moving at high speed or decided he wanted to see something prettier than Nissans and Mazdas playing tag at 120 kmh and the revetments of the superhighway, so he took an exit ramp. Bob easily followed him. Soon enough the houses fell away. Ahead, some mountains dominated the landscape, and rows of carefully cultivated fields lay on either side. The traffic thinned, and finally Kishida turned up a smaller road and seemed to be heading into the mountains. He still had not noticed Bob, now two hundred yards behind.

The road was empty, climbing slightly through rich pine forests. Bob had never seen a more beautiful and serene range of hills. He knew he’d never have a better chance. The guy might join a heavier-traveled road in seconds.

He gunned up into fifth gear, goosed the bike, and flew beyond a hundred miles an hour. The wind beat against him and he closed the distance like a shot, zooming by Kishida, feeling the man’s sudden start of panic. Then, cruelly, he cut Kishida off, eating up his space, driving him onto the shoulder. The dust spun up in clouds as Kishida struggled with the treacherous loss of traction, got tangled up in gears and throttle and brake sequence, almost lost control, almost in fact died, but somehow managed to brake hard and bring the bike down in the dust.

Bob fishtailed to a halt, punched down his kickstand, and ran to the man lying next to the fallen, still chugging bike. He shut down the engine and saw through Kishida’s shaded visor the man’s fear, panic, confusion, and hesitation. Kishida tried to rise. Bob put a left-footed dragon’s kick into the side of the helmet—hadn’t done that in years!—and clocked him hard. Kishida fell down, slipped trying to get up, ripped at his helmet, then grabbed at his zippered jacket, perhaps to reach a gun or a tanto, but Bob kicked him in the helmet with another wheelhouse dragon’s sweep. That put him down solidly, and he lay, shaking stars and spiderwebs out of his head, trying to figure what the hell was—

Bob jumped him, pressing his knee against the squirming man’s chest. He pulled the zipper down, saw the shaft of a Glock, pulled it, dropped the mag, racked the slide to toss the chambered round but there wasn’t one, then tossed it twenty feet away. Kishida recoiled in horror. Bob yanked the man’s helmet off.

“You stay put if you know what’s good for you. I’ll smack you around even more if I have to!”

“I am a police officer. You are in big—”

“Shut up. I ask the questions, you answer ’em. That’s how this game is going to be played. The sword.”

“I don’t—”

“The sword, goddammit.”

“What sword?”

“The sword that bought you this bike. The sword that paid all your debts. The sword that bought you some new toy in your vault. The sword that’s going to buy you teacher porno for the next ten years.”

Kishida said nothing. His eyes suddenly went distant and he looked off, thinking. Then, finally, he looked back.

“I know who you are. I knew you’d come.”

“It don’t matter a lick who or what I am or who or what you know. What matters is the sword. You were the one who spotted it. Who’d you tell? How did it happen, how was it set up, what was the deal, the connection? Don’t give me any bullshit. I know more than you could guess.”

“Please, I had no idea those people would be killed. You have to believe that. I never realized…I just had no idea.”

“So you knew it was going to the Yanos.”

“No, but the collectors were talking afterward how some American at the site of the fire was screaming about a stolen sword. That’s when I saw how it could have been. I am ashamed. I should have committed seppuku, but I lack the courage.”

“You and me both, pal. Just tell me: who reached you? How did it happen? Who was on the receiving end of the information? How was it set up?”

“I can’t tell you. Go ahead, kill me. If I tell you, I’m dead. It’s the same thing.”

“You don’t want to die. Not with that pretty bike lying there and brand-new swords in your vault. It ain’t worth dying for, believe me. And I don’t want to kill you. Too much paperwork. Tell me. Talk to me, Kenji, goddammit.”

The man took a deep breath.

“I was approached by a low-ranking yakuza some six months ago. He gave me a hundred thousand yen. ‘For what?’ I said. He said, ‘Just for keeping your eye out.’ He knew that I was a collector, an ex–kendo champion, something of a scholar of the sword, and at Narita I was always the one called to inspect and judge blades that unsuspecting tourists brought in or took out without proper documentation, and that I was also asked to consult on sword thefts, insurance values, that sort of thing. So he knew that I was at a kind of crossroads of sword information.”

“He had a specific sword in mind?”

“No. He couldn’t have known what would or wouldn’t come in, if anything. But they were looking for something big, something that would make a splash. They turn up now and then as more and more swords are returned, as people look at the things they have in their trunks, as collectors and foreign buyers become more aggressive and pay more and more. Samurai is bigger than Japan. Samurai is international now.”

“So you saw the sword?”

“It was lying on a desk, just in from Customs. A fellow was typing up the license. I knew in a second it had historicity to it. I made a fuss and demanded to take charge. I told them it resembled a certain stolen sword and I had to make some phone calls. Once I had it in my office, I had some trouble getting the hilt off. Someone seemed to have poured some black tar or something into the mekugiana and I couldn’t budge it. Fortunately, I had my kit. I was able to knock the pin out with the brass hammer. There was even a poem written by someone, I don’t know who. ‘Moon of hell,’ that I remember. But I was too excited about the sword. I didn’t recognize the smith’s name, Norinaga. But I picked up the crest, looked at it through my loupe, and realized at once it was the Asano mon. I recognized the koto shape, which put it in the proper time period. It was a thrill. It was all I could do to keep from jumping up and down. It was only later when I researched the smith’s name that I realized what it had to be. If I had known that—well, I don’t know.”

“So you called?”

“Well, first I had to make the imprint of the tang. I did that quickly. Then I made the call. It was a young man’s voice, husky, strong, not the yakuza I’d first talked to. He heard me describe it and left the line for a second or so. He called someone. Another voice came on the line. He asked me to describe it. He was very knowledgeable. He even knew that the Asano family crest had changed over the years and had me recheck it to make certain that the one I had was right for the time. I told him the smith’s name. He got very quiet. I said, ‘What do you want me to do? Confiscate it?’ ‘No, no,’ he said, ‘fax me the oshigata and stall. Take an hour or two. Let the gaijin wait. Walk by him several times and note his height, his weight, his demeanor. Do you understand? We need to know what he looks like.’ So that’s what I did. I actually walked by you two or three times, and once sat near you. You didn’t notice me. I could tell you were angry. Then I went and called them and gave a detailed description. He had me wait another few minutes and then finally okayed the next move. I reassembled the sword and went to my supervisor and told him I had been mistaken and that the license was fine and to tell you how moved we were that you were returning it.”

“And that’s the time they set up to tail me to the Yanos.”

“I don’t know. I never heard from them again. Two weeks later a package arrived. I opened it and found three million yen. Not a fortune but enough to pay my debts, buy a shin-shinto that had caught my eye. I still had half of it left, so I bought the bike.”

“I don’t suppose you kept the package?”

“No, of course not, I destroyed it. I had to spend all the cash. I couldn’t put it in a bank because then I’d have to pay taxes on it and explain where I got it.”

“Do you still have the fax number or the original number?”

“No. I destroyed them too, after the murders.”

“Any names, any vocal characteristics, any—”

“I do recall one thing. When the young man went to call his master, he left the phone. But I heard the name. He called ‘Isami-sama.’”

“Isami-sama?”

“Isami, the name would be; sama is honorific.”

“Did you recognize it?”

“Any swordsman would recognize it. Kondo Isami, a great killer from the bloody past. Many duels and murders, many bodies. A pseudonym of a fellow with a high opinion of himself. Also bespeaking a high opinion: sama. It’s an inflated honorific, higher than san. It connotes high rank or special talent, as viewed from below. The man doing the talking considers this Kondo Isami highly accomplished and is trying to ingratiate himself.”

Bob walked over and fetched the Glock. He picked it up, punched the cartridges out of the magazine, then slammed the magazine home and handed the gun back to Kishida.

“If I need more information, I may visit you again.”

Kishida said, “If Kondo Isami catches you, he will make you tell where you got your information. You may be brave and resolute, but you will tell him. Then I am a dead man.”

“No, what’s going to kill you is that damn bike you don’t run worth a damn. You better get some practice on a closed course.”

“I get mixed up in the gears.”

“Good way to die young and beautiful.”

“It doesn’t matter. I am already dead.”

“Nah.”

“You can guarantee that?”

“Yes.”

“How?”

“Because I’m going to find him first. I’m going to cut him down and leave him for the birds.”

22

YAKIBA

She wasn’t the best. But she was fast. And she had guts. He watched her from the second row. Here in the far western suburbs, he wasn’t in an English-friendly tourist zone. There wasn’t a lot of translation around to help the rich gaijin; people lived and worked and died without much thought of Americans. So the banner above the brightly illuminated mat was untranslated, but he figured the swoop of red kanji had to say something like “Tenth Annual Women’s Kendo Semifinal Match, Kanagawa Prefecture” or some such. It was in a high school gym, like the one he’d played basketball in a thousand or so years ago, and the baskets were folded back on rollers, up near the ceiling. The light was harsh and the competitors dashed through it, blades blurred in stress and skill.

Most were younger. Some were older. The fans were just as intense as stateside b-ball parents. She won her first bout easily, had some trouble in the second, and finally, in the semifinals, went down hard to some seventeen-year-old genius who moved so fast she made a blur seem lazy. But Susan Okada had poise and dignity. She countered the cuts and tried to get her own in, she gave ground, then advanced, she ducked, she thrust, she did everything but win. She also took two or three hard claps on the side of the mask; the sword, called a shinai, was only sliced bamboo staves held together by twine for presence but not strength, but at that speed when it hit, it had to feel like someone had pronged a huge rubber band against her head.

When it was over, she bowed to her opponent, bowed to the referee, bowed to some kind of altar or something of kendo godhood off to one side beneath a dramatic kanji and a couple of framed photos of old Japanese guys, and finally found her way to a front-row seat, where she crashed. He watched: Boyfriend? No. Husband? No. Gals from the office? No. Nothing. She was by herself.

She sat somewhat dully during a break in the ceremony, a towel around her neck. Her feet were still bare. She didn’t look particularly feminine; she looked like any jock in defeat, tired but secretly pleased she had done as well as she had, not really ready to leave the world of athletics and go back to a real one where victory and loss weren’t so clearly defined.

He squirmed down and sat one seat away from her. She didn’t notice.

“You swing a mean stick, Ms. Okada.”

“Swagger. I thought that was you.”

“In the flesh, big as life, twice as mean.”

“Jesus Christ, how did you get in? You’re on the Japanese watch list and they don’t make mistakes like that.”

“I have some friends in the business. They got me some real good papers.”

“Do you have any idea what can happen to you?”

“People keep telling me I’m in for a big fall.”

“You are going to make such an unhappy inmate.”

“Well, they gotta catch me first.”

“If they do, I can’t do a thing for you. If you break their law, it’s tough shit, buddy. You’re in their system. Off you go. The embassy will just walk away. That’s our duty. It’s their law, we have to respect it.”

“Just don’t call the cops, that’s all I ask. Anyhow, you seem to have picked up kendo fast. You looked good out there. I wasn’t joking. I’d hate to have you mad at me with a live blade. You’d cut me to spinach.”

“Swagger, this is so dangerous.”

“Let me buy you a beer. You look as if you could use one, just having been clocked by a seventeen-year-old. Damn, I hate it when that happens. There’s got to be a place around here.”

“I’ll go shower. Tell me how it turns out.”

“The good guys win, just like in the samurai movies.”

“No, here. I want to see how far that little bitch who whacked me gets.”

The match had started anew and as Bob watched, the little bitch kicked ass big-time.

It was a working-class bar a few blocks away, and so dark and quiet no one seemed to notice the tall white guy. Most everyone sat stupefied in front of a TV showing sumo while downing mighty tin kegs of Sapporo. They found a table in the rear, thanked god there was no karaoke tonight. Finally a waiter came by and they ordered a Sapporo for the little lady and a Coke for the tall white guy.

“Why’d you take up kendo?”

“My father was a kendo champ many years ago here, before he went to the U.S. for medical school. So it runs in the family, I guess. Plus, I’m supposed to meet these people, understand them, provide little insights to the more important analysts when I’m not getting drunken Americans out of the Kabukicho tank. This is a good way.”

“It’s none of my business, but no boyfriend, no husband, no—”

“It is none of your business. I have a career. It’s enough for now. Swagger, what are you up to?”

“I have two items of business and I need your help.”

“You are putting me at a terrible disadvantage. My official responsibility is to turn you in, cut a deal with the Japanese, get you out of here before you do some real harm or get yourself in real trouble. I have to do that. It’s nothing personal. You seem like a decent enough guy. But there is such a thing as duty.”

“I know about duty.”

“I know you do. I looked carefully at your record. You left everything in Vietnam. I get it, I respect it, it moves me. But I cannot let you get in trouble and I cannot let you screw things up for our country over here. You understand that?”

“Sure. I understand. But let me just tell you a thing or two. Then you decide what to do.”

“Oh, this should be rich.”

He told her the story, his assumptions and where they’d led him, leaving out only his quiet alliance with the Japanese Self-Defense Force airborne boys. He ended with the motorcycle adventure and the admission of the police officer.

She was silent for a while.

“I don’t know,” she finally said. “Maybe he just said that to please you. You’d damned near killed him, you were sitting on his chest like a baboon, you’d technically assaulted him so you’d committed about your twenty-third felony, and since he was Japanese he was used to indirection, politeness, lowered voices, discretion. You probably scared him so much he would have said anything to get you out of his face.”

“Maybe so. But how did he know about the two sword identifiers before I told him? He knew. If nothing else, that proves the sword was valuable and not some piece of war junk. If it was valuable, the whole thing swings into line. You know how nuts these people are about swords. In Dr. Otowa’s office I felt like I was visiting the pope. It’s a religion.”

Again she looked off.

“Look, give me a few more days,” he said. “And just a little help, okay? I won’t break any more laws or beat anybody up or chase them with a motorcycle.”

“What is it?”

“The officer. He said he heard the kid on the other end of the phone call somebody ‘Isami-sama.’ Kondo Isami. He said that was the name of a great swordsman and killer. Anyhow, I need to talk to somebody who knows yakuza. I have to find out who this guy who calls himself ‘Kondo Isami’ is. I can’t just walk into a cop station and ask to see the file on Kondo Isami. You must have a contact somewhere, a cop, someone in the media, some spook or something, someone who knows someone who would know this stuff. If this Kondo is a real guy, if he has a past, if he fits, then we’ve got something, at least a next step. If he’s nobody, if it’s nothing, I’m on the first plane home. I tried, I failed.”

“No more felonies. No bull-nose macho Marine Corps bullshit. Don’t call in any napalm strikes.”

“No napalm.”

“Call me at my office tomorrow afternoon. I may have something for you. You can stay out of trouble till then?”

“Sure.”

“Take a steam bath or something?”

“Sure.”

“And you said you had other business. Two pieces. That was one.”

“The child.”

“Miko?”

“Yeah. I have to know. What’s happening with her?”

“She’s in a hospital. There are few orphanages in Japan. Orphaned children go to relatives. But there are no relatives left. So the social services people put her in a Catholic children’s hospital. She’s not doing well. There’s no one for her. She lost everything one night, and now she sleeps on a cot. She thinks the Tin Man is going to come and rescue her, poor thing. I haven’t figured out who the Tin Man is.”

“That’s so sad.”

“So it goes on the wicked planet Earth.”

“Nobody visits her?”

“Not anymore.”

“Can I visit her?”

“Not a good idea.”

“She needs someone.”

“It’s not possible.”

“Miss Okada, don’t you want these people? They killed a family and orphaned a four-year-old child. They have to be punished. Don’t you see that? Didn’t you send me an autopsy report? I have an idea in my head this professional objectivity is a game; you want these guys as bad as I do.”

“I didn’t send you anything. That’s a delusion on your part. But it’s not the serious delusion. The serious delusion is that you want to believe that you and I are buddies, in this together, in a quest for justice. No way. I work for the United States government, which is where my loyalties begin and end. Don’t romanticize me, because I’ll disappoint you. Here’s the reality: you have one inch of leash. You pursue this investigation for a little while longer. If you develop some evidence, you make sure it comes to me first, last, and only. If it’s of value, I will see that it gets to the proper Japanese authorities, and at that point our interest ends. The Japanese system will deal with it, or maybe it won’t, because that’s the reality. If you break my rules, I’ll report you in a flash and you’re on your way to a Japanese prison.”

“I would say you drive a hard bargain, except you don’t bargain at all.”

“No, I don’t. You can’t go samurai on me, do you understand? If you samurai up, I will have to take you down hard. I do not bullshit, Swagger, and I tell you loud and clear: if I have to, pardner, I will bust you up so bad you’ll wish you’d never entered this rodeo.”

23

THE TOKYO FLASH

Of course she drove a red Mazda RX-8. Long hair flying, wearing aviator’s teardrop sunglasses, she flew through the Tokyo traffic like a ninja, cursing at the slower, veering in and out, braking hard, gunning too fast, rushing through the gears, utterly confident in the left-handed driving. It was late afternoon of the following day, and when he called her, she told him she’d pick him up.

But they didn’t go to any reporter. Instead, they pulled into a large building of gray brick, clearly Catholic, from the religious statue in the front yard. She drove around the side to the parking lot that faced a playground behind a cyclone fence.

“You stay here,” she said. “I don’t want her seeing you. We don’t know what she remembers, what her associations are. Believe me, this child doesn’t need any more trauma. It’s hard enough.”

He sat in the car as Okada disappeared into the building and, ten minutes later, emerged with the child.

Bob watched. Immediately he saw the difference. Where Miko had been a force of nature, a naturally gregarious, adventurous child, now she held tightly to Susan’s hand and didn’t seem to want to go out on her own. Susan took her to a swing, sat her on it, and pushed, but in a few seconds the child began to holler.

They were too far away for Bob to hear, but he saw Susan take the child off the swing and hold her. Then they walked to a slide and, tentatively, Miko climbed and desultorily descended the gleaming surface. But there was no liberation, no surrender to the giddy power of gravity; it was a glum trip.

The visit lasted a few minutes. Miko seemed fearful, constricted, clinging neurotically to Susan, who was talking gently to her but without much effect.

It was almost more than Bob could take. He found his muscles tensing, his jaw clenching, and his anger rising.

I don’t care what I said to Susan, he thought. The man who did this to her will feel fear too. Then I will cut him.

The woman and the child went inside and Bob tried to relax, but his mind was too buzzed. He wished he had a drink, but that would not solve anything. Instead, he climbed out, took a few drafts of fresh air, and tried to calm down. Pretty soon Susan arrived, and they drove off.

“Let me ask you something,” he said as she gunned through the busy avenues. “When this is over and let’s assume I’m still standing, I ain’t in no jail, and I’m headed back to the States—”

“No.”

“You don’t know where I’m going.”

“Sure I do. I know exactly where you’re going. You want to adopt her.”

“I am already a father. Some say I’m a good one.”

“I’m sure you’re a great one. Moreover, you could make her a wonderful home in the West, and sooner rather than later she’d heal, though never completely, and she’d come back to us and she’d become happy and productive and have a wonderful life. That doesn’t matter.”

“What matters?”

“Connections, which you don’t have.”

“What do you mean?”

“It’s very hard for foreigners to adopt a child in Japan. First, few of them are available. I’m not sure if she qualifies. Then there’s the shape of your eyes. They’re round. The Japanese are disinclined to let a westerner adopt a Japanese child, unless there’s some prior connection. It’s not like China or Korea where cute girl babies are a cash crop for American yuppies.”

“There’s no hope?”

“Not a whisper. Not an eyelash.”

“Suppose your boss, Mr. Ambassador, used his influence.”

“He wouldn’t do it for me, why would he do it for you? I don’t have the juice, you don’t have the juice.”

“That sucks.”

“It does indeed. But the world is full of terrible injustices. Ninety-eight percent of them can’t be helped or fixed. This is one of them. Concentrate on the two percent that can. Ah, here we are.”

Nick Yamamoto lived in a quiet Tokyo residential neighborhood a few kilometers geographically and several universes culturally from Kabukicho. His was one of those nondescript wooden homes behind a fence that was attached to other homes on either side, all of them squashed together like french fries in a greasy bag. They had no trouble parking in the quiet neighborhood, slipped through the gate, and knocked.

Like many Japanese males he was slender, small, wore glasses, moved fluidly. Unlike most Japanese men, he had blond hair. It was thatchy, moussed in odd directions, and suggested some kind of rock star. If you only counted the hair, he looked eighteen; the rest of him was a man of forty-odd years.

“Do you like it?” he asked Susan.

“No. It’s stupid.”

He looked up at Bob.

“Is she a bitch or what?”

“She can be pretty tough,” Bob said. “You should get her started on me if you want to hear some ugliness. Anyhow, my name is Bob Lee Swagger. I like your hair.”

“See, he likes my hair.”

“What does he know? He’s a gaijin.”

Bob and Nick shook hands, bonding immediately on their mutual fear of the great and wonderful wizard Susan Okada. Nick took them into the place, all wood floors and luxurious western furniture. A seventy-two-inch TV hung on one wall broadcasting baseball, but everywhere else books were jammed into shelves and framed front pages hung on walls. The smell of grilled meat hung in the air; Nick had just finished dinner.

“A drink?” Nick asked.

“Can’t touch the stuff,” said Swagger. “If I do, I’m gone for a month. Please go ahead.”

“Okada-san?”

“No, I’m working. This isn’t social.”

“Tea, coffee, Coke, anything?”

“No thanks.”

“Well, I think I will, if you don’t mind.”

Nick went and got himself a jug and a cup and proceeded to lubricate himself with small sips of sake. He ushered them to the leather sofa and he slipped into a nice Barcelona chair.

“Nick used to be the Tokyo Times’ Washington bureau chief, which is where I met him. But then he was recalled and in a few months got himself fired. What was it, Nick? I don’t remember. Plagiarism or bribery?”

“Actually, it was both.”

“The cocaine made him do it. It wasn’t his fault.”

“The cocaine made me do it. It was my fault.”

“Anyhow, he says he’s clean now, and he’s still a one-man show. He publishes, writes and reports, and lays out the Tokyo Flash, a weekly of a disreputable sort. Tokyo has hundreds of them. His is one of the best. If you want to know about Brad and Angelina, or what porn star has just left which studio to go hard-core for two billion yen, Nick would know.”

“But I know some other stuff too.”

“He’s published seven books on the yakuza. And he knows a lot more than he’s published.”

“I’d be dead if I published what I know.”

“You sound like just the man I need,” said Bob.

“Well, I’ll try. I owe Susan for something in D.C. So try me.”

“Kondo Isami.”

“Ohhhh, I’m impressed. Which one? Kondo the original, or Kondo Two, the Sequel?”

“I guess the first to start.”

“You probably couldn’t understand the second without the first.”

“I’m all ears.”

Nick poured himself a little more sake. He turned off the TV, fished among his CDs and found one, and popped it into a player.

“Soundtracks from several samurai movies.”

“Swagger’s seen a lot of samurai movies. Too many. He has the Toshiro Mifune disease.”

“Well, Swagger-san, I’m a writer, so I believe in mood. This is the right music for this story.”

He took another swig on the sake.

“Westerners can’t really appreciate the dynamic between shogun and emperor that played, off and on in Japan for three hundred years. I won’t bore you with it in detail, but we had this weird system of a showy but powerless emperor-god on a throne in Kyoto and a guy in armor who’d fought in a hundred battles and outthought everybody else running the show in Edo. They never got along.

“It came to a head in the middle of the nineteenth century, when aggressive outsiders began pressuring Japan to open up and trade with the West. The shogun opposed the move, the emperor embraced it, more or less, and that set the clans a-warring. The emperor, as I say, lived in Kyoto, the shogun in Tokyo. I’ll call it Tokyo instead of Edo just to keep it simple.”

“I’m very simple,” said Bob, “but so far I’m with you.”

“A lot of pro-emperor ronin—masterless samurai, who despised the shogun—came to Kyoto and essentially turned it into Dodge City. It was violent, terrible, a city of anarchy. The year is roughly eighteen hundred sixty-two. In Tokyo, the shogun was embarrassed that he couldn’t keep control of the city where the emperor resided; it made him look foolish.

“So a lord sympathetic to him, and certainly with his permission, hired a militia. Or maybe you’d call them vigilantes, or regulators, something cowboy. A gang, a posse, an outfit, whatever. They called themselves the Specially Chosen Ones, which in Japanese is Shinsengumi. They were led—well, there was a lot of turmoil in their own leadership, as there always is in Japan, but eventually, with the help of a really good, bloody assassination—by a guy named Kondo Isami. Big guy, tough guy, ran a dojo out west, very ambitious. So Kondo and his Shinsengumi set out to tame Dodge. They did it by killing. It’s been in a thousand movies, but you probably remember either Band of Assassins or When the Last Sword Is Drawn.”

“Saw ’em both. Poor Toshiro gets beheaded in Band. I guess he was Kondo.”

“That’s right. Kondo Isami is definitely the Mifune part. That’s what happened to Kondo when the emperor’s clans won and the shogun was replaced. But for a long time, in Kyoto, Kondo was the law, and he and his boys were the bloodiest mob old Japan ever saw. They killed and killed and killed. Kondo himself probably killed a hundred men in sword fights. He was your true-grit samurai, love him or hate him. So any man today calling himself Kondo means to scare you and frighten you and communicate to you that he is willing to kill. That he even likes to kill.”

“And Kondo Isami Two?” Bob asked.

“I’ve never seen his name in print. Supposedly it appeared only once and a few weeks later, the reporter’s head was found mounted on a tripod of golf clubs outside his paper, a tabloid called Weekly Jitsuwa. It caused quite a stir. The three clubs were the eight and nine irons and the number three wood. Ya-ku-za, of course, is slang derived from a card game’s losing hand, which is eight-nine-three.

“Nobody knows who he is, only what he does. He’s an elite yakuza assassin, with a very small team of highly trained men who favor the old traditions. They still kill the old way, with the sword.”

“You’ll have to explain that to me,” Bob said.

“For a westerner it seems bizarre, I suppose. But in certain applications, the sword is actually far more efficient than the gun, if you don’t mind a lot of sloppy blood around. These guys spend their lives working on it and get very, very good. They can take you down as fast as a gun. It’s an extremely lethal weapon and they have a butcher’s knowledge of anatomy. They know exactly where to cut you or, if they have to, pierce you, to empty you of blood in a split second. They cut your lungs and take out your air supply, they cut your pelvis and shatter your support system, they cleave your brain and it all goes dark. You don’t even feel the pain, you just go down in a heap. And best of all: no noise. You can have a nice little battle, a good triple assassination, a one-on-one to the death, assured that no cops are going to show up. Nobody knows until the next morning when they notice all those pools of sticky red stuff in the gutter. Here, look at these.”

He went to a cabinet, pulled out a file, and handed it to Bob.

They were autopsy and crime scene photos of men dead by sword. On the slab, the nude bodies had oval openings the size of footballs, sometimes hard to see because the skin sundered wasn’t white but usually mottled red, black, and green, not from disease, as Bob initially thought, but from the dense, almost obsessive tattooing that marked the bodies. But the cuts were visible once you focused on them amid the dragon’s heads and wolves’ yaps and kanji characters: they exposed a butcher’s festival of sliced meat inside, visible now only because the blood had drained. The cuts were gigantic, and deep, and permanent; they’d empty the sack of fluid that is a human body in a second. In the on-site photos of the rubbed-out of the underworld, the distinguishing feature was not the black suits and shoes, not the sunglasses, not the twisted postures of the fallen or the occasional lopped limb or split head, but the blood, the lakes and lakes of it. Each body sat like an island in the middle of a red sea; it lapped everywhere, spreading in satiny luster, as if by some mad king’s imperial mandate.

“This Kondo Isami came on the scene about five years ago. An underboss named Otani was having trouble with a Chinese-sponsored hotshot in Kabukicho and was bedeviled by one individual in particular. ‘Bedeviled’ as in ‘cut really bad.’ Kondo Isami introduced himself to Otani by sending a business card and a head. It was very effective. As Otani rose, so did Kondo, specializing in the impossible, the discreet, the hard to do. Evidently, unlike most of the yaks, he is not tattooed. He has to be brilliant, socially adept, and completely presentable. But even so, there are weirdnesses. Many who’ve met him have not seen his face; he goes to great lengths, including masks or theatrical lighting arrangements, to prevent certain people from getting a look at it. But he’ll meet others very casually, it is said. He goes dancing or clubbing. Suddenly, for no reason, he doesn’t care if anybody sees him. Now what the hell could that be about?”

“Sometimes he’s shy, sometimes he’s not. Maybe that’s all there is to it.”

“No, there’s more. Nothing’s simple about this guy. He has brilliant sword skills. He’s at the level of almost transcendent technique that some of the legendary sams achieved, like Musashi or Yagyu. His boys may not be quite so advanced, but their internal discipline is tremendous. Only once has a Shinsengumi guy been taken by the cops, and he committed hara-kiri in the station with a fork before he talked. He turned out to be a street gang kid who’d evidently been talent-spotted by Kondo, brought into the unit, trained, and disciplined. They found him soaked in his own blood with a smile on his face.

“Otherwise, they specialize in the hard to do. Enormously violent. There was a rumor some Chinese gangsters were going to mount a move against Boss Otani, and the Shinsengumi took them out in about thirty seconds in a Kyoto inn, where the group had gathered for recreational indulgence. They caught them in the lounge. The swords came out much faster than the Berettas, and they danced from man to man in seconds, cutting. Kondo himself split a Chinaman from crown to dick. Cut him in two, top to bottom. Amazing strength, but more. You have to know the art of cutting. He does. Then they left no witnesses.”

“Look, Nick,” said Bob, “I think Kondo has a new client. I think he took out Philip Yano’s family, stole a sword of some rare value that had come Yano’s way, and now he’s got some plan for the sword that I can’t figure out. So can you ask around, see if you can find out who Kondo’s working for and what he’d need a special sword for? And why would he have to wipe out the Yanos? Why couldn’t he just send a burglary team in, crack the vault, and walk out clean? Or even buy the damned thing, not that, come to think of it, Yano would have sold.”

“Sure, I can ask. But I’m getting something out of this. I’m getting a scoop that’ll make me the man in the tabloid game, and even get me back in the respectable rags.”

“Absolutely.”

“Nick, be careful,” Okada said.

“I’ll be careful. Meanwhile, Swagger-san, learn to fight.”

24

THE EIGHT CUTS

The compass no longer held four directions. There was no longer a left or a right. That up/down stuff? Gone totally. As for colors, numbers, signposts, any markers of a universe to be navigated rationally: vanished.

Instead, all reality consisted of the eight cuts.

There were only eight cuts.

Never more, never fewer.

Tsuki.

Migi yokogiri.

Hidari yokogiri.

Migi kesagiri.

Hidari kesagiri.

Migi kiriage.

Hidari kiriage.

Shinchokugiri.

Or thrust, side cut left to right, side cut right to left, diagonal cut right to left, diagonal cut left to right, rising diagonal cut from right to left, rising diagonal cut from left to right, and vertical downward, the head-splitter.

He stood, sweating, the very sharp blade in his hand so that his concentration wouldn’t wander. A mistake with a thing so sharp could cut him badly and he already bled in small quantities from a dozen brushes with the yakiba, the tempered edge, of the wicked thing. Doshu paid the blood no mind: the message was, if you work with live blades, you get cut. That’s all. No big thing. Get used to blood. It goes away or it needs stitches and there’s nothing in between.

“Migi yokogiri!” the bastard commanded, and Bob obligingly performed the downward right to left cut, not a slash, not a lunge, not a thrust: a cut.

“Kire! KIRE!” the man yelled at him.

Cut.

Bob realized there was magic to the Japanese in the word. It wasn’t like “cutting classes” or “cutting the rug” or “damn, I cut myself” or “don’t cut corners,” all those little metaphorical indulgences on the principle of the sharp thing encountering the soft thing, the sort of expressions a society might create that had never taken blades too seriously.

To the Japanese the word cut had special significance. You didn’t toss it about lightly; it was almost a religious term. With a sword, you cut. To cut was to kill, or to try to kill. The weapons were meant for that purpose only; they were dead-zero serious, no jokes, no jive, no sport, no fun. In their way, they were as meaningful, emotionally, as loaded guns and possibly more so because a gun could be unloaded but a sword never could.

“Left diagonal cut!”

“Right sideways cut!”

“Rising left diagonal!”

There were only eight of them. But everything depended upon those eight. If you could not master those eight, you had no chance.

“No, no. Angle all wrong! Angle bullshit. Angle must be perfect. Go slow!”

How long had this been going on? It felt like the crazed exercise at Parris Island, back when Parris Island meant something, where you were on a seventy-two-hour field exercise and nights bled into days, which bled into nights, until you were so aching you thought it would never end and your movements had gotten stupid with fatigue. What was your name? Where were you from?

But that’s what got Swagger through ’Nam three times, so as much as every second of it sucked hard and long, it was somehow worth it. You had to do it.

“Rising left diagonal! No, no, blade bent, no! Feel!”

The small man came behind the sweating gaijin and with vicelike fingers took his arm through the motion, controlling his elbow, controlling the angle of the blade, which had to be precisely aligned to the angle of the cut, else the whole process broke down, you got a blown cut and the sword torqued its way from your grip, or at least took you out of timing so that your opponent could get in and cut you bad.

No, not cut you bad.

The Japanese would say, Bassari kiru.

Cut you through.

He thought he’d pass out. But if the little man with the wispy goatee could keep going, so, somehow, could he. But it went on for hours and hours and hours until:

“Put sword away.”

Bob bowed, not knowing how or why.

He found the saya, remembered to extend it from him, and dropped it over the extended sword, whose edge he’d turned to self according to etiquette, and then returned it to the rack in the deity alcove.

When he turned, Doshu was tightening a men around his head and had already gotten on the body padding.

“Come, come. Now, you, me, fight. Fight hard. You kill me with wood. Good cuts. Make good cuts.”

Bob must have groaned; all he wanted was a nap.

“Come on. Only do for six, maybe ten more hours. Then I give fifteen-minute break.”

Bob realized—a rarity. A joke.

Hmmm. He found out quickly that he could fight or he could cut. But it was damned hard to do both. He was as fast as Doshu and now and then got his licks in, though perhaps Doshu was going light on him, even if the whack of the wooden edge against his unprotected arms or torso would leave welts and bruises for days. But when he hit, he hit sloppily. When he cut well, he cut slow.

“I can’t stay with you.”

“No ‘stay with.’ Sickness. Sickness of ego. No win, no lose. You must fight in one mind.”

One mind. Now what the fuck did that mean?

“Concentrate but no concentrate. See but no see. Win but no win.”

What language was this?

“Stop,” the man said after a bit. “You like girls?”

“Yeah, of course.”

“Remember best time with girl?”

“Well, yeah.”

“What?”

“Come on. I can’t tell you that.”

“When?”

“Oh, ’ninety-three. I hadn’t been no good for a long time. Hadn’t been with a decent woman in a long time. Got in a bad scrape and was on the run, and I made it to the house of a woman who’d been married to my spotter in Vietnam. In some way, I’d fallen in love with her picture first. She was what I lost when I lost him. It fucked up my head. So anyway, had no place to go and I went to her and it’s been okay ever since. She saved my life. And the sex part—well, hell, it don’t get no better.”

“Think of sex,” said Doshu, and cut him hard in the throat.

“Ach! Hey,” Bob shouted.

“Think of sex,” said Doshu, and whapped him hard with the blade in the right shoulder.

“No!” Bob said. “It’s too goddamn private. It ain’t for this. I can’t think of sex. It’s wrong.”

“You fool. No Japanese. Think of—think of smooth.”

Smooth?

What was smooth?

“I don’t—”

“No! Think of smooth!”

And what came to mind when “smooth” was ordered? He thought of the scythe. He thought of his solitude on the high arroyo, the long spring and early summer months, the old blade in his hand, the suppleness through his torso, the way he could only keep it going three hours the first day and by the end, when he was damn near finished, he could go fifteen, sixteen hours at a whack, thinking nothing of it. He thought of the small, tough desert scrub, the way that old blade, nothing a samurai would look at twice, would just smooth through it. Sending stalks and leaves aflying in a spray, with that oddly satisfying whipping sound as it rent the air.

Somehow he found something private and his own, and using it, he blocked the next cut, stepped inside it, and cut Doshu hard across the wrists, knowing that he’d purposely missed the wrist guard by a hair so that the blow really hurt the little bastard like hell.

Think of the scythe!

He wasn’t sure when it stopped, he wasn’t sure when he rested, but somehow he found himself outside in the dark, rolling carpets.

“Roll tight. Not tight enough! Roll tighter.”

What the fuck did this have to do with anything?

“Why are—”

“No why, fool! No why! Do! Do well, do right, do as Doshu say, do, do, do!”

And so he did. He rolled the thatchy carpet squares into tight rolls, pinned them, got twine around them, and tied them tight. The absurd image of tying off an elephant’s penis came to him, and when he smiled, Doshu hit him hard with the switch.

“No goddamn joke, gaijin.”

Finally, he got them secured. It took a while to get the feel of it, but finally he could do it fast enough, and when all the carpets were rolled, he’d accumulated quite a pile, maybe seventy-five or eighty.

“Now soak!”

“What?”

“Soak, goddamn! Soak!”

What this turned out to mean was loading the carpet rolls into a trough, then going to the hose and filling the trough to the brim. It was dark. What day was it? He thought it was the third day, though maybe it was the fourth day or maybe just the second. Who knew? Who knew when this little bastard was shutting up? Who knew when it would stop—

“You sleep now. Till dawn. Two hours. Then we cut.”

“Cut?”

“Yes, no bullshit, sword is cut. No cut, no sword. We cut, cut well, cut hard, or I kick you out, you hopeless gaijin, goddamn you to hell.”

Three hours later, slightly refreshed but still groggy as hell, he found himself in the back courtyard. Doshu had directed him to load five of the soaked, rolled carpets on five heavy wooden bases, each with a vertical rod from which sprang a spike. The carpets sank on the spike and stood upright, like little soldiers.

“Tameshigiri.”

“Okay,” said Bob.

“You watch, then do.”

The old fellow took the sword, bowed to it, withdrew it from its saya. Then he turned, faced the array of five carpet rolls on five spikes.

“Ai!” he shouted, and with a speed that Swagger almost could not follow he flashed through the formation, coiling and uncoiling, the blade whispering at warptime, just a sliver of light, a flash of shadow, a sense of willed disturbance in the cosmos, and in what had to be less than one second, he had precisely cut each carpet roll at about a 47.5-degree angle, talk about your “smooth,” and stood still.

“You do. Tameshigiri. Test cutting. Must cut real. Pretend all bullshit. Do it. Do it now.”

Bob bowed to the little god in his sword, not because he believed there was a little god in there but because not bowing would be one thing more to be yelled at for, unsheathed, and approached the closest rolled carpet.

“Jodan-kamae,” yelled the man, meaning on high, and being right-handed, Bob found that position, one leg slightly ahead of the other, almost a batting stance but not quite as his hands were far apart on the hilt of the weapon and he was thinking of killing.

“Ai!” he shouted, and brought the sword down hard at 45 degrees against the bundled material. With a vibratory clatter, the sword twisted in his hand and seemed stuck about a half inch in the bundle.

“No, no, no,” screamed the little man. “Angle all wrong, much stupidity. Angle of edge be same as angle of blade or you get bullshit like that. I told you. Do what I say.”

Bob readdressed his carpeted opponent, tried to shake his brain free of thought and not feel like an idiot in a bathrobe with a long knife cutting up carpets, but instead like a ferocious samurai warrior about to dispatch an enemy.

The sword seemed to move on its own; his mind was blank to results and he thought for a second he’d missed completely it was so smooth, but then with the lazy grace of the totally dead, the top half of the carpet roll fell off to hit the ground.

“Again!”

And again, and again, and again.

Somewhere in there, he progressed to two-cut sequences, cutting one way, reversing smoothly by the gyroscopic guidance in his elbows from the center of his shoulders, then coming back through it. He seemed to be getting it, feeling the power in his hands, making subtle corrections in the stroke, cutting not with arms but with the “center of his body,” that is, with the whole weight of the body behind it; there was weird satisfaction in watching the carpeting fall helpless before his blade.

“Not good,” said Doshu. “Is maybe okay. But no time to make good. Now you can cut a little, so tomorrow we teach you to fight.”

“Floating feeling in thumb and forefinger, with the middle finger neither tight nor slack and the last two fingers tight. When you take up sword, you must feel intent on cutting the enemy. No fixedness. Hand alive. I no like fixedness in swords and hands. Fixedness means a dead hand. Pliability is a living hand.”

Yeah, sure, easy for you to say, thought Bob, and Doshu raised his own sword smoothly and with elegant grace and rhythm, a snake coiling to strike, a swan rising, his muscles in perfect syncopation.

Bob tried to model on him, feeling his body fight him, feeling ridiculous, a barefoot Fred Astaire with a pretend sword in a gymnasium.

“No! No, again, no thought. No thought. Too much thought.”

What does that mean?

He tried to concentrate but thought, See, it would be easier if he broke it down, one, two, three, then four, five, six, and I could practice each one and—

He pinched off the spurt of frustration and tried to feel the move, the slow rotation of hips, the uprising of the arms, that goddamned “floating feeling in thumb and forefinger,” and somehow it was just a little better.

“In one timing, Swagger,” said Doshu, whatever that meant.

“I—”

“No talk! One timing. One timing!”

What did one timing mean?

“Make shield of fists.”

“I—”

“Place body sideways.”

“Okay, but—”

“Keep shoulders level with opponent’s fists.”

“I’ll try if—”

“Keep rear leg open, Swagger.”

“Like this?”

“Keep stance same as opponent’s.”

He tried to do it all, and of course could do none of it. There was no end, no progress, no start, no finish, no lesson plan. Doshu gave him opaque orders, shouted commands to “Approach no-think!” as though he were ordering a trainee to drop and give him fifty. It went on, pointlessly, forever. Fourth day? Fifth? Afternoon of first? Who knew? He realized at a certain point the only way to deal with this wasn’t to think about it being “over.” Don’t think about it “ending.” It is not a thing of beginning and ending. Concentrate only on exactly what is before you. Do exactly what is stated. Do it, don’t think about it, analyze it, try to “learn” it. Just do the fucking thing, and do not place it in time or cause-effect, or this, then that. See it—this seemed to help—as shooting. You simply have to teach your body the way. The body knows the way, so that you don’t have to instruct it; it is on subconscious autopilot, there’s no particular sense of having “mastered” a thing, it’s just that all the work is connecting and the body is learning things without telling its owner.

Maybe he was getting it, sort of.

Swagger cleans the floor of the dojo on his hands and knees. With a soft wet cloth and a pail of warm water, he scrubs each and every square inch. He goes over the woodwork and reaches spots that have not been reached before. He gives himself to this work, taking pride in the perfection of it.

And in cleaning he came across a little corner where a few treasures of ego were on display: it was in what he knew to be the deity alcove, the spiritual heart of the dojo, where the truly supplicant went to worship.

What Swagger saw, beyond an indecipherable kanji banner and a few photos of elders who must have founded this particular style or school or way or whatever, were pictures from a past full of men and boys and, lately, girls. All were sweaty, all in triumph, all in gi and hakama, and Bob always recognized Doshu, and in some of the earlier ones he recognized his sponsor in this madness, Dr. Otowa, supremely cool and intelligent. In one Otowa and Doshu stood with a boy, who by the cast of his eyes and the wit in his mouth and the sternness in his forehead had to be a little Otowa, a son, with some silly trophy or something, all of them sweaty, all of them exhilarated. It was like a Little League photo from the ’70s, so far distant in time and place as to be all but unrecognizable, all of it however speaking of some unbroken line, father to son, going back through the generations.

You saw these photos all over Arkansas, though usually a dead deer or a baseball bat or a football was part of it, instead of a kendo shinai; it was the same, the father passing on what he knew, the boy, though distant, hungry for it.

“Swagger! Sword, now. Now!”

Doshu is a drill sergeant. He’s a yeller, a pressure cooker, a demander. But it’s so hard because it’s not progressive in a western sense; there’s no feeling of going from here to there. The edges of things are blended. Somewhere—the start is indistinct—he’d moved into kata, which was a series of moves with the sword, a kind of offensive syncopation so that the blade came out, flowed around the shoulders to a certain perfect position, then was cut with, the cut riding a rhythm, never just a brute expression of force. It seemed to have something to do with wave dynamics, a sense of harnessing a blast of energy that would rise from one hip, course through the body to the opposite shoulder, flow downward into the fists, which would then surge in opposing directions, bringing the blade through with an amazement of unwilled speed and force, all without trying. Doshu would swing lazily at him with his bokken and Bob would block it, feel it sliding off his own wooden blade, and see how to ride it down and open up a way to the man’s innards, then turn back and slip into another kata.

“Attack and abide in one,” Doshu said, “migi yokogiri,” and Bob delivered his side cut.

“By the false, the true is obtained,” he also said, “hidari kesagiri,” so that Bob tried to obtain the truth through a left-to-right diagonal.

He clarified by adding, “Beat the grass and scare up the snake, tsuki,” and Bob thrust, trying to scare up snakes.

Then to make it absolutely clear: “Use thought to approach no-thought; use attachment to be unattached.”

He then tried speed. A Swagger gift: fast, good hands.

He brought maximum speed to a horizontal stroke from the draw—nutisuke—and you’d have thought he’d blown his nose on a flag or something.

“No! No! Speed wrong. Speed bad. Speed sick, Swagger. No speed. No speed!”

It was not the only time the obscure little man seemed really agitated, but something about speed annoyed him deeply.

“Speed sick. Speed bad.”

He said it over and over.

Don’t think of speed, Bob cautioned himself. If you connect with speed, it’s all wrong. No, no, no. Slow, sure, smooth. Smooth is fast. Fast is not fast. Fast is slow. Smooth is fast. Be smooth.

“Moon in the cold stream like a mirror.” That was the strangest, yet it was what Doshu would always come back to. Opaque, cute even, some Asian cornball thing from an old TV show or other. It felt too self-consciously “mystic.”

He remembered Yoda from some Star Wars thing: “There is no try. Only do.” Something like that. Maybe he was some aged fool of a Luke Skywalker on a strange planet far from home, trying to master a little wizard’s poetry, which would only work if you believed it, yet he could not believe it at his heart, because he was a U.S. Marine and what he believed in was obedience to orders, obedience to traditions, never surrendering, and breaking the weapon down to clean it.

Yet he saw that was itself a form of Zen or bushido or whatever this little guy was selling. It wasn’t action, it was belief. You had to give yourself to it and trust it. You had to give up on the you part of you, because the more of you there was, the less belief there was and the more vulnerable you were.

Day and night flowed together. Bob never saw the sun, not after the first morning’s work outdoors. He slept in snatches, was pulled from unconsciousness, dragged to the dojo floor, and put through paces. Some children watched and laughed. They thought he was really supremely funny, big, tall, clumsy, gangly. Sometimes even Doshu smiled.

But it did seem a rhythm arrived somehow, sometime. The moves began to feel all right to him, possibly even good. The less he tried, the better he did. Maybe it was that he was so exhausted he didn’t care anymore. But he was learning smoothness.

Doshu stood across from him; the bokken flashed toward his face, and Bob was fast enough to parry and ride the sword down. He saw three next steps: he could rise off the pinned sword and go for a horizontal cut—migi yokogiri—that would take Doshu across the chest; he could pivot inward, getting so close to Doshu that Doshu was helpless, and drive backward for a penetrating strike to the chest, tsuki; or he could float backward, find a new stance, and look for another, larger opening.

While he was thinking, Doshu was cutting. Doshu had reversed, come out of the pressure of the upper blade, and stepping away, clipped him with two inches in the larynx. If the swords had been steel instead of wood, he’d be on the floor trying to hold the last of his seven pints of blood in his body, but he wouldn’t be fast enough.

This went on; the combative katas increased, and Bob got them, he saw them, he understood the principle, saw the opening, but he just never quite got there in time.

“Fuck!” he said.

“Moon in the cold stream like a mirror,” the man said.

Bob tried to crank up the concentration, but that didn’t work. He was being beaten severely at every exchange, and the blows of the wooden sword were raising knots on his bones and joints. His sweat poured off him. His fingers felt numb. How much longer would this go on?

And suddenly it stopped.

Doshu drew back from him and looked at him. Then he delivered a verdict.

“First day, eight cuts. Not bad. Second day, cutting tameshigiri, not bad. Yesterday, fighting, good. Today, fighting, not so good. Nothing.”

“I don’t have it today,” said Bob.

“Is no ‘Don’t have today.’ No yakuza say, ‘You got today? Okay, now we fight.’ Is only now.”

“I’m trying,” Bob heard himself say, and waited for Yoda to answer, “Is no try. Is only do.”

But it was Doshu who answered: “You not know enough. Anyone beat you.”

Bob wanted to say, But you said speed is sick. Wanting to win is sick. Then he stopped. Why fight him? he thought. He knows this shit, I don’t. It’s not up to me to point out his contradictions. Just go with it.

He bowed, showing humility to his tormentor, and saw immediately that this pleased the man. Bob composed his face into an expression of nothingness. Is nothing. Nothing is. Only void. Enter void. Do not exist. Use thought to approach no-thought.

“You sleep now.”

“No, I’m fine. I can go on.”

“No, sleep. Tired, sore, disappointed, confused. Not concentration. You sleep now. You come when you wake. But then, you fight.”

“Fight?”

“Sure. A match. But you must win.”

“I will win.”

“You must win. No win, I kick you out. I cannot help you nothing. You go away. Swagger die soon anyway, no worth helping.”

“I will win,” pledged Bob, believing he would. He liked this little development; it was a return to cause-effect. It was an ending, a climax. He would fight, he would win, he would go on. The finality was pleasing.

Doshu bowed; Bob returned the bow and went off. He went to the kitchen, where a surprisingly nourishing meal had been prepared; he ate it hungrily. Then the old lady—Doshu’s mother, his maid, his sister, no introductions had been made—took him to a room where he discovered a modern shower. She left, he stripped, and luxuriated in the warmth of the stinging water, feeling it soothe his bruised muscles and achy, swollen joints. Then, wrapping himself in a towel, he found his pallet behind the kitchen. Someone had covered it with a futon and a clean linen sheet and he settled into surprising comfort.

He woke sensing light.

I am ready, he thought. I will win.

He found a fresh jockstrap, pulled on gi trousers, covered them with hakama trousers, which he now knew how to tie, all the little bows and straps, all nice and neat. Attired, he stretched for twenty minutes, warming his muscles. Finally, all loosey-goosey, he put on his gi jacket, belting it tight, and walked to the dojo.

Doshu awaited, as did his opponent.

“You must win,” said Doshu. “No mercy, no hesitation, no doubt. Give all. Become void.”

“I—,” said Bob, then stopped when he saw the enemy.

It wasn’t merely that the enemy was about four feet tall and about ten. It was much worse. She was a girl.

25

THE FLOATING WORLD

Nick worked the clubs. Uptown, downtown, all around the town. He did the fancy glass-and-chrome joints in the Ginza, the most sophisticated of Tokyo’s nighttime districts. It cost him a fortune, because the Ginza is possibly the most expensive strip of real estate in the world, but he’d just moved two pounds of pure Moroccan White Girl to a minor yak offshoot and so he had a big wad of cash in his drawers and he didn’t mind spreading it around in search of a scoop that would put his rag on the map big-time.

And it would be a scoop too: Kondo Isami, the legendary yak killer, man of mystery and blood, working for a new big boss on a new big plan. That would make him in this burg. God, he loved this filthy town.

But he had no luck on the Ginza strip. He worked the gay part of the city, Shinjuku-2-Chome, on the principle that a few of the yaks were fairy or went to both coasts; they might sneak off here to relax, to get off, to forget the slicing that was so much a part of their lives, and might relax enough so that with a gallon or two of sake, they might spill something to a rent boy, he might spill something in turn. He worked Ace and Kinswomyn and Kinsmen and Advocate.

But no. The fags weren’t talking, or if they were, they weren’t talking to him, a straight guy with blondish hair and too much money to burn.

He had no luck either in Akasaka, another bright grid of streets loaded with bars, clubs, joints, particularly soaplands, those slippery palaces of hygiene and blow jobs, but not quite as sophisticated as Ginza. A lot of loose lips, in more ways than one, in the soaplands. Again, nothing. Nobody was talking.

He tried bouncers, barkeeps, hostesses, jazz musicians, rockers, cops, dealers, a few low-ranking yaks, people he knew or who knew of him. He spread a fortune around doing all the places: Cavern Club, Crocodile, Fukuriki Ichiza, Gaspanic Bar, Geronimo Shot Bar, Ichimon, Hobgoblin Tokyo, Shinjuku Pit Inn, Ruby Room, Nanbantei, Milk, Maniac Love, Warrior Celt, Xanadu, and Yellow. He got names and places from guys and moved on to other guys, other places, but generally he got the same warning, high town or low.

“Baby, you don’t want to ask about that guy. That guy’s serious. If he finds out, he’ll come to call in the night and you’ll end up cut to noodles.”

“I hear you. It’s just I heard a little something, I’d like to lay it out.”

“It’ll lay you out, Yamamoto-san. You’ll die for the glory of the Tokyo Flash. Is that what you want?”

“Thanks, bud.”

“Good luck, man.”

He tried Nishi Azabu, Roppongi, Harajuku, and Shibuya Center Gai, even Ebisu, popular with the expatriate set, though it was almost unthinkable that a gaijin would know something before a Nipponese would.

No, no, no, nothing. Instead, he came upon a yak scoop, having nothing to do with anything at all. Still, it was all the buzz, and he heard it in a dozen places. The yak talk was porn talk, almost the same thing. The boys at Imperial had made some big American connection and were cooking up a deal; it looked like they’d be getting western stars, blond girls, into their product line, and that looked promising if they could only get import licenses. Anyone who got American product into Japan stood to make a fortune, as the Japanese hunger for white women was well known. And if you could get white women to do the Japanese things—bukkake, subway groping, pig snout rings, bondage, urination fantasy, rape, teacher, airline hostess, office lady—the profits would be huge. But until now no one had been able to break the ban on foreign product; nobody had the juice to get it through customs. One man stood against it.

Miwa, called “the Shogun” because he was the genius at Shogunate AV, was known for his ferocious interest in keeping Japanese porn Japanese; the Shogun worked hard to keep the laws really tight so that any American outfit trying to set up business in Japan would find itself ensnared in legal troubles and police harassment. It was almost certain he was a nationalist crackpot, as were many yaks with business connections and many businessmen with yak connections.

The Shogun was head of AJVS, the All Japan Video Society, the professional group that represented Big Porn’s interests and worked with the Administrative Commission of Motion Picture Codes and Ethics, which theoretically regulated the porn industry, though it was more frequently thought to be a subsidiary of AJVS by virtue of collateral interest or out-and-out bribery. The key to the Shogun’s power was his presidency of AJVS, which in turn made him the most influential figure of the Administrative Commission; it made him the boss, really, of porn. If he lost that, he lost everything. And his term at AJVS was up. Word had it that for the first time in years, bribe money was being spread around to the other porn studio execs—there were hundreds of studios—to deny the Shogun reelection; if Imperial took over AJVS, they took over the Administrative Commission as well; they’d open up trade with the Americans. As rich and powerful as Miwa was, how could he stand against a huge tsunami of American capital, ravenous for the incredibly flexible gymnastics of the classic Japanese pussy? He hated the Americans. It was more than anything rational, it was cultural: their product was uninteresting, it had no ideas, it reflected a society of decadence and softness. “Keep Japanese pornography Japanese!” the Shogun said.

That’s all the boys were talking about. It was like a war was going to break out, and maybe it was, as both Imperial and Shogunate AV had their powerful sponsors in the business. Maybe the streets would run red with blood as the two porn giants tried to dominate and set the future.

“Nah. The porn people may have yak money in them, and yak influence, but they don’t like to go to the blades. They’d rather sue or try to ruin each other with unsubstantiated rumors. They’d never kill. They get too much pussy. If you get a lot of pussy, you don’t see the point in cutting someone’s head off, especially when it might get you your head cut off.”

“Maybe Kondo is signing up with one of those outfits just as a threat, a hint of future difficulties,” Nick said to this source, a detective on the Organized Crime Squad, who knew.

“He’s above that crap. His thing is the elegant, perfect hit. He’s not going into alleys with hoods and start madly hacking off heads. It’s too common. He picks his jobs, that’s all. He’d never get involved with porn. He’s old school. He’s like all the stiffs who hate Miwa for making millions off pussy.”

“Sure,” said Nick. He slid over ten 10,000-yen notes.

“Wow,” said the cop, “that’s a nice tip. You won’t tell anybody I talked to you?”

“You bet I won’t,” said Nick, “and you won’t tell anybody I talked to you?”

“You think I want to spend my last eight seconds bleeding out in an alley?”

Finally, only Kabukicho was left. He was well known there, and it made him feel a little vulnerable. But he had no choice. He knew this was dangerous and Kabukicho was Otani’s and clearly Kondo had an Otani connection. The wires in Kabukicho would be direct; any questions he asked would get to the wrong people fast.

He knew he ought to hire somebody to do the asking for him, somebody from out of town so it wouldn’t get back that it was Nick Yamamoto, the Tokyo Flash, the Clark Kent of the Tokyo tabloid scene, on the trail.

But he couldn’t resist. He had that reporter gene. He wasn’t an elegant writer, he wasn’t ambitious for power, fame, or money, but he just had to know a little bit more, a little bit sooner. That’s what drove him. It was such a high—it got you much higher than the White Girl, which is why he was able to walk away from the White Girl for personal use, though he didn’t mind making a buck or two off her once in a while—to hear something first. There was that moment when you knew what nobody else knew. God, what a buzz, what a jolt.

He began casually, with people he knew were so minor they were probably unconnected to anything big.

“Anything going on? I’m thinking some kind of realignment. A certain guy who’s worked with Otani on some delicate matters now working with someone else, someone big, someone from a little outside? Hear anything?”

“I think I know who you’re talking about, but I don’t ever discuss him. It’s not healthy. He’d cut off my arm and make me eat my tattoos.”

He went everywhere, Queen Bee, the S-M Club, Mysteria Purity, Le Grand Bleu, MoMo Iro, everywhere, talking to anyone, whores, image club performers, trannies, enforcers, bouncers, cutters, the odd Chinaman, the odd Korean, the odd African, impersonators, pickpockets, and everywhere it was the same.

Nothing. Nothing.

It was the nothing that had him tantalized. There was usually something, but the talk about the upcoming election for presidency of AJVS and its implications on the issue Imperial versus Shogunate AV had become so loud that nothing else was being talked about. It was as if an anvil had been laid across Kabukicho gossip lines. But then finally…oh, it was so small. It was so nothing. It was a wisp, a leaf in the wind.

He was in a small club closed to strangers, so late it was early. Scotch was the drink of choice, blues the music and the lighting scheme, smoke the preferred atmosphere. You could hardly see across the room. Nick threw down another Scotch and water, turned to the barkeep, and said, “Another for me, another for Dad here.”

Dad was a bouncer at Prin Prin, an image club that catered to the fantasy life of the Japanese male, including student-teacher, airline hostess, office lady, kimono. It even had a whole set built to resemble a subway car for those who just had to grope. But even in such a kingdom of the dream cum true, trouble sometimes broke out and thus a fast big man with good hands was needed. His specialty was the “soft punch” by which he deflated the overly amorous with a thunder blow to the midriff, yet left no scars, no bruises, nothing but a powerful sense of ill-being.

“You didn’t hear this from me,” the thunder-puncher said.

“Yeah, yeah, yeah.”

“Swear to god, not from me.”

“Swear to god twice.”

“I have a bitch. She’s half Korean, supervises a shift at one of the hand-job joints. Tough little gal. Pretty, but tough.”

“Yeah.”

“She says all the Korean sex workers are nervous because one of their own got disappeared a few months ago.”

“I didn’t hear a thing.”

“That’s just it: you weren’t supposed to. Just here one day, gone the next. But here’s what my girlfriend knows that nobody else knows and she didn’t even figure it out till she thought about it. The next morning on the way to work, she saw a guy named Nii, some minor hood who somehow got into a good crew and is now off the street—”

“Nii.”

“Nii. She saw him stagger out of a bar where he’d clearly been for hours, go into an alley, and puke his guts out. Just puke. She swears that when he bent over, his jacket fell open and the bottom half of his white shirt was drenched in red.”

“Lord.”

“Like he’d been at some brutal hacking. So who had Nii hacked? The woman? Why would he hack some nothing Korean whore and then make it go away?”

“Maybe he’s screwy that way. Jack the Ripper, that sort of thing. Or maybe it’s just Kabukicho. The odd whore gets disappeared once in a while. Life goes on. Boo fucking hoo.”

“Sure. But there’s something weird here. What was weird, this Korean whore thing, it was somehow set up, all the Korean girls were talking about it for weeks. Her boss kept the gal late so she didn’t go to Shinjuku station with the others. She went later, by herself, and somewhere along the walk to the station, real early in the morning, she met up with somebody and just vanished. The Nii thing suggests she was cut.”

“Hmmm. Doesn’t have to be Eight-Nine-Three Brotherhood.”

“Yeah, it does. Because the thing was planned. Somebody with juice got it set up so that this gal could be, you know, cut from the herd, held for a certain time, then released to go off and be chopped, diced, spindled, mutilated in private. No cops, no witnesses; it was all planned out. And poor Nii had the cleanup job. He wouldn’t have the juice to set it up. He’s nothing, a servant, a cleanup kid. But he’s working for somebody with juice and somebody who likes to cut.”

Nick saw it then: sure, it fit.

Nii would have to work for Kondo. Kondo wanted to cut something. It was all arranged via Boss Otani. But why?

“Do you remember the date?”

“Only that it was just after that soldier-hero and his family got burned up. Remember that? God, that was sad.”

“It was sad,” said Nick.

But his mind was already racing. Kondo had cut the shit out of someone and Nii had helped. Nii was Kondo’s boy. So if he wanted to find out what Kondo was up to, he had to find out what Nii was up to.

The police records were easy enough to obtain. Nii, Takashi “Joe.” The photo showed a squat face under long Beatle-style hair, the eyes gleamless with a lack of intelligence or purpose. The photo was taken when he was eighteen, old enough to be arrested the first time. Rap sheet: impressive but hardly incredible. Breaking-entering, time in juvie, assault, robbery, carrying a wakizashi, a footloose punk hunting thrills and his own death in the alleyways of Kabukicho. He ran with a street gang called the Diamondbacks. That meant, among other things, he probably had tattoos of diamonds on his back. With his pals, he raised minor hell. Eventually, he did two years hard time for beating a shop owner half to death. He clearly was a guy trying to attract yak attention, and failing. Yet two years ago…he disappeared.

Has Mr. Nii turned a corner and become a model citizen? Is he now selling life insurance, Popeye’s chicken, Nikes, porn? It doesn’t seem likely. Far more likely: he’s made that dream contact, he’s been taken in by somebody, cleaned up, spiffed up, given a haircut, he’s put on a suit and a pair of expensive Italian pointed-toe black shoes, he’s learned how to tie a tie and cut his nails, and now he moves discreetly and invisibly through the world of yak crime, violent when necessary but not spastically violent, pointlessly violent, the violence of sudden rage. No, now it’s controlled and deployed by a much wiser boss.

Nii? You see Nii? Any word of Nii? Where’s Nii hang? Remember Nii? That kid, Nii, always gets in trouble, ran with the Diamondbacks. Funny you should mention the Diamondbacks as I think the new bouncer at the Milk was a Diamondback for a while.

Nii? Oh, yeah, Nii. Okay guy, I guess, don’t know what happened to him. Not that you’d notice him. He was what you call your averagelooking guy, nothing about him stood out. Oh, one thing I remember, yeah, he used to like to go to a bar called Celtic Warrior. He always had a samurai thing. He saw himself as the last of the Toshiro Mifunes. Yeah, Celtic Warrior, it’s in Nishi Azabu.

Which is how come Nick found himself sitting in Celtic Warrior in Nishi Azabu on a Thursday night, alone at the bar, nursing a bourbon and water and a headache, trying to maintain his sanity as a bad multiracial goth band played heavily Japanese-influenced Celtic war melodies, an assault on the ears almost too intense to be described, much less endured. The joint was typical plastic shit, with shields and those ridiculous western knight swords like the old kings used hanging crosswise all over the place, and big mock-metallic triangles everywhere, crap out of Black Shield of Falworth, all Hollywood phony, all plastic. Some mooseheads and deer hung on the walls too, and there was even a stained-glass window behind the bar. It was so Camelot, or a Japanese version of an American version of a story that had never been true in the first place.

And that’s when he saw Nii.

It would have been so easy to miss him. It was only the sullenness in the eyes, their lack of dynamism that clued Nick in. The guy had bulked up considerably, and cleaned up; he now wore a neat crew cut moussed to an inch and a half of vertical, a white shirt, a dark suit, a tie. He could have been any salaryman unless you looked carefully at the fastidious way in which the collar of the jacket fitted the broad neck so perfectly, the way the suit hung with just the faintest dapple to it, picking up a sheen, the razor-vivid line of the trousers crease, their wondrous drape and flow that only the finest silks achieved, and the black shoes that seemed so standard but were actually extremely expensive British oxfords, worn generally by CEOs, ambassadors, and power lawyers. He was $6,000 in wardrobe trying to pass as $400 in wardrobe.

His whole manner was refined, poised, amused, confident. Say, hadn’t he come up in the world? And he wore his kingliness well, as Nick observed how extravagantly he was treated by the waitstaff and how generously—but quietly—he responded. He was a happy man, Nick realized; good job, plenty of dough to spend, the future looking brighter and brighter.

Nick watched the play of the evening. Occasionally a band member would come over and pay homage to Nii, occasionally the staff. Others came and paid honor and were rewarded with a smile or a touch; girls too, he seemed to be catnip to girls, that gangster thing just drives them wild.

And after a time luxuriating in the pride of having Made Good, Nii spoke to a young woman—the most childish woman there, Nick noted—and she trotted off to get her coat and tell her friends she wouldn’t be going home with them. The two walked out, holding hands, and Nick let a long minute pass before leaving a generous mound of yen on the bar and following.

He shadowed for a while from across the street, and eventually Nii took the little date into a nice apartment building and upstairs. Quickly enough Nick dashed across the street and sited himself a little to the oblique so he could see two sides of the structure. He prayed that Sir Lancelot Nii’s place was on one of these two sides, and indeed, within a few minutes, a light on the fifteenth floor came on. Nick counted windows, establishing how far from the corner the apartment was, so that he could get into it tomorrow.

Nick got there early. He was wearing a wig, a dark mop, because it occurred to him that it wouldn’t do to let the world on to the fact that a blond-haired man much too old for blond hair was stalking a well-known yakuza killer.

It didn’t take long; a Mercedes pulled up, a black S-Class limo, and Nii, crisply dressed for work, and the girl, looking as if she’d had her brains fucked out and couldn’t even comb her hair, stepped into it and it sped away.

Nick had a little thrill. Was Kondo in that car? It was unlikely Kondo would pick up his own crew. More likely he hired a limo service to round the boys up and bring them where they would do that day’s business.

Nick crossed the road, went to the apartment’s foyer, flashed a credential at the doorman. It was quite an impressive piece of paper, signifying him to be a representative of the Domestic Appropriations committee of the Diet. It was entirely authentic, in its original owner’s name, and a Kabukicho forgery expert had expertly glued Nick’s picture on it.

“I’m taking depositions on the land scandal,” Nick said. “Mr. Ono,” that being the first name he’d cross-referenced with a phone number listed to that address.

“I shall buzz him, sir.”

“Not if you want to keep your job, you won’t.”

“Yes sir.”

“And you won’t tell the houseboy either. I know how these places work. You call the houseboy, tip him, and he gets to Ono before I do, Ono has time to destroy incriminating documents, Ono gives the houseboy a huge tip, and he splits it with you. I’m not stupid.”

“Sir, Joji’s on fourteen; he won’t be involved.”

“You make sure Joji stays on fourteen.”

“Yes sir.”

Nick knew Ono lived on seventeen and so he took the elevator up to that floor, got out, and took the stairway down to fifteen. He quickly established the door that had to lead to Nii’s and went down to fourteen. He found the houseman, a dull-looking Korean, smoking a cigarette in a closet on break.

“Oh, there you are, Joji,” he said. “Dammit, I do this twice a week! I locked myself out of my apartment. Can you let me in?”

Joji looked at him dully, trying to place him.

“It’s me, Nii, fifteen-oh-four, come on, Joji, I’m late.”

If Joji hesitated it was only to secure a bigger tip; Nick slipped him a 5,000-yen note, and they went upstairs. Joji used his house key and headed back to his cigarette.

Nick was alone in the apartment. Very nice. Had Nii gone so far as to hire a decorator? The place was very much your modern yakuza, without frill or kitsch. No books, but one whole wall given over to a sound system and just about every western rock or rap CD ever cut, a shelf or two of Shogun AV’s teacher-blows-Koichi—and oh, say, naughty, naughty, even a few black-market items involving young girls. Nii, you’ve got some sick bugs in you. There was also, of course, a TV screen big enough to land a jet on.

Skipping through the apartment, Nick counted clichés: the furniture was black leather and chrome with a few modernist gewgaws here and there, crystal sculptures signifying crystal sculpture, a horrible and therefore priceless piece of modern art on the big wall.

Another room was the workout palace, which explained Nii’s new body. The space was half dojo; a wall rack held a batch of swords, some wood, some steel, for cutting. In the corner lay a pile of tatami mats.

The bedroom had its own special sort of cliché: the mirror on the ceiling threw back the image of the devastated bed, sodden and twisted and wrecked. Stains and the smell of sweat were everywhere. Handcuffs, lined with soothing foam, still attached to the bedpost, suggested the way the night had gone. Also a coil of rope lay on the bottom half of the bed, so Nii had probably done some tying too. He must have had that Japanese thing for a well-tied knot. As an aphrodisiac, the form of the beautiful young girl, bound and helpless before him, had done wonders for Nii: three discarded, half-full rubbers lay like squashed snakes on the hardwood floor. Nick thought, Oh, to be twenty-five again!

Next, the closet: ten black silk suits, each with a swanky Italian tailor’s label, three pairs of black oxfords, twenty pairs of almost-new Nikes, and a pile of neatly ironed and folded white silk shirts.

Nick sat at the desk and began to work through it very carefully. One drawer had a collection of sports magazines, another bank statements, which showed the guy was indeed doing very well, and other bills: dry cleaning mainly, rent, and…well, well, well, here we have something very interesting.

It was a series of drawings: three diamonds, crude and amateurish, in the first. In the second, the diamonds had begun to be subsumed by superior imagery, as the new forms obscured the crudity of the original pattern. In the third, the imagery, drawn by a master, had triumphed, and no trace of the diamond remained. The third, a kind of design proposal, had been signed with a name from a tattoo parlor in Shinjuku, Big Ozu. Nick had once done a story for the rag on Big Ozu, favorite skin artist of the yakuza. He was your man for snake scales, imitation Kuniyoshi faces, lions, tigers, and bears, as well as fans, scrolls, bamboo, and kanji, all popular yakuza motifs. He still tattooed the traditional way: not by electric needle, but more slowly, more painfully by bamboo sliver. So now that he was in the bucks, Nii had hired Ozu to craft a design to absorb his no-class street-gang origins, as if obliterating his sordid past.

The big guy owed Nick a favor, for his piece had driven Ozu’s customer list through the roof, including some movie stars and rock singers. And he also knew that men tell their tattooists what they don’t tell their wives, bitches, shrinks, and buddies.

26

KATA

“I am not going to strike a child,” Bob said.

“Probably true. But she strike you, often,” said Doshu. He spoke quickly to the girl, who began to carefully assemble her kendo armor.

“This interesting,” Doshu said. “My pupil Sueko. She will be safe from your blow and armed with a bokken. As she short, bokken long. When she strikes, much pain. You wear no armor. On the other hand, with a shinai, even your strongest blows will not affect her, that is, if you are even able to strike her. Also, as you long, shinai short. Yet you must defeat her.”

“Sir, you don’t understand. I cannot strike a child.”

“Do not look and see form. Look at what is close as if distant and distant as if close.”

Bob dropped the shinai on the floor.

“No, sir. I come from a father whose father beat him terribly when he was a child. He never struck me and he made me understand, one does not strike a child.”

“Then you must go.” Doshu pointed to the door. “You do not know enough yet. Your mind is soft. You will die quickly if you stay. Go back to America, drink and eat and forget. You are not swordsman. You will never be swordsman.”

Bob saw how cleverly Doshu had penetrated him. The man had put him in a situation where his strength and speed were meaningless; he could not use them against a child, even if he had wanted to. Something deep in his fiber would prevent him. On the other hand, he had to win. If he didn’t win, he’d failed. He would not be a swordsman.

So how could he win? He had to find some way to fight soft. He had to anticipate, move, parry at a level higher than he’d ever been, much higher, and when he saw his opening, he’d have to take it but willfully disconnect from those things that made him a man—his strength, his speed. He had to take command of his subconscious and will it to govern him to a smoothness he didn’t have, a quickness no one had. He was trapped.

“I will fight,” he said. “But if I hurt her, I will hurt you. Those are the stakes here, sir. You understand that. You can’t put her in jeopardy without risking your own ass. And don’t think you can go aikido on me. I know that stuff too. I’ve been in a few dustups. Here, look, goddammit.”

Bob yanked down the corner of his little stupid jacket and showed the old man a few places where hot metal had tried to interrupt his life span. They were puckers, frozen stars of raised flesh, long gashes, healed but never quite vanished, relics of a forgotten war.

“I have seen much blood, my own and others’. I can fight, don’t you forget it.”

Doshu was not impressed.

“Maybe then you be good against little girl. But I think she whip ass.”

Bob faced the child. She looked like some tiny druid priestess. Her bokken, stout white oak, looked like Excalibur or Beheader of Kira and when she drove it into him, it would bruise to the bone. Her head was encased in a padded helmet, her face covered by a steel cage; the helmet wore two thick pads that flared laterally to cover her neck and shoulders. Her torso was encased in padding, and both arms and wrists as well; she wore heavy gloves; she looked part goaltender, part catcher, part linebacker, and 100 percent pure samurai.

They moved to the center of the dojo floor, bare feet on bare wood, under the wooden struts that sustained the place, which felt more like temple than gym. Swords hung on the wall, ghosts flitted in the distance.

She bowed.

He bowed.

“Five strikes wins. Also, kendo much head. I have asked Sueko not to hit head unless necessary. Also, war, not kendo. So any killing strike wins, not only kendo targets. Understood?”

He waited a second, permitting no questions, and then said, “Guard position.”

Bob stepped back, to segan-kamae, the standard high guard, his sword before him at 45 degrees, both elbows held but not locked, the tip pointing to her eyes. It was a solid defensive position, but you couldn’t do much with it. She, meanwhile, fell to gendan-kame, with her sword held low, pointed down and to the left. It was an offensive position, quick to lead to stunning blows, less efficient for blocking.

Bob tried to find the rhythm that had sometimes been there for him and sometimes not. He tried not to see “her,” that is, the child; instead he tried to see her bokken, for it was his real enemy.

Doshu stood between them, raised a hand, and then his hand fell.

He stepped in fluidly, she countered a little to the left, and suddenly, like quicksilver, she went low to high—“dragon from water”—and he could not get his shinai into a block fast enough by a hair, and she slipped her blade under his guard, screamed “Hai!” with amazing force, and he felt the bitter bite of the white oak edge, classic yokogiri, against his ribs. God, it hurt.

He realized, I have just been killed by a child. With live blades, she would have cut his guts out.

“One for Sueko. Swagger nothing.”

Rage went through him, red and seething. He had an impulse to revert to bully’s strength, flare and howl and race at her, using his bulk to intimidate, but he knew he wasn’t fast enough or smooth enough and that no answers lay in the land of anger. She would coolly destroy him.

She attacked, he gave ground and parried two of her blows; then, being limber and flexible, she split almost to ground level and swept at his ankles, but somehow the solution came exactly with the attack itself, and he found himself airborne—he knew that leaving the ground was a big mistake, one of the “three aversions,” to be avoided at all times, but in this case unavoidable—to miss the horizontal cut and, as he came down, he tapped her on the thick pad of the shoulder, near the neck, a somewhat uninspired kesagiri.

“Bad cut, Swagger. But still, you get point. One to one.”

The next two flurries were in hyperspeed. He could not stay with her for more than three strikes and she seemed to gain speed as he lost it, and each time, “Hai!” the bokken struck him hard, once across the wrist, making him drop the shinai, once on his good hip, a phenomenon known in football as a stinger. Oh, hoochie mama, that one hurt like hell.

Sweat flooded his eyes and he blinked them free, but they filled with water and the keenness of his vision went.

He felt fear.

He had to laugh. I’ve been shot at ten thousand times and hurt bad six times and I am scared of a little girl.

Was it the fear or the laughter or both? Somehow something began to come through him. Maybe it was his blurred vision, maybe that thing in sports called “second wind,” maybe a final acceptance of the idea that what came before meant nothing, there was only now, and her next kata seemed to announce itself, he took it on the lower third of the blade, ran her sword to ground, recovered a hair faster, and slashed the shinai across her center chest, kesagiri. She didn’t feel it, given the heavy padding, but Doshu’s educated eyes were quick to make note.

“Hai!” Bob proclaimed.

“Too late. Must deliver blow and shout in one timing. No point.”

Bad call. That was kendo; this was war. But you forget bad calls, as every athlete knows, and when she came, he knew it would be from the left, as all her previous attacks had been right to left; in the split second she drew back to strike, he himself unleashed a cut that seemed to come from nowhere, as he had not willed it or planned it; it was his fastest, best cut of the afternoon, maybe even the whole week, and he got his “Hai” out exactly as he brought the shinai tip as smooth and soft as possible across the left side of her head, and felt the bop as it hit her helmet.

“Kill, Swagger.”

He dropped back, going again to segan-kamae. He saw what she had that he didn’t. It wasn’t that she was stronger or faster. It was that she got to her maximum concentration so much quicker than he did, and her blows came so fast from the ready position; he could stop the first, the second, maybe the third, but by the fourth, he was behind the curve and he missed it.

Yet the answer wasn’t in speed.

Not if you “tried” speed, in the Ooof!-I-must-do-it! way. You could never order yourself to that level of performance.

What was the answer?

The little monster, however, had altered her stance. She slid into kami-hasso, issuing from above, the bokken cocked like a bat in a batter’s stance, spiraling in her grip as she would not hold it still because stillness was death.

She stalked him, sliding toward him, and now that he was tired, he knew that he’d lost much speed and if he struck first, he’d be slow and she’d nail him for the fourth point, then finish him in seconds and it would be over.

What is the answer? he thought, backpedaling, going through his small bag of tricks, and coming up dry.

Oh, shit.

What was—

He tried to read the eyes, could not see them in the darkness of the helmet; he tried to read her sword, it was a blur; he tried to read her body, it was a mystery. She was just it: death, the enemy, all who’d sought to vanquish him and failed, coming in this time on a surge of adrenaline and serious attitude, sublimely confident, aware that he could do nothing but—

“The moon in the cold stream like a mirror.”

Musashi said it four hundred years ago, why did it suddenly appear in his mind?

Suddenly he knew the answer.

What is the difference between the moon in the sky and the moon in the water?

There is no difference.

They have become one.

You must become one with your enemy.

You must not hate him, for in anger is sloppiness. You must become him. And when you are him, you can control him.

Bob slid into kami-hasso and felt his body begin to mimic hers, to trace and somehow absorb her movement until he felt her and in some strange way knew her. He knew when she would strike for he could feel the same wave building in himself, and, without willing it, struck first with his shorter sword and would have sliced both hands off had there been an edge to his weapon. The sword had done it. The sword saw the opening; the sword struck, all in microtime.

“Strike, Swagger. Three–three.”

It was like he’d found a magic portal to her brain; the next strike went quicker still, a tap through her defenses to her solar plexus, so soft he couldn’t exactly recall delivering it but just felt the shiver as the split bamboo splines of the shinai bulged to absorb the impact.

“Hit, Swagger, four–three.”

She suddenly knew rage. Champions are not supposed to fall behind. He had broken her; she lashed out, issuing from above, yet as fast as she was, he felt tranquillity as the blade dived toward him in perfect shinchokugiri. He turned, again without force, and caught her under the chin, a blow that in a fight would have decapitated her.

“Match!” yelled Doshu.

He withdrew, assumed a formal position, and bowed deeply. Becoming her, he now loved her. Becoming her, he felt her pain at defeat. He felt no pride. It wasn’t Miller Time. He felt honored to have fought one so valiant.

She took off her helmet and reverted to child: the face unlined, unformed, though dappled with adult sweat, the skin smooth, the eyes dark and piercing. She returned the bow.

She spoke.

“She say, ‘Gaijin fight well. I feel him learning. I feel his strength and honor. He an honorable opponent.’”

“Tell her please that I am humbled by her generosity and she has a great talent. It was a privilege to learn from her.”

They bowed again, then she turned and left and at a certain point skipped, as if she’d been let out of school early.

“Okay, it worked. I learned something. The moon thing. I got it, finally.”

“Tomorrow I will speak certain truths to you. I must speak Japanese. No English. You know fluent Japanese speaker?”

“Yes.”

“You call. I tell this person some truths, he tell you.”

“Yes.”

“I give you truth. Are you strong for truth?”

“Always.”

“I hope. Now wash floor of dojo. Scrub, water hot. Wash down all surfaces. Go to kitchen, assist my mother. Then cut wood.”

Okada was surprisingly agreeable. She left Tokyo early the next morning and rammed her RX-8 into Kyoto in about five hours, arriving at noon. She parked out front, and Bob, who’d been washing dishes under Doshu’s mother’s stern eye, saw her arrive, in her neat suit, her beautiful legs taut, her eyes wise and calm behind her glasses, her hair drawn up into a smooth complexity of pins and stays, tight like everything about her.

She came in, having replaced her heels with slippers, and was greeted by a child, then led into the dojo. She didn’t even look at Swagger; instead, she bowed to the approaching Doshu.

“Hi,” Bob said, “thanks for coming.”

She turned. “Oh, this ought to be really good.”

Then she turned back to Doshu and they talked briskly. She asked questions, he answered. She asked more questions. They laughed. They talked gravely. He made policy statements, she gently disagreed, and he defended his position. Swagger could hear the rhythm of discussion, the rise of agreement, the fall of disagreement, the evenness of consensus.

Finally, she turned to Bob.

“You got it all?” he asked. “He says I’m a moron and I ought to be kicked out. I thought I did pretty well yesterday. I beat a ten-year-old girl.”

“That ten-year-old girl is Sueko Mori, the prodigy. She’s famous. She won the All Japan Kendo Association for twenty-one-unders a week ago. She’s a star. If you beat her, you did okay.”

“That little kid?”

“That little kid could beat most men in this country. Are you ready?”

His annoyance tamed by this information, Bob nodded.

“Doshu says you learn fast. You are athletic. You are strong, with quite a bit of stamina. Your left side is stronger than your right side, and your rising diagonal is stronger than your falling diagonal. He does not know the explanation.”

“Tell him I spent a summer swinging a scythe, low to high, left to right. Those muscles are stretched and overly developed.”

“Well, he really doesn’t care. Next, he says you have good character and work habits. He worked you like a dog. If you had a weak character or bad work habits you would not have stood for the grueling ordeal and the humiliation. He was very impressed with that aspect of your behavior. He thought, after the first day, you might make a swordsman. Your mind was right. Untrained but right.”

“Well, thank him.”

“He doesn’t require thanks. He’s not congratulating you, he’s telling you what is.”

“Sure.”

“But, he says, it is possible to be too athletic, too strong, too hardworking. The hard worker tends to oversegment, the athlete to trust reflex and muscle. So, though you picked up the moves very quickly, you had trouble integrating.”

“He said ‘integrating’?”

“He said ‘becoming one timing.’ I said integrating.”

“Okay.”

“He says that yesterday, finally, under pressure of the match with Sueko Mori, you integrated. Your learning curve in that match was extraordinary. You went in a nobody, you came out a swordsman. You must learn to develop that feeling, that sensibility; it is your only hope.”

“So he thinks I’m okay?”

“Well, that’s where he goes a little opaque on me. He stops well short of declaring you the next Musashi. He says you still have problems. But he says you have advantages too. Thus he has an idea of what you can or can’t do, and how you must operate.”

“Please, go ahead.”

“He says you are not Tom Cruise. There is no Tom Cruise. No one can learn the sword in days or weeks, except in movies. He hated that movie, by the way. However, you have done a great deal more than most.”

“Okay.”

“You must know your weaknesses and strengths and maneuver accordingly. That is strategy. You have not become a great swordsman. You have become an almost proficient swordsman. You will lose to any proficient yakuza swordsman. You will only win under one circumstance: against someone younger, who hasn’t been in a fight and will panic at the sight of his own blood. You’re a warrior, you’ve seen blood, others’ and your own. Blood doesn’t scare you, turn you to jelly. Thus, you know that in a fight you will be cut, you will bleed. Your opponent may not. He will see blood, his own or even yours, and he will tighten, lose his rhythm, his concentration. He will die; you will survive.

“Other than that, stay away. If you fight others, you will die. You are not strong enough to cover all the sectors of defense. The longer you go, the slower you will get. A good swordsman will play you out, waiting for your sword to still or drop, for your concentration to falter, and then he will kill you. In fights, you must win quickly, one, two blows, or you will die. The longer you fight, the larger the chance that you will die. You survive not merely on your sword, but on your guile in fighting only those you can beat and never those you cannot beat. A great swordsman will kill you in a split second.”

“He knows,” Bob said. “He sees where this is going. He’s telling me I cannot fight Kondo.”

Doshu heard the name and turned to Bob.

“Swagger-san,” he said, with something almost but not quite like affection. “Kondo: death.”

They roared through the Japanese night in her Mazda, the rush of the wind so intense it precluded conversation. Maybe there wasn’t much to say, anyway. Kyoto was a blur of light behind them, Tokyo not yet a blur of light ahead of them. She kept the red sportster up well over eighty miles an hour, driving with calm deliberation, all intensity and concentration.

But after a couple of hours, it began to rain. She pulled over to the shoulder. A car, too close behind, screeched and honked.

“What’s his problem?” Bob said.

“He was too close. I should have signaled. Can you latch the top?”

“Sure.”

She pressed a button and the rubberized roof came out of its compartment, unfolding on an ingenious structure until it covered the cockpit. He got it latched without trouble, though the mechanism, clever and Japanese, was new to him.

“Do you want me to drive? You must be exhausted. Now it’s raining.”

“I’m fine. I’m a big girl. Anyway, you’re just as tired as I am.”

“No, I didn’t get much sleep there, that’s for sure. That old guy worked me to the bone. ‘Eight cuts! Eight cuts!’ I haven’t worked that hard in years.”

“You are a hardworking guy,” she said. “Believe me, I know plenty who aren’t. My supervisor likes to cultivate ‘the big picture,’ which means I do the work and he’s out on the links chatting up businessmen. But I guess it’s okay that he’s lazy, because he’s so stupid if he worked hard he could really screw up.”

“Amazing how full the world is of assholes,” he said. “Anyway, have you heard from Nick yet?”

“No, nothing. I checked my phone and e-mail before we left. I’ll check again.”

She flipped open the little jointed piece of plastic, worked it over, its bright glow illuminating her grave face, and then announced, “No, nothing yet.”

“Okay.”

“What are your plans? You have to tell me, Swagger. I’m so afraid, now that you think you’re Yojimbo, you’ll go out on your own.”

“No, I told you I’d clear everything through you and I will. I’d hoped to hear from Nick, that’s all.”

“Suppose you don’t.”

“Then I’ll try and find a private investigator, a guy with yakuza connections, maybe an ex-cop, and we’ll turn him loose on the case. Maybe I should have done that already. I didn’t think of it. I was just thinking of how to keep that old man from whacking me black and blue.”

“A private eye won’t work. If Kondo doesn’t want to be found, the PI will know it and he will just take your money and conveniently come up with nothing. Nick’s got the guts to ask around; I doubt anybody else does.”

“Then I’ll go to Kabukicho and start kicking in doors on yakuza joints and asking loud, impolite questions about Kondo. That should get me noticed.”

“That should get your head delivered to the embassy by Black Cat Courier by Monday.”

“Then I don’t know. Maybe I am overmatched on this one.”

“On the other hand, you’ve learned stuff—”

Her cell phone rang. She checked the number ID and said, “It’s Nick.”

She hit talk.

“Hello, Nick, what is—”

But then she was quiet.

“Oh, hell,” she said.

“What?”

“It was Nick. But he said ‘Susan, I fed the dragon.’”

“‘Fed the dragon’? What the hell could that mean?”

“I don’t know. But it was also his voice. It was full of fear. Real, ugly fear.”

“Oh, Christ,” Bob said.

She dialed Nick’s number. There was no answer.

27

THE SAMURAI

Nick had it, or most of it. He sat in his kitchen under a bright lamp, looked at his notes, an outline, a time line, charts of consequences, phone numbers, the whole thing: amazing how it came together, how quickly.

The tattoo artist, Big Ozu, had told him of Nii’s bragging about easy street from now on, and how he could afford to have his back finished and the horrible, crude diamonds hidden in an abstract of classical Japanese shape and color and the kanji inscription, “Samurai forever.”

It took some doing and a mighty investment in the world’s best sake, but Nick finally got Ozu to reveal the darkest secret: the name of the man to whom Nii, through Kondo, was now pledged. It was as if Kondo’s clan had found a new daimyo, its connection to the ruling powers was now so much more powerful.

It was a name he already knew: Miwa.

Miwa, the shogun of Shogunate AV and head of AJVS, at that very moment stuck in a power struggle with Imperial to maintain command of Big Porn, trying to keep it Japanese against Imperial’s hunger to Americanize the industry and bring white women in.

Now, what could Kondo do for this man, and of what meaning would a sword, a special, important, historical sword be?

Nick could have left it there: the man just wanted the sword because he was a collector, this was the mother of all swords, to add it to his collection would be—

But then why didn’t he just buy it from Yano? And why were Yano and his family wiped out, why were certain suggestions given so that the unfortunate tragedy of the Yanos was not pursued with alacrity and instead allowed to drift? It hadn’t even been assigned to a senior investigator.

So Nick began to look at Miwa. It turned out there was quite a lot of data: Miwa’s career was storied, publicized, even self-publicized. It was the tale of a poor boy, going from nothing to something and conquering Japan in a way few men had since the shogun, an irony in itself. Miwa lived in luxury with houses everywhere in Japan, seven in Tokyo, two in Europe, one in Vail, one in Hollywood, one in New York. He traveled by private jet, he consorted with millionaires and movie stars, his amorous adventures were legendary.

How could such a man want one thing more?

And Nick realized that it wasn’t “one thing more”—it was simple survival. He saw now how a sword could help Miwa and establish his line forever.

Against that, the deaths of the Yanos was nothing. Really, what was it? A mother, a father, four children? You could cut them down and leave them. That, simply, was the eternal order of the universe. Who were they next to greatness? What were they? Compared to the fabulousness of Miwa and the scope of his ambitions, what did they weigh? Who cared for them? No samurai would rise to their defense. They must yield to the inevitability of it all, and cease to impede Miwa in his march to glory.

Nick needed a drink. He went to the refrigerator and got out a bottle of sake. He struggled with the plasticized cap and finally, in frustration, got out a small kitchen knife, sliced the plastic off, and poured himself a drink.

Ah. The taste of sake, so utterly Japanese. He set the knife down on the table and sat back. He allowed himself to take some pleasure.

Nick saw a golden life before him, where it would all go: his scoop would shock the world, an arrest would follow, Japan’s foundations would be shaken, the world’s journalists pouring in upon him as the scandal reached epidemic proportions, his own redemption.

He would be back after his various misadventures with Lady Kokain. It would be—

Nick heard something, a strange sound, he didn’t know what it was, then realized it was some heavy object being laid against his doorjamb, and in the next second he heard the crash of wood splintering, of the door giving, and the sound of footsteps.

Nick knew immediately.

He scooped his notes up and stuffed them in a manila envelope.

He had seconds.

He fought panic.

Then he saw where he could hide them.

He raced to that spot, rolled them up, and shoved them in.

Then he picked up his cell, punched Susan Okada’s number, worried about being tapped, tried to think of some unique way to reach her, a suggestion, a code even, that she and she alone would recognize.

“Susan,” he said when she answered, “I fed the dragon.”

Then he turned and saw his old friend Nii advancing on him with a pugnacious look and a wakizashi in his hand; behind him came Kondo, and Nick had the biggest scoop of his life.

Now he knew who Kondo was.

Now he knew why some people got to see Kondo and others didn’t.

He also realized they would torture him beyond description to learn what he knew and who he had told and who he was working with.

Nii raced to him but wasn’t in time.

Nick plunged the knife into his own carotid and bled out, smiling, in eight seconds.

28

DRAGONS

They got there by midnight. The traffic in Nick’s neighborhood was normally nonexistent at this hour, but tonight it was terrible. Four blocks from Nick’s, the lanes froze into gridlock; nobody was going anywhere.

“There’s a cop up ahead, trying to get this sorted out,” Susan said.

“I’m going to slip out and see what I can see. If I don’t make it back in time, I’ll meet you at Nick’s.”

“That doesn’t make any sense. Everybody will notice a gaijin. I’ll go. You scoot over and stay with the car.”

She got out; he moved behind the wheel and waited.

Ten minutes later the car hadn’t moved an inch, but Susan was back. As she approached, he could see, from the slowness of her movements and her downcast expression, that the news was very bad. She ducked into the seat.

“They burned it. Like the Yanos’. Burned it to a crisp. Burned the houses on both sides too.”

“Maybe he got out.”

“No,” she said from far away, “he didn’t. The cop said a man was dead. A suicide. He set his house on fire, then he cut his own throat. They carted him away to the morgue an hour ago.”

Swagger tried not to concentrate on Nick, poor Nick. He tried not to feel rage or pain or despair. He remembered Doshu: “Only now.” Only now. Yeah, right, but get me off this goddamned frozen star, the alien place where everybody I talk to gets whacked hard and ugly by men of shadow I have never even seen and the game is nothing I understand.

Only now. Only now. Think it through.

She didn’t say anything but just sat there for the longest time. Her almond eyes seemed unfocused; maybe she was seeing afar with a close-up eye and seeing close-up with a distant eye.

“Poor Nick,” she said at last. “I think he was finally in the clear.”

“Smart guy. Brave guy. The best.”

“Poor guy—”

“Look, I’m not the boss or nothing, but we have to think this through. If Nick cut his own throat, it means Kondo Isami found him and he knew he’d be tortured. He knew these boys. So he went out samurai.”

“I hate to think of that.”

“Well, ma’am, somebody has to think of that, so I guess I’ll go ahead and be the one.”

“You know, it makes me sick how good at all this you are.”

“I understand that. I make a lot of people sick. I’m a sergeant, it’s my job. We are in a war, people are dying, people are in danger, so let’s just figure out a next move.”

She was silent. Then she said, “I can’t think in this car. We’ll go to a coffee shop. I have to get out of this stupid traffic.”

The place was half-empty. They got coffee at the counter, then found a table at the back. Starbucks. It was like being in Iowa.

“Okay,” Swagger said, “you tell me if I’m right. You’re smart. I only went to high school.”

“New rule: sarcasm not permitted. Sarcasm out of bounds. Get it?” she said angrily.

“I apologize. It was stupid. It won’t happen again. Okay, here’s where we are. Nick found something. We don’t know what. But somehow they heard about it and came after him. He gave you a clue. So somehow he had enough time to hide what he had and to call you. ‘Susan, I fed the dragon.’ Then he cut his own throat, knowing that if they got to him, they’d torture him and he’d give everything up. Little skinny Nick, more samurai than any of those boys. And here’s another thing I have figured out. See if you agree.”

“Okay.”

“They didn’t burn the place for no reason. They figured out he’d learned something, and they were worried he’d left it. They couldn’t find it. They burned the place so that whoever he was working with couldn’t find it either. There’s no point in burning the place otherwise. It just attracts attention and the last thing these people need is attention.”

“That makes as much sense as anything.”

“Okay, so let’s think about the clue Nick gave you. Maybe I’m full of shit, but it can’t be that hard. He cooked it up in two seconds. You said he sounded scared on the phone. He knew they were there. He hid whatever it was fast, he came up with a clue fast, and it was something only you knew.”

“But what does that tell us?”

“It means it plays off something you know. ‘I fed the dragon.’ No, no, ‘Susan, I fed the dragon.’ Not dragons in general, not dragons in history, not dragons in no poetry or movies or songs, but a dragon that Susan knows. So what we have to do is find a point where three things touch: Susan, Nick, and a dragon. What does Susan know about dragons?”

“Nothing.”

“Did you ever discuss dragons with him?”

“No.”

“Did he ever mention them to you?”

“No. Never. The first time I heard the word ‘dragon’ from his mouth was last night.”

“What was the first thing you thought when he said ‘I fed the dragon.’”

“Oh, this is helpful. I thought, What the fuck is he talking about?”

“Are there any dragons in your past?”

“I dated a couple, that’s all. I was married briefly to one.”

“Think of what a dragon could be or relate to. A team name? Your high school football team—I’m betting you were a cheerleader—was it the Dragons?”

“I was the head cheerleader. It was the Panthers.”

“Ever study, uh, what’s it, dinosaurs?”

“Paleontology, archaeology, geology. No, never. Russian and Japanese literature.”

“Oh, that’s helpful. You can make a lot of dough off that.”

“Swagger, I gave you sarcasm warning number one. One more violation and you’re on your way to Arkansas.”

“Idaho. Let me say some dragon things to you. You react. Maybe it’ll jog a memory.”

“Fire away.”

“Flying dragons.”

“Nothing.”

“Sleeping Beauty.”

“Nah.”

“Prince Charming?”

“No such thing.”

“Reptiles.”

“Are dragons reptiles?”

“Well, they’re green and scaly. They’re like dinosaurs or big alligators.”

“Do they have two-chambered hearts? Are they cold-blooded?”

“I don’t know.”

“I don’t know either.”

“Chinese dragons?”

“No.”

“Dragons in parades? You know, people under a long dragon thing?”

“Wouldn’t that be a Chinese dragon?”

“Dragon bones? Dragon wings? Dragon tracks? Dragon breath?”

“No, no, no, no.”

“Flying Dragons.”

“You said that.”

“A gang called the Dragons?”

“No.”

“A triad called the Dragons?”

“No.”

“A flying dragon kick from karate?”

“No.”

“The sleeping dragon? That’s a kendo move, low to high.”

“I know what it is. No, not that.”

“A Chinese restaurant called the Dragon.”

“No.”

“Saint George?”

“No.”

“Saint Andrew?”

“No.”

“Prince Charming.”

“You did that one already. This isn’t working.”

“Well, I’m pretty much out of dragon stuff. Could it be a picture, a movie, a book, a poem, an article, a paper, a—”

“Hmmm,” she said.

He saw something in her eyes. It was that faraway look: seeing the mountain as if it’s close at hand.

“Article?”

“Paper. If dragons are reptiles, does that make them lizards?”

“There are no dragons, so can’t they be anything?”

“Well, as you said, green and scaly. That makes them reptiles. So wouldn’t they be lizards?”

“I suppose. Why?”

“It’s just that—oh, it’s nothing.”

“Try it. What the hell?”

“Lizards. I have something in my life dealing with lizards. I may have mentioned it to Nick.”

“But you’re not sure.”

“Swagger, nobody can remember everything they’ve said to a casual acquaintance over a five-year period.”

“Of course. Sorry. But you said a paper. School paper. Lizards.”

“Yeah, it’s a story I’ve told a few times in embassies and at the department, at parties and dinners, that sort of thing. Did I tell it to Nick? It’s possible. I met him at a party at the Japanese ambassador’s residence on Nebraska in D.C. about five years ago. It was low-key professional: I was supposed to chat him up, he was supposed to chat me up. There was some drinking. I may have told him.”

“Tell me.”

“I had a petty good-girl’s ambition to graduate from high school with a four-point-oh average. I had to be perfect, and for three years, I was perfect. But my senior year, I dropped a couple of points in advanced-placement biology. I had to somehow make it up, or I’d get a B, and there would go the four-oh. So I went to the teacher and I said, you know, I can’t quite make it up on the remaining tests. If I ace them, I still just get an average of three-nine-nine in here. Is there any extra credit thing I could do? He was a good guy. He said, ‘Well, Susan, if you wrote me a paper and it was really good on an original subject, I don’t see how I could keep from giving you the A that you need so badly.’ The joke is, I have no feeling for biology. I just learned it by rote. I had no gift at all and there was nothing I was capable of writing an A paper on. I had no inspiration, no anything. So I went to the National Geographic bound volumes in the library and just paged through them. I was looking for something that might stimulate my imagination.”

“And you found something?”

“A lizard. A big, ugly lizard. God, it was ugly. It was about ten feet long, green, carnivorous, with a forked tongue. It was limited to seven islands in the West Pacific near Java. The biggest island was called Komodo, and so the lizard was called a Komodo lizard. So I became an overnight expert on the Komodo lizard—this is before the Internet, I should add—and I did a paper on its prospects in an environmentally diminishing world. I got the A, I was valedictorian, my parents weren’t disappointed, and I went on with my life as planned, except of course I didn’t marry Jack McBride, but that’s another story. The funny thing is, that lizard really helped me by being so interesting. So the joke is, now and then if I’m happy and I’ve had a few drinks and people are toasting, I toast. My toast is ‘Here’s to the lizard.’ And they all laugh, because it’s so unlike little Susan Okada, the Asian grind with the four-oh average who never makes a mistake. I may have told that to Nick, after toasting the lizard. I think a bunch of us, some Japanese journalists and some State people, I think we went to a sushi place in Georgetown. That may be where I did it.”

“And that’s it?”

“Yeah. But see, here’s the thing. That creature is also sometimes called a Komodo dragon. Maybe I toasted the dragon and that’s what Nick was thinking of.”

“Komodo? Is that a Japanese word? It sounds Japanese.”

“No, it’s Indonesian, I think.”

“It sounds Japanese. Os, lots of syllables. It could be Japanese.”

“It does sound Japanese. It actually sounds like a Japanese word, very common, kamado. Kamado simply means stove or oven. It’s an inverted ceramic bowl or something. In the old days, most Japanese homes had one. It’s a grill, I suppose. You grill fish in it. Usually small, it’s—”

They both let it lie there, on the table.

A few minutes passed. Then Bob said, “Nobody would see the correspondence between the word Komodo, the name of the lizard, and the word kamado, meaning grill, unless they spoke both English and Japanese well. That would be you. And nobody else would have a Komodo in his background except you. Now, the next question: would Nick have had a kamado?”

“He shouldn’t have. They all have microwaves now. But he did have one. Don’t you remember how his house smelled the night you were over? He had just eaten and he’d grilled some meat. He grilled his meat in a kamado.”

“Now, Nick’s sitting there, somehow he knows he’s about to get hit. It’s over. But he doesn’t panic, not Nick, he’s a cool hand, he’s samurai all the way. He knows he can’t get out, but he tries to preserve what he’s got, which is some documents, that’s how he beats his killers. Where’s he put them? He slides them into the kamado. Maybe there’s a liner and he puts them under that, in the bowl. Then he calls you and he’s afraid the phone is tapped and the only thing he can think of is that little anecdote from your first meeting and the correspondence between kamado and Komodo, that only you would see.”

“He was good at puns. He said he loved to write his headlines in his rag because he liked the puns, the more outrageous the better.”

“I think,” said Bob, “tonight I’m going to pay a visit to the ruins of Nick’s house. You tell me what I’m looking for and where it’ll be. I’ll find it if it’s there.”

29

THE SHRINE

It was one of his favorite spots: the secluded cemetery at Sengakuji, the Shrine of the 47 Ronin behind its gate and its imposing statue of Oishi. Here lay the remains of the 47 who’d forged through the walls at Kira’s, slaughtered his bodyguard in furious battle, then beheaded the old man. It was as sacred a spot to the Japanese imagination as was possible, and when the Shogun visited, he always called ahead, made certain that the place was “closed for maintenance” so that he would have it to himself and that the usual clouds of incense smoke from the hundreds of joss sticks lit by supplicants would have cleared away.

Here was naked bushido. It expressed itself on many levels. The bodies themselves, after the mass seppuku, were buried at the highest level, in Buddhist fashion, a thicket of vertical grave markers and ceremonial wooden stakes weathering in the rain and snow. One could—and many did—buy a bundle of joss sticks to lay in tribute to the 47 or their lord Asano, who was here also, which was why a low, smoky vapor lingered among the headstones. Below was a museum, for tourists; a courtyard, wide and gravelly, the shrine itself, the typical Buddhist structure of timbers and white plaster of a pattern spread widely across the whole of Asia, under a tile roof with tilted corners, an archetype that on a thousand Chinese restaurants had become a cliché. Here also—between the courtyard on one level and the cemetery on another—was the stream in which the men had washed the head that night so long ago. Here was the vengeance and the loyalty of the retainers. Here were men who’d die before they’d live with dishonor. Their headstones lay alongside the paths, under the shade of trees. Here is where they presented Kira’s head and got a receipt—preserved and displayed in the museum—from the priests:

Noted:

Item: One head

Item: One paper parcel

The above articles are acknowledged to have been duly received.

Here is where they waited to be arrested; here, months later, after they’d been ordered to commit seppuku, here is where their bodies had been taken.

The skylines of Shinjuku or central Tokyo were far away. Fall was upon them, a chill bit the air, soon winter would arrive. The leaves, russet, red, gold-brown, orange, fell to earth in riots of color. He drew his muffler tighter against his neck, pulled his cashmere overcoat tighter, looked and saw bodyguards with receivers in their ears all around.

“You’re sure?” the Shogun asked Kondo.

“Not totally, no. But I’m sure that he had nothing set in type, as we found no page proofs. I’m sure he had made no attempts to talk to police sources because we’ve canvassed. As far as I can tell he spoke only to a few sources: the tattooist and several, uh, ‘experts’ in Eight-Nine-Three affairs. All have been spoken to, all have owned up, all have been remonstrated against. They will not betray us again. For Yamamoto, I’m sure he had nothing except the possible suspicion that you and I had made an alliance.”

“Still, it’s disturbing. At this time, particularly, when things are so delicate and hanging in the balance.”

“Most likely, sheer coincidence. Someone saw something, and maybe this reporter had a hunch. He was well versed in the ways of our brotherhood, he knew who to ask, and he made some slight penetration into our business. Alas, his hair was blond like Charlize Theron’s and someone noted him and sold him to us. We dealt with him. That is the order of business. As for any information he may have learned, it almost certainly died with him.”

“You’re sure?”

“Well, Lord, of course there is no ‘sure.’ I’m as ‘sure’ as I can be. But I can only talk in probabilities. We never had a conversation with him. His actions precluded that. He knew the conversation would have been unpleasant. But there’s no evidence at all he was working for someone and no reason to believe he was. He had as yet assembled no product: we examined his house seriously before lighting it. No notes, no story, no time line. He had nothing but suspicions and they died with him. That is the highest probability.”

“But what were the probabilities that Spruance’s Dauntlesses would catch our fellows on their decks refueling? Why would they come in at just that precise moment? The probabilities were infinitely tiny, yet the Americans fell out of the sky, and in five minutes we lost three carriers, three hundred of our best pilots, and the war. I think about that moment often, Kondo-san. That moment. Not one minute before, not one minute after. The carriers were turned into the wind, their decks laden with refueling planes. It was Japan’s moment of maximum vulnerability during the war, and in that moment the Americans struck.”

“The Americans cheated. They had the codes.”

“I hate the Americans. They always cheat. They are stupid and blundering and it doesn’t matter because they cheat.”

“I cannot protect you from God’s apparent enthusiasm for the Americans, Lord. He makes the unexpected happen, as Midway proves for all time. I cannot protect you from it, just as no one could have protected Nagumo from Spruance’s Dauntlesses. No one can protect you from Buddha’s whimsy, God’s will, the indifference of Shinto, or the sheer random drift of chaos in the universe. It sticks its ugly little head in at the most inopportune time. But we have done everything rational to protect you and to make this thing work and to get you what you so richly deserve. The only thing we can’t protect against is bad luck.”

“The Americans always have good luck,” said the Shogun bitterly. “Now they think they can take over my business, that I am vulnerable, that my planes are on the decks refueling. They are cheating by spreading millions around. It’s so unfair.”

“Lord, it will not happen.”

“That’s what Kusaka, Nagumo’s chief of staff, said too,” said the Shogun glumly.

“I understand. Therefore I have sent my best men to the polisher’s, and the security at that point is perfect. These are the boys who visited Yano-san and his family with me—all sworn, all bloodied, all who have cut before. There isn’t a man in Japan or even the world who could force the issue at the polisher’s. It would be one against six, and six of the best. Nii leads them and he will willingly give his life. He is true samurai. Your head is safe. And so is mine.”

30

SWORD OF LIFE

It was the next evening, past midnight, at the same Roppongi Starbucks.

He put it before her. It was slightly scorched, but he gently opened the manila envelope and one by one spread the documents out onto the table of the coffeehouse. He could see Nick’s handwriting in kanji running up and down the pages of vertically lined genko yoshi.

“And no one saw you?” Susan asked.

“I done some crawling in my time. I got in close as I could, then crawled past the other houses till I reached the ruin. I didn’t even have to go inside; I found the kamado buried under some fallen timber close to the first-floor patio in the backyard. Half the bowl remained intact and the envelope was in the lining between the charcoal chamber and the outer wall. It slid right out. I got my ass gone fast. Total time on-site, less than five minutes. Just in case anyone was watching, I doubled back three or four times. Nobody could have stayed on me, way I ride. I’m in the clear.”

Susan applied the full force of her intelligence to the pieces of paper, now and then shuffling them, now and then righting them, trying to make them assemble into coherence. Bob sat quietly, aware that he no longer existed.

Finally, fifteen minutes and another cup of coffee later, she said, “Okay.”

“He had it?”

“Most of it.”

“Does it make any sense?”

“Yeah. In fact, it’s simple. It’s just business.”

“The guy we’re after, he’s a businessman?”

“Is he ever. His name is Yuichi Miwa, called ‘the Shogun.’ His fortune is based on pornography: he is the founder of Shogunate AV. Miwa got into DVD early and onto the Internet early; thus he made millions, which, reinvested in newspapers, television, software, games, and so forth, became billions. But now he may lose it.”

“Someone’s coming after him.”

“Someone is. It’s an up-and-coming AV company called Imperial. Imperial, evidently, has American money behind it; they want to take over the Japanese market, import American women, blondes mostly, to perform in Japanese-style porn. The government has forbidden that for many years, but if Imperial can get it done, their profits would go through the roof. Miwa happens to be president of something called AJVS, the All Japan Video Society, the industry rep group, I guess a kind of MPAA for dirty movies. AJVS works with the government and controls the regulations of the business; under the Shogun, the government has kept American product out of Japan. Miwa’s term is almost up and there’s an election. He’s won unopposed for sixteen consecutive years, but now he’s opposed. Imperial is spending a lot of money and is running a slate. There’s dozens of smaller porn studios, and they’re either going to follow the Shogun or the usurpers from Imperial. See, it’s like a lot of industries and regulatory agencies. If you control the industry association, you really control the regulators, in this case something called the Administrative Commission of Motion Picture Codes and Ethics. Really, as it functions, AJVS controls the commission. It is the commission.”

“So what does the sword have to do with any of this?”

“Miwa has to win that election. If he loses it, he loses everything. So he needs to do something bold to make himself a beloved institution. He has to transcend porn and become a hero to the people. At that point, the smaller studios and Imperial cannot vote him out. He’s too big. He in essence becomes president-for-life. He maintains control of AJVS and the commission and ipso facto the industry; he prevents the American product from coming into Japan. His business thrives; Imperial withers and dies.”

“Now I get it. Yuichi Miwa understands how sword-nuts the Japanese are,” Bob said. “It will be his publicity masterstroke: he will make a big-deal announcement that he found the most revered relic in Japanese history. It’s the actual blade used by the great Oishi in the attack of the Forty-seven Ronin against Lord Kira in seventeen-oh-three. It’s the thing that took Kira’s head. He’ll get all kinds of media. He becomes a hero. That’ll establish him as the Great Man of the People who cannot be replaced.”

“The little guys know if the election goes against him, it will be a complete loss of face for the industry. They cannot afford the shame.”

“I see.”

“Yes,” she said, “and now it swings into line. That’s why the Yanos had to be wiped out. It had to be entirely a Miwa production, his campaign, his search, his recovery, his restoration, his presentation, all under his auspices. The Yanos mess up that narrative and show the random nature of the process. He’s not a campaigner for the culture, he’s just a rich guy who bought something off someone. So they had to be eliminated entirely, and their deaths had nothing to do with anything else in their lives. They were just the people who were in possession of the sword. They were in the way. They had to be destroyed for the welfare of the Shogun, their property confiscated.”

“So the Yanos had to die,” Bob said, “so some creep could win an election for king of teacher-blows-Johnny.”

“Well, you could have put it more eloquently, but essentially that’s right.” Suddenly a deep melancholy seemed to overtake her. “The terrible thing is, I think he wins.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Now it’s too late. He has the sword. It’s protected, it’s guarded, it’s hidden. No one could ever get it back. There’s no connection to the Yanos. He’ll announce it in time for this ridiculous porn election, get all the media, get the TV and the print, and win his little contest. I don’t see a legal way of reaching him. I suppose you could give a statement to the police identifying the sword as the one you brought into the country, I suppose we could find police factions that would see it our way, I suppose—”

“Yagyu Munenori, sixteen thirty, The Life-giving Sword: ‘It is missing the point to think that the martial art is solely in cutting a man down. It is not in cutting people down. It is in killing evil.’”

“Forget it, Swagger.”

“I can’t. I didn’t come across no ocean to give a statement.”

“It’s moot. You forget, we don’t even know where it is. You can’t be Toshiro Mifune because there’s no place to be Toshiro Mifune.”

“I’ll find the goddamn thing in ten minutes.”

“Swagger, you’re proposing a felony. I have a duty to report you to the authorities. I always told you this.”

“Okada-san, you know the authorities have been bought off by Miwa. There ain’t no authorities in this case. It’s just you and me, redneck and cheerleader. We do something or that little girl is orphaned and there’s no justice in it at all. It’s just a thousand years of history all over again: big guys with swords cutting people down and laughing about it.”

“That sword is locked and guarded in one of Miwa’s seven estates around Tokyo.”

“I can find it in ten minutes.”

“Swagger, it is locked and guarded in—”

“It’s being polished.”

“What?”

“The blade needed restoration. He would hire the best polisher in Japan to bring out every last wiggle of the hamon on the blade. It has to be beautiful, don’t you see? He can’t take the blade into his mansions, because the sword polisher’s equipment is heavy stone and the art of polishing a sword is delicate, slow; it demands total concentration. Somewhere right now, within a few miles of us, there’s a sword polisher working the blade to perfection under heavy guard. The polisher probably doesn’t want to work on the sword, but Miwa and his pal Kondo Isami don’t care what the polisher wants. They don’t care what anybody wants.”

She looked at him.

“So what are you proposing?”

“I go to the shop. I get the sword.”

“That’s a plan?”

“I’ll knock on the door. I’ll say, ‘Please give me my sword back.’ They will say, ‘No, that is not possible.’ ‘Hmmm,’ I will say, ‘I’m afraid I must insist.’ We will have a spirited discussion.”

“You are insane. You’re not a samurai.”

“The samurai left town. You’re stuck with the old white guy.”

“They’ll kill you, Swagger.”

“Think of something better.”

She couldn’t.

31

BATTLE

Susan dropped him at the museum at 6:30 p.m. and it took some yakking to get by the guards and the receptionist as the institution was about to close. But Dr. Otowa himself okayed the entry, came down and met Bob at the elevator, and took him through the somber gray light, the solemn quiet, the dignity of the displays, up to the office, where they sat among swords. The swords, behind glass in a humidity-controlled environment, were everywhere, except for the large black door that signified the presence of a vault. Inside it, there had to be more swords.

“Doshu said you learned well. He was very impressed with your skill and character. He is an astute judge of men.”

“Well, sir, glad I came through and that he thought I did okay.”

“Now, you said an emergency.”

“Yes, sir. I think I know where Philip Yano’s stolen sword would be. Well, it would be in the restoration process. That being the case, odds are it’s at a polisher’s because that’s the longest, hardest part of the process. I could kick around making phone calls and visits for a week, but I know you’re wired into that world. You could find out in a second.”

“You want me to make some inquiries?”

“Sir, the way these people operate, I don’t think an inquiry digs them out. These people want this blade restored now. They want someone good working crazily to finish the project in a certain time frame. They’re running low on time, they have a schedule to meet. They also have to restore the furnishings and scabbard, all at the very top of the art. What that means, I’m afraid, is that there’s a polisher who has suddenly disappeared. He’s no longer a part of the mix. He hasn’t been heard from and his friends are getting worried. He’s out of the loop, he’s gone off on an unexpected ‘vacation,’ something like that.”

“I know a journalist who would know. Please sit down while I e-mail him.”

The doctor went to his terminal, logged on.

Bob sat and let his eyes trace the curve and shimmer of the beautiful blades that surrounded him, while hearing the tappity-tap of keys. You could watch the comings and goings of designs, as the curves got deeper and deeper, then began to shallow out and rise toward a straight line. Or you could watch the tsuba change from a single iron ring, as rugged as a Viking oar, to an elaborate, gold-etched carving, elegant, too beautiful for its ostensible purpose, which was to keep enemy blades from sliding down one’s own, to cut the hand off. You could watch the points elongate or shorten, the grooves on the blades reach farther and farther, double up, shrink, then disappear altogether. You could see the play of hamon, sometimes feathery and insubstantial where the hard tempered steel of the edge met the softer embracing steel of the spine. All in all, it was quite a display, and even knowing as little as he did, Bob had the sense now of a secret world. Kissaki, yokote, mitsugashira, hamon, shinogi, shinogi-ji, hira, ha, mune, munemachi, hamachi, mei, mekugiana, nakago, nakagori, that was it, tip to butt, and he knew what each meant. It was a universe.

“Mr. Swagger?”

“Yes, sir.”

“The best sword polisher in Japan is in London, restoring blades for the Victoria and Albert Museum. The second best is in San Francisco, giving a seminar for your countrymen. But the third—”

“The third.”

“The third used to be the best. Only time eroded something of his skill. He is eighty-four. His name is Tatsuya Omote. I have his address.”

“Yes, sir.”

“You’re on to something. I fear that three weeks ago, he abruptly canceled an appearance at a conference in Osaka. He’s missed the deadline on a commission he undertook for a shrine in Hiroshima. His shop doesn’t answer and he no longer responds to e-mail. This is very troubling to his friends, but he did send one e-mail several weeks ago telling them not to worry, he was fine, he simply had an all-consuming project.”

Bob looked at his watch. It had taken seven minutes.

“What now?” the doctor asked. “Should we call the police?”

“I think that’s likely to tip people off rather than set anyone free. I think I’ll drop by and see what’s going on.”

“That could be dangerous. Are you armed?”

“No, sir. Of course not.”

“Come with me.”

The doctor led him to the vault and spun the dial of the combination lock. He pulled the door back, and Bob had the sense of a great weight shifting on ball bearings.

Bob didn’t enter because he wasn’t invited. But the doctor emerged in a few seconds with a white weapon.

“Gendaito wakizashi. Modern short sword. It was forged in nineteen forty-three by one of the leading showa smiths at the height of his powers. It was meant for the smith’s son, who was then an officer on an island called Tarawa. Obviously, the son never came back. After the war, the smith remounted the blade in the civilian furniture you see now, which is why the saya, the tsuba, the same, the saego are all white. White is our black. It reflects grief.”

The doctor held the sword before him, cutting edge up, and with his left hand removed the white-lacquered saya. The naked blade gleamed in the light, beautiful and hungry.

“The old man told me, when the museum acquired his collection, that this was the sharpest, strongest blade he ever made. It was made with love to protect his son. But his son never got to carry it. The old man gave it to me with the idea that I would give it to my son, to protect him, but my son never got to carry it. He died early also. So I give it to you, because you are a son too. I give it to you in hopes that it can protect you with its magic ingredient of a father’s love. So this is really a gift to your father, from me. I hope he was a good man.”

“He was a very good man,” said Bob.

“Good. I’m praying that you don’t have to use it, but if you do, I know this: it will cut swift and fast and true.”

They drove through the suburbs, then farther into the farmlands surrounding Tokyo, the famed Kanto plain. Mountains loomed on the edge of vision, including the great one, Fuji, gigantically big, the clear fall day revealing it vividly. It looked like an advertisement for a Japan that only existed in the minds of western tourists.

“You don’t have to do this,” he said. “I have the bike. I could have found the place on my own.”

“Suppose you get cut. Suppose you’re bleeding and you can’t work the bike. Suppose someone calls the cops and you have to run away and have no place to run. You’re just a big gaijin and they’d pick you up in thirty seconds. No, Swagger, I do have to do this. I can’t believe I’m doing this.”

“It’ll be fine.”

“And that’s why you’re carrying something under your jacket? Something about the length of a sword.”

“Otowa gave it to me, just in case.”

“Swagger, you are going to be so dead or so locked up and my career is going to be so over.”

“I can handle this.”

“Yeah, the white guy with a week of training. Uh-huh.”

“Don’t forget, I beat a little girl.”

At last they found it, on a nondescript street in a nondescript town, a nondescript commercial building with a few ground-floor shops, one of them clearly closed, its curtains drawn. The others in the line sold noodles, sushi, sex movies, liquor, and software games. But the sign over the closed shop simply read Nihonto.

“That’s it. That’s Tadaaki Omoto’s place. God, it looks like a place where they sell cheeseburgers.”

“Tatsuya Omote. Can’t you get the name right?”

“You’re very edgy, Ms. Okada. I know what you need. How about some shopping? It’s time to go shopping.”

“What?”

“Sure, that always settles folks down. Let’s go buy some stuff.”

He got out of the car and strode across the lot. A few steps behind, she followed. He went straight to the liquor store. By the time she’d caught up to him, he had bought a pint of Jack Daniel’s.

“This is a very fine drinking whiskey,” he said. “Would you like some?”

“Swagger, I—”

He paid, about 3,600 yen. He held the bottle out to her, but she shook her head no.

“Okay, in a few minutes. Now, what about a nice cup of noodles?”

“Mr. Swagger, have you had a breakdown? Really, I—”

“No, ma’am, I am fit as a fiddle. I do think we should have some noodles.”

“You are—”

“We should watch for a while before I go into my Toshiro imitation. Come on.”

So the samurai and his companion went into Solo’s noodle-rama and had a nice cup of noodles each, and a diet Coke. It was actually pretty good. They sat near the window.

“What do you see?” she asked.

“Well, I see a large Mercedes S-Class, black, very shiny, parked in the lot. Your standard yakmobile.”

“You have no idea how many of them are in there. We should call the police.”

“Yes, and what do they find? An old man polishing a sword in the presence of several thugs in suits. Where would the crime be? Would the old man say, ‘These guys have terrorized me into polishing this stolen sword’? He would not, because he fears retaliation, and rightfully so. The cops would say, ‘How is this sword stolen? Has it been reported stolen?’ And of course we’d have to answer, ‘We have no proof except for the crazy accusations of Slim Whitman here who claims it’s a sword he brought into the country a few months ago.’ Then the yaks would say, ‘And here’s the license for the sword,’ which they got from Yano-san. So the sword goes back to the yaks, we’re booted out of town, and Mr. Tatsuya—”

“Mr. Omote, dammit. Can’t you get anything right?”

“Mr. Omote gets back to polishing. Meanwhile, the cops discover my passport ain’t no good and I’m arrested. That don’t sound too good to me.”

“Come on.”

She led him back to the car.

“Get in.”

She opened her purse, a rather large green leather bag, and handed it to him. He looked inside and saw the grip of a small pistol.

“It’s a sterile Chinese Makarov. I got it from a couple of the Agency clowns on the fourth floor. It’s loaded with some magic candy called three-eighty hollowpoints, whatever that means, it had the boys all giggly. Take it.”

“No.”

“Swagger, you can’t go in there with just—”

“Yes, I can. This game is called swords. It’s their game. I beat them at it and that makes me the winner. And throw that thing into Tokyo Bay. It’ll get you sent to Japanese women’s prison for the next fourteen years and they don’t have no Kate Spade bags there.”

“I hope you survive long enough to tell me how a bumpkin from Utah who sounds like Johnny Cash before the cure can identify a Kate Spade.”

“I’m from Idaho out of Arkansas. My daughter made me buy her one. I also bought one for my wife. You must do okay. They ain’t cheap. Sure you won’t have a drink?”

The question wasn’t even sane enough for an answer. She just looked at him. He took the small, flat brown bottle out of the paper bag, cranked off the cap, smiled, toasted her, and said, “Cheers.”

Then he poured some of it into his hair, and ruffled his hair with his other hand.

He splashed some on his neck.

He handed her the bottle.

He pulled down his tie and unbuttoned four buttons on his shirt and tugged his shirt up on the left side.

“‘The foundation of the Way is always deception.’ Yagyu, sixteen thirty-five,” he said.

“All right, Swagger. I give up. Go to your little war.”

“See ya,” he said, stepping out.

“I’ll be waiting for you to come out, that is, if you come out.”

Nii was amazed. The old man, barefoot and in black like some kind of hipster, with glasses so big they blew his eyes up like a bug’s, sat on a low stool on a platform. He looked like some kind of musical performer. He was bent over the long curve of steel, his eyes fiercely concentrating, his left hand securing the blade against a block of wood, his right gripping a piece of flat stone. A water bucket sat at his right foot.

He was in the part of the process called finishing. It had been a long, slow war, starting with foundation stones and the full power of his imagination and his stamina and his know-how, all applied against the blade in an act that was part love and part hate and all art. The blade, for its part, fought him stubbornly. Its scars were proudly earned in forgotten battles, its surface was stained by the blood of many, some justly taken, some not so justly taken. It did not want to return to the ceremonial pristine.

In the war, the old man’s weapons were stones. There were dozens of them, each with a specific name, a specific grain, a specific face, to be used in one place, in one direction—arato, kongoto, binsui, kasisei, chunagura, koma-nagura, uchigumori hato, uchigumori-to—and the art of the campaign was in knowing the place for each in the time-consuming ritual. The old man’s face was as wrinkled as a prune’s, but his hair was long and fluffy. He looked more like a saxophonist than a warrior, but a warrior he was, and the glitter of a million particles of ground steel were the evidence of his attack, even if, every hour, he vacuumed them up, for an unvanquished particle could slide between stone and blade and cause havoc.

Nii watched as something beautiful emerged with slow precision out of something mundane. What had seemed to be a common chunk of old steel, smeared, spotted with rust, nicked, and hazed, was now an elegant sweep of colors and textures. It didn’t shine, not really; it glowed, as if lit from within. Somehow as the old metal was removed, the blade regained its life and power. It was alive now. The smeary, milky line (or smudge, really) of the hamon ran along the whole edge. The tip, kissaki, was cruel and perfect, a couple of inches of eloquent steel that would penetrate anything. The thicker metal of the mune had a golden quality, substantial and embracing, solid yet giving rather than crudely strong and brittle. And the two grooves (bo-hi, they were called) gave the blade an aerodynamic purity and would make it sing as it cleaved the air. It looked hungry for blood. It was one of those objects that was sacred and profane at once. It wanted but one thing, to drink more blood, and yet it was also an expression of the distilled genius of the people of the little island who had created and spread its soul and spirit across half the known world. Nii knew none of this. He could express nothing of it. He felt all of it. It had gotten his mind, for once, off little girls.

The old man worked steadily, without seeing anything but the sword, six inches from his face. He was, in his way, too cool to see the gaudy, fashion-obsessed yaks of the world. He communicated to them that, though loud and forceful, they were trivial, meaningless. He lived to work. He accepted that day some weeks ago when they had simply shown up with guns and a large pile of money.

“You will do this work. This work and no other. You will keep it secret from everybody. You will be watched. You must finish by the first week in December.”

“It cannot be done in that time.”

“Yes, it can,” Kondo had said to him. “You must know who I am, and what I am capable of. I would hate to spill your blood—”

“Life, death, it’s the same.”

“To you, in your eighties, but perhaps not to children, grandchildren, wife, friends, and so forth. We will leave a big hole in this small town.”

Glumly, the old man accepted the new now. He gave himself up to the blade. What choice did he have, really?

And now he was done. A final burnishing, an inspection, the full power of—

“Nii!” someone called.

Nii looked up. He saw that the old man had stopped polishing, something he’d never done before. That disturbed Nii.

Then Nii heard it: someone was banging on the door.

“Who is that fool?” he demanded.

“It’s a gaijin. It’s some stupid-looking gaijin.”

“Fuck. Well, I’ll get rid of him,” Nii said. “You, back to work.”

But for some reason the old man would not work. He stared at Nii with great intensity, as if seeing him for the first time or as if he knew something. Then he smiled.

He spoke for the first time in months.

“This is going to be good,” he said.

Bob knocked hard on the door. He heard stirring inside. He tried the lock, felt it rock in the jamb but not give much at all. He knocked again, harder.

“Hey!” he said. “Hey, goddammit, open up. I got a sword needs polishing!”

Something stirred inside, and through a small crack in the curtain behind the glass, he sensed a flash of movement. What he could see was otherwise unimpressive: shelves and on the shelves what looked to be shoeboxes, and in the shoeboxes what looked to be stones, some flat, some jagged, all different in shape, texture, and color.

“Hey,” he shouted again, “goddammit, I have a sword! You want some money? I have money for you. Don’t you want to work? Come on, goddammit, open the hell up.”

He did this for about three minutes, loudly, a drunken gaijin who would not go away, not soon, not ever.

“I hear you! Goddammit, I hear you in there, open up, goddammit!”

Then he saw movement in the dark, which soon resolved itself into two husky young men in suits. They had impassive faces and one wore sunglasses. They were about 240 each and lacked necks. They had short arms that hung at a slight bend because the muscle was so overdeveloped it kept the arms from straightening.

They came to the door, and Bob heard clacking as the lock was released. The door slid open an inch but no farther and both young men crushed against the opening with their full linebackers’ weight and strength, giving no quarter.

“Hey, I—”

“You go away. Shop closed. No one here. He gone. Go away now, please.”

“Come on, fellas,” he said with a drunk’s belligerent stupidity. “I bought this thing for a thousand bucks. It needs a shine. This is the place, ain’t it? Guy told me this place really shines ’em up good. Come on, lemme in, lemme talk to the fella.” He held up the white-sheathed, white-gripped wakizashi.

“Go away now, please. No one here. Polisher gone. Go elsewhere. Not your business here.”

“Guys, I just want—”

“No business for you here.”

The door rocked shut and Bob heard it click.

The two men edged back, then disappeared into a rear room.

He stood there a second, then reached into his pocket and pulled out a metal pick. The clickings of the door had informed him that it was a standard throw-bolt, a universal fixture, easily overcome. He slid the pick in the keyhole, felt the delicate mesh of tumblers and levers, wiggled this way and that, and felt each tumbler eventually give up its position. He put the pick away, took out a plastic credit card, drew that up the door slot to the bolt, and began a steady upward tapping, gentle and persistent, urging the bolt off the spring-driven lever that secured it. In two seconds, with a snap, it yielded to these probings and popped open.

He stepped into darkness.

“Hey,” he said, “anybody home? Goddamn, the door wasn’t locked, you must be open.”

He heard shuffling from behind a curtain, some whispers.

He bulled his way back with a lurch, stepped through the curtain, spilling awkwardly into the larger rear room, and there beheld a strange spectacle. A small old man with hippie hair and spaceman goggles sat on a platform with the blade, which Bob recognized instantly by shape and length, though now it gleamed like some rare piece of jewelry.

Six extremely husky young men, all in black suits, three in sunglasses, all holding sheathed wakizashi, stood across from him. He almost laughed: they looked like the Notre Dame interior line doing an en masse imitation of the Blues Brothers.

Suddenly the Japanese began to jabber, an excited, stunned blast of men talking over other men, until finally one yelled loudly and seemed to take command. He leaned forward and sniffed.

“You drunk. You go home. Go now, go fast.”

“Just want to get this here sword shined up so it’s like that thing there. Damn, that’s a pretty one. Sir, can you make this one like that one?” He held the sheathed wakizashi and waved it about theatrically.

The leader spoke harshly and two of the linemen came at Bob, bulking up as they came, their muscles bunching as they tensed, their right hands forming fists.

“Whoa, whoa,” he said, “no rough stuff, fellas, please, please!”

The bruisers halted.

Then he looked at the old man, who looked back. He winked. The old man winked.

A frozen moment transpired as everybody took stock. Eyes flashed this way and that, hands tightened on hilts, breathing became harsh. Bob was suddenly quiet, wary, eating them up. It was a moment that seemed to last an eternity. One could compose a haiku during its exquisite extenuation.

Bob looked at the fat leader.

“The one he’s polishing? The one you killed the Yanos to get? I want it back. And I want you knocking at the door to hell.”

Then it was over, as if no concept of quietude or peace existed anywhere on earth. It was time to cut.

The two closest yaks went for their swords to cut down the American, but they were not fast enough. Iai-Jutsu. The art of drawing and cutting. It was called nukitsuke. With his off-the-charts hand speed Swagger got the blade out—it clacked dryly as the transaction between blade and saya occurred—and into a horizontal cut called “crosswind” by Yagyu, one-handed, the cut landing with his front foot, the body weight behind it for power, so full of adrenaline he drove through both of them. Hidari yokogiri, his old friend, cutting horizontally from left to right. He thought he’d missed, for he only felt the slightest resistance, and for a nanosecond had an image of disaster. But the disaster was theirs. The blade slashed deeply in a straight line, gut to gut, through suit, shirt, undershirt, skin, fat, entrails, viscera, spleen, liver, whatever, and just kept on going in a mad driving arc, leaving in its wake nothing, and then everything. The blood pushed out with a good deal of power. It didn’t explode, as in too many movies, and spritz as though a sprinkler had projected it, it just sloshed out heavily, along with two breakfasts. And it kept on coming, seemingly gallons of it, in a red dump that literally sounded tidelike as it splashed against the floor. One stricken man went down like a sack of potatoes fallen off a truck; the other just stood there, stupefied, stepped back, trying to hold his guts in, and then sat down to die.

Without thinking, Bob’s blade rode the energy high and came up into issuing from above, better known in the country of its origin as kami-hasso, and he watched as another man, sword high in jodan, came galloping at him. Under such circumstances, most men would panic: a huge, angry, bulged-eye man of immense strength charging full bore, the sword raised in his hands as he gathered strength to unleash a sundering blow, he was every mad psycho in every bad horror movie ever made. He screamed dramatically. But with eyes that saw far as though it were close and close as though it were a distant mountain, Bob waited until the clumsy drive of the blade announced itself and then with a quick small movement slipped to the left and shimmied into safety exactly as, trailing blade, he cut the big one’s belly open deeply, and the sword never fell. This one instead kept going by him, turned, eyes now spent of rage and filling instead with horror at the immense damage that had been done to him, went to one knee, dropped the sword, then toppled clumsily forward.

Bob saw none of this. He turned and watched as the three remaining split up, two going one way, the third the other as they came around the old man on the platform, who watched the craziness largely indifferent. Bob’s lizard brain understood without actual thought that fighting one was better than fighting two, so he rotated to the left, coming around to meet the lone man on the left side of the inert polisher on his platform. His enemy was a slight but older fellow, not given to panic or stupidity. His long face intent, the sword before him, he approached steadily, just watching, waiting for Bob to give him an opening, which Bob of course didn’t, so he attempted to make one. His sword flashed laterally, the classic kesagiri, shoulder to navel, left to right, on the diagonal, but from somewhere at a speed that has no place in time, Bob read the cues—“The eyes are the key to reading the actions of the mind: the light or gleam in an opponent’s eyes is as revealing as the movements of the rest of his body”—and rose to take the cut on his own blade, rode the blade down, and then reversed. It was uke-nagashi, the flowing block, and he absorbed the energy from his opponent, seized it, then unleashed it, snapping through with his wrist and extending one-handed in as small a space as possible. Throat. At the end of the arc, the point was traveling at stunning speed, generating amazing foot-pounds of energy, taking all of Swagger’s strength and distilling it to one small cutting edge.

Results looked unpleasant, even shocking, but worse than that was the sudden noise the man made, a hideous wailing, as air and blood were forced from his split larynx and the realization of his own inevitable doom overcame him, causing his lungs to expel their atmospheres forcefully. But he did not fall. By one of the eccentricities of a dying body’s last spurts of energy, his knees locked and he stood still, arms fallen, sword lost, spewing blood from the cut throat—though in a kind of gurgly fountain style, not the patented Toho spray—as his eyes looked at nothing. Then, finally, like a tree, he fell, hitting the puddled blood so hard he kicked up splatters, some of which suddenly danced across Bob’s face, the old man’s face, and the ceiling.

The other two came around the old man’s platform and confronted Bob, separating slightly; they dropped into classic tachi, relaxed standing, the sword before them, as they slid through the blood steadily on small, floating steps, eyes steady, faces intent, not angry or frightened. Bob found himself—who the hell told him this was best?—in kamehasso, sword higher, almost a batting stance but relaxed, trying and finding it within himself to stay calm as they rotated around the front of the platform and came at him smoothly. He looked for his opening, they looked for theirs and had the advantage because they could spread out on the sound idea that he could not—being no Musashi—fight in two hemispheres at once, and whichever he chose to defend, the fellow assaulting from the other would deliver the death cut.

He knew without thinking it, he had to be the aggressor. He didn’t come to a conclusion, it was just there before him, as certain solutions to certain vexing problems had come to him in his last fight, against the little girl.

He lunged left, but it was a feint, meant to drive back the one on the left. It worked. This fat boy stepped back for just a second. But seeing that move, the fellow on the right foolishly interpreted it as commitment, his heart filled with greed and visions of victory and reward, and he drove forward with the horizontal cut, the same crosswind Bob had used earlier. Bob knew it would come and pulled a move of his own devising, which was to thrust forward low, one knee plunging, the other back-kicking, flattening and lowering him. He felt the opponent’s sword roar by his hair, fluffing it, and he cut the man through the knee with a strike that felt slow and weak but that must have been strong and powerful, for it got through the one leg completely and the leg fell away to the right. The one-legged man hopped in screaming horror. Some things can’t be stopped, however, and the blow was too good: it continued, though much less forcefully, and bit halfway through the other leg, trapping itself for a second as the man fell.

He was dead. A brilliant move against one opponent, it was a foolish one against two, for now the fat one, who’d done all the talking, had the advantage and surged forward, flowing smooth and soft like a beautiful river—from somewhere Bob noted that he was well schooled—to deliver the diagonally angled kesagiri issuing from above to split the crouching gaijin.

I die, thought Bob, knowing that he was so far behind the curve he’d never make it, even if he felt his blade pull free. What happened next he saw clearly. Both his opponent and he had forgotten one thing: it didn’t matter to him because his center of gravity was so low and his supporting feet were so widely spaced, one before him and bent, the other stretched behind him and straight, but the venue in which they fought was slick with blood. Fat boy, on the other hand, had a high center of gravity, an unstable one in the slipperiness of the blood. He lost his footing, his sword wavered, oops, oof! omigosh! ulp! He struggled with his balance, the rhythm and timing of his cut utterly wrecked, and by the time he delivered it at about one-quarter speed, Bob got the blocking blade, even turned to take it on the mune of his sword, found the leverage in rising and pushed the enemy blade away and, finding himself in a nicely set-up shimo-baso, with the blade now back and the hilt forward, simply drove the hilt with a monstrous thud into the fat one’s face just below the eye. He fell like the giant in Jack and the Beanstalk, all dead weight, ker-splash in the blood, throwing splatter everywhere. With one hand he waved the sword and Bob hit it hard with the lower half of his own blade just above the tsuba and it flew away with a clatter. He leaned close, smelled breath, saw sweat and teeth and venting nostrils and fearful eyes, and hit the guy exactly where he’d hit him before with the hilt. It was a solid drive that echoed through his bones. The fat boy groaned and lay flat.

Bob stood, breathing hard. He flicked the blood off his blade, heard it splatter against a wall. He realized he still gripped the saya. All his blows had been one-handed, against all doctrine.

He turned and walked just a few feet to the amazingly contained old man.

“Cut down,” said the old man. “Not just cut. Cutting no good. Blood, no death soon enough. Cut down!”

Christ, Swagger thought, everybody’s a critic.

“Better footwork. Feet all tangled,” said the hipster. “You fight two, no good. Go to dojo. Get sensei. Must learn. You lucky. You use up all luck this life and next life. No more luck for you. You must practice with sensei. Much work to do.”

“You got that right,” said Bob. “I definitely was lucky. Now, old fellow, give me what I came for and I will get out of your way.”

“Fat one not dead.”

“I get that. I’ve got some words for him.”

“Okay. Very nice sword here. Honor to work on. Highlight of life. I appreciate much. Here, let me finish sword.”

He applied himself to it for another minute, held it to the light, pronounced it done, and put it into a red silk bag. It seemed to take him hours to tie the fucking thing, and Swagger saw that he had to do it just right.

Finally, he handed it over.

“No touch blade with stinky Merikan fingers.”

“I understand that. You’ll be all right?”

“Fine. I go stay with family in Sapporo.”

“Can we drop you anywhere?”

“No, I catch bus. It’s fine.”

Bob turned. He walked to the supine form of the one survivor amid the carnage as the polisher Mr. Omote put on some slippers, got a coat on, and made ready to leave.

Bob poked the live one, felt him stir, then groan. The eyes finally came open, blinked as he reacquainted himself with unpleasant memories of the last few minutes.

He touched the wound under his eye, from which blood flowed. It had already started to puff and would soon grow to the size of a grapefruit.

“Hey, you,” said Bob, “listen here or I will do some more cutting on you.”

“Please don’t hurt me.”

“Why not, it’s fun.”

“Oh, my face,” said the guy, who, Bob now saw, was about twenty-five or so. His mug issued blood, tears, and snot from a variety of damaged sites.

“Pay attention. You have to deliver a message, all right?”

“Sure, Joe.”

“My name ain’t Joe, asshole. See this?” He brandished the red silk sword bag. “It’s the sword. It’s my sword, I have it back. Kondo Isami wants it bad. Fine, I’ll barter it to him. He has something I want. When I get it, I’ll give him the sword.”

“I hear you.”

“In three days, I’ll take a classified in the Japan Times personals column. It’ll be addressed to a ‘Yuki.’ It’ll be in alphabet code from The Nobility of Failure in English, not the Japanese translation. Got that?”

“What’s that?”

“A book, you moron. Way too hard for you. He’ll know what it is. Can you remember that?”

“Sure, J—sir.”

“Sir I like. The ad’ll give a location, a park probably. He’s to meet me at that park alone the following evening. He gives me what I want. I’ll give him what he wants.”

“Sure,” said the fat yak. Then his eyes clouded over with puzzlement. “You want money? A pile of it?”

“I don’t give a shit about money, clown-san.”

“What you want, then?”

“His head,” Bob said. “Tell him to bring it.”

32

KONDO

Kondo was fascinated.

“He said that? He actually said that?”

“Yes. He did.”

“Nii, tell me again. Tell me exactly.”

“I asked him what he wanted from you. He said ‘His head. Tell him to bring it.’”

“Cheeky fellow.”

“He was, Oyabun.”

They were in Nii’s apartment. A private nurse in 8-9-3 employ had stitched and bandaged Nii up, as his own fellows cleaned the sword polisher’s shop after dark, making sure the bodies and all the carnage on the floor—and the chopped leg—were neatly disposed of. Nii, stitched, swollen, returned to his own place, and a few other men of Shinsengumi lingered about, dark-eyed, dark-suited, wary. Kondo, however, was lit up by the situation. Something in it pleased him immensely. He could not keep a half smile off his face.

“Describe him again, please.”

“American. Tallish, not gigantic. When himself, composed. Not one for excitement. His eyes were very still. He knew where to look, how to move. He’d killed before. Blood, the ugliness of the cuts, none of that had any effect on him.”

“Tell me again how he fought. Details this time, Nii. Tell me everything.”

“He was shrewd. We were stupid.”

“You were stupid, Nii.”

“I was stupid. He smelled of drink. He was wild and loud and out of control. His hair was a mess. He was any gaijin you see in Kabukicho, full of wild plans, knowing nothing. I was thinking how to get him out of there without incident, without the police becoming involved. I knew it would be difficult. I missed something.”

“What?”

“He picked the lock. I heard it lock yet in seconds he had penetrated it. He was an experienced man. I sat there, trying to remember whether or not we had locked it. Now I know we had.”

“So he deceived you.”

“With the drunk act, completely. It was brilliant. If he had announced himself at the door, he would have greeted six men, blades out, hearts strong. Instead he got close with his absurd drunken act. Then, in a flash, he was sober and deadly. He cut down the first two in one stroke, expertly delivered. His best cut of the fight, I think, though the cut he made on Kamiizumi was also excellent. Anyway, they were gone and lost in the first second, Johnny Hanzo in the next. Johnny Hanzo lost his head and charged and the gaijin quietly let him come, then pierced him in the second before Johnny could unleash a cut, and Johnny was gone. In less than three seconds three men were out of the fight.”

Through the narration, Kondo sat quietly, in rapt concentration, as if he were working on serious visualization skills. He was seeing all this in the dark space before him.

“So then there were three?”

“Yes. And all three could not get around the old man on his platform. So Kashima and I went one way, and Kamiizumi the other.”

“Kamiizumi was the best of you six. The oldest, the most experienced. He’d been in fights before.”

“He was magnificent. I thought for certain he would achieve victory or cut the man so bad the victory would fall to us. But the gaijin anticipated his cut, took it, and used it to propel himself into flowing block, threw it off, then came through with something I’d never seen before, a kind of one-handed drive, amazingly fast. He had to anticipate which way Kamiizumi, blocked, would break. Perhaps it was just luck, but he hit Kamiizumi in the throat. Unbelievable. Such blood. It was—”

“Did he watch him fall?”

“No, Oyabun. Instead he turned immediately to face us as we came around the old man. He went under Kashima and cut him through the leg. He sundered it. That’s when I had him. His blade was momentarily trapped in Kashima’s second leg, because he didn’t anticipate getting through so easily and had lost a firm grip on the sword as it bit into the second leg. It was a blown cut, trapped, tying him up. But then Kashima toppled and his blade came free.”

“You had him.”

“I did. Him below, sword down, myself above, driving full strength toward my target, his neck. If you try for speed, you do not achieve speed.”

“It must be no-try. Always, no-try.”

“It was try. Too much try, Oyabun. I slipped, lost my footing, and when I was back in timing, he was ready; he took it, slipped it, and drove his hilt into my face.”

“It wasn’t pretty.”

“It wasn’t. The last was sheer improvisation on his part. Very sloppy. I think he was running out of energy.”

“How old was he?”

“Advanced. Not ancient. Oldish. Late forties, maybe early fifties, maybe older. Very brown from a lot of sun, as if permanently tanned. Thinning hair. His face never got passionate, except the last time he hit me. I think he enjoyed that.”

“What a man. This is so wonderful. I can’t begin to tell you. I have never fought six. What were his strengths?”

“Spirit. He was very hard of resolve. He was not scared, excited, scattered, angry, or anything. He was empty of everything except his professionalism.”

“I like that.”

“He was fast. He was very fast. His hands particularly. I will say, however, that he fought much better against one than against two. He easily defeated every single man he fought, he vanquished the first two with nukitsuke. He only faltered when the two of us moved in, where he made a mistake and I almost had him.”

“Excellent.”

“Oyabun, may I be permitted to commit seppuku now?”

“No, no, no. There’s too much to do. I have nobody to spare as your second. We don’t have time now.”

“I am so ashamed. I cannot face my parents’ ghosts, my friends, our other Shinsengumi. I can hardly face you.”

“Don’t be an idiot. It would accomplish nothing. Plus, I’ve seen it and it hurts. It’s very messy. You may have to die, Nii, but at least let it mean something. Now look at Kamiizumi and the others. Their deaths were helpful. They exposed the strengths and the weaknesses of the man. They died well. You conveyed the information that they unearthed to me. It’s valuable information. If you had cut yourself after the fight and killed yourself, that information never would have reached me. What good would have been accomplished?”

“I survive only to serve. When no longer needed, I will express my shame and try to get my honor back with the tanto.”

“Yes, yes, if that’s what you want. You could also go off and get laid, and maybe that would be enough for you. Anyhow, Nii, listen to me. I am going to get a police artist. I want you to describe this gaijin to him very carefully. We will spread a net to catch this fresh fellow and get our sword back. We have to get him before the night of the exchange because if he controls the exchange, we’re at a great disadvantage. We don’t know who he represents, what his goal is. I can’t believe it’s simple kataki-uchi. Westerners don’t understand the concept of vendetta. Maybe Sicilians, but no others, not really. He’s playing an angle, and he could have snipers on the roofs, a team of fellow professionals. It’s too big a risk to run. I’d hate to go into that blindly.”

Nii nodded solemnly. He tried to remember details, to assemble them in his mind so that he could assist, but he was aware that something wasn’t adding up. Then he saw what it was.

“Oyabun?”

“Yes, Nii,” said Kondo, who was already striding out to make his arrangements, even as he debated whether to tell the Shogun of this disturbing yet provocative development.

“I’m sorry. I regret. I did not recognize.”

“What?”

“I realize now: I know who this gaijin is.”

“You do?”

“Yes, Oyabun. I regret that I did not recognize him at the shop, but it was so out of context that I—”

“Stick to the message, Nii.”

“Yes, Oyabun. I once sat two seats behind him on the JR Narita express. I followed him from the Yanos’ to Narita the night we—”

“That gaijin?”

“Yes, Oyabun.”

“That would be the gaijin who brought the sword in.”

“Yes.”

“He was with the Yanos.”

“He stayed at their house for several days.”

“He was close to them?”

“Yes, now I recall. I watched from just across the street that last night. He hugged them all. I followed him to Narita and watched him check into the flight. I watched him pass security. That’s when I left to join you and we went to the Yanos’. With Kamiizumi, Johnny Hanzo, Kashima, and the others.”

“He knew the Yanos,” Kondo said again, deliciously. “Then it is kataki-uchi! Oh, splendid.”

“I suppose we could contact the inspector. He would know the name.”

“We don’t need the name. Now I know how to catch the gaijin. I’ll reel him in and cut him down.”

“And when it’s over, I can have my seppuku?”

“Nii, you shouldn’t be so selfish. Think of your oyabun, not yourself. Find dignity and worth in service. Then, if you’ve been good, I’ll let you kill yourself. But as a treat, Nii, first I’m going to get you a nice little girl.”

33

ORDERS

With your typical order of yakitori, you got four edible, even delicious skewers of meat and one so repugnant it was almost kind of funny. The smell of chicken cooked on an open fire filled the place. No Popeye’s ever smelled so good. At other tables men and women were lustily gobbling their food. Bob had eaten the hearts, he’d eaten the meat, he’d eaten the gizzards, he’d eaten the other strange things, but he was left with the knees.

Well, maybe they weren’t knees. Maybe they were elbows. Whatever, they were twisted little chunks of glistening sinew. Even the flames of Mama-san’s blazing fire behind the bar hadn’t blackened them. In truth, in the curves and folds of each there seemed to be some gobbet of protein, and maybe a truly hungry man would scrape it out and go to town, but he just didn’t have the heart. Instead, he looked across the smoky space, across the rude tables and floor, half-expecting Toshiro to come blasting in and start cutting people at any damn time, until he caught Mama-san’s eye, pointed to his empty plate, and somehow communicated the idea, Bring me another order, touched his empty Coke can to request more of that too. She nodded. He could have been in the fourteenth century, except for the Coke. He went back to the puzzle before him.

He almost had it. He’d been scouting Tokyo by bike for a nice private place for his meet with Kondo and finally found just what the doctor ordered: he’d have the man travel to Asakusa and walk the street outside the shrine, where all the stalls were. For some reason, that zone closed early and went largely unpatrolled. He’d meet him there, in the street, and he wouldn’t jump until he was satisfied the man was alone, not trailing a crew of goons. He didn’t want to fight six again, or more likely thirty, for Kondo would travel with his specially chosen group.

Now he worked on his code, primitive as it was, finding the right words in The Nobility of Failure, marking page number, paragraph, sentence, and word so that the message was shaping up to read “Dear Yuki, 233-2-4-3,” denoting page 233, second paragraph, fourth sentence, third word. It went on and on, gibberish if you didn’t know the key. Decoded, it would read “Asakusa, Temple Street, midnight tonight, alone.”

He felt her before he saw her. She strode in manfully, as per her style, and sat down. He didn’t look up for the longest time.

“I’m almost done with this. I think I’ve got it set up just right.”

It was several minutes before he finished, and when he came out of his zone of concentration there was another interruption, as Mama-san brought the plate of skewered chicken parts and another Coke, asked Susan what she wanted, and received only a drink order, then scurried away.

“You shouldn’t be anywhere near us tomorrow night, in case it goes bad. But I wanted you to see what I was doing; I told you I’d keep you in the loop.”

Then, finally, he looked at her and knew instantly that something was wrong.

“All right,” he said, “what’s up? You haven’t said a thing.”

“You remember I once told you I wasn’t a bullshitter?”

“Yes.”

“I’m not going to start now. I’ll be honest and blunt, all right. So no matter what, you can never say, She misled me.”

“Oh, Christ, Susan. I don’t like where this is going.”

“I’m closing you down, Swagger. It’s over. It’s finished. Time to go home.”

He didn’t feel anger or rage or betrayal. She had never exactly pretended to be his pal in this and had always told him she’d do what was best by the rules of her duty, not her feelings. And she’d never quite bought into it, the whole warrior thing. On the way back from the fight at the polisher’s, with the blood soaking his pants and spattered on his face, she’d said nothing except:

“Did you hurt anybody?”

“No, but I killed five men.”

“Oh, god.”

“It wasn’t no movie. It was like a pie fight in a sausage factory. I didn’t like one goddamn thing about it, but they would have cut me deep as I cut them, so I did what I had to. The old man is fine and has left. I have the sword, so that’s fine. The yaks will clean up, once they find out, because they don’t want no cops nosing into their business. It’ll be fine, no mess.”

She had only said, “No mess this time.”

Now she said, “This can go one of three ways. I hope you see that it is best if it goes the first way.”

“And that would be?”

“You give me your false passport. You go out with me to a government van and you are driven to a U.S. Air Force base not far from here. I have arranged, or rather with some dickering and string pulling the ambassador has arranged, for you to be flown home, gratis, by the United States Air Force, outside all channels. You will be landed in California, escorted to the gate, and permitted to exit. That’s the end of your involvement. What has happened over the past few weeks here in Japan ceases to exist. There was no—I can’t even remember what your passport says.”

“Thomas Lee.”

“There was no Thomas Lee. He’s gone, you’re gone, it’s over. You go back to Arkansas.”

“Idaho.”

“Whatever. Meanwhile, the ambassador finds a way to slip a report on your findings that I have written to certain sympathetic Japanese Ministry of the Interior officials. It will give them some guidance. I hope they act on it, and I feel certain that within the Ministry of the Interior, there is a clique that will want very hard to proceed. It may take some time and there will be no illusion of progress for a long time. But eventually, as the Japanese sort this out, they will proceed and the thing will be done, and those who killed Philip Yano will be punished. In any event, since we now have the sword, the immediate plan of the man who styles himself a shogun has been disrupted. He will not win reelection to AJVS, he will be undercut and destroyed. So that’s something. And in the end, we will achieve justice.”

“You know that won’t happen.”

“Way number two. Exactly the same outcome, except that you make some sort of ruckus or act irresponsibly. Four large gentlemen enter the restaurant. They happen to be former South Korean Special Forces guys who handle contract work for certain embassy departments when needed. They are very tough. Something like seventeen black belts among them. Lots of combat. They subdue you. It hurts. Then you are taken to the van, only you are wearing handcuffs and are severely bruised. Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Swagger, don’t do that. Don’t put yourself and me and them and everybody through that. It would be such a waste, so foolish, so pointless. It would break my heart.”

“Okada-san, possibly at this moment I ain’t too worried about your heart.”

“Way number three. You bolt. There’s probably a rear entrance to this joint, and you are, as we know, an extremely capable, resilient, creative man, particularly in dark arts like escape and evasion. You break out, you get away, and try and finish on your own. Then we snitch you out to the Japanese authorities. A tall gaijin with no Japanese language skills, I don’t like his odds. Maybe it takes two days, maybe it takes three. But they catch you, divine that your passport is fake, read our signals and see we are not interested in helping, and off you go, before the judges. No juries in Japan. Second offense, off you go to prison. Five, maybe ten years. What a waste. What a foolish, sad, absurd ending. What a way for a great hero to end his days. No wife, no daughter. I will come visit you until I get bored, and then I won’t anymore.”

“What about way number four?” he said.

“There is no way number four.”

“Way number four: You send the big boys back to their cages. We proceed. I only need two days more. I meet Kondo Isami on the street at Asakusa at midnight. Your four ROK Special Forces guys handle security, so there ain’t no interruption. Kondo and I fight.”

“That is one of the things I am trying to prevent. He will kill you.”

“Maybe. Or I will kill him. If the first happens, you go ahead with your plans. On the other hand, if the second happens, you go ahead with your plans. Maybe the Japanese eventually bring down Yuichi Miwa, maybe not. The point is, the man who killed Philip Yano and his family is dead. Justice has been served. Or someone has died trying to do that justice. He failed, but at least he tried. Somebody called it ‘the nobility of failure.’ That’s the world I’d rather live or die in.”

“No. It’s not going to happen. It has been decided. We cannot have a dangerous, violent American citizen in this country illegally mixing it up with Japanese criminal elements, in ways that can’t be controlled and could explode into scandal, damage, death, anarchy, humiliation at any moment. We need the Japanese, we need their cooperation in a lot of bigger battles. There’s a war going on, in case you haven’t noticed.”

“Philip Yano noticed. He lost an eye and a career in that war.”

“What happened to Phil Yano and his family was a tragedy and an atrocity. But the wicked, wicked world is full of tragedies and atrocities, and they can’t all be avenged. Other things may matter more, like national security, like smooth relations between allies, like truth in dealing with allies, like any number of things that will be decided by people who see the big picture and live with responsibilities you and I can’t imagine.”

“What is Okada-san’s attitude in all this? I hear the State Department, I don’t hear Okada-san.”

“Okada-san is samurai. She works for a daimyo. She lives to serve him. It defines her. She obeys her daimyo. She made peace with that decision years ago. Her feelings are her business and nobody else’s. Duty is the only thing that counts. Now, Swagger, please, finish your motherfucking chicken skewers and leave quietly with me. It’s the best way. It’s the only way.”

“You are a tough one, Okada-san. I give you that. Nothing gets in the way. Professional to the core. You sure you weren’t a marine?”

“If it matters, I hate to see this end. What you’ve done—well, I’ve never seen anything like it. But that’s neither here nor there. I am samurai. I obey my daimyo. Now it’s time to—”

A strange noise came between them.

“Shit,” she said.

She bent, picked her green Kate Spade bag off the floor, and fished out her cellular. It buzzed irritatingly.

“Your daimyo wants an update.”

“It’s not my daimyo’s number.”

She popped the thing open.

“Yes. I see. No, no, that was the right thing to do. And when? All right, thanks. I don’t know. I—I just don’t know. No, don’t call them. I don’t know, I have to think. If you call them, it makes even more problems.”

She closed the phone and put it back in her purse.

“So,” he said. “Let’s go to the van. Let’s get this over with.”

“No,” she said. “It’s all changed.”

He saw now something in her eyes that could have been the beginning of tears. Even her tough warrior’s face and its self-willed impassivity, a signal mark of her beauty, seemed slightly affected. Gravity somehow had altered it into something darker, sadder, and more tragic.

“That was Sister Caroline at the hospital. Armed men just broke in and kidnapped Miko Yano.”

34

THE TAKING

It still made no sense to the little girl. She had been at her friend Beanie’s house and they had a party and played with Pretty Ponies and watched a movie about a funny strange green man in a forest and giggled the night away and the next day two strange men and a strange lady took her away to this place full of nuns and nurses and hurrying and scurrying. She didn’t belong here, but there was no other place for her.

She understood, of course, that something had happened. A sister led her in prayer and finally told her about a fire and that Mama and Dada and Raymond and John and Tomoe were now with God. That was fine, but she had to know. “When can I see them?”

“My dear, I’m afraid you don’t understand. Let us pray again.”

The days passed, then the weeks. Every time someone came in the room, she looked up, felt a surge of joy and hope, and thought, Mama? Dada?

But it was only a nurse.

They dressed her in strange clothes. The toys were dour and limp, many broken. The other children stayed away from her as if she were infected. She was so alone.

“Mama?”

“My dear, no. You have to understand. Mama and Dada have gone to be with God. He called them. He wants them.”

In her mind, she could see only one face that comforted her. It was from the TV, a fabulous story she loved so much about a little girl and her three friends who went off to fight a witch. One of the friends was a tall, almost silver man with a great cutting tool. He was the Tin Man. She loved the Tin Man. He was in her life somehow. She associated him with her father, for she’d first seen him with her father. The man was kind, she could tell. She remembered him in her own house, and she saw that in some way her father loved this man and the man loved her father, something she saw in their bodies, in the way they related and joked and listened to each other. If Daddy and Mommy and her sister and brothers were gone, she wondered about the Tin Man. She dreamed about him. Maybe he would save her from all this.

But the bed-wetting started and it annoyed the sisters and the nurses. They tried to hide their anger, but a child is sensitive to nuances of face and tone and body, and she realized that she was letting them down horribly. It made her sad. She could not help it. It humiliated her, because hygiene (she didn’t know that word but thought only of her mother’s term for it, “being fresh”) meant so much and she had been coached in it so powerfully by Mama and now she couldn’t control her dirtiness. Voices weren’t raised, punishments weren’t threatened, blows weren’t unleashed; still, she felt the nuns’ disappointment like a powerful weight.

She didn’t know when the screaming started. But after a while, it seemed that there had always been screaming. She had no idea where it came from, but some nights, when she was alone in the dark and sometimes asleep, and sometimes not, she began to hear the screaming.

Mama? Dada? Raymond? John? Tomoe?

It wasn’t them, but it was. She missed them so. Why had they left? Why did God want them so badly? It seemed unfair.

“You must be strong,” the nuns told her.

But what was this strong? Her brothers, especially Raymond, the ballplayer, were strong. They lifted weights and their muscles bulged and shone in the light. They laughed and teased and needled each other about school and girls and homework and other things, and it had been so wonderful, though of course at the time she didn’t know how wonderful, and that it would soon end forever.

But that seemed not to be the strong the nurses wanted. It wasn’t muscles, but some other thing that she could not understand and could never do. It had nothing to do with each morning’s wet bed and every other night’s screams.

“It’s you that’s screaming,” one of the nurses said. “Not anyone else. Please, darling, you have nothing to fear. You are among friends who will take care of you. You must be”—that word again—“strong.”

And then one afternoon the screaming was so loud it woke her. But then she noticed she hadn’t been sleeping. It was daylight. There were no shadows. It occurred to her that it was not, this time, her own screams or the screams of Mama and Dada and John and Raymond and Tomoe but of Sister Maria.

At that point the door to her room exploded open, and a giant monster crashed in. He was a very bad giant monster, she could tell. One side of his head was swollen and yellowish, he had a bandage over the lower half of his face, and blood spots stood out against the white. He looked her over and she was so scared she peed.

He grabbed her.

“Little girl,” he said, “you will do exactly what I say or I will hit you hard. Do you understand?”

She felt the full force of adult will against her and if she wanted to scream, she couldn’t, for she was too scared.

Holding her roughly, he proceeded to the hall. She saw Sister Maria on the ground, her face bloody, and Nurse Aoki kneeling over her trying to help, afraid to look up, shaking with fright. She thought of the Tin Man. The Tin Man could save her. But the Tin Man was not there.

As the giant monster roared along the hall, two other giant monsters joined him, in the same black suits.

In seconds they were outside. Nobody had bothered to get her a coat or anything.

A sleek black car pulled up, and the giant monster shoved Miko into it and sat next to her, his bulk dominating.

“You,” he said. “No noise, no screaming, do what you are told, or it will be hard on you. Squat down so nobody can see you.”

He forced the child to the floor and threw a blanket over her as the car pulled away with a screech.

35

FACE-TO-FACE

Exactly as Bob had planned, an ad keyed to The Nobility of Failure appeared in the Japan Times’ Personals section. The difference was that it was not sent from him to Kondo Isami but from Kondo to him. It deciphered neatly enough to “Yasukuni gate, 10 a.m. Tuesday.”

“They’ll kill you,” said Susan Okada.

“No. Not if I don’t have the sword. What he’ll do is set up a second meet. That’s when they’ll kill me.”

“Oh. That’s so much better. Look, we have to call the police.”

“No. You know that Kondo, or his boss, Miwa, have sources and influences in the police. If you tell them, in ten seconds Kondo knows. And what does that get? It gets Miko killed, it gets me killed. I will go to this meeting, I will set up the next meeting, the exchange, and we’ll go from there.”

“But he’s holding all the cards and he knows it. You can’t negotiate with someone who has an advantage. He will get you to some deserted place, kill you, take the sword, kill Miko, and go ahead with his plan. They’ll win.”

“Maybe I can—”

“No! You’ll get her killed. You’ll get yourself killed. Miwa will win. And then what?”

“Okada-san, I will go to this meeting and come back. And then we’ll see.”

“If something I did gets that child killed—”

“You did nothing but your duty. This is not about any failing of yours. It’s about guys who will do anything to get what they want. That’s what it’s always about. And you and I are lucky that we have the privilege to fight them. And we will fight them. And we will stop them. They think they’re samurai. They’re not. We’ll show them what samurai means.”

But Susan wasn’t convinced; Bob left her in a state of despair.

It had turned cold. The greenness of Japan had vanished. A cold wind blew, scattering dead leaves across the pavement of Yasukuni Shrine. On either side of the concrete esplanade, some trees stood tangled and severe; they looked like rusted barbed wire.

Bob stood under the steel gate. It towered above him, two steel shafts rising fifty feet to two steel crossbars, one mundane for stability, the other the great soaring wing that was the universal symbol of Japan, the torii gate with its architectural communication of the glory, the breadth, the scope, the power, the beauty, the immensity of Asia. Bob looked up into a blue sky at the top bar and saw immensity.

He shuddered. He was wearing a black suit and a raincoat, slightly underdressed for the weather. Outside the shrine parklands, Tokyo’s business hustled along its avenues, the honking and screeching of cars, the bustle of the endless parade of pedestrians. Here a few salarymen, a few tourists, a few visitors traversed the grounds in small knots, headed either to the shrine at the end of the walk or the samurai museum to the right of the grounds.

Bob checked his watch: 10:15 a.m. Of course, somewhere they were checking him out with binoculars, making certain he really was alone.

But then, from a knot of nondescript businessmen, one separated and ambled over to Bob.

Bob watched him approach. Was he expecting something special, someone whose demonic charisma seemed to carry its own internal light? He just saw a guy in a suit and a topcoat, with sunglasses, a broad but unimpressive face, dark hair cut into a bristly crew cut. As the figure approached, possibly he picked up vibrations of physical vitality, as if the man, under his dreary outerwear, possessed surprising strengths and agility. Or possibly it was his imagination.

“Greetings, I am the assassin Kondo Isami,” said the man in clear, accentless English, well polished, well schooled. “Who are you working for?”

Now that he faced him, Swagger felt a weird sense of familiarity. It was peculiar. What was so familiar? He spoke. “Philip Yano.”

“You’re not representing certain American adult-entertainment industry groups? You’re not a professional?”

“I would have nothing to do with that business. I don’t care for teacher-blowing-Johnny. But I’m professional enough to handle you.”

“You don’t represent government or any such official entity?”

“Nope. Did some work for ’em once, didn’t like it.”

“Who taught you the sword?”

“Toshiro Mifune.”

“Who’s the woman?”

“Pal, I ain’t here to play twenty questions.”

“What was Philip Yano to you?”

“A good man with a good family who never deserved what he got.”

“He was nothing. There are more important things than one obscure family living on a government pension and investments.”

“I would say, He was everything. I would say, Cut the shit, let’s get cracking. The longer I stand here, the more I feel like breaking your neck.”

“I spent some time in America. You remind me of a football team captain who ended up a fireman. Stupid, loud, aggressive, but brave. He died on nine/eleven when the tower went down on him.”

“It makes me sick that a creep like you even knew him.”

“Yes, he was a hero, as you are. But in a different way. His was samurai’s courage, rash and emotional and caught up in the moment. That I understand. You’ve had weeks to think this over, to consider, to find reasons not to act. Yet you persevere. What drives you on this bizarre personal mission that can end in nothing but disaster for you? I suppose you’ve rationalized it elaborately. Really, I’m curious. Why? Why?”

“On,” said Bob.

“On,” scoffed the man. “You can know nothing of on. Obligation. It’s a Japanese concept, endlessly convoluted and twisted. It’s meaningless to any American.”

“I think I get it pretty well.”

“Impossible,” he said. “I went to an American high school. I had a year at an American university. I know America. No American could feel on.”

“Ask your pals at the polisher’s how serious I am. They’d know.”

“You had the advantage of complete surprise. So possibly the feat is less impressive than you imagine.”

“Sir, I really don’t give a fuck whether you’re impressed or not. I want the child.”

“I want the sword.”

“You can see that I don’t have it.”

“Where is it?”

“When I get the child in one hand, I’ll cut your head off with it with the other, and that’s when you’ll know where it is.”

Kondo reached in his pocket and pulled out a cellular phone.

“Two days from now, at five thirty a.m., you will receive a phone call on that phone. You will be given a route. You will proceed. I believe you have a motorcycle? I’d wait for the call near the Imperial Palace. That’s centrally located. At five forty a.m. you will get another call. It will direct you to turn. This will continue for a bit until you arrive at a certain destination at around six a.m., though you will have to run some stoplights. But you’d better run those stoplights. If you are late I will cut one of the child’s fingers off. Each minute, one finger. When I run out of fingers, toes. Then there’ll be nothing trivial to cut, so I’ll cut limbs. She’ll probably bleed to death before I get all four off, but if not, I’ll take out each eye, her nose, and her tongue. It means nothing to me. So you had better be on time.”

“I am really going to enjoy taking your head.”

“You bring the sword. I will release the child when I have the sword. The initiative is mine, I control the transaction. You may leave with the child. Later I’ll call you on the cellular and set up another appointment. We will settle our business.”

“It sucks, of course. You could have sixty men there with AKs.”

“I could. But if you don’t agree, I’ll start cutting the child right now. You doubt it? Look over there.” He indicated and Bob saw, fifty yards away, a large man with a bruised, bandaged face—Bob remembered clocking him hard, twice, at the polisher’s—and Bob saw Miko. The big man had his hands on her shoulders. She looked scared and wan. Her controller turned his hand, and the light caught the blade of a tanto held intimately against her delicate throat. There was also something about his hand, some sexual electricity. You could see he enjoyed the closeness, her smell, her helplessness.

“That boy will cut her in a second. He is true yakuza, living for obedience to his oyabun.”

The obscenity of the large, strong young man holding the bright blade against the terrified little girl and enjoying it so much filled Swagger with rage. But rage was not helpful.

“I’m impressed with how strong you are against little girls,” he said. “That’s quite a trick, but we’ll see how you do with someone with a sharper sword and faster reflexes. My guess is I’ll see fear in your eyes before I cut you down.”

“We’ll see you in a while, gaijin. Bring Beheader of Kira.”

“I’ll be there. And when I’m done with you, I’ll donate Beheader of Kondo to a museum.”

36

THE WHITE ROOM

They drove back across Tokyo in a giant black car. Miko sat in the back—on the floor, actually—between the two giant monsters. The two men said nothing to each other or to her. She just sat there, feeling the start and stop of the car in traffic.

She had recognized the Tin Man, the man from the good memories even if she wasn’t sure what they were, what they meant. This time, he looked at her with such sadness in his eyes, and as she watched, the sadness flashed to rage, then went calm again. But she had caught it, that moment of rage, and somehow from that she took some hope. He knew, somehow. He was on her side. He would save her. But then the two giant monsters roughly returned her to the car, calling her only “Little Girl,” never her name, as if she was the unwanted stepchild. And she drove back to the house, the room.

The giant monster dragged her out of the vehicle. In a kind of courtyard, she caught a brief flash of fresh air. The courtyard was walled, somewhere in the city, and she could hear the sounds of traffic, see apartment buildings off in one direction. She had the impression of many men. They seemed to lounge everywhere, young men without women, all in black suits, all somehow tough or ready to fight. They scared her, as they gambled or joked or looked at magazines, or boisterously shoved each other around. She knew they were some kind of army.

The giant monster took her upstairs to a white room. She knew it well. It contained a bed and a television set. There were no toys or books or dolls. The windows were painted white. There was a bathroom attached. Three times a day, she was brought food, usually by one of the angry young men or by the giant monster with the swollen face who was her primary keeper. It was always takeout food, hamburger from McDonald’s or fish cakes, or pork cutlets wrapped in paper bags, or some such, a Coke in a cardboard cup. An hour later, wordlessly, someone would return, unlock the door, and take the garbage out. Meanwhile, she just sat and watched the television, or sat in the whiteness thinking and remembering, or sat in the whiteness crying.

“Little Girl,” said the Monster, “you know the rules. You stay here. You obey. If you do not obey, I will punish you. I believe in punishment. Your parents did not punish you hard enough. I will punish you severely. Do you understand?”

“How long—”

“Be quiet! Little Girl, ask no questions. You need to know nothing. Be a good little girl or we will have to punish you.”

Then he locked her in her room.

“Nii, come here,” said Kondo.

“Yes, Oyabun.”

“How’s the eye?”

“It’s fine.”

“What did you think of him this time?”

“Without a sword, he’s just another man, Oyabun.”

“He seemed calm. That impressed me. He had a moment when he saw the child and his eyes flared. He felt rage. But then he controlled it. He knew that if he tried anything, you would have cut the child’s throat.”

“Yes, Oyabun.”

“Nii, you would have cut the child’s throat, right?”

“Yes, Oyabun.”

“Sometimes I worry, Nii. Of them all, I trust you the most. These fellows are hard and tough and will obey and fight, even the new ones. But your job, Nii, that is the hardest. I cannot believe the gaijin won’t try something. And it may be that you will have to kill the child. You must be samurai. You must be Shinsengumi. You must be Eight-Nine-Three. You must be all will and no heart.”

“Yes, Oyabun.”

“You can’t go sentimental on me in some appalling way. Is that clear?”

“Yes.”

“You are kobun. I am oyabun. You understand that. All things flow from that.”

“I stand ready.”

“I can’t imagine that it could happen, but if there’s an attack, you will proceed directly to the child and cut her throat.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes, Oyabun. Why—why do you ask?”

“Because I am aware that you have some feelings for this child.”

“Oyabun, I—”

“No, I’ve seen you in her presence. You cannot tear your eyes away. You look back. On the drive over, you kept looking down at her. When you hold her, I see a certain passion in your limbs. You enjoy holding her.”

“Oyabun. It’s nothing. I swear to you, she is nothing, it—”

“I understand how comely the child is. I understand how her form can seduce you.”

“She is but an object.”

“Nii, don’t lie to me. I am your oyabun.”

Nii swallowed harshly, caught in his lie.

“Nii, listen to me. I must know that you can kill her. Because if I don’t know it, then they will also sense it. It will embolden them. Do you understand?”

“Yes, Oyabun.”

“So listen to me. Before you kill her, fuck her. Once you are done with her, she is no longer a little princess. She is a whore, used by you for momentary pleasure and now defiled, tarnished, made dirty. She is nothing more than that Korean cow we slaughtered in Kabukicho. At that point, you can cut her and walk away.”

Nii saw the logic. He liked the logic.

“Do you hear me, Nii? Before you kill her, fuck her.”

“I hear, Oyabun.”

“Good kobun. Good student. I know I can count on you.”

37

STRATEGY

“Here is our best option,” said Susan Okada glumly. They sat at a table at the Roppongi Starbucks, among software designers, clothing salesmen, mothers, teenage girls and boys with pins in their noses and lips. “I have thought this over and it could work. I go to the ambassador. I explain the situation, its urgency, the timing. He goes to the prime minister. They go to the minister of the Interior. We get some sort of dispensation, and we make guarantees. Of no, or at best minimal, collateral damage. If we get their okay—notice I’m bypassing the Tokyo police and the whole infrastructure in which Miwa and Kondo may have influence—we can move a SEAL team in from Okinawa. Most of the teams are in the Middle East, but Seven is in Okinawa and they’re very good. They’ve done stuff you wouldn’t believe in North Korea and on the Chinese coastline. So when you get that call at five thirty a.m., Seven is above you in a helo, they follow you to the location, and we air-insert fast. We have Japanese police cooperation to the point that we’ve got the park or whatever it is cordoned off, so no civilians will get shot. So SEAL Team Seven takes out Kondo and Miwa, if he’s there. Seven prevails. We get the little girl, you are not dead, Kondo and Miwa are dead or behind bars, Seven flies back to Okinawa, and we have our happy ending.”

“All due respects, ma’am, you can’t fight them on their ground when they’ve had time to set up their ground. Lesson number one from Vietnam. When they hear them choppers, they kill the little girl. The SEALs are still at five thousand feet, drinking their coffee. When they land, the only thing there is a dead child. Maybe I’m dead too. Meanwhile, everybody in Tokyo hears the choppers and in two minutes there are fifty TV news crews on the spot. When the Japanese hear Miwa is involved, they go nuts. It ain’t going to work.”

“Swagger, I never said it was perfect. But we have been dealt a crap hand and it’s the best I can do with a crap hand. It controls collateral, it gets the best hostage rescue team on earth in play to save Miko, it takes out the bad guys hard, and it’s over in seconds.”

“It’s full of things that can’t be controlled.”

“There are no other options. Oh, except the one where you go, you give them the sword, they kill you, they kill Miko because she’s a witness, they disappear, and then the whole thing happens as planned and Yuichi Miwa is reelected head of that Japanese porno association, drives out the Americans, and convinces himself he’s a great patriot because he’s kept Japanese blow jobs Japanese.”

“No, there’s another option. Night raid. Before they move to the site. We go in under cover of darkness and we get the child out. Then, when she’s gone and safe, we settle up. We do it with swords, so there’s no gunfight in downtown Tokyo to make the noon news and the cover of Time.”

She laughed.

“Are you joking? It’s fine, except A, we have no idea where they are, where they’re keeping her, and we have no fast way to find it. If I had a thousand men and a week I could probably find out. I have less than forty-eight hours and we are talking the biggest city in the world. And B, we have no people. I couldn’t get a SEAL team on a mission like that, because nobody above me would approve it. So who goes? You alone? You’re a good operator, I know that. You’re not that good, nobody’s that good. You can’t go alone.”

“No, I’m not that good.”

“I return to point A: even if you find the people to go along, you don’t know where Miko is. You have no idea where they have her.”

“They can be found in ten minutes.”

“Come on.”

“Maybe five.”

“Swagger, are you off the wagon again? How on earth would you—”

“I didn’t say I could find them. I couldn’t find them. But I know somebody who could.”

“Who would that be?”

“You, Okada-san.”

She just looked at him.

“I’m guessing assistant head of station, chief of operations, Central Intelligence Agency, Tokyo Embassy. Code Name: SCREAMING BITCH.”

“Christ,” she said.

“You are so Agency, it’s written all over you. You must think I’m as dumb as I look and sound. I’ve been around you guys all my life. I worked with the Agency to recover a Sov sniper rifle in ’Nam back in ’seventy-three. I helped the Agency with its housekeeping in the matter of a deputy director named Ward Bonson who wasn’t exactly who he said he was six years ago. So I know Agency.”

“My code name isn’t SCREAMING BITCH,” she said.

“I know. I was trying to be funny.”

“It’s MARTHA STEWART. I hate it, but there you have it.”

“Some jerk at headquarters hung that on you?”

“He did. I’ve made some enemies.”

“You must be good, then. Anyhow, here’s how I figure it. You tell me how close I am. This whole thing has been Agency from the start. The object was to find out who killed Philip Yano and his family. Because Philip Yano was your man and always had been. He was getting you the Japanese stuff on a target like North Korea or China.”

“Something like that.”

“That’s why he had such a good career. That’s why he got all the choice American schools, and he got the big job in Iraq, and got to go into battle finally. They even postponed his retirement for him to lead his men. And he did well, except he lost an eye.”

“He was a very fine man. I had the privilege of running him during his last three operational years. He never betrayed his country, and he served ours brilliantly. We were very lucky to have him on the team.”

“Then, two years into his retirement, he gets whacked, and so does his family. Now, you have a problem, a big problem. Who killed Philip Yano? Has your outfit been penetrated? Did someone outside the need-to-know list figure it out? Did the Chinese kill him? Did the North Koreans? Did a disaffected Japanese group kill him? Or, always a possibility, could it have nothing to do with his career in your business? Could it just be random shit going down, the way it always does in the wicked, wicked world? Things are made more urgent by the fact the Japanese themselves don’t seem too eager to solve the mystery. Why? Who’s pulling strings? What’s going on? What does it mean?”

She nodded. “I knew you have an instinct for this kind of work.”

“Maybe so. Anyway, someone comes up with the idea of hiring the eight ball, the wild guy from way outside—”

“Me, actually.”

“I thought so. What an answer to all your prayers I was: I know nothing, ain’t a part of no system, but I got the advantage that I don’t take no for an answer, I don’t mind busting heads, I ain’t afraid of the red stuff, and I knew and loved Philip Yano. That’s how come Al Ino was able to get me such a good phony passport, that’s why someone knew where I was to ship me the Yano autopsy file, that’s why you’ve been so interested in me, and here I thought it was my redneck good looks and my real tight blue jeans.”

“Your jeans are too tight, Swagger,” she said morosely. Then she added, “I don’t see how you breathe. Anyhow, North Korea. Not China, but North Korea. Phil had access to the Japanese networks there, he knew everything about it. He was months ahead of everybody.”

“Yes, and that’s why, two days ago, you pulled the plug. When you found out Phil Yano died because Bob Lee Swagger gave him a sword that, one in a million, turned out to be the one that some old guy used to cut some other old guy’s head off three centuries ago, and that it had nothing to do with the North Koreans. No American national interest. None of our business. It was like a traffic accident, that’s all. Tough, sad, too bad, but not a part of your operation, so it was time to pull the plug. Game over, investigation over, Swagger go home.”

“Swagger, that decision was made at the very top. If it matters, I fought against it. You have no idea how I fought against it, how everybody here fought against it. But we all serve the daimyo.”

“I hear you. I done my time serving the daimyo too. The pay is lousy, the food sucks, but you get shot at a lot. Anyhow, now it’s time for the daimyo to serve us.”

“Where are you going with this, Swagger?”

“I ain’t going nowhere. I’m sitting here and I’m gonna get another one of those mocha frappe things. I think the Japanese add fish oil to ’em; that’s a drink with some kick.”

“Swagger, I can’t—”

“You’re the one that’s going someplace. You’re going to the fourth-floor commo room and getting out your little magical encryptor, the one you got in that cereal box. Here’s what you tell ’em in Virginia: you got a tip that someone is receiving explosives from North Korea for a terror strike on Tokyo. He’s mounting a mission here to bring down the Hyatt or the Tokyo Tower or the Tokyo Dome. They’ll buy that in Langley. You request a tasked satellite intel mission, flash. You have a bird in the sky zero in on every known Miwa property in Tokyo, and your research people can dig them up for you. I’m guessing that’s the seven mansions, five or six distribution centers, ten warehouses, two or three TV stations, four or five printing plants. Twenty, tops. You put the big sky eye smack cold zero on them and inside of five minutes the bird will uncover unusual, abnormal activity at one of them. Lots of men on the grounds, lots of seemingly aimless milling about, maybe a lot of kendo practice, some judo, that sort of thing. Oh, and an unusual collection of vehicles, perimeter security, maybe even patrols. It’ll look very military op. And I’m guessing it’s near a park, or some wide-open facility with a single entrance they can control without a lot of travel. That’s where they’ll run the exchange, that’s where Kondo will kill Miko before my eyes just to see the hurt on my face, and that’s where he’ll cut me down.”

She just looked at him.

“All right,” she finally said, “so we’ve found them.”

“You want to know who’s on the team we put over the wall?”

“Do you have forty-seven samurai waiting outside?”

“No, outside is where you have your four Korean ex–Special Forces guys, who aren’t Agency contract boys but Okada-san’s bodyguards. Every time I get near you, I gotta play bumper car with them. The kid in the second car is too aggressive. He almost creamed us on the trip back from Kyoto. I hope you reamed his ass for that. He was way too close. But I know the type. They’re all probably in love with you and they like to fight. They’ll go.”

“You’re right, they’ll go. That’s four.”

“Now for the fun part. We call one-eight-hundred-SAMURAI.”

“What’s that?”

“Here’s another surprise. I have regularly been reporting to a Major Albert Fujikawa of the Japanese Self-Defense Forces. He’s in the loop and right now he’s in Tokyo with forty of his boys. He was Phil Yano’s exec in Samawah. It was his life Phil saved when the IED went off. The unit is a recon company from the First Airborne Brigade of the Eastern Army, HQ’d at Narashino. They’re paratroopers, but all they do is play sixteenth century all day long and smack each other with wooden swords. I’m betting they’re the best swordsmen in Japan.”

“If we get them involved, we break every law on the books regarding JDF.”

“They’ve figured out the patterns of on. Some things trump others in this country, and loyalty to murdered lords means more than obedience to the shogun’s law. They’re here, all set up and ready to go. You get us the satellite dope and we go in twenty-four hours.”

She just looked at him.

“You are dangerous,” she finally said. “This was your game from the start, right?”

“We hit ’em dead solid cold. They have no idea it’s coming. It’s over in a few minutes because swords leave a mess, but they don’t make no noise. Then we go home. Sometime the day after, someone notices the flies buzzing around the joint. That’s when they make the discovery. Everybody’s home and in bed by that time, and Miko’s fine. Kondo Isami’s head is on a pole. The sword is in Dr. Otowa’s vault, where it belongs. You just made head of station.”

“So, forty JDF paratroopers, plus Major Fujikawa, four ROK Spec Ops guys. I count forty-five.”

“It’s enough,” he said.

“Not quite. You forgot the forty-sixth.”

“Who’s that?”

“Me.”

“Okada—”

“Don’t even start, Redneck. Don’t you dare even start. I’m not sitting home baking cookies while you are destroying my career.”

“You’re too stubborn to argue with.”

“Forty-six,” she said. “Just for the luck factor alone, we should have one more. Who did I forget? Oh, yeah. You. You’re the forty-seventh samurai.”

38

NII'S DREAMS

It was well after dark.

Nii was alone with the little girl in the white room. He could hear, vaguely, the sound of other men moving in the large house, loafing outside, yelling and shoving and gambling, playing around. He knew that Kondo was back from whatever errands and that the thing would happen very soon, the day after tomorrow almost certainly.

He could hear traffic, though this house was on a quiet street in a quiet part of Tokyo, far from the major arteries that hummed with life and action.

He could hear the quiet whistle of wind in the trees, and he remembered how surprisingly cold it was, and he realized that the seasons had changed and he’d been so caught up in the drama of his life, he hadn’t noticed it.

He didn’t think of the future or even the past; he didn’t think of his beloved oyabun or of his oyabun’s daimyo, in whose favor they all labored so hard. He didn’t think that it was almost over, that he would be a complete and full-fledged member of the dominant yakuza gang in Tokyo, that his name would be known and that he would be mighty and feared.

That wasn’t what preoccupied him.

He stared at her.

She slept uneasily, her body spilled out. In the low, somber light, his imagination played tricks on him. He imagined she was naked, when he knew she wasn’t. He imagined she wanted him as much as he wanted her, when he knew she didn’t. He imagined, somehow, they could be together forever, when he knew it was impossible because she had to die.

Nii had never felt this before. She was everywhere in his mind. That she was four and he twenty-five had no meaning; it was supposed to be. He knew it had to be.

He could make out the soft up and down of her frail chest under the blanket, hear the melody of her breathing. He could see her small, perfect foot, her adorable toes with their flaky coat of the summer’s last toenail polish. He could see the button of her nose, the repose of her face, the quietude of her pale eyelids. He could see her cupid lips, buttercups, rose petals, candy kisses. He could see a flare of tension and relaxation in the perfect oval precision of her baby nostrils.

Nii watched until he could watch no more, then rushed out to masturbate.

The day after tomorrow, he told himself.

39

THE KENDO CHAMPION

Bob pulled his bike into the museum parking lot. It was cold, getting on to nightfall. His chilled steel hip throbbed dully, broadcasting its message of deadness. He shook off the unpleasant feeling and its tendrils of memory. Tonight it all happened, he knew. He tried to wipe his mind blank. But he could not. No man could.

He checked his watch. It was 5:45 p.m. Tokyo time. Driving had been hellish, sliding in and out of the busy, mirror-image shunt of the cars, with things coming at him from odd angles. He didn’t enjoy it a bit. It took too much out of him.

Of course all these ill feelings had their source in the immediate few minutes, where he’d have to deliver some very bad news to a man who’d been nothing but good to him. Not a happy prospect. Was it necessary? Yeah, it was. He couldn’t proceed without what lay ahead in an office full of swords.

He thought of the parts assembling. Susan and her four Koreans, Major Fujikawa, the paratroopers, all of them quietly converging on a neighborhood in northwest Tokyo, far off the tourist way, miles from the famous spots like the Ginza and Shinjuku and Ueno and Asakusa, a place without major shrines or nightclubs or department stores. It was near there that the Agency satellites had uncovered intense activity on a Miwa property, a walled mansion in a secluded street next to a parkland called Kiyosumi Garden, once the playground of the Mitsubishi family and now a kind of wonderland of Asian garden themes. The mansion hit all the criteria perfectly: quiet, obscure, close to a park with one gated entrance, easy to command, walled off from society.

They would meet to stage at the close-by hotel banquet room, where, under a guise, Susan had made an emergency rental of the large room, claiming to represent a kendo club headed to an out-of-town meet and needing a rallying point.

Bob shivered. The weather had changed abruptly, the temperature had dropped, and he really didn’t have the clothes for the midthirties, which it threatened to reach tonight. He drew his raincoat tightly about him, for warmth, but it was a thin coat and his black suit was thin cotton, summer weight, unable to stand up to the bite of the sudden gusts of breeze or the generalized bite of the falling temperature.

He approached the museum, feeling its cathedral-like grandeur tower over him. It was a modern building, constructed after the war, of course, but its lines carefully duplicated the harmonies of classical Edo architecture. So in a sense entering it was like being swallowed by Japan, as Jonah was swallowed by a whale. Inside, it was all Japan, only Japan, and no other place was permitted to exist. The somber, gray light lent everything a stoic dignity; in glass cases, kimonoed princesses and armored knights stood nobly, reflecting the grandeur of a past so glorious and bloody and complicated, so full of opera and murder, it almost defied belief. You could see the whole thing play out before your eyes in these vast rooms, from the little men the Chinese had found living in thatched huts to the brilliant men who had invaded China, raped its cities, cut it in half. You could see the Zen priest and the samurai warrior. You could feel the presence of men so mentally tough and sublimely confident, they could fight twenty at a time and win and not think much of it, with their long, curved swords of the most sophisticated metallurgy in the world. But it was all one thing: if you had those brave men, you also had sword testers who went out in the night and cut random strangers down to see how well the blades cut, you had secret diagrams of how to arrange a corpse to perform a cutting test on it, how many times a skull could be cleaved and from what angle. You had the brilliant men who destroyed the Russian fleet in seven minutes in 1905, and their grandsons, who fell from the sky in planes that were bombs, skipping between the blasts of American flak, hunting for a nice large gray superstructure against which to obliterate themselves. It was that same utter commitment that sank the Russian ships, blew up the American fleet off Okinawa, and built the skyscrapers of Shinjuku.

By this time, the security people knew Bob and nodded him through. He took the elevator to the fourth floor.

“Is the doctor in?”

“Yes, yes,” said his secretary. “Dr. Otowa, Swagger-san is here.”

“Oh, do come in. I was just getting ready to leave. Do you think it will freeze?”

“Feels like it in the air.”

“Yes, nippy out. Bracing, I must say. You have some news? Please sit, my friend.”

Bob sat in the familiar chair and faced the old man in his room of swords.

“The good news is, I think this will be concluded very shortly, and if all goes well, I will be free to dispose of the sword as I want. What I want is for the museum to have the blade. You-all would know what to do with it. It shouldn’t be the possession of any one man but of your nation.”

“That is very thoughtful of you. I had hoped for as much.”

“It is my pleasure. But I actually came on another bit of business. I’m sorry to say, this news ain’t good.”

“I am prepared.”

“Are you sure?”

“Speak, please.”

“There’s a man calling himself Kondo Isami. Do you know the name?”

“Of course. Every Japanese does. Kondo Isami was the leader of Shinsengumi in Kyoto in eighteen sixty-seven. He led many raids, was in many fights. A hero or a villain, depending, but surely an extraordinary swordsman in the shogun’s cause. He was executed in eighteen sixty-eight by the emperor’s forces. He died well but dishonorably, by beheading. He was not permitted seppuku.”

“This new Kondo Isami is also an extraordinary swordsman. In his fashion, he works for the shogun, fighting against outside domination. He’s a yakuza contract killer, the very best. You can see by his name he has some kind of vanity for samurai history. He likes to think of himself as one of them old boys. But nothing stops him. He killed Philip Yano and family. The whole business with the sword has been his invention. Now we have the sword. I’m afraid to say he has kidnapped Miko Yano, and tonight, all that gets sorted out.”

“There will be blood?”

“A lot of it, I think.”

“Yours?”

“Possibly.”

“You will fight this Kondo Isami.”

“If I can find him.”

“You are very brave, Swagger-san.”

“No. I just don’t see no other way. He’s too good to fight the others; he’ll kill them quick. So I have to run him down and face him off. That’s what he wants. It’s what I want too. It’s why I came here.”

“I see. And from me you want?”

“I have gotten so much from you, but I must ask for one more thing. It’s the hardest thing and you can be forgiven for not wanting to give it. But I felt I must ask.”

“What?”

“Your blessing.”

“Why would that be such a hard thing?”

“Because this ‘Kondo Isami’ is your son.”

There was a pause.

“I am beseeching the father of a man I must kill for his permission,” Bob said. “I won’t have a chance unless you free me. I can’t see a son. I can only see an enemy.”

Dr. Otowa looked at him dully.

Then he said, “I have no son.”

“Then he is your brother’s son or your sister’s son.”

“I have no brother or sister.”

He met Swagger’s gaze steadily.

“It is said of the new Kondo,” Swagger said, “that some people he meets normally, that he goes clubbing, that he has a regular life. But sometimes he retreats into some kind of artifice. If he has to meet certain people he wears a mask. Or he designs some theatrical lighting setup so his face can’t be seen. What’s behind that? When I saw him, I knew. He can’t meet people who know you. He met me because he doesn’t know I’ve been in contact with you. But anyone who’s seen him and you would see in a second the extreme facial similarity. It’s all there: the eyes, the shape of the nose, the shape of the mouth, the texture and color of the skin, the width of the face, the hairline. It’s a face I had seen before, sir. I saw it in a photo at Doshu’s dojo in Kyoto. You, Doshu, and the boy, then possibly fourteen, and some big trophy.”

“My son died,” said Otowa.

Bob saw no point in adding a thing. In any case, he had nothing to add.

Finally, Dr. Otowa spoke.

“I suppose I always feared such a thing. No one can hurt a father like a son, and no revenge is sweeter than the son’s upon the father.”

“You should not blame yourself.”

“There is no one else to blame. That picture was taken in nineteen seventy-seven when the boy was sixteen. He had just won the eighteen-under all-Japan kendo championship open division, under Doshu’s coaching. His life was set. He would win it at seventeen, and at eighteen; then he would enter the men’s division and win that for five years running. Then he would be a national hero, a celebrity. He could go anywhere and do anything. Japan would be before him. He could be a politician, a CEO, an admiral.”

“What happened?”

“An appointment came up. It was an extraordinary opportunity. I supposed it would turn me into a national hero, a celebrity. I chose myself over him. I took him to America with me for three years. He had two years of American education at Scarsdale High and a year at Columbia. I don’t think he ever really forgave me for taking him out of his competitive kendo for the three most important years of his life. But to this day I don’t know how I could have turned it down. In any event, America changed him in some basic ways. It confused him.”

“It’ll do that.”

“He came back in ’eighty at nineteen and we knew he was too far behind to score well in the eighteen-overs, that is, the national championship. But he competed valiantly. It was astonishing. He made it to the finals. He was so heroic. But he lost, a close match. So it goes. But then in a split second, he threw it all away. Samurai pride, samurai rage. The helmets were off, the two opponents bowed, and my son went berserk for one second. He struck the man in the neck with his shinai, hurt him quite badly. Broke his collarbone. I had not been father enough to save him from his greediest hungers. The scandal was shattering. There was no hope. His gi and slippers were found on the beach at Enoshima. He had walked into the sea. No body was ever found.”

“I’m very sorry,” Bob said.

“You have no need to apologize. The shame is mine to bear, and mine alone. I love what my son was, I hate myself for my agency in his corruption, and I loathe what he has become. I can see the psychology, though. He did become the best swordsman in Japan, though not in a surrogate format with bamboo weapons. As a calculated affront to me and to the elders of the kendo world, he became a champion in the real world of the gutter, where the blades are sharp and the blood is real.”

Bob said nothing.

“Come with me,” said the old man.

He led Bob to the blank dark wall of the vault, cranked the handle, and slid the massive door open. He ducked in, gesturing Bob to follow, and Bob found himself amid yet more swords, even more beautiful, more valuable.

“There are many great collections,” Otowa said, “but none so great as this.”

“I am privileged,” said Bob.

The doctor leaned and plucked one off the wall.

“Here,” he said, handing it to Bob.

Bob felt the electricity of the thing, the perfection of its balance, the hunger of its blade, the stunning artistry of its fabrication.

“May I?”

“Of course.”

Bob turned the blade upward and cleanly drew it from the saya. The koshirae—blood red sago of black sharkskin, a gold-tinted tsuba—were magnificent, but even that magnificence was diminished by the blade.

“That may be the most perfect blade in all Japan. It is certainly the sharpest, the strongest, the most deadly.”

“Sir, it’s priceless.”

“Take it. Use it. Fight with it. Possibly it gives you a slight edge. My son will recognize it. He will know its power. It is one thing that may give him pause. It is your only chance. He had a superb natural skill set, and if he’s worked hard for the past twenty years, he is indeed transcendent.”

“I couldn’t risk losing it.”

“Swagger-san, it was built for this purpose and no other. It is fulfilling its destiny. Were it sentient, it would petition for permission to defend you. Think nothing of its value. Think nothing of its rarity. Think only of it as your weapon.”

“Yes, sir. A Muramasa, I take it?”

“It is indeed. The ‘evil’ swordsmith. His was the blade—maybe even that one—in the stream in the famous story about Masamune. The leaves and twigs avoided the great Masamune’s. Muramasa’s attracted them, and it cut them flawlessly. Muramasa took pride in this when he should have felt shame. Thus his blades had a reputation for blood. They yearned to cut. They also had a penchant for seeking out members of the shogun’s family, and killing or maiming them. They were banned, rounded up, and destroyed by the shogunate, which is why they are so rare today, and that is one of the survivors. My son will know this, and know that he works for a kind of shogun. That will cloud his mind. Again, a small thing, but victory is won on small things.”

“I thank you. I will return—”

“No. If you kill him, then the sword will have served its purpose. Maybe that is why it came to me so many years ago. Destroy it, that’s all. Get it off the earth. Send it to hell. It came from hell, it represents hell. Use it and destroy it without a second thought.”

“I will, Dr. Otowa.”

“That sword is my blessing. Now please go. I wish to be alone.”

40

THE BIG SHOTS

“You’re sure,” said the Shogun.

“As sure as I can be. I told you, Lord, this is a determined and creative adversary. But now we have him.”

“I worry that at the park, it will be difficult to control. It will spill into a mess, and the news stations and the—”

“I will have ten men concealed. They are experts at camouflage. Ninja, almost. Not really, but close. I myself will be there. It’s early, we control access to the park. No one will interfere. Certain suggestions have been made to the police to stay away. It’s very, very early, barely dawn. We control the terrain. He has no choice but to come, if he loves the child, and he loves the child. I saw it in his eyes. At a signal I can get forty more men in the park almost instantly. He has some skill, I admit. But not enough to overcome me and certainly not enough to overcome fifty men. That only happens in movies.”

“Suppose he brings—”

“He can’t. He won’t have time. He cannot locate us until we call him. He will have to travel at extreme speed across Tokyo. We will be watching all the roads as he approaches and will know if he has allies. But he can’t get allies close enough in time. It’s a very solid plan.”

“The child—”

“The child must die. She’s seen too much. It is a small matter. It means nothing.”

“It’s just that I—”

“Lord, it means nothing.”

“Yes, Kondo-san.”

They sat in the living room of the mansion next to Kiyosumi Gardens. It was nearly midnight. Kondo had spent the day going over his preparations. He had his own trained men; he had his kobun Nii, his most trusted fellow, virtually connected by tether to the child; he had forty toughened soldiers from Boss Otani, ready to die for him. No, they weren’t the best and they preferred to fight with Kalashnikov and Makarov than katana and wakizashi, but they would still rather die than yield, and would kill at the drop of a hand. And, if necessary, he had plenty of Kalashnikovs and Makarovs.

Still, the Shogun was nervous, Kondo could tell. He sat there, licking his lips, his face glowing in the light of the fire, swallowing, twitching occasionally, trying to control his nerves. He wasn’t so brilliant at this kind of thing. The Shogun didn’t even need to be there, but he had insisted. Still, regret seemed to cloud his thought.

“I just wish all this hadn’t happened,” he said petulantly. “We are running out of time.”

Pornographer! thought Kondo. There was no point in explaining to him that what happens is what happens. Feelings about what is past are silly; they contribute nothing; one must only look at the now.

“Lord, I have made all the arrangements. The koshirae will be completed in record time. The hard part was the polishing. Getting that done—and I understand the old man did a superb job, maybe his best—was the key. You will have the sword in plenty of time to announce it, to enjoy the prestige and attention, to empower your plans. All the things you desire will be delivered to you, exactly as planned. This unforeseen business—a trouble, I admit—is unfortunate, but we have it under control.”

“The stroke of the child. It was brilliant. We went from losers to winners in that single instant.”

“Strategy is very important.”

“You are a genius, Kondo-san. You will be well rewarded.”

“My service is my reward. But I’ll still take that four million dollars. Tomorrow at this time I will have both my fortune and my opponent’s head. I think I’ll take a nice vacation.”

“Try Los Angeles. I’ll give you some numbers. Fuck some blond white women. Very enjoyable. Once you do, you’ll see why only certain Japanese should be allowed that pleasure. It would corrupt the general public and soon the concept of ‘Japanese’ would be gone! We must protect the sexual powers of our men, the submission of our women, and the purity of our—”

You had to stop him or he’d go on for hours and Kondo wanted a little sleep. “I look forward to it,” he said.

Miwa went to pour himself another Scotch. He watched the amber fluid splash across the ice cubes. Then he raised his eyes and peered out the window, where the many spotlights created an intense and impenetrable zone of illumination.

“Kondo-san,” he said, “look! It’s snowing.”

41

THE STAGING

An observer could be forgiven for thinking that indeed a kendo club had commandeered the banquet hall of the Kasaibashi Hotel on Kasaibashi Road a block from Kiyosumi Gardens in East Tokyo. The young men were husky, handsome, quiet, athletic, graceful, and all carried kendo bags, long enough to accommodate shinai, the bamboo sword of the sport. Other bagged gear surely contained the armor kendoists wore, and the appearance of medical technicians merely confirmed the impression, as kendo can be a rough encounter, leaving abrasions, bruises, sometimes even cuts. Their coaches, a few years older, were also husky, handsome, quiet, athletic, and graceful. All wore black jumpsuits under sweatshirts, all carried black watch caps wedged into their belts, all spoke only to friends if at all. So many young men—but they had to be a team because there was no joshing, no horsing around, no shoving or needling. Certainly, a big match loomed ahead.

The observer would have wondered about the gaijin who seemed to be some kind of consultant to them, for he enjoyed the confidence of the older fellows and soon took over the pep talk from the head coach. But what to make of the slim, beautiful woman in glasses, who also seemed to enjoy everyone’s confidence? Was she a kendoist? She was wearing blue jeans, New Balance sport shoes, and a black turtleneck, almost a kendoist’s outfit. And yet again, what of the final touch, the four Korean men, much squarer in face and blockier in build than their Japanese counterparts, who spoke to no one and hovered close to the woman? All in all, it was a very strange gathering.

But of course there was no observer. The Kasaibashi was a two-star business joint well away from tourist areas. At midnight, when this strange confab began arriving in ones or twos, checking in with a fellow who looked as much like a sergeant as a coach, only a single employee was on duty at the hotel, a night clerk who doubled as a telephone operator. He was earnestly advised to mind his own business by someone whose seriousness of purpose impressed him. And his switchboard was quietly disconnected from the outside. All this was done with utmost politeness but, at the same time, utmost sincerity.

In the big room, the men eventually assembled before a blackboard, each silent, each ready, until at 3 a.m., the meeting commenced, the head coach welcoming them, promising them that this would be their night, the night they had so long awaited, the night when their team would triumph. The men seemed, like all men in preathletic stress, tight and nervous and hungry at once.

Finally the gaijin stood in front of the men. Hmmm, what would a gaijin know about kendo? But this one held their attention, even if he didn’t seem to be talking about kendo.

“Last-minute check,” he said, speaking in an English that more than half understood, but which was translated by the woman with great technical fluency in near real time. “Medics, there are medics here, Major Fujikawa?”

The major nodded, as three men raised their hands.

“You’ve all got O-neg, plenty of needle and thread, plenty of QuiKlot, plenty of clamps and transfusion equipment? Wounds tonight will be cuts. You medics, I hope you’ve been practicing clamping and sewing, that’s what it’ll be all about.”

The appropriate men nodded.

“Okada-san,” he said.

The woman handed out Xerox sheets.

She said in Japanese, “That’s the latest satellite photo of the target, taken approximately six hours ago. Don’t ask who took it or how I got it. You can see the layout of the building, the layout of the walls. We have ID’d approximately fifty men on site. They seem to be quartered in the basement, because they go in and out of one lower-story side door. They were all inside as of nineteen hundred hours. The front gate is locked. You can also see that we’ve indicated by marker your approach to the target. It’s no more than half a mile from here.”

“Let me run through this one more time,” said the gaijin. “You’ve been briefed, but let’s take it by the steps.”

He ran through it again: how in small groups the men would infiltrate Kiyosumi Gardens, come out at the far end, and gather in two groups on the north and south sides of the wall around the Miwa mansion. The four snipers would take up positions on the walls. At that point Susan and Bob would approach in her RX-8, park next to the west wall midway between the two teams. The signal was a loud blast from the horn, and then the men would proceed over the walls.

“Captain Tanada takes the rear team over the south wall. Major Fujikawa will go over from the left of the gate, the north wall. I don’t want to breach the gate because I don’t want to use explosives, and if there are sentries inside with firearms, their first instinct will be to zero in on the gate. As they look at the gate, the snipers should find them in the windows and take them out. Okada-san and I will go over from our position on the east wall.

“You get to the house, then you toss your flash-bangs: each window, each door. I don’t want you entering the house because you don’t know the layout and the arrangement of the furniture or the closets, and Okada-san and I will be inside, and I don’t want us getting all mixed up. With the flash-bangs, those guys will come pouring out.

“I should tell you: the one feature of a sword fight is a lot of blood. It ain’t like no movie. There will be blood everywhere. You cannot cut with katana hard into the torso without severing major arteries. It will be slippery and sloppy. You cannot allow yourself to be shocked by it. When you cut him, he’ll bleed bad. If he don’t go down, cut him again, hard, and he will. Then move on. If you are cut, disengage, get your bandage tight on it, and fall back to the medics, who will be the last over the wall. They will get you clamped and get an O-neg line into you. You have a lot of blood. You can lose half of it before you pass out. If you see a lot of your own blood, do not panic. Move swiftly to the medics and you will be all right.

“There is one man you should avoid. This man is called Kondo Isami. He will be older, about forty-five. His skills are beyond yours, believe me. If you see him, do not fight him; if he means to escape, let him escape. If he is guarding someone—I’m imagining he will be guarding Miwa, the big boss—then you surround them but do not attempt to take him down. He will kill six or seven of you before you can finish him and those are unacceptable casualties. Simply hold him at bay; we’ll get the snipers in quickly, and if they won’t surrender we’ll shoot them. Or tell me where he is. If it comes to it, I will handle him. I’ve done a lot of fighting in my life and I am not afraid to fight.

“Finally, remember our priorities: saving Miko Yano is first, justice for the man who murdered her father and family is second, and this fellow Kondo is third. Okada-san and I will find the little girl. Okada-san has night vision and we will penetrate the house first; we think the kid’s probably in a cluster of bedrooms on the second floor. After we get the girl out safely, I will be looking for Kondo; Major Fujikawa, who is in charge of the ground forces, will be looking for Miwa. Captain Tanada, I think, will just be looking for heads to take.”

There was laughter.

“Now, I just want to thank you. I am a stranger to this country and the men of this platoon have made me feel at home. I know I am among professionals. Our interests are the same: justice for Philip Yano and his family, and life for his surviving daughter. The people who took the first and threaten the last are a half-mile away, sleeping the sleep of the wicked, confident that they own the world. This is the night they find out different.”

After that, it just seemed to happen without much drama. The men, clutching their kendo bags, pulling on their black watch caps, began to form up into the two-or three-man teams. The medics with the larger bags of gear fell in to the rear. The staff people—Fujikawa, Sergeant Major Kanda, Captain Tanada, and Bob and Susan—were at the front, looking at the map one last time.

Bob and Susan sat in her car outside the hotel, watching as the last of the teams moseyed out and disappeared into the night. It was about ten minutes from go-time. Bob looked at his watch.

Suddenly a buzz filled the empty space.

“Shit,” Susan said. She pulled out her cell phone, switched it off.

“Your date is annoyed because you stiffed him?” Bob said.

“My boss is pissed because I stiffed him. That’s the fifteenth time he’s called in the last two hours. He’s also sent me ten text messages. He wants to see me right now.”

“Christ.”

“He can’t reach me. That doesn’t please him. He’s mad, he’s desperate, and tomorrow I get fired.”

“You could go now.”

“No way. If my career’s going south, I want to be there for the fifth act. I want to see it all turn sour. Now, Swagger?”

“Yes?”

“Some questions, all right? No bullshit. I have never bullshitted you. We may both be dead in twenty minutes, so no bullshit.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Swagger, your little drama is about to come off. You made it happen. Subtly, carefully, skillfully, with a great deal of sound planning, you’ve got a career CIA officer and fifty Japanese Self-Defense Force paratroopers about to raid a yakuza strong point, in contravention to the basic laws of both groups. It shouldn’t be possible, but you made it happen. The question is simple: why?”

“Why? Well, I cared a great deal about Philip Yano. I felt involved because I gave him the sword.”

“Bullshit. That’s what you’ve been saying, but I see now you’re too smart for that. You think things through too carefully. That’s just a cover story. You know that giving him that sword was pure chance. You could not have known what the consequences were, and you were not responsible for them. You know that. And another odd thing: why did you work so hard to give him that sword? You told me you went all over America looking for the sword. So even before you’d stayed with his family, the Yanos meant something special to you. What, Swagger? Tell me.”

Swagger considered.

“All right,” he finally said. “I was raised not to talk of such things and I never have. But you deserve an answer, Okada-san.”

He looked off. The snow was falling more heavily, sifting down through the trees, muffling the earth, driving most of the traffic away. Swagger thought of the men moving through the dark, creeping toward their destination, violence in the air, another night of war. So much war in the Swagger family.

“My father,” he finally said, “never talked about the war. He was a great man, one of very few surviving five-invasion marines. He hit five beaches, was shot up seven times, once close to death, but he kept going back. Finally, two days after the fifth beach, Iwo Jima, he won the Medal of Honor. I suppose he liked having won that medal and the respect it earned him. But he never, ever bragged on it or mentioned it, and he told me once, ‘You are never to tell anyone about that medal.’ That was very important to him.

“But one night in nineteen fifty-five, a few weeks before he died, he was out on the porch talking with a friend of his, the county prosecutor, a wonderful old goat named Sam Vincent. The two of them were talking about the war. Sam was running himself down and Dad said, ‘Mr. Sam, you think I am such a goddamned hero and you are a failure because of Thebes. Let me tell you a thing or two and maybe you don’t know so much and things ain’t so clear. You know that big medal I won in the war?’

“And Sam said, ‘Earl, everyone knows you single-handedly took on a Jap pillbox and killed forty men that day.’

“‘Well, sir,’ said Dad, ‘it wasn’t quite like that.’ And he told him what really happened.”

42

MOON OF HELL

SHOWA YEAR 20, SECOND MONTH, 21ST DAY

21 FEBRUARY 1945

The third chamber had caught most of the blast. As he squirmed into the entranceway, Earl saw that the big automatic weapon was atilt and two men, standing over the body of a third, struggled to restore it to a firing position. Goddamn, they were good, the little bastards. Fighting so hard, no matter that death was here for them, to kill a few more marines. You had to respect them, even as you killed them, and kill them he did, one spray that caught them in tracer and clouds of debris from the bullet-strikes against concrete behind them. He stepped forward in aggression. Then he caught a flash of movement in his peripheral, turned, and saw that it was too late, as a man with a sword drove forward, had him cold and uncoiled, the sword diving toward his neck.

But then it stopped. There was a frozen moment when the sword caught on the ceiling for some reason, and the arc was interrupted.

Earl pulled back in panic, swept left and fired. The gun fired three times, went empty, but the three had all hit. The Japanese officer went down. He squirmed into the fetal position, blood pooling beneath him hard and black and glossy in the low, smoky light of the gun pit. He moaned, convulsed, thrashed.

Kill him! Earl thought.

He dumped the light machine gun, and his hand flew to his .45; he got it up, jacked back the hammer, and put the sight on the man’s head.

Kill him!

But he couldn’t. The man was twisting in great pain, his jaws clamped shut. Earl quickly stuffed the pistol back in its holster, reached around for his first-aid kit, and pulled out a Squibb morphine syrette. Quickly, he broke the glass casing that shielded the needle, removed the needle, and reversed it to puncture the tube seal, then screwed the needle onto the neck. All he had to do was inject the needle point and squeeze the tube.

He bent to the man, pulled back his tunic collar to expose some neck, and placed the pinprick against the flesh, and—

The American fired from just outside the entrance. His gun threw light into the room, like the sparkly contents of a pail of water. Then the man stepped into the room to make sure and Captain Yano uncoiled.

He had done it a thousand, a hundred thousand times, felt the muscles charge with power as the sword acquired speed and certainty, flashed through its arc and hungered for flesh. He had him cold, for he was so ahead of the reaction time that the hairy beast could do nothing but die. The blade would shatter the clavicle bone, cut through spine and lungs and heart, continue to the intestines; he would drive on, cutting, then withdraw on the same plane and—

Then he felt his foot, thrust forward in the stroke, alight atop something hard, so he was two inches high and the sword caught on the ceiling and its vibration of disaster flowed from point down shaft to grip—from kissaki down to nakago—and in the second he lost, the hairy one squirmed right, spun the gun, and it erupted.

He did not feel himself fall. He did not feel his legs. What he felt was that he’d been drenched in hot, steaming water. The pain soon localized into three bad sites, and his fingers clawed at them, to hold the blood in, but he could not. He lay on his side, his knees up, feeling his life drain away.

He felt the American on him. He felt the pressure of the other body, he felt the hands go to his neck.

He cuts my throat!

His hands bunched at his stomach, his elbows drawn in, he suddenly realized he had a whisper of advantage, for his enemy considered him dead already and in that second his elbow achieved force and speed and it slammed hard into the man’s face just under the eye, driving him back, and again the captain elbowed him in the face, driving him back still more in a moment of stunned weakness. The captain, liberated from the weight of the man, drove himself at him.

They rolled in the dirt. The captain seemed to get his hands around the American’s throat, but a punch arrived from nowhere, breaking his grip, knocking out two teeth. He slammed the American under the eye with the palm of his hand, feeling the blow strike hard, hearing the other man grunt. They pounded into each other’s torsos with fists and open hands, their sweat fell on each other’s faces, they tried to find leverage bracing against the floor.

He knew he would die; his strength was ebbing and the pain in his guts rose.

Gradually the stronger American seemed to prevail, but the captain thought of kendo, of perfect emptiness, and found a blow to the throat, and the man jacked upright, lost his grip, and somehow the captain put strength in it, then took it away, and the American’s own strength toppled him, so the captain slithered over him, and was atop him in terrible intimacy. His right hand flew to the leather haft of a knife the American wore on his belt; he snatched it, again feeling the friction as the blade freed itself from a metal scabbard. He rammed his wrist into the man’s throat, driving him back, and continued on the roll, thrusting the knife upward, nesting it between two ribs so that it would slide easily into the central chest cavity. The grip was wood or leather, grooved heavily, a little thick for him, but he controlled it quickly enough, securing it in his strong fingers. He felt the knife point pressuring the skin, the skin fighting, then yielding, as the blade penetrated a quarter of an inch. Two ounces more of pressure and he could thrust through to the man’s heart and take one more with him.

Earl was dead. Where did the scrawny man find the strength? He looked into the Japanese’s eyes, felt the pinprick of the blade of his KA-BAR between his ribs, and fought to get his hands around the man’s throat but was too late.

I am dead, he thought.

He got me.

He beat me.

He closed his eyes. He felt the wrist heavy against his throat, smelled sweat and oil and fish, felt their two hearts beating almost against each other, locked in the murder embrace.

The deadly point of the KA-BAR probed his skin, bent it down, maybe drew a drop of blood. It would slide in easily, climb through lung tissue, and find the clump of muscle called his heart.

Oh, Christ, Junie, I tried so hard.

The captain leaned into the knife hilt and—stopped.

He saw on the ground next to the American’s head a flexible metal tube with a syrette screwed to its mouth. He realized instantly it was morphine. The American hadn’t been trying to cut his throat; he’d been trying to ease his pain.

He drew back. It seemed suddenly wrong to kill a man who meant to save him.

But it seemed wrong to surrender to him too.

I wish I done gave you a child, I am so sorry to leave you alone. There wasn’t no time, I had so much to tell you.

But he felt an immense liberation as the pinprick went away and the man somehow heaved himself off Earl’s body, and lay a foot away, breathing hard.

A smile came to the man’s grimy face.

“Samurai,” he said.

Then he reversed the heavy war knife, plunged it into his own neck, where a major artery carried a river of blood to his brain. The jab was expert, and the blood spurted out in a bright and gaudy fountain. In eight seconds his brain had devoured the oxygen and glucose that remained, and his eyes closed.

“He killed himself,” Susan said.

“Yeah. Dad told Sam he thought the guy may have seen the morphine single he was trying to inject. It was right there on the floor next to them. Or maybe Hideki Yano had had enough killing. Or maybe he was saying, I’m the better man, I can kill you or not, and then I can embrace death. Whatever, my father always felt he’d lost that battle. The Japanese officer won it. And for whatever reason in the middle of a battlefield, the worst battle on earth, the most dangerous—on a ‘moon of hell,’ as someone called it—the officer let Earl Swagger live. That’s why my dad gave up that sword. Maybe that’s why he never talked about the medal. And also because of that, Earl got to go home, where he got his wife pregnant and they had a little boy called Bob Lee. And how Mr. Earl loved that boy, and helped him and taught him. So Bob Lee not only got his own life in the deal, he got nine more years with his daddy, who was a great man. And thirty-odd years down the worthless road, Bob Lee himself got a daughter out of it, and she’s a great one too. It all goes back to the decision that Japanese officer made in that pillbox. So you could say Bob Lee, he owes the Yanos something big. Call it on, call it whatever you want. But what he owes them is everything.”

“He does,” said Susan.

Bob looked at his watch. It was 4:59:57 a.m.

:58.

:59.

“Okay,” she said. “Samurai up.”

43

CHUSHINGURA

The last thing Swagger said was, “When you hit the ground, wait a second, then pull down your goggles and go to night vision.”

But in the one-tenth of a second of fall, she forgot, and she landed with more thud than she expected: it was seven feet, she felt her body elongate to full extension then accordion shut with a bang when she landed, snapping her head hard enough to drive bangles and spangles before her eyes.

She could see—nothing. It made no sense. Light and dark, nothing focused, nothing where it should be, all confusion, her will scattered and gone.

“Goggles,” whispered Swagger, who had come down beside her.

She got the goggles down—PVS7s, she’d had a day on them at a Delta Force counterterror workshop at Fort Bragg a few years ago—and hit the toggle, which was no longer where it should be but an inch to the right, evidently resettled on her head in the landing. This led to another moment of confusion, but then she got them aligned right and it all popped to. Things were beginning to happen.

It was a green, fuzzy world. Still, she made out the house. To the left, a glowing amoeba seemed to be disintegrating before her eyes. It was Tanada’s rear team, coming hard over the back wall, in fact most were down, pausing only to withdraw their katana, then peeling off individually to the left rear. Meanwhile to the right, the same optical phenomenon reiterated itself, this being Fujikawa’s front team, maybe a tad behind the curve, but peeling right. She swept the house, saw nothing, but then the front door opened and she saw a man with a rifle—AK-47, she ID’d it, again from her Bragg tutorial—and behind her she heard the sound of—well, of what? It was light, a wet piston floating through the grease of a hydraulic tube, nothing sharp, but surprisingly vibratory. It was a silenced rifle, wielded by Sniper 3 Kim, and before the sound had even dissipated, the rifleman went down as if someone had cut his knees and they no longer held, and he just flopped down hard and fast.

She realized, I just saw a man die.

“House clear,” came the voice of 3 Kim from above.

At that moment a series of bright flashes syncopated to hard pops lit off in the basement of the house, as the first team of intruders had gotten their flash-bangs into the area where the yaks were.

“Go, go,” said Bob, but she was already on the way, low, hard, cutting directly across the courtyard to the house, reaching it and sliding along it. She felt Swagger beside her. She reached the open door, stepped over the body of the guy with the rifle, and, clutching her wakizashi in her right hand, ducked inside.

Captain Tanada was not the sort to direct; he was the sort to lead. So he hit the ground and took off, and fuck anybody who couldn’t keep up with him. But that got him close to the rear of the house first, and he pulled his flash-bang, got the pin out, and almost—but not quite—launched it through the window.

He got himself under control.

Four other men reached him and to each he gestured with the small munition, and each duplicated his move. Flash-bang out, pin out, lever secured, each man placed himself next to a window and in the next second, on Tanada’s nod, each shattered the window with a pad-protected elbow, tossed in the illumination device, and peeled back, withdrawing katana from scabbard, waiting for a target.

The things went off almost simultaneously, not in concussive explosion—they weren’t bombs, after all—but with a harsh bang and a white phosphorous flash that blasted anyone’s night vision to pieces. You could be forgiven for thinking that the devil himself had chucked a nuclear device through the window. They caused one of two responses: utter paralysis or complete panic. Four of them quadrupled the effect.

In a second the first man came out, unarmed, and Tanada hit him with the hilt hard in the head. Two more came out, one to be conked, the other took a roundhouse slash at Tanada, who neatly evaded and watched one of his men hit the yak with a hard diagonal cut, left to right, so that he jacked, pirouetted, dropping his weapon, and went down, spurting blood.

And then suddenly it was happening, exactly as the men had dreamed about and believed they wanted, exactly as had not happened in Japan, except on movie sets, for more than a century: the yaks poured from the house and began to spread out, each unleashing a sword, and the soldiers moved forward to engage them, a kendo-to-the-death in dull light as the snow swooped downward, the cuts hard and serious and meant to kill, the evasions equally hard and serious and meant to avoid, the whole thing happening in slow motion and fast motion at the same time.

Tanada killed two men in a single second as they came at him, his technique superb: kesagiri on the first, diagonal, a flowing block from the second assailant’s kesagiri, which led quite naturally into a horizontal yokogiri, with four inches of blade opening eight inches of body. The destroyed man made a gasping sound, tried to step back, and fell.

Tanada looked about and saw war everywhere and was happy. Then he got back to work.

Nii was dreaming, filthily, completely, in anatomical detail, dreams that would shame most but only gave him a boner the size of a V-2. But then the V-2 exploded, and he came hard awake in time for another V-2 explosion, then a third and a fourth. Around him, he heard screams, starts, lurches; men jumped, some wailed, some grabbed weapons. The door was open, and someone rushed out, and Nii caught a glimpse of him brought down with a wicked blow.

Attack, he thought.

His mind dumped clear and empty. He had a moment of stupendous confusion as all his reflexes broke down. Two more, then two more explosions went off, but after the first, he got his eyes shut and buried in his fists.

When he opened them, the big room was half empty. He saw a man jump in, blade whistling, and take one of his friends down with a single blow, and in the ferocity of the blow, he knew there was no mercy this night, it was to the death. More men flooded the room, blades slicing the air, cutting through meat, killing. Someone threw a charcoal hibachi at an invader, who ducked and killed him with a cut across the belly.

Nii rose to fight, then remembered his mission.

Kill the little girl.

It wasn’t a judgment call. It was what he owed Oyabun. It became the only thing in his life, that plus the fact he would fuck her first, then kill her, then commit his beloved seppuku and go happily to his ancestors, his honor restored.

He rose, grabbed his sword, and as men surged forward and death and chaos were everywhere, he cut against the tide, found the steps, and rushed up, one flight, then another, and, entering the upper hallway, saw that so far it was empty. He counted the doors, which were popping open, and men were pouring out, until he reached the door to the white room that contained the little girl. He got out his key and fumbled to insert it.

Major Fujikawa saw that the plan was not quite working. That is to say, the congestion point seemed to be the doorways, where the violence was sharp and ugly and the whole thing coagulated into a subway platform at rush hour with swords. Not pretty.

He pulled out a whistle. There was no plan; in the hurried assembly of assault details this one had not been considered. But he understood that his people couldn’t kill efficiently enough at this rate. He blew the whistle, hard, and watched as dozens of eyes popped to him.

“Let them out, goddammit,” he screamed, “then kill them.”

What a good idea, everyone understood, and the crowding at the doorways immediately broke out as the raiders made way and the yakuza spilled out into the falling snow. There was a moment of near poetry, if the death even of evil men can be considered poetic.

Someone’s flash-bang went off in the crowd of fighters. It was a moment with the snow falling in the gentle Japanese fashion, and behind the screen of lulling white, men were briefly isolated by the flare of white chemical light in postures of attack and defense, the cuts stopped in midflight so that the whole had the clarity of one of Kuniyoshi’s woodcuts, an orchestration of muted color and delicate grace though applied to the subject of maximum violence. Fujikawa wished he had seventeen syllables at his command to press into a poem, but then he remembered he was a soldier, and he rushed forward, sword in hand, looking eagerly for someone to kill, aware that the chance to fight with a sword would never arrive at his doorstep again and he’d better take advantage of it.

The raid caught the great Kondo in an unfortunate position. He was in the shower, performing ablutions, readying for the next day’s events, when the first bomb went off, followed by three more.

His first thought: Fuck!

He knew immediately that by some magic, the gaijin had located them. He had a moment’s rage for the fellow’s guile and wondered who had helped him, and imagined their heads on the table next to the gaijin’s.

He got out, threw on his robe—naked, they caught me naked!—and edged quickly to the door. His bathroom was on the second floor, above the living room. He edged down the hall, looking for a view of the events, to decide upon an action. Though he couldn’t see much, he noted shadows on the wall from a stairway leading downstairs. The violence of the shadow-work dancing hard on the wall conveyed the violence of actuality. Then another flash-bang went off.

By chance he’d been looking directly at it and the brightness stunned him. He could not think, he could not see, he was defenseless.

Fuck!

He knew he could not retreat into the bathroom, for to do so would equal his death or his capture, actually the same thing. Yet he could not go back to his room where his swords were, because he could not see.

He heard the rising screams and smashing of fists, flesh, and swords as the fighting rose and knew that his men had been engaged by a force as large as they. He yearned to rush to his swords, claim them, and turn, whirling with violent purpose into the melee, cutting and cutting and cutting, knowing that he could turn the tide.

But he was blind.

He thought, The bathroom window.

It was a low drop—say ten feet to earth.

Blindly, he groped his way back to the bathroom window, slid it open, tried to remember exactly where the bathroom was with regard to the floor plan of the estate, realized that thinking cost him time and he had no time, so he launched himself forward, fell through cold space, and hit the ground with a thud.

“There’s one,” someone said, “grab him.”

In seconds four men had him.

“Give it up, brother. We won’t kill you if you surrender.”

“Don’t hurt me,” he said, going limp and sad. “I am a cook. Please, I only work here, don’t hurt me.”

Miwa tried to be calm. He listened to the general roar outside and understood what was happening. His only thought was to escape, but of course he was too frightened to attempt such a thing on his own. Therefore he assumed that Kondo, the ever-loyal retainer, would come for him.

After a few minutes, he realized that Kondo would not come for him.

Cursing his luck, he crawled to the doorway, slipped it open half an inch, and saw the same shadows on the wall that Kondo had seen.

They really frightened him.

He fought panic.

He thought, If I can hide, I will survive. They cannot stay long. They must attack, kill, then flee. I will never escape, but I can hide.

On all fours, he scrambled down the hallway, found steps downstairs, and like a snake, slithered down, into darkness.

“Please don’t hurt me, I am a cook,” Kondo said, as the arms locked him down, and someone pinned his arms.

“He’s nothing,” said a raider. “Akira, take him to the courtyard; we’ll continue.”

Three of his captors dashed away to join the general melee, still intense behind them.

“Come on, asshole,” said the remaining raider, “get going. Christ, you’re not even dressed, you poor son of a bitch.”

True, he wasn’t dressed, but Kondo blinked and watched as the strobes flashing in his brain shut down. He blinked again, watched vision assemble itself out of sparkly chaos, and he found himself alone in the backyard with his assailant, his arm pinned behind him as he was being roughly driven ahead.

“Sir, my arm?” he said.

“Shut up,” said the raider, or perhaps meant to say, but somewhere between the Sh and the ut, Kondo got leverage, hit the man with a left-handed dragon punch out of the most basic aikido text, knocked the man to the snow, then drove a palm into his temple with a thud, not knowing whether he’d killed him or not.

He felt the man collapse with a groan.

He snatched up the man’s sword, a good utilitarian cutter, and went to the wall. He was over it in a single bound, lay on the other side, breathing hard, waiting to see if anybody had followed him.

No.

He stood, naked but for the robe, and ran barefoot through the snow. He found a nearby house, broke a window, and entered. He raced upstairs to face a scared man and his wife in bed. “You stay there or I’ll kill you. Now, I need some clothes. And a cell phone.”

Nii got the door open and stepped into the white room. All was dark. To the left he recalled a light switch and, not thinking clearly, popped it. The room leapt to view, all its detail brilliantly exposed—the knotted bed, the television, the painted white window, all of it, white, white, white. But where was the child? A bolt of panic knocked through him, then fear: he could not fail. He ran to the bed, pulling it apart to find nothing, dropped low and looked under it, saw nothing. Then he thought to touch the sheets, found them warm.

She’s hiding, you fool! he thought.

He raced to the closet, pulled it open, finding nothing. That left only the bathroom. He ran to it, pulled the door. It was locked from within. That’s where she was!

“Little Girl, open the door! You will be in big trouble if you don’t open the door! Little Girl, do what I say, damn you.”

The door was silent and still.

Outside, the din of fighting rose to a still higher pitch, the grunts, the shouts, the cries of being struck, the thud of strikes. A part of Nii yearned to join the battle. But he had duty.

“Little Girl! Little Girl, I am getting mad!”

But the child said nothing.

“All right,” he said, “you’ll be sorry.”

With that, he drew back and with his katana began to cut at the door, which, being a cheap and typical modern product, quickly splintered under the assault. He watched it dissolve with three or four great whacks, and when a ragged gap had been cut through it large enough for his shoulder and arm, he reached in, found the lock, and popped it.

Then he heard someone shout, “Back off, fatso.”

He turned, furious, and found himself confronted by what appeared to be an actual Mutant Ninja Turtle. Donatello? Or maybe one of the others. Leo? Raph? That is to say, his antagonist was unusually tiny and thin, dressed all in black, and had a single eye protruding from a mask.

Suddenly the turtle reached up and flicked off its heavy eyepiece and as the thing flew away, it pulled the hair loose and the hair cascaded free, a dark torrent, long and beautiful, and Nii realized he was facing a woman.

“Bitch!” he screamed at her.

Susan leapt through the door; her night vision goggles captured exactly what lay before her. To the left were big rooms, and from them rose the racket of battle, a humming, throbbing fusion of grunts that men made involuntarily as they came together and tried to dominate each other. Before her on the right, a short stairway led up to a hallway, while below it, at this level, another stairway led to bedrooms and the like.

Down which hall? Certainly the top one; they wouldn’t put a prisoner, even a small child, at ground level. Up she went in one bound, Swagger just behind her. They were met at the top by three men, but they weren’t combatants. They were fleeing in panic, so Susan and her companion stepped aside as the three—cooks possibly, or accountants, hard to tell as they were in pajamas—raced outside to be secured by raiders.

But suddenly two men came at them from the left, and they were yakuza. Beside her, Swagger leapt forward, evading a cut, and clocked one with his elbow hard, sending that boy to the floor in a heap, and was then so close he had no room for swordplay and instead grappled, rolling against a wall, kneeing his opponent, slamming him several times hard against the wall.

“Go, go,” he shouted.

Susan peeled off from the struggle, kicked in the first door, found the room behind it empty, sped down the hall to another, kicked it, another empty one, then heard screams and shouts from ahead.

She raced to a room whose door was already open and from which bright light flowed like water. She ducked in and beheld a strange sight, amplified by the night vision goggles, though it was completely illuminated already. A large man was brutally cutting a closet or a bathroom door to ribbons in a frenzy, his blade splintering the thin wood. He was screaming, “Little Girl, come out. Little Girl, you must obey me or I will hurt you. Little Girl, you must cooperate or I will be very, very angry.”

Susan stepped in.

“Back off, fatso,” she commanded.

He turned to her, his face bunched into a sweaty rage.

He was large and green.

Then she realized she was still wearing her night vision goggles, and she tore them off, feeling a slight snare of pain as one of the straps caught in her hair.

Her womanhood seemed to enrage him even more.

“Bitch,” he screamed.

“Cow,” she replied.

Swagger found himself in a room with six men, evidently some kind of security guard for the upper floors. He flailed about, driving them back. Now they faced each other, one on six, in the relatively close confines of the small room.

Oh, shit, he thought, wondering if he had a chance against six.

Without willing it, he went into full aggression mode, going quickly to jodan-kamae, right side, and stepped forward, ready to issue from on high, feeling that pure force was the only solution to this tactical problem.

It was, but not in the way he imagined.

His war posture, the ferocity of his fighting spirit—“The moon in the cold stream like a mirror”—and his eagerness to cut people down immediately melted the will of his opponents. Six katana dropped quickly to the floor, and the men fell to their knees, wishing to offend him with their lives no more.

This was fine, it was even an ideal outcome, for at this point killing seemed pointless, but it left him with the problem of administering to six prisoners. He ran to them, reaching in his pocket for the yellow plastic zipcuffs and discovered—shit!—only four.

He worked around behind them until he ran out of zips. It was two-handed work and he had to wedge the Muramasa katana between his arm and body.

With each man, he shouted, “Kondo Isami?”

Each man looked at him with fear redoubled in his eyes and his face yet paler by degrees. If they knew Kondo, it was only by reputation.

Ach! The assault clock continued to grind on, the seconds falling away, as Bob struggled with these boys, of no consequence but still men who couldn’t simply be released. At any moment they could have turned on him, the six on one, and knocked him down and killed him. But there was no fight at all left in them, and after still more time, he had them all neutralized, four in the restraints, two tied in their own obis, not that such binding would hold but it was symbolic of surrender.

He pushed the first one out, pointed down the hall, and marched the small parade to the stairway, from which the front door was visible. Possibly, outside, the fighting had died down, as the din wasn’t so loud. He pointed again, watched them file out to their fates.

Suddenly he heard screams, male and female, signifying the coming together of two warriors at death-speed.

One voice was Susan’s.

Outside, suddenly, it was over.

The blades stilled, the grunts died, the spurts of harsh breath rising like steam, all finished. Only the snow continued its drift downward, settling in increasingly delicate piles on the brick courtyard.

Everywhere Fujikawa looked, the men had ceased to be opposed by the enemy. Some of the enemy were down with red smears across them or lay still in large puddles, where blood and snow had fused to slush. More, however, were on the ground, either tied or obligingly raising hands to be tied.

“Secure them,” he yelled pointlessly, for that process was already happening.

“Snipers?”

The snipers were still perched on the walls, hunting for armed targets in the house.

The calls came quickly.

“Sniper one, clear.”

“Sniper two, I have nothing.”

“Sniper three, all quiet.”

“Sniper four, no targets.”

“Secure the compound,” the major yelled, again more ceremoniously than to real effect, for his well-schooled men had already begun to spread out and hunt for the hidden, the missing, the escaped.

He watched as Tanada came around toward him.

“Secure, Major,” said Tanada.

“Yeah, here too. Sergeant Major Kanda?”

The sergeant major, who’d had a fine old time laying about with a bo—a four-foot-long stout fighting stick—stood up from securing the yaks he’d clobbered solidly.

“Yes sir?”

“Get a head count.”

“Yes sir.”

The sergeant major ran off to consult with various squad leaders.

“I can’t believe it went so fast,” said Tanada.

Major Fujikawa looked at his watch. It had taken seven minutes.

“Any sign of Miwa or the child?”

“Swagger-san and the American woman are inside.”

“Get them some help, fast.”

“Yes sir.”

His rage flared: kill, smash, crush. All his anger turned chemical, the chemicals went to his muscles, which inflated with strength and resolve.

He would cut her in two. He would destroy her.

He ran at her and she at him. His sword was high, and he meant to unleash hidari kesagiri, diagonal cut, left to right, exactly as all those nights ago he’d seen his oyabun perform it on the Korean whore, and he visualized it more clearly now: the progress of blade through body, the stunned look upon the face, the slow slide as the parts separated.

Agh! He let fly and felt the blow form itself perfectly and issue from above with superb speed and violence as driven forward by the grunt, which propelled oceans of air from his lungs.

She was quick, the little bitch, and he missed her by a hair as she slid by.

But he recovered in a split second. Improvising brilliantly, he snapped his left hip outward and felt it smash into the running woman, who was so light that its momentum flung her through the air. She struck the wall with a satisfying crash. She must have hit it midspine, for her arms flew out spasmodically, the sword in her hand flipped away, her face went dull with momentary shock, as she began to slide down the wall toward unconsciousness.

Now, the end.

Tsuki, thrust. He—

“No!”

It was English. He halted.

“Daddy’s home.”

He turned.

It was the gaijin.

It was the source of his humiliation; he had a rare chance to erase a failure. His warrior heart swelled with pleasure.

“Death to the gaijin,” he said, “then the child, then this whore.”

“The reason you are fat,” the gaijin said, “is that you are full of shit.”

Nii rushed the man, sword high, issuing from on high, and cut a large slice in the universe, though alas the gaijin wasn’t in it.

He spun, went to a cocked position, and thrust forward at the man.

With both hands, he drove the sword forward to impale his opponent’s opened body and nothing halted him as he plunged onward and onward, waiting for the resistance, when at last the sword’s point passed through the flesh. The point and the blade it led must have been very sharp for the flesh didn’t fight it a bit, he just kept on going.

Then he noticed he had no sword.

The second thing he noticed was that the reason he had no sword was that he had no hands. The gaijin had cut them at the wrist, both, neatly and nearly painlessly, going into what Yagyu called “crosswind,” specifically designed against kesagiri, and culminating in the direction “cut through his two hands.” The gaijin had been the faster.

The blood did not fizz and spray. Instead, far still from coagulation, it squirted out in pitiful little spurts, each driven by a beat of his heart. He looked at them and wished he had a death poem.

He turned to smile bravely, and then the world cranked radically to the right and went to blur and he had a sense of falling but no sense of body. Then his eight seconds ran out.

Bob stepped back from the carnage he had wreaked.

The fat one’s body lay in the bed, where it had emptied a great red tidal wave across sheets and blanket. The head had bounced and rolled somewhere else.

Then he picked up Susan, who moaned as she came to.

“Oh, Christ,” she said.

“It’s okay,” he said. “Where’s the child?”

“The bathroom.”

Bob turned, went to the bathroom, reached in the gap, found the lock, unlocked it, and entered.

“Honey? Honey, are you here? Sweetie, where are you?”

“Tin Man, Tin Man,” cried the girl in broken English.

“Here I am, sweetie.”

He ran to Miko, who crouched in the bathtub, and picked her up and squeezed her hard, feeling the tiny heart beat against him.

“Will the Giant Monster hurt me?”

Swagger spoke no Japanese. He just said, “It’s all right. They’re all gone.”

“Oh, Tin Man.”

“Now listen, sweetie. I’m going to take you out of here, all right? Everything is going to be just fine.”

The child spoke in Japanese, but then Susan was there.

“Don’t let her see anything,” Susan said.

“I won’t.”

Susan spoke in Japanese. “You have to make us a promise.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“I will carry you. But I want you to close your eyes very tight and press your face against my chest until I tell you it’s okay. It’ll just be a minute or so. Can you do that for me? Then we’ll get some ice cream. I don’t know where, but we’ll get some ice cream.”

“Yes, Auntie. Will the Tin Man come?”

“Yes, he will,” she said in Japanese, and to Bob said, “She thinks you’re the Tin Man.”

She picked the child up and turned.

“All closed now?”

“Yes, Auntie.”

Okada-san stepped from the bathroom and immediately saw two of her snipers, carrying their M-4s at the ready, standing there to escort her to the car, and then to wherever.

“You did good, Cheerleader,” said Swagger.

“So did you, Redneck,” she said, and carried the child out. Miko obediently kept her eyes shut and never realized that the room was no longer white.

44

EDO JUSTICE

He reached the compound just as the buses that would take the raiders out of the area pulled in. He walked to Fujikawa.

“What are your losses, Major?”

“We got out clean. A few bad cuts, now stitched. A few concussions, sprains, a lot of bruises, that sort of thing. The worst was a trooper knocked unconscious by a cook, who escaped.”

Swagger knew who that would be.

“How many kills?”

“Fifteen. Lots of wounded, though. Our people are stitching up the badly hurt yaks and getting plasma into them. They’re pretty goddamned lucky. Another yak crew would have let ’em die.”

“Sixteen. I had to take a fat one down. Anyhow, it looks like you’ll be out of here before light.”

“We have a last job.”

He turned and gestured. Bob saw Yuichi Miwa, shivering in a kimono-bathrobe that exposed his scrawny old man’s chest, kneeling in the snow. Nobody was touching him or abusing him, but his face was down and grave.

“Possibly you don’t want to see this,” said the major.

“I’ve already seen it.”

“This is the old way.”

“It’s the right way.”

“The men think so. We voted. It was unanimous.”

He nodded to Sergeant Major Kanda, who approached with what Bob recognized immediately: a red silk sword bag, neatly tied. Quickly, Major Fujikawa untied it, removed a blade in shirasawa that Bob knew intimately, as it was the blade his father recovered on Iwo Jima.

Major Fujikawa approached the kneeling man.

He spoke in Japanese, but Captain Tanada whispered the translation in Bob’s ear.

“Miwa Yuichi, this is the sword Asano retainer Oishi used in the fifteenth year of Genroku to behead Kira, who had betrayed his lord. It’s the blade that was presented to Philip Yano by this American, and had become ancestral to the Yanos by reason of Major Hideki Yano’s last battle with it on Iwo Jima. It is the blade you murdered Philip Yano and his family to obtain, for reasons of career and ambition, you who have so much, who wanted so much more. I, Fujikawa Albert, of the First Airborne Brigade of the Japanese Self-Defense Force and former executive officer of Philip Yano, claim a retainer’s right by ancient tradition to avenge the death of my lord. I do offer you a choice. If you wish, you may use the sword to end your own life, and thereby, in samurai eyes, regain your good name and honor. If not, I shall execute you like a common criminal.”

Miwa’s chest puffed importantly.

“Do what you will. Just know you are killing a man of vision. I will say that the deaths of Yano-san and family were necessary. I fight to keep Japan whole and pure. I stand for the old Japan. I fight the foreigners, and Yano-san, as is well known, had sided with the foreigners. Now, you kill me. That is your way; I would not talk you out of petty vengeance that only attests to your smallness as men. But when I die, a part of Japan dies. Let it be said, I gave you my neck, and in nights far distant, many will regret what you have done and who you have killed.”

The snow fell, drifting this way and that, covering all, cloaking all sound. The moment was silent. Even the prisoners, secured on the ground, watched with respect, acknowledging the ultimate meaning of the moment. The old man leaned forward, stretching his thin neck for not merely the ease of the executioner but also for his own ease, and the major set himself. He offered his blade for cleansing; a bottle of Fuji was emptied upon it, consecrating it. Then the major stepped into a fluid shinchokugiri, the straight vertical, and the polished blade sang in the cold air. The separation was almost bloodless. The head fell with the thud of a book hitting the floor. Then the body pitched forward, twitched, and went still. A red flow began to print odd patterns onto the snow.

The major performed a quick chiburi, flinging the blood off the blade to form a spray of red abstraction in a snowpile, then someone began to play “The Star-Spangled Banner.”

It wasn’t until “proof through the night that our flag was still there” that Swagger realized he was the source of the music; it was the ringing of the forgotten cellular phone that Kondo had given him to manage his transit to the point of exchange.

He flicked it open.

“It’s five thirty a.m. As I said I would, I call you. We have some business,” said Kondo Isami.

“We do,” said Bob. “Time and place, please.”

“It’s not so far, gaijin. It’s next door, over the wall, quite a lovely place. Kiyosumi Gardens. Turn left at the pond. Look to the left. I await you on an island. I’ll be easy to find. I’m the one with the sword.”

45

STEEL TO STEEL

Swagger turned and strode out the gate, the Muramasa blade over his shoulder, the folds of his hakama jacket tied back by a figure eight of rope around his shoulder, his obi tight, his creases still sharp. He turned right on the little street, walked fifty yards, then diverted to the left through the open gate of Kiyosumi Gardens in the somber rise of light.

He entered a kind of wonderland. Light snow lay upon everything, as did the utter tranquillity of dawn. Before him he saw the pond, a flat sheet of reflection, its surface broken now and then by the ripple of one of the ceremonial carp the size of trout breaking the surface in a flash of golden torso. In one corner, reeds, still green because their verticality gave snow no purchase, waved ever gently, more on their own internal vibration than by any force of atmosphere. Across the way, a pavilion, ivory with a sequence of tile roofs and the elfin upturn of Asian style over stout mahogany pillars and a sea of paned, opaque windows, supported its own mantle of snow. The trees were variously dressed in white as well, the pines supporting it, the willows less cooperative and, like the reeds, still mostly green. Ducks cruised, the big fish fed, the snow lay crisp as sugar, everything was etched to a woodcut genius’s perfection. No modern buildings could be seen. It was a haiku called “Garden, 5:32 a.m., Break of Dawn.” He might have added, “1702.”

He saw the man standing on an island to the left, still a hundred quiet yards away. Swagger followed the path, skipping over rocks where they transected a cove for a shortcut, ducked under willows, turned again to find a wooden bridge, and crossed to the island.

The circle of earth lay possibly thirty feet across, with a shore of rocks artfully arranged, some glazed white in snow. Its trees were willows, bent with their own load of snow, the white on the green, the whole painted magenta by ribbons of sunlight broken through and captured on the surface of the low, dense clouds. Now and then a bubble popped, as a fat carp came up in search of food or merely to belch.

Kondo stood, one hip cocked, with a warrior’s utter narcissism. Like Swagger, he held the saya over a shoulder, almost like a rifle. A smirk marked the handsome face on the square, symmetrical head. He looked like a jazz musician ready for a riff or a ballplayer in the on-deck circle, his muscularity held taut under a black, formal kimono, his radiant vitality almost a heat vapor off his posture.

“So,” he said as Swagger approached, “did Miwa die well?”

“Not particularly,” said Swagger. “He gave some bullshit speech.”

“Alas, I heard it many times. You, Swagger-san, I know you will die well.”

“I doubt it,” said Swagger. “I plan on screaming like a baby. But since it ain’t happening for thirty more years, it ain’t worth worrying about now.”

The jibe brought a sharper smile to Kondo’s confident face. Then he noticed something.

“Oh, I see my father gave you Muramasa’s blade. He actually still believes in all that crap. It’ll be a pleasure to give it back to him without comment this afternoon. He’ll know what it means. That will be my revenge on him. Oh, what a warm family moment.”

“What he’ll get is a bag with your head in it.”

“If Dad’s been helping, that means he sent you to Doshu. I studied with Doshu too. It’s too bad, you know; you can only get so far with Doshu. You’re limited by Doshu’s imagination. You better have more than eight cuts if you’re going to last a minute against me. And when I take your head, Doshu will hear too. I wish I could see that.”

“You must be nervous. You talk too much. I come to fight, not talk.”

“No, I am not nervous, I am eager. This is a red-letter day for me. I didn’t help Miwa win his dirty movie election, but so what? As I say, he was only a pornographer. But I am about to fight and defeat a really great samurai, as I have dreamed of for years. Then I will have defeated in proxy my father, and as he is the living memory of samurai in Japan, I will have entered legend.”

“You’re talking so much you must think you have all the time in the world.”

“I do. And let me tell you why. I have genius, and genius always triumphs. It’s the law of genetics. I have a thousand years of swordsmen’s blood in my veins. Then I have experience. I’ve fought man on man to the death thirty-two times and won all. I know what happens in a duel. I have strength and stamina. I have foreknowledge: I know Doshu’s style and the eight cuts he taught you, and I can easily counter every one with either hand. I also know your particular style: the cuts are shaky, except for your best, migi kiriage, and your footwork is always suspect,” said Kondo.

Swagger said, “You forgot one thing: I cheat.”

The swords came out fast, like the flickering of a snake’s searching tongue, with doubled rasps of polished steel against wood loud against the silence of the dawn. Kondo was much faster. He was so swift in the unleashing, Swagger knew he’d been smart to keep his distance, so that he couldn’t be chopped down in nukitsuke, the draw, and fall ruptured before the fight had even begun.

The island afforded little enough room: Swagger thought that was to his advantage, because the less he ran, the more strength he’d have. The closer he got, the better chance he’d have. If it became a running, cutting thing, like all the movie fights, he was done when his gas ran low, so why bother with the technicalities just to die tired.

Trusting aggression, his old friend, he moved in, quickly cutting the island in half, bringing his blade on high right to an enemy that awaited on the balls of his feet, bent utterly in concentration, his blade thrust before him.

Bob closed, forgetting the swordsman’s shuffle over the bare wood of a dojo. This was in the real world, over clumps of grass, drifts of feathery snow, the odd stone. He launched forward—“Ai!”—with his right-handed kesagiri, but the mercury-slippery Kondo rotated out of sword’s fall, repaying with a fast sideways cut, very strong, classic yokogiri, but Swagger with a speed he never guessed he had (but knew he wouldn’t have for long) got his blade up in time to turn it away, as the steel on steel hit an almost musical tone. Swagger felt the muscle and precision in the blow, even as he turned it and got himself out of range for a second.

“Yes, that’s good, close in, finish it fast. We both know you can’t stay with me. Each second is a point for me. I don’t need to cut you down quickly to win, merely to last until your arms fade,” the yakuza said, that fucking smirk still on his face.

In that second he made as if to relax and exactly as Bob’s subconscious read the relaxation in his body, he knew it to be a fake, and in the next moment, from the pose of muscular softness, Kondo exploded. His move had no coefficient in nature, it was beyond metaphor. What Swagger was doing still alive after that, he never knew, because something cat-fast in himself took over, as his blade didn’t fight Kondo’s for the space, but vacated pronto, turning with a way-less-than-good cut, which Kondo easily thwarted. But Kondo didn’t press the advantage, instead eased backward.

“Not bad. Slow, imperfect, but you still breathe. Let us try you again.”

Tsuki, a straight thrust driven by lunge and locked elbows, flew at his face, a fast-closing raptor, seeking his eyes or his mouth or his throat, and it was only an ancient dinosaur brain somewhere in Swagger’s pelvis that saved him this time, jacking his upper body back an inch beyond the gleamy tip of the katana. Then, stepping to the right, he tried the sideways cut, yokogiri. He cut something, but it was only cloth.

“Agh!” groaned Kondo, deeply affronted, and his rage transferred itself instantaneously to the wicked diagonal kesagiri, which Bob redirected just enough to miss him. Then came a thud as something hard plunged into Bob’s face. It was the hilt, as the enemy swordsman, with not enough room to reverse and get his blade into play, simply reversed and drove, clubbing him hard in the face with his hilt, knocking spiderwebs and fly wings and gunflashes into his mind, setting him up for the kill.

But Swagger wasn’t ready for death yet and grappled the man. Bob chose the moment to repay favor with favor, unleashing a head butt that caught Kondo flush and would have knocked a lesser man to the ground, but Kondo used the energy to break away and reset.

The two stared at each other, each gulping for air, each taut face leaking blood, each set of eyes bulging in the need for information.

Kondo took a small breath.

“You fight like a peasant,” he said.

“I am a peasant,” Bob replied.

Now it was his turn for the tsuki, the fast thrust, though he aimed lower, meaning merely to puncture heart and center chest and bleed his enemy dry. The thrust seemed to take an hour. He stabbed air, withdrew, took a feint cut to his left, and knew that Kondo wouldn’t feint left then cut right the first time and so was stable and locked when a nanosecond later the withdrawal abruptly ceased and became another launch from the left. He rode the strike, tried to turn it to his advantage by stepping inside, but, although the sword was past him, he had momentarily forgotten that his enemy had two arms and with his other one, the guy roped him around the neck. Swagger drove backward, then yielded with a trickster’s cunning, dropped to one knee, and heaved the man over his shoulder, bracing himself on his own blade to stay upright.

That saved his balance but it meant he was behind the curve in getting the blade back in play, and by the time he was ready to cut, so was the other man, having rolled adroitly through the throw to arrive standing in a cloud of snow sprinkles his fall had raised, his hair a mess. Bob shivered, ordering some small pain to abate for the moment.

“Again, you surprise me. Two minutes of fighting, you have even drawn blood, and you’re still standing and spitting.”

Bob had no words for the man. He yearned to nurse the terrific clout he’d taken under the eye and now battled a new enemy beside the real one, his age, his lack of experience, and his fear: his left eye was swelling. One-eyed, he might as well be blind.

He gathered in some breath, trying not to make it obvious, and ran through homilies that might help him.

The moon in the cold stream like a mirror.

Nah. Nada.

Think of sex.

Bad idea.

Think of the scythe, the smooth sweep of the blade through the clear Idaho air.

But as he was reminding himself to think of the scythe, a scythe came at him, that hard-powered kesagiri, what a magnificent thing it was, maybe the best ever, all power concentrated in four inches of flying yakiba, and if he weren’t again lucky as hell, it would have cleaved him, clavicle to belly button, and left all his secrets to spill out on the nice white snow.

Inside the thrust, he head-butted again, at the same time trying to find enough play to get his own point into flesh, but the butt was a glancing thing, more of an ear slap, and by the time his blade was where Kondo was, Kondo was no longer there.

Bob gulped.

Christ, he felt old and used.

“Feel fear? I see it in your eyes. You have accepted your defeat. Wonderful. I can do it quick. You won’t feel a thing. They just fall, wordlessly, without a sound. I’ve never heard a cry. The eight seconds of oxygen in your brain goes fast. The pain never catches up with it.”

Bob’s answer was yokogiri, left to right, driven by the proper “Ai!” because expelling the air in perfect timing hastened the blade. He sliced the air cleanly in two. A lesser man would have fallen in both directions at once. Kondo pirouetted into a new defensive position, then stepped forward with a high kick and a “Hai!” and drove a superspeed diagonal at Swagger who fortunately had a nervous system still enough in the fight to react and leap ahead. In a blinding flash Kondo unleashed another giant power cut, this time his own version of yokogiri, left to right, much more perfectly formed than Bob’s, much more elegant and worthy of a movie. The wicked point of the blade cut Bob’s hakama sleeve and maybe an inch or so of skin. Swagger smelled blood, his own. That was a serious cut, deep, almost to the bone. It needed stitches or it would bleed him out in an hour or so. But it wasn’t to guts or heart or lungs, it took down no bone structures, it didn’t interrupt the flow of neurons, it just fucking hurt.

He rotated leftward, bumped into something hard, the thin trunk of one of the ceremonial willows, and maybe lost a step. At that moment, from utter repose, Kondo fired another yokogiri at him and he winced, not fast enough to block, too tired to duck.

But instead of opening his throat like a broken gutter, the blade lost possibly a tenth of its speed as it hit the willow trunk, glided through without breaking a sweat, and then halted and withdrew a few inches from his face.

“Pretty cool,” said Kondo. “You haven’t seen that in a movie, have you?”

Indeed, he hadn’t. Suddenly snow on the willow leaves shook itself loose as the top half of the tree tumbled, trailing spirals of snow.

Swagger took a shot at kiriage, the rising cut, left to right, his best option, but it was too slow.

“I’ve seen better,” said Kondo. “Really, I think Doshu would admonish you for that one.”

Bob gulped air.

“No snappy patter? You’re spent. That was your last cut. You have no offense.”

With that Swagger lunged again, tsuki hard, but spent most of his energy in the thrust, which connected with nothing except the void that Kondo had so recently occupied.

Swagger sucked hard for oxygen. God, where was his second wind?

“Swagger, let me finish it. No need to go out on a bad cut, screaming, your guts hanging out. I can put an instant end to your suffering.”

Swagger responded to the offer with a diagonal issued from on high that was so awkward and poorly timed it was almost an insult to Kondo. It missed by what felt like seven yards. He had almost nothing left.

“Just let me end it now, fast and clean, old lion.”

Bob didn’t take the advice, as expressed in shinchokugiri, a vertical downward, but badly out of timing and harmless.

“If you didn’t kill me early, you aren’t killing me at all,” Kondo said. “Okay. I offered. I pay my respects. This has been great. You’re a valiant guy. But the party’s over. Five hard cuts and you’ll only be able to stay with me through four. I know you will die strong, great samurai.”

“Fuck you” was all the blown man’s wretched mind could come up with.

“Hai!” screamed Kondo.

The blows came so fast Swagger’s eyes could not stay with them, only the dying warrior reptile far inside took over his instincts and got soft parries on the first left-hand diagonal, the second left-hand diagonal, somehow got horizontal for a harder, low-blade block on a vertical, lurched to the right to dissuade the fourth, now right-handed diagonal, and dropped to come against the final side cut, the yokogiri.

No time.

No gas.

No speed.

His blade couldn’t catch up with the blur of steel that seemed to pick up acceleration as it vectored hard to his body.

It was perfect yokogiri, with Kondo’s full might and genius behind it, and as he knew it would, it flew true into the shred of opening under Bob’s lagging defense. Kondo had an image, almost of woodcut clarity, of what must happen next.

Yakiba—tempered edge—sheers through hip bone, shattering it, continues downward, shattering the femur ball by the inevitable physics of its own impact reverberation, then shatters the femur itself and with it nips the femoral artery, that torrent of blood. Sundered, the femoral deposits its fluid in midair in a fine and driving rush to turn the snow below to purple slush. The blade itself, far from spent, cleaves through what remains of flesh, breaks free, its amputation complete, and Bob falls as he exsanguinates. Clinical death is possibly not instantaneous but certainly occurs within eight seconds.

Yet even as his brain told Kondo that must happen, it did not happen. Instead odd vibrations of uncertainty came his way, as he felt the cut stop hard and shallow and his own hilt torque wildly, almost out of his hands, though he was fast enough to recover even as an old adage somehow came to mind. Who said it? Where? When? Why was it so familiar?

Steel cuts flesh, steel cuts bone, steel does not cut steel.

He struggled to regain timing but was not quite fast enough.

It was the migi kiriage, the rising cut, left to right, the scythe cut, Swagger’s best, honed on desert slopes under a hard and ceaseless sun. For his part, bad old Muramasa was with it all the way. His blade hungered for blood, driving up from just above the hip, through hoses and ducts and wet linkages and mechanics, through a whole anatomy lesson of viscera, splitting them wide so they could jet-empty their contents upon the snow. It wasn’t Swagger’s best cut, for it wore out at the halfway point before cutting the spine, much less the lungs. But even Doshu would have counted it adequate.

He withdrew, and seeing that which was far as if close and that which was close as if far, segued rather gracefully from recovery into the next most accessible position, which was kasumi (“mist”), a horizontal, over-the-shoulders construction supported on reversed wrists.

“Feel the fear at last?” Bob asked, and maybe saw a glint of it in the man’s stricken face: I am mortal, I will die, my time is up, why why why?

Bob’s kasumi then transcended miraculously and of its own volition into tsuki, not well aimed but well enough as it punctured and passed through Kondo’s throat, splitting his larynx and jugular, half-severing his spine, and weirdly sustaining him in midfall for a half-second before withdrawal.

Kondo toppled, issuing fiery liquids from his ruptures. His face was blank, his eyes distant, his mouth slack. When he hit, a reddened puff of snow flew up.

Swagger stood back from the carnage and his hand flew to his hip, where the steel inserted courtesy of a Russian sniper in Vietnam decades ago had stopped Kondo’s brilliant cut. It was Swagger’s only card, and he’d been wise enough to play it last. The cut was precise butchery, smooth but shallow, and some black gruel pulsed from it, but it wasn’t geysering spectacularly, meaning no artery had been cut. Bob got a pouch of QuiKlot out, tore the top off with his teeth, and poured the clotting agent into the wound, knowing again that stitches were mandatory within an hour, if he had the strength. Then he poured more on the bloodier cut on his left shoulder.

Christ, it hurt.

He retreated, found his saya, and stood for a second.

Do it right, he thought. Thank the fucking sword.

Feeling foolish and white, he held the weapon horizontally before him and bowed to the little Japanese god inside the steel, and said arigato as best he could. Then since the thing wore a dapple of disfiguration, he snapped it hard to the right, flinging its contents off to splatter an abstraction on the snow—chiburi, in the vernacular, big in all the movies.

Now noto: he sheathed the sword, as ceremony demanded, drawing the dull spine of the blade through his left hand and fingers while clutching the saya’s opening until he reached the tip, then smoothly snared the tip in the opening, then ran the wood casing up to absorb and protect the blade, the whole move ending with a gentle snap as tsuba met wood.

His watch read 5:39 a.m., Tokyo time. He turned and looked at the body of the man he had killed. Kondo lay in a sherbet field of blood and snow, and the spurting had stopped. It was only drainage now. Somewhere a big fat golden carp came to a placid surface and seemed to burp, leaving a widening burst of rings in its passing.

Swagger looked back at the body. He could have taken the head as he’d promised. But really—what was the point?

46

OFFICE POLITICS

She arrived at the American embassy promptly at 8:45 because nowadays it took a good fifteen minutes to get through security. She wore a new Burberry pantsuit she’d bought recently at Takashimaya, a smartly tailored pinstripe on gray wool, a white silk blouse and pearls, a pair of Christian Louboutin round-toed platform pumps, her Armani horn-rims. Her hair was pulled back into a severe ponytail, her foundation Lanvin, her blush Revlon, her mascara Shiseido.

She got to his office exactly at nine and, of course, he let her wait ten minutes, a kind of humiliation ordeal—more of which would be coming her way, assuming she survived the next few minutes in any case—then he ushered her in.

“So nice of you to join us, Susan.”

“Doug, I’m very sorry, I—”

Doug had graduated from Annapolis, and though he had never had a command at sea, his office was filled with nautical gewgaws, like brass sextants, charts, gaffs. In office lore it was called “the Bridge,” though never when he was around. He was the sort of man who demanded results yesterday but then forgot to ask for them tomorrow.

“Sit down, sit down.”

She sat opposite: he was a large-headed, red-faced beefy man, ten years older, from an old family that was by reputation third-generation Agency. His hair was a brusque graying crew cut and he wore his suit jacket at his desk. He was a well-studied imitation of the man Swagger represented naturally, without self-consciousness or reflection.

“Look, I shouldn’t have to give a pro like you pointers, but goddammit, I have to be able to reach you twenty-four hours a day. That’s why we have cell phones, pagers, the like. It doesn’t work if you turn the goddamn things off.”

“I didn’t turn anything off. I just didn’t answer because I was in an awkward situation.”

“Anything you care to discuss with your chief of station?”

“It’s all right, Doug. It was a Swagger issue.”

“I told you the Swagger thing wouldn’t work. He’s too old, he’s too slow, he’s too stubborn, he’s nothing but trouble.”

Like to hear you say that to Swagger, asshole.

But she played his game: “I know it was my idea to bring the guy back. He proved harder to manage than I thought. However, now it’s fine, it’s great, I’ll have him out of country as soon as I can make arrangements. He made some progress. He—”

“I want a report. First thing tomorrow.”

“Sure. Is that all? I—”

“Oh, no. Oh, no, it’s not over, Susan. This isn’t just more Swagger bullshit. That was just the start. The issue is much more serious. As in, Why the fuck did you send an unauthorized request to SAT-D to orbital on seven houses and thirteen business locations in the greater Tokyo area?”

“Oh, that?”

“Yes, that.”

“It was mission-related.”

“There is a big flap at Langley.”

“I made a judgment, possibly it was wrong. I had to confirm something fast.”

With an egomaniac like Doug it was important to show contrition. Defiance simply enraged him, and enraged, he was even more erratic than when calm.

“Tell me why it was so goddamned important for the birds to eyeball Japanese mansions and warehouses when they could have been looking at North Korean launch sites, Chinese naval bases, Taliban outposts, or god knows what?”

“I have a guy who has a network, mostly low-grade stuff, but you never can tell. Somehow he picked up a whiff that a certain ultra-wealthy Japanese national had sympathies in a certain direction and was unstable. It wasn’t enough for any hard action. I didn’t put surveillance on him, I didn’t discuss him with Japanese intelligence, because we knew he’d hear. I didn’t try to penetrate or eavesdrop, I didn’t recruit within his organization. But I decided on a look-see.”

“Come on, Susan. You’re stalling. Why, please?”

“Doug, there are a lot of tall buildings in Tokyo. If someone flew an airliner into one of them, we’d look foolish. Plus, it would kill a lot of people. I was trying to split the hair between being overreactive and being responsible. I was trying to do my job. I flash-prioritized it over your signature because if you don’t, it takes weeks. You weren’t around to sign off, as I recall.”

“You can use that one to justify anything, Susan.”

“Yes, Doug. I know. However—”

“What did you find out about Mr. Miwa?”

“Oh, at Langley they made the connect?”

“And how. They are not pleased. What did you learn?”

“Well, frankly, nothing. At one mansion there was what might be termed unusual activity. That is, a great many people, vehicles, a lot of movement outside in the courtyard. Possibly it was a business conference, possibly a company retreat of some sort, even some kind of reunion. Then it occurred to me, since I’d looked into him, that it might have been yakuza-related. I believe he has yakuza ties. But the infrared picked up no concentration of explosives, the spectroscope didn’t indicate nuclear, and we don’t have bio-chem sensors yet.”

“Susan, assure me you didn’t muss, even slightly, Yuichi Miwa’s hair.”

Hmmm, Susan wondered, does cutting his fucking head off count as mussing his hair?

“Doug, no entity under any possibility of my influence or under my direction has had anything to do with Yuichi Miwa. We looked at him from three miles up, that’s all. It couldn’t have been softer or more discreet. If anybody finds out, it’s because of a leak somewhere, nothing that I have done or caused to have done.”

“You’re sure?”

“I was going to eyeball him from upstairs another few times, just to make certain. Maybe I’d put some discreet feelers out. That’s it. I was just checking.”

Doug sat back. He looked immensely relieved.

“Okay, fine. Good. The man is not to be touched, even watched. He is to be utterly ignored.”

“Of course.”

“Strictly hands off. Do you understand?”

“Of course.”

“Until you figure out how to destroy him.”

“Ahhh—”

“That’s why they’re in such a frenzy at Langley. That’s what this is all about.”

He reached into his desk, pulled out a large folder wearing the usual TOP SECRET stamps across its top.

“The file on Miwa-san. It’s come to our attention that some years back, Miwa-san almost went under. He owed yakuza, he owed banks, the whole thing was going away. He convinced himself it was an American plot against him, that the mafia wanted to crack Japanese porn and to do so they had to destroy him. He was Japanese porn; he was Japan, for god’s sake. So he turned for help to the enemy of his enemies, the North Koreans; he told them if they helped him, his newspapers would always sing their song. They funded him. They can’t feed their own people, but they’re giving millions to a Japanese pornographer to produce DVDs the likes of which I can’t even begin to describe.”

“Teacher-blows-Johnny.”

“Thank you, Susan. I knew I could count on you. Anyhow, he turned it around, got in on the Internet early, found some disgusting niches, pushed the technological edge, made sharp investments, and became a major, major billionaire. So your boy’s sense of him may be right. We just have to coordinate all this and stay organized.”

“I have it.”

“Now he’s involved in some election for the king of pornography or something. It’s all in here. He’s got to win that election, he’s got to find some way to make himself an institution. He’s got to do something big, to get all the mucky-mucks and all the little people behind him.”

She just smiled a bit. Nick had it a week ago. He beat Langley’s bright boys by seven full days.

“If he wins, the next step will be the bestowal of something called the Supreme Order of the Chrysanthemum on him, Japan’s highest civilian honor. He’s had lobbyists pushing that in the Diet for months now.”

Now there was something new.

“That will have the impact of instantly legitimizing him, and it’ll gain him access, influence, and so forth. He’s a North Korean agent. He’ll be set to get them stuff on the Japanese and on us they’ve never gotten before.”

“Do the Japanese know this?”

“No. One of our listeners is in North Korea, and if we tell the Japanese, they will understand we have a good North Korean earhole. Then maybe someone finds that out from them. Do you see?”

“Of course.”

“Susan, make up for your bad judgment on Swagger and put it all behind you. This will take all your creativity and imagination. It’s your number one priority now: you must figure out a way to derail the Miwa express, but you must do it in a fashion that leaves no footprints to us. We must appear entirely innocent and uninvolved. But he has to go down before his big PR push makes him legit and the emperor gives him that award. You’ve got to somehow move through Japanese entities, perhaps in ways that they themselves won’t even recognize. It won’t be easy; you have somehow got to do it, Susan. Your job and my job depend on it.”

“What’s the time frame?” Susan asked.

“Well, you’ll need a week or so to recon and develop some sources, another to come up with an operating plan, we’ll have to get it approved, then you’ll have to staff it. You’ve got at least three months. No more. I know it’s hard, but sometimes we have to do the hard thing.”

“Okay,” said Susan, “suppose I can bring it off by…four thirty this afternoon?”

“What? Susan, this isn’t a joke. This isn’t—”

“Doug, do I look like I’m joking?”

“I—well, aren’t you overconfident?”

“Doug, you’re scheduled to rotate back to Langley in the spring. Are they going to bring in another stateside tool to be head of station?”

“Susan, that’s not fair.”

“Focus, Doug. Nothing personal, but I’m so tired of answering to tools. By four thirty today, Doug. All right? And then by five thirty you’ve sent the first of many, many wires in which you single me out for extraordinary praise and recommend to all your old-fart buddies I get head of station here. Do we have an understanding?”

“What do you know that—”

“Do we have an understanding?”

Actually, the announcement of Miwa Yuichi’s death of “natural causes” came at 3:25; she beat the deadline by an hour and five minutes.

47

NOTO

He came out of unconsciousness on the second day and floated through a semiconscious state, aware of bindings on many parts of his body, aware of the ceiling, of the occasional Japanese medical staffer, and the slow passage of time.

On the third day, he could sit upright, and some clarity and memory returned; on the fourth, more clarity, more memory. It was around then that his Japanese caretakers were subtly replaced by two clean-cut American boys, whom he took to be, on no evidence except that they called him Gunny, navy corpsmen working in mufti. They were good kids, though, and who knew from what secret installation they had been assigned.

On the fifth, his brain had settled enough so that he could watch the television. He quickly discovered a nation in—well, not exactly mourning but something like morbid fascination, perhaps, a sense of mass irony, perhaps, a secret pleasure in the tragedy of the other. This was occasioned by the sudden death of Yuichi Miwa, aka “the Shogun,” one of Japan’s leading geniuses of the silver screen, the porn billionaire, the founder of the aggressive Shogunate AV company, and later publisher, radio station owner, media mogul, playboy, and nationalist crusader.

Swagger watched without comment the coverage on bilingual TV news. The man, by rumors all but awarded the Supreme Order of the Chrysanthemum, had died suddenly of a stroke. Swagger was one of the few who knew whose stroke it was, and with which weapon it had been delivered. But watching, Swagger could tell: the Japanese weren’t that broken up about it, not really. Miwa was, after all, a pornographer. In any event, soon enough the news passed from attention.

He managed to gain access to a laptop, pulled up the Japan Times site, and got the articles from two days after his fight on the island. On the national page, he found the brief item he was looking for: an unknown body had been located in Kiyosumi Gardens, presumably a yakuza or someone who had run afoul of the yakuza, given the gravity of the cuts that had killed him. A police captain was quoted expressing concern that while the Brotherhood of the 8-9-3 was frequently violent, these crimes almost always took place in tenderloin areas such as Kabukicho; the captain worried that a corpse in the elegant, historical glades of Kiyosumi Gardens indicated some new phase in criminal culture.

There was no other coverage; no one visited him, no one asked for a debriefing, a statement, a comment, an account. He simply lay there, regathering his strength, reading newspapers, watching the tube, eating cold eggs, cucumber sandwiches, and many kinds of fish and cutlets.

A week into it, his wounds were checked, rebandaged, painkillers and more antibiotics provided, and then he was declared well enough to travel. The young men brought him a new suit, as well as his fraudulent passport under the name Thomas Lee.

“Gunny, I’m told that when you get to LAX, someone from State will meet you. He’ll ask you to surrender this passport. It’ll then disappear. I don’t know a thing about this, but they told me to tell you that Thomas Lee will also disappear.”

“Who’s ‘they’?”

“Oh, you know. The guys in the suits. That’s all I can say.”

“Got you, son.”

He got into his clothes and assembled his meager possessions—the passport, the United ticket for the flight scheduled for 7 p.m. that night. The keys to his bike were missing. It didn’t matter.

The hospital insisted on a wheelchair, and one of the corpsmen wheeled him, ridiculously, to the van, a tan, unmarked Ford. The cold air was like Boise in January. He climbed in slowly, using his uncut arm and his uncut leg for leverage.

“Got everything, Gunny?”

“Enough to get me back.”

“We’re off. We’ll get you there in plenty of time.”

Nobody talked on the long drive to Narita. It was essentially the second time he’d been ejected from Japan, and he knew he was lucky he wasn’t in prison. The traffic, the small, crowded neighborhoods, the driving ranges, all fled by unremarkably, and two hours later, the low, sleek hull of Narita’s No. 2 terminal came into view.

At the curbside, he got out, as did one of the corpsmen.

“Ben’s going to park the van. I hope you don’t mind, but we’re supposed to stay with you till you get beyond security.”

“Sure, you have a job to do, like everybody.”

That ordeal went smoothly. He checked in, displayed his passport, got his boarding pass—well, well, the flight was first class, so much easier—and the two young guys took him to security.

“This is always a pain,” he said. “I have a steel hip, so bells go off.”

“No problem,” said one of the kids. “We’ll help.”

“Look,” he said, “is this it?”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, nobody’s debriefed me, nobody’s taken a statement, nobody’s even asked any questions. I don’t know what happened to some people who were involved with me. There was a little girl who—”

“Gunny, we’re just pharmacist’s mates. We don’t make policy. This is the way they want it.”

“Them again.”

“Sorry, Gunny.”

“I just have to make sure this little girl is all right. I mean, she was just a kid.”

“I don’t have any information for you, Gunny. They didn’t say anything.”

“Oh…okay, okay.”

So he turned to security and this time, at least, the bell didn’t go off. Without ceremony he was through. He nodded at the boys across the rope line, and they nodded back but made no move to leave. As this was the only exit, clearly they were to stay until eight-ball Swagger had safely departed.

He walked toward the gate, skipping the mall area where, a few months ago, he’d so memorably fallen off the wagon. He felt—well, what? Not satisfied, not really. Old. His wounds hurt, his gait was stiff, he needed another painkiller, but at least he wasn’t on crutches or in some kind of a chair. He also felt oddly empty. The light was gray and somber, perfect for his mood: used up, useless, spent, irrelevant. Maybe even disappointed. Couldn’t put a finger on it. It was over, was all, back to the world, DEROS, all that good shit.

Till the end, he kept his hope up. Perhaps Okada-san would show up, perhaps she’d have Miko along and they could have a nice farewell chat. That way there’d be some finality to it, some sense of ending. But it didn’t happen and then the flight was called.

The blade flew against the scrub, bit hard and clean, and sent a sheaf of cuttings flying through the air, where a harsh wind sprayed them across the slope. Back and forth, back and forth, the scythe ate the brambles as Bob found his rhythm, leaning in, uncoiling lightly, and cutting.

He had to start over, of course. During the months in California and Japan, the slope had grown out. Now, under a lowering winter sky, you could hardly tell where he’d cut and where he hadn’t. This was his fourth day here, the air was raw and the wind sharp, but on some principle that he could not name, he had come back, taken up the scythe, and again laid into the long job.

“That is not what is eating you,” Julie said. “You don’t give a damn about that slope. Something is eating you alive. I can tell. You’d better get some help.”

“Sweetie, I am fine. I started a job, now I will finish it.”

“You should talk to someone about Japan. Maybe not me, maybe not anyone here in town, but a specialist. I have never seen you so low since the day you showed up in my front yard shot full of holes all those years ago. Bob, if you don’t deal with it, this’ll be the one that kills you.”

“Nothing bad happened in Japan,” he said. “Everyone says it was a big success, and that we got a job done. Now I am back, everything is fine, and I have this thing to do.”

“Yes, and you came home like you always do, tired and sad with a whole new set of scars. You only get scars like that in fights to the death. But it’s even worse than that. I can tell. Someone died, someone you cared about, and you don’t have any way to scream about it. Honey, you’ve got to find a place to scream.”

“There were some rough times. Yes, some people died. Nothing I could do about it, unfortunately. But that’s not it. I have to tell you, there’s a child I wanted so much to help. And I couldn’t, not really. So she’s lost. Not dead, just lost. That’s all. I’ll tell you more sometime, not now.”

“Well, I’m sorry. A child would be nice,” said Julie. “Liven this place up. I might even love a child. Tired of living with a grouchy bear, how much worse could a child be?”

Not even Nikki, who’d come home for a spell, could really get through to him.

“Something about a child that he didn’t want to talk about has him all hurting,” her mother said, “and he’s too goddamned stubborn to take a rest and get some help.”

“He’ll be all right. You know him. He comes back from everything.”

“But someday he won’t, and maybe that day has come.”

“No, he’s fine.” But even as she said it, she didn’t believe it: her father was somehow there/not there at once, as if a hole had been opened, then lightly covered over.

A child? What child could that be?

So the three lived in the nice house on the outskirts of Boise, and from a distance, everything seemed fine. The doting father, the handsome wife, the beautiful daughter, now and then in town at a fine restaurant or off to the movies. Why, it looked so fine; there was plenty of money and the three of them so bright and attractive you’d have thought, Those are America’s aristocrats, not of birth but of skill and strength. They are so blessed with health and courage and even some wealth and so proud of each other. They are the best we make.

He cut, he cut, he cut. First day was the worst. Each cut brought an increment of pain. His stamina was way down too, and he wasn’t as hard as he thought he’d be. He’d lost a lot. By the end of the first hour, he breathed hot and hard through dry lips. Over the next few days, it got a little better, and by the third day he stayed out even as a squall blew through, pelting him with ice particles.

It looked like today might bring more of the same, though the heat he’d raised was insulation against the rain and the cold. In the distance, of course, stood the mountains, dark to the point of purple, their peaks lost in the low strata. The prairies between them and him had turned yellow in the winter, dried out and cleansed of wheat or let simply go if they were only grass, so the whole earth had a yellowed, used, even dead feel to it. Yet it was so western: nothing at all looked like it could be of Japan or the East, just rolling hills and plains and the scars of the mountains lost in the dark clouds thirty miles to the east.

It was about four when he saw Nikki’s truck. What was that damned girl doing all the way out here? He’d driven her out to look at his land once late last summer, before all this, but she’d not returned since and there’d been no talk of a visit that morning or any other morning. He was surprised she even knew the place, for it involved a cutoff and a couple of unnamed back roads before it yielded the Swagger retirement property. Maybe she’d had a bitter fight with her mother and was pulling out early and stopped off for a good-bye. It had happened before.

Nikki’s truck pulled up at the foot of the slope, and Bob came down to greet her.

He could see his daughter in the driver’s seat, laughing. Then he saw she had a passenger, and the door opened and out climbed Susan Okada.

Something went off inside him; it might have been a sense of hope. He took a deep breath.

“Well, lookie here, the lady from the embassy.”

“Hello, Swagger. I had to come.”

“My god, it’s so great to see you!”

“You saved my life. I never thanked you.”

“You saved the child’s life. I never thanked you.”

“The child’s life is thanks enough.”

“Fair enough.”

“You deserve a report on how it all shook out.”

“I been wondering.”

“Well, to start with, the Japanese government clamped down on it right away. The fight, the deaths, never reported. No scandal. They got there and closed it all down. They don’t want it public.”

“It would take a lot of explaining.”

“And they don’t like to explain. But two days later, Major Fujikawa and Captain Tanada surrendered to the authorities.”

“Good lord!”

“Yeah. They felt they had to do it. Japanese thing, don’t ask.”

“What’s going to happen to them?”

“Not known yet. Depositions have been taken and all have been released on administrative leave while the government figures out what to do. You might think, eighteen men are dead, including a multibillionaire, huge deal. But seventeen of the eighteen are low-ranking yakuza who could have died in any of a hundred squalid ways and the eighteenth is Miwa. But dead, Miwa has no power, no heirs, no legacy. And it turned out he had some unsavory foreign connections that made him very problematic. Finally, the yakuza people don’t want to upset the working relationship for vengeance, since he wasn’t really one of them. I’m hoping that the whole thing will be brushed under the carpet. The Japanese are very good at brushing things under carpets.”

“Can you help the officers?”

“There’s not much I can do. Maybe it’ll work out. At least they won’t be ordered to commit seppuku.”

“That’s something. And how about you?”

“Well, it worked out to my advantage. Long story, still classified, but as I said, Miwa had some contacts that had lots of Agency people worried, and getting him out of the picture—well, you got him out of the picture—worked out to my benefit. I’m going to get a promotion. I’m the new queen.”

“You were born to be a queen, Okada-san. Glad I helped. Still, I have to ask about the child. Is she—Is she all right?”

“She’s better. She’s sleeping through the night.”

“I guess that’s the important thing. Still, I wish I had seen her one last time. There at the end, it was so crazy, I just lost sight of you and her. You just disappeared. It was so sudden.”

“I got her back to my place and then we got her back into the system. She’s safe now.”

“I just hate the thought of her in that hospital.”

“She’s not there anymore.”

“Oh, they found someone to take her? Well, ain’t that nice. I suppose that’s all for the best.”

“She went on a long trip.”

“She went to gaijin?”

“There was no one left in Japan. We had to look hard to find someone to love her.”

“I hope it’s a good family.”

“I know it’s a good family, Swagger-san. Nikki!”

She called, and Nikki climbed out of the truck, delighted, holding a wrapped but lively bundle that twisted in her arms mischievously, and he recognized Miko.

She looked over at Swagger and her eyes filled with something.

“Miko, it’s the Tin Man. He came and rescued you. He helped you so much.”

The child looked at him, then buried her shy eyes in Nikki’s chest, then found the courage to look again, decided it was okay, and smiled.

“Hi, there, sweetie,” he said. “Don’t you look swell today? Oh, you’re a peach, I’ll say.”

“Here, give her a hug,” Nikki said, handing the child over.

She squeezed him, he squeezed her.

“It’s so nice to see you,” he said to her, now worried that his daughter and Okada-san might see him cry. Big guys don’t cry, it was a rule.

“It’s so nice that she’s here.”

He was trying to put it together. Somehow Okada-san had taken charge of the child and was bringing her—well, where?

“You say that now, but maybe you’ll change tunes in fifteen years when she brings home a boyfriend with fishhooks in his eyebrows,” Okada-san said.

“What?”

“It’s very tough for a foreigner to adopt a kid in Japan, but it turned out that Miko tragically fit all the criteria. When I found that out, I couldn’t just leave it alone. So I went to the ambassador, who went to the prime minister, and maybe someone whispered something in someone’s ear about certain behind-the-scene occurrences. Anyway, there’s still paperwork to catch up on and some pro forma interviews, but everybody concerned thought it was better to get her over here sooner rather than later and play catch-up on the other stuff. Swagger-san, say hello to your new daughter.”

“Oh, god,” said Bob, “I don’t believe this.”

“Mom is so excited!” said Nikki. “She’s out buying a child’s bed and toys and the whole shebang.”

“Okay, sweetie,” said Bob, holding his child closer, “it’s time to go home.”

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Readers of the entire Swagger saga will see that the account of Earl’s heroics on Iwo Jima, even as to date and unit, have evolved slightly from previous accounts. As I have progressed through what has become a life’s work, I keep encountering small areas where the joinery between volumes is untidy, and I can only plunge ahead, correcting or reinterpreting as I go. I count on your goodwill to understand that such awkwardnesses are unavoidable and make a promise that if I can ever convince a publisher to negotiate the complicated rights (among the issues: a trilogy in which each volume was issued by a different publisher!) and put the whole thing together in a uniform set, I’ll try and reconcile all such annoyances.

I must also say that the great Musashi, oft-quoted here, said many provocative things about the art of the sword, but “Steel cuts flesh / steel cuts bone / steel does not cut steel” was not one of them. It was Hunter who said that, sitting in his third-floor office in Baltimore, Maryland.

This is another way of pointing out that no reader should impute to me any deep knowledge of the way of the sword. I’m a writer, not a samurai; I tell stories, I don’t cut enemies down. My weapon of choice is the adjective, not the katana. I based my accounts of sword encounters mainly on secondary sources, a slew of texts, and dozens of DVDs of samurai films, high and low. I took sword-cut terminology from Shinkeudo: Japanese Swordsmanship by Toshishiro Obata. Devotees will possibly be upset that I’ve mixed kendo and combat terms in my quest to give the encounters a different feel; send angry e-mails to Hunter-doesn’tcare@aol.com.

I relied on friends for support and encouragement. My old pal Lenne Miller gave me the advantage of his insightful enthusiasm; Gary Goldberg did as much, plus Gary—the world’s most advanced networker!—set me up with Dr. David Fowler, the medical examiner of the state of Maryland, who gave me an hour of his time to discuss the biomechanics of sword cuts, very helpful in a book as bloody as this one. My pal and hunting pard and former collaborator John Bainbridge gave me the gift of his great eye for proofreading. Jeff Weber, way out in California, was uniformly enthusiastic and had a number of extremely useful insights I was happy to incorporate into the text. James Grady, great navigator of the Condor and a Washington fixture, also was a shrewd and helpful early reader, as was Jay Carr, the former film critic of the Boston Globe, who in retirement has become a Washington screening-room regular and a good and valuable friend.

Bob Beers continues to maintain the unofficial Stephen Hunter website, there being no official one. What he gets out of it, I’ll never know, certainly nothing from me, but he’s made it into something solid. Check it out at Stephenhunter.net. Thanks again, Bob. Alan Doelp, as always, was an invaluable advisor on computer issues.

In the world of the Washington Post four colleagues gave of themselves to my advantage. The great Kunio Francis Tanabe, retired after forty years on Book World, advised me on Japanese names and gave the manuscript a close reading. He also wrote Hideki Yano’s death poem, after pointing out that my version wouldn’t pass muster in Japan. Anthony Faiola, the Post’s brilliant Tokyo correspondent, looked into and then briefed me on the structure of the porno business and its various governing bodies in today’s Japan. Finally, Tomoeh Murikami Tse took the trouble to render an early version of the death poem into kanji. Paul Richard plied me with Japanese art books. I’m greatly indebted to all of them.

Finally, late in the process when news of the book’s publication had somehow reached the Internet, I received an e-mail from Mark Schreiber, a freelance writer, translator, and all-around man-about-town who has lived in Tokyo since 1965. Among his many accomplishments, he is the organizing genius behind the Tabloid Tokyo books, which compile some of the zanier tales of the Tokyo weeklies for American readers. Mark volunteered to read the manuscript for accuracy in all those little areas through which Hunter sometimes dozes, and there were times when it seemed to me he was working harder than I was. One weekend he went to Kabukicho on a scouting trip, found the ideal spot for Kondo Isami to test his blade, measured it, photographed it, mapped it, then e-mailed it to me. That same weekend, I drank, watched football on TV, slept, and of course drank. Moreover, he caught dozens of mistakes of the sort that would have deeply annoyed readers who were more familiar with Tokyo than I was after a two-week trip. I should also point out that mistakes that remain are not Mark’s fault or any of my other contributors’, but my own entirely. As I said before, angry e-mails may be sent to Hunterwon’trespond@aol.com.

I should mention my professional colleagues as well, all of whom were enthusiastic and supportive throughout: Michael Korda and David Rosenthal of Simon & Schuster, and my agent, Esther Newberg, of ICM.

Let me broadly thank the Japanese themselves for being so damned interesting. I must make special mention of my three muses, Sakura Sakarada, Yui Seto, and Shiho. The dedication page expresses my profound gratitude to the artists of the theory and practice of samurai on the screen. I should say, also, that in a certain way those movies saved my mind. The origin of this book, for anyone interested, was a personal depression in my life as a professional film critic, when American movies seemed to have reached a new low. In this morass of mediocrity, I saw Yoji Yamada’s great Twilight Samurai and was instantly reborn. That set me off on a two-year samurai movie rampage (interrupted by American Gunfight) and the obsession took its final form in the idea of writing a samurai novel set in the era of warring clans. Being smart enough to realize that a novel set then by a gaijin who’d seen too many movies wasn’t the soundest of ideas—what would you call it, Memoirs of a Samurai?—so I tried to figure out a way to fuse samurai issues and fighting styles with a traditional American thriller. The result you hold in your hand.

Finally, I must thank my wife, Jean Marbella, the world’s greatest trouper. She’s lived patiently for a year among swords, samurai movies, books on sword fighting, sword making, sword polishing, and sword collecting, all in piles spread randomly throughout the house and seldom policed. Never complained, never whined, and even pretended to be interested in sword fighting and yakuza. What a gal.

NIGHT OF THUNDER

ALSO BY STEPHEN HUNTER

The 47th Samurai

American Gunfight (with John Bainbridge, Jr.)

Now Playing at the Valencia: Pulitzer Prize Essays on the Movies

Havana

Pale Horse Coming

Hot Springs

Time to Hunt

Black Light

Dirty White Boys

Point of Impact

Violent Screen: A Critic’s 13 Years on the Front Lines of Movie Mayhem

Target

The Day Before Midnight

The Spanish Gambit (Tapestry of Spain)

The Second Saladin

The Master Sniper

SIMON & SCHUSTER

1230 Avenue of the Americas

New York, NY 10020

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 2008 by Stephen Hunter

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information, address Simon & Schuster Subsidiary Rights Department, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020.

SIMON & SCHUSTER and colophon are registered trademarks of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Hunter, Stephen

Night of thunder: a Bob Lee Swagger novel / Stephen Hunter.

p. cm.

1. Swagger, Bob Lee (Fictitious character)—Fiction. 2. Vietnam War, 1961–1975—Veterans—Fiction. 3. Marines—Fiction. 4. Snipers—Fiction. 5. Fathers and daughters—Fiction. 6. Automobile Racing—Fiction. 7. Tennessee—Fiction. I. Title.

PS3558.U494N54 2008

813'.54—dc22

2008017856

ISBN-13: 978-1-4165-6615-1

ISBN-10: 1-4165-6615-5

Visit us on the World Wide Web:

http://www.SimonSays.com

For my daughter, Amy, as the wonderful person she is,

but also as the symbol for the young American reporter

Speed is of the essence

—ANONYMOUS

PART I

PRELIMS

ONE

Brother Richard liked it loud. He punched the iPod up all the way until the music hammered his brain, its force beating away like some banshee howl from the high, dark mountains hidden behind the screen of rushing trees. He was holding at eighty-five miles per hour, even through the turns, though that took a surgeon’s skill, a miracle of guts and timing. The music roared.

Sinnerman, where you gonna run to?

Gonna run to the sea

Sea won’t you hide me?

Run to the sea

Sea won’t you hide me?

But the sea it was aboilin’

All on that day

It was that old-time religion, fierce and haunted, harsh, unforgiving. It was Baptist fire and brimstone, his father’s fury and anguish, it was Negroes in church, afeared of the flames of hell, it was the roar of a hot, primer-gray V8 ’Cuda in the night, as good old boys in sheets raised their own particular kind of hell, driven by white lightning or too much Dixie or too much hate, it was the South arising under the red snapping of the flag of the Confederacy.

He rode the corner perfectly, left-footing the brake and coming off it at the precise moment so that he came out of the hairpin at full power. It was late, it was dark, it was quiet, except of course for the thunder of the engine. His right foot involuntarily pressed pedal to metal and the car leapt forward, breaching the century mark, now 110, now 120, right at death’s edge, right near to and within spitting distance of oblivion, and he loved it, a crack in the window seal sending a torrent of air to beat his hair.

Sinnerman, where you gonna run to?

Gonna run to the moon

Moon won’t you hide me?

Run to the moon

Moon won’t you hide me?

But the moon it was ableedin’,

All on that day

A climb and then a sudden turn. It was Iron Mountain, and 421 slashed crookedly up its angry hump. He hit brake, felt the car slide, saw the great whiz of dust white in the headlamp beams as he slipped to shoulder, felt the grit as the stilled tires fought the gravel and ripped it free, but the skid was controlled, never close to loss, and as the car slowed, he downshifted to second, lurched ahead and caught the angle of the turn just right, pealing back across the asphalt and leaving the dust explosion far behind as he found the new, perfect vector and powered onward into the night.

If you thought you were in the presence of a young prince of the South, high on octane and testosterone and the beat of an old and comforting spiritual, you’d be wrong. Brother Richard was by no means young; he was a thin, ageless man with a curiously dead face—a recent surgery had remolded his physiognomy into something generally bland and generic—and he was well enough dressed to pass for a preacher or a salesman or a dentist, in a gray suit, white shirt, and black tie, all neat, all cheap, straight off the rack at Mr. Sam’s big store near the interstate. You’d never look at him and see the talent for driving that was so special to his being, or the aggression that fueled it, or the hatred that explained the aggression, or the bleakness of spirt and utter capability, or even his profession, which was that of assassin.

“Nikki Swagger, girl reporter.” It was funny, it was corny, but she liked it and smiled whenever she conjured it to mind.

Nikki Swagger, girl reporter. It was true enough. Nikki, twenty-four, was the police reporter for the Bristol Courier-Herald, of Bristol, TN/VA. “TN/VA” was an odd construction, and its oddity expressed an odd reality: The newspaper served a single city set in two entities, half in the Volunteer State, half in the Old Dominion State. The border ran smack through the city, a burg of one hundred thousand set in the southernmost reaches of the Shenandoah Valley, where one state became another. It was horse country, it was farm country, it was quarry country, but most of all, and especially this time of year, it was NASCAR country. Race week was coming and soon one of Tennessee’s smaller cities would become one of its larger as three hundred fifty thousand citizens of NASCAR nation—some would call it Budweiser nation—came to town for the Sharpie 500 a week and days away, one of the premier Sprint Cup events on the circuit. Nikki couldn’t wait!

But for now, Nikki drove her Volvo down Tennessee’s State Route 421 from Mountain City, Johnson County’s county seat, twenty-odd miles out of Bristol. She drove carefully as the road wound down the slope of a mountain called Iron, switchbacking this way and that to eat up the steep elevation. She knew she had to be wary, for it was full dark, visibility was limited—sometimes interstate rigs came piling up on the verge of chaos and hurt, taking a shorter, emptier route at night between podunk destinations—and to her life was still one great adventure and she wanted to enjoy every single second of it.

She checked the speedometer and saw she was under forty, which seemed about right, and the world beyond her windshield consisted of two cones of light which illuminated the next 250 or so feet, a narrow ribbon on asphalt, and curves that came and went with breathtaking abruptness. She was an excellent driver, possibly because she’d studied the nature of vehicles in space so assiduously in her western girlhood where, besides horses, she’d spent years in tough-as-nails go-karting and had the medals and scars to prove it, as well as several roomfuls of trophies and ribbons and photos of herself. The girl in the pictures was beautiful as always but equally as always slightly disheveled, and usually posed in a caged car about quarter-size. In the pictures always were her mother, a handsome, fair woman who looked as if she stepped out of a Howard Hawks movie and should have been named Slim, and her father, whose military heritage seemed inscribed in the leather of a Spartan shield that comprised the perpetually tanned hide of his smileless face.

Down the mountain she went at a carefully controlled and agilely sustained forty per, her mind alight with possibility. She’d been in the county seat all day and talked to dozens of people, the subject being her specialty as a crime reporter, methamphetamine issues. Meth—called “crystal,” called “ice,” called “killer dust,” called “purple death,” called “angel breath,” called the “whispering crazies,” called whatever—haunted Johnson County, Tennessee, as it haunted most of rural America. It was cheap, it was more or less easily made (though it did have a tendency to explode in the kitchen labs of the trailers and shacks where it was manufactured), and it hit like a sledgehammer. People loved the first few minutes of the high, and didn’t remember the last few minutes, where they put their newborn—in the oven or down the well or just on the clothesline. They didn’t remember beating their spouse to death with a hoe or a brick, or wandering down the interstate, shotgun in hand, shooting at those strange things roaring by that turned out to be cars. People got themselves in a whole mess of trouble on meth. Not after every usage but often enough so that lots of ugliness happened. She’d seen families sundered, hideous crimes, law enforcement compromised by the abundant profit, dealers shot or slashed to death in alleyways or cornfields, the whole spectrum of big city dope woe played out in no-name towns the New York Times had never heard of and no movies had ever been made about. She was the scourge’s scribe, its Homer, its Melville, its Stephen Crane, even if no one had ever heard of her, either.

As she drove, she puzzled over several eccentricities her daylong trip had uncovered. The nominal reason for the trip was to go on a meth raid with Sheriff Reed Wells, the ex-Ranger officer who’d returned home to clean up the county, as the saying went, and who had talked the Justice Department into leaning on the Department of Defense and had somehow acquired a much-beaten but still-viable Blackhawk helicopter to permit scouting and airborne tactical consideration. In fact, she’d spent the morning airborne, sitting next to the handsome fellow, as he maneuvered his troops down brushy mountain paths, and coordinated a neat strike on a rusting trailer, which in fact did turn out to house a small-scale meth lab. Nikki had seen the culprit, a down-on-his-luck mountaineer named Cubby Holden, arrested, his apparatus hauled out into the yard and smashed by husky young deputies dressed up like Tommy Tactical action figures. They loved every second of the game, leaving behind a sallow woman, two wormy kids, and a hell of a mess in the yard.

A typical triumph for Sheriff Wells, yet the problem was that meth prices, despite his many strategic successes, stayed stable in the Tri-cities area. (The second and third cities along with Bristol were Johnson City—oddly, not a part of Johnson County—and King-sport.) She knew this from interviews with addicts at a state rehab clinic in Mountain City. Kid told her he paid thirty-five dollars a hit yesterday and two years ago, it was thirty-five dollars a hit.

Now how could this be? Maybe there were a lot more labs out there than anybody knew. Maybe there was some kind of protected superlab. Maybe some southern crime family was running the stuff in from other places.

Then she heard a strange rumor, thought nothing of it, picked it up again, and had a few hours before dark. It held that someone in the mountains was shooting up the night. Lots of ammo being burned, blasting away, somewhere down old Route 167 before it connected with the bigger, newer 61. Now what could that be? Would that be the famous super meth lab, hidden in some hollow, invisible from the sky, its security so professionally run it demanded its own set of Tommy Tacticals to handle perimeter duties and work out with their submachine guns every night?

Rumor suggested that it lay in the pie of land around the nexus of the 67–167 routes, and, night still being a bit off, she’d poked around there finding nothing except some kind of Baptist prayer camp nesting behind a NO TRESPASSING sign that she ignored and, upon arrival, encountered a Colonel Sanders in a powder blue Wal-Mart suit who gave her a free Bible and tried to get her to stay for supper. She skipped the food, but driving back down the dusty road to the highway—

It was just a piece of cardboard, trapped by a snarl of weeds and held at a peculiar angle so the sun happened to light it, yielding a color not found in forests in steamy Augusts as well as right angles, not found in any forest, ever. Her eye caught it. So she stopped and plucked it up. Something in it was familiar. It was something official looking, military, at least governmental—equipment, ammo, something like that. The scrap was torn, rent by being crushed by passing vehicles, but as her father was a noted shooter and always had boxes of weird stuff around, she knew what this sort of thing could mean, though only a bit of official print was still legible on the scrap.

But then she was disappointed, as all thoughts of ammunition and explosives vanished. She thought it might be biblical, something Baptist, for it also carried religious connotations. It had been bisected in its rough passage to its nest in the leaves, and only a few symbols remained on the piece. Who knew what started the inscription, but it ended in “k 2:11,” though with dirt splashes and spots and crumples she wasn’t sure about the colon. But it made her think instantly of Mark 2:11. Bullet or Bible? Weirdly, both. She remembered the crazed Waco standoff of her youth, the gunfight, the siege, the fire-and-brimstone ending. That was something that somehow combined both bullets and Bibles. Maybe that dynamic was in play here, for the world in many places had not grown beyond killing on what was believed to be God’s say-so. On the other hand: It’s just a scrap of cardboard by the road, that’s all it is, it could have blown in and ended up here a million different ways. Maybe it’s just a function of my imagination, the reporter’s distressing tendency to see more than what’s there. She tucked it in the Bible that the old Baptist minister had pressed upon her so it wouldn’t get lost or crumpled in her briefcase and drove off in search of answers.

But a local gun store, run by a bitter old man who’d turned skank mean after a bit, was of no help, so she set about her drive home.

But now she thought: My dad will know.

Her dad knew stuff. He was a great fighter, once a famous marine, and more recently had gone away for a while a few times and then come back, always sadder, sometimes with a new scar or two. But he had a talent—and in this world it was a valuable talent—and the core of it was that he knew a certain thing or two in a certain arcane subject area. He wasn’t reliable on politics or movies—hated ’em all—but he was superb in nature, could read land, wind, and sky, could track and hunt with anyone, and in the odd, sealed little world of guns and fighting with them he was the rough equivalent of a rock star. Never talked about it. Now and then she’d catch him just staring off into space, his face grave, as he remembered a lifetime of near misses or wounds that healed hard and slow. But then he shook off his pain and became funny and outrageous again. And she knew that other men respected him in almost mythical ways, because what so many of them dreamed of, he’d actually pulled off, even if the details remained unspecific. After his last absence, he’d returned with, among other things, a bad limp from being laid open across the hip and not stitched for several hours, and an incurable depression. Or so she thought. And then the depression was miraculously cured in a single afternoon when a Japanese-American civil servant had delivered…a new little sister. Miko. Adorable, insatiable, graceful, full of love and adventure. The family atmosphere lightened immeasurably, and the family condition became extreme happiness, even if, over two weeks, the old man’s hair went from a glossy brown to a gunmetal gray, and aged him ten or twenty years.

So her dad would know.

She pulled off the road, not wanting to have the cell in her hand when a truck full of logs or canned goods came barreling up the other lane off a blind turn. She got the cellular out of her purse, the car’s engine idling, the silence of a dark mountain forest all around her. She picked up the Bible and plucked the scrap out, holding it in one hand so she could describe it.

The phone rang and rang and rang until it finally produced her father’s recorded voice: “This is Swagger. Leave a message, but I probably won’t call you back.”

His sense of humor. Not everybody found it funny.

“Hey, Pop, it’s me. Call me right away. I have a question.”

Where was he? Probably sitting around with a crew of marine buddies, laughing to hell and gone about master sergeants from another century, or possibly out with Miko, teaching her to ride as he had taught Nikki to ride.

So she’d have to wait. Or would she? She put the scrap back in the Bible, pulled out her laptop, along in case she had to file remotely. The question, would there be a network out here? And the answer was—ta da!—yes. Wireless was everywhere!

She went to Google and pumped in “k 2:11” and waited as the magic inside hunted down k 2:11s the world over and sent the information back through blue glow to her. Hmm, nothing in any way connected to her issue. So she went to Mark 2:11 and got Mark’s words, which made no sense to her. Context. You have to have context.

Arrgh, nothing. She wanted a cigarette but had been trying to quit.

But then she thought of her good friends from Brazil who were taking over the world.

She requested Amazon.com, and instantly that empire responded.

A few tries at k 2:11 yielded nothing except some technical gibberish, a book on Russian submarines, another on World War II ships called corvettes.

Next she tried to work the bullet angle, just in case, and went to “Cartridges” and got a lot of info, maybe too much. After scanning its contents courtesy of the Amazonians, she settled on a book, The History of Sniping and Sharpshooting, because it seemed to offer the broadest overview of the subject, then hit the one-touch purchase option so that it would arrive soon. That was stupid. Her dad would call well before then, and explain all. Still, it made her feel that she had done something positive.

She put the laptop away and checked this way and that for traffic, preparing to edge onto the asphalt. She’d be home in an hour. Another day, another dollar for Nikki Swagger, girl reporter—whoa!

Some redneck in a low black car came whipping by, faster than light or sound. Man, was the guy crazy or what? She’d never seen a car move like that, a blur, a low hum, a whisper of streamline and chrome, there and gone and then vanished forever. Was it a dream, a vision, something out of a nightmare?

It scared her. Not that these hills were haunted or anything, but you could convince yourself of anything looking at fog-shrouded hollows, hairpin turns, the dark carpeting of trees leading up to unseen peaks, the networks of roads leading off to NO TRESPASSING signs and God-knows-what-else up them. There were rumors of militia out here or some gang of outriders or Klansmen or White Supremacists or some such. There was the business about shooters, blazing away in the night, an army of righteousness getting ready for its conquest. This guy in his muscle car bolting along over a hundred miles an hour could have been an emissary from any of them.

No, she told herself. Some kid, too much beer, he thinks he’s some NASCAR hero, these people love their drivers, that’s what a kid’s fancy would turn to. She half-believed that in the next twenty miles she’d come across the low, black speed merchant on its side, bleeding flame in a pulse of red light, as the emergency service vehicles circled it and their crews tried to pull the hero, now a crispy critter, his soul in heaven, from the flames.

She shivered. Then she slipped into gear and pulled out.

He saw her. It was in a haze of speed, but he made out the Volvo and a young woman’s face caught in the glow of dash light. She’d pulled aside on the right, nestling under trees, and had been working at some task, some continuation of the curiosity that had doomed her. He saw in that flash of light a beautiful young face and he knew how close it was, he was running out of mountain road, and she’d be a much harder kill without an iron wall of trees to drive her into on her right side.

Why had he looked to the right at that moment? Who knew? It was the Sinnerman’s luck, and even the Sinnerman got lucky once in a while. He slowed to eighty, then found a wayside, pulled over more deeply, to await her.

Brother Richard punched the iPod and ran through his Sinnerman options again, beginning with the Travelers 3, going to the pure gospel of the Reverend Seabright Kingly and His Hebrew Chorus (that was funky!) and on to the personality-free Seekers. Then to Les Baxter’s balladeer, winding through the high-boring purity of Shelby Flint, and finishing up with the arrhythmic, antimelodic approach of Sixteen Horsepower. All interesting, with the Travelers 3 maybe the truest folk esthetic, the Balladeer the highest show-biz, and the Reverend the fanciest old–Negro church version, almost unrecognizable for all the hooting and shrilling.

Brother Richard knew himself proudly to be the Sinnerman. He would do the wrong. I can live with the wrong. I exult in the wrong, he thought. I define the wrong. I am the wrong. It could have turned out different, but it turned out this way.

He waited as the music roared in his ear. And finally, she came by him on the lonely road, not seeing him pulled off to the side, her placid, little, sensible Volvo trimly purring along at less than forty. He could see that she was tense behind the wheel, for he saw her body hunched forward to the wheel, her neck tight and straight, her head abnormally still, her hands rigid at ten and two on the wheel. She was worried about the road, about the possibility of a big truck coming up from behind her or barreling widely and wildly around a turn.

But she wasn’t worried about the Sinnerman. In her version of the world, there was no Sinnerman. She had no concept of the Sinnerman and no idea of what was about to befall her.

Almost out of these damned mountains. Then a short, flat run across the floor of Shady Valley, a last splurge of hills, and then Sullivan County, civilization, as 421 took her back to Bristol, to her apartment, to a nice glass of wine.

Then Nikki saw death.

It was a blur in her mirror, just a shadow as no details presented themselves. Then it was a blur in her driver’s-side window, growing exponentially by the nanosecond, full of thrust and empty of mercy. It was death in a dark car, come to snuff her out.

No one had ever tried to kill Nikki before. But she had her father’s blood in her veins and more importantly his DNA, which meant she had reflexes fast as her killer’s, and she wasn’t by nature turned toward fear or panic. The car hit her hard, the noise filled the universe and knocked her askew, toward trees which rushed at her, signaling catastrophe as her tires bit against the skittish dust. Then she did what one person in ten thousand will do in those circumstances and she did it at a speed that has no place in time, out of certitude for correct behavior at the extremes.

She did nothing. She let the car correct itself as its wheels reoriented swiftly. She had control again.

Most, seeing trees or cliff rushing at them, will overcorrect, and when they do that the laws of physics, immutable and merciless, mandate a roll. The roll is death. The neck and its thin stalk of spine can’t take the g-force and sunder under the extreme vibration. Cessation of consciousness and life signs is immediate, and whether the wreck is in flames or not, further body trauma, broken bones, sundered blood-bearing organs, whatever, is immaterial. She didn’t know that the Sinnerman, with his experience in automotive assassination, had presumed she would yank the wheel for life, guaranteeing death, and was surprised as she rode the bump out, got soft control, and then accelerated, half on road, half on gravel, to escape his predation.

He hit her again, in the rear-third of the accelerating Volvo, knocking her fishtailing off the road in a screech of dust. But she didn’t panic at the wheel and hard-spin it this time either (sure death), but instead let it spin free and find its own proper vector as she scooted just ahead of him. He pulled himself left, drew off, set up for another thump, this one better aimed.

Nikki was not scared. Fright is imagination combined with anticipation combined with dread, and none of those conditions described her. Instead, she accepted instantaneously that she was in a fight to the death with a trained, experienced killer, and she didn’t waste any concentration on the unfairness of it all. Instead, she pushed the pedal so hard to the floor of the car that she felt the beginning of g-force, though of course the Volvo 240 with its 200-horsepower six-cylinder was no match for the muscled-up Chrysler barn-burner under her antagonist’s foot. But as he struggled to find an angle, she put surprising space between the vehicles and yet was astute enough to see in supertime a turn approaching. So now she finally braked, softly turning into a power slide that would get her around the turn at the best angle and set her up for another dead-on acceleration the hell out of there, if such a thing were possible, and it probably wasn’t.

Damn, she was good! As she control-skidded around the turn in a whine of rubber fighting for purchase of asphalt, Brother Richard saw his opening and, instead of veering outside of her, he bravely cut inside to begin his surge. His professional-quality cornering, as opposed to her gifted amateur approach, won him the inside where she didn’t expect him to be. As she tried to float back into the proper lane, he revved beyond redline, closed that off from her, and delivered his blow to the front fender of her right-hand side, not so much a thud as a nudge to push her out of equilibrium. But now, damnit, she figured this one out too, and jammed hard on her brakes, pumping the wheel as she skidded left.

The world spun before Nikki, racing across her windshield, pure abstraction in the cone of the one headlamp that still burned, and she nursed the brake pedal with a delicate foot while merely making suggestions to the wheel, which kept her in a semblance of control as she stopped, alas, to find herself one-eightied in the other direction. She was now facing the dangerous rising linkage of switchbacks up Iron Mountain that she’d just survived. So she punched it hard, jammed on the brakes as he came by her a third time (how had he gotten around so fast!), somehow got through a reverse right-hand, backing turn at a speed at which such a maneuver should never be conceived of, much less attempted, and again punched hard.

But he beat her, somehow, to possession of the road, and this time he hit her, rode her hard right. He turned, and she saw his face in the glare of the dash, its plainness, its evenness of feature, its dull symmetry, its almost generic quality, like the father of Dick in a Dick and Jane; it burned into her mind. And then she was off the road, out of control among the trees, and the world was jerking left and right, hard as the car slammed against or glanced off the trees. She felt her neck screaming, her head flopping this way and that, and then she hit, and everything stopped.

TWO

It happened so fast, two weeks. His hair went straight to winter from summer, with no autumnal pause. It didn’t thin, it didn’t fall out, it just veered off to dull gray. He looked ancient, or so he thought.

It was a memory that did it. He had recently had an actual sword fight to the death—in the twenty-first century, in one of the most modern cities on earth—with a Japanese gentleman of infinitely superior skill and talent. Yet he had won. He had killed the other man, left him cut through the middle in a mushy field of sherbet snow, turned magenta by the man’s own blood.

Bob thought often: Why did I win? I had no right to win. I was…so lucky. I was so goddamned lucky. It was like a worm, gnawing at his heart. You lucky bastard. Why did I luck out and that guy end up guts out in the snow?

Not that Swagger had escaped intact. The guy had laid him open to steel bone at the hip, and he’d gone too long before stitches saved his life. It never healed right, and he didn’t help by denying so fiercely that there was a problem. Somehow his leg stiffened, as if the tide of blood that the stitching dammed was still there, coagulating and about to break out in a red ocean spray and bleed him to death. Killer’s revenge. But the killer had also, as another part of his revenge, turned him comical, with one of those weird bounces in his gait. Could still ride, could still walk, couldn’t really run much. No talent at all for climbing. A motorcycle saved his life by giving him the illusion of freedom that had once been his strongest attribute.

“I look a hundred and fifty,” he’d said, just that morning.

“You don’t look a day aver one hundred forty-five,” his wife said. “Honey, look at Daddy, he’s turned white.”

“Daddy’s a snowman,” shouted the little girl, Miko, now seven, delighted to find a flaw in a hero so awesome as her strange, white father. “Snowman, snowman, snowman!”

“It’s gray, it’s gray,” Bob protested. Then he added, “I know someone’s going to find her ride cut short she don’t stop calling Daddy a snowman.” But the tone revealed the fraudulence of the threat, for it was his pleasure to spoil his daughters and then take pride in how well they turned out anyway.

He was a rich man. Rich in land—he now owned six lay-up barns in three western states, two in Arizona, two here in Idaho, and one each in Colorado and Montana, and was looking at property in Kansas and Oregon—and rich in pension from the United States Marine Corps. He was rich in homes, as he owned this beautiful, recently finished place sixty miles out of Boise, on land he’d cleared himself that looked across green prairie emptiness to blue scars of mountains under piles of cumulus cotton against a blue diamond sky. He was rich in wife, for Julie was handsome, a character out of a Howard Hawks movie, one of those tawny, feline women who never got excited, had a low voice, and was still sexy as hell. And he was richest of all in daughters.

He had two. Nikki was a graduate of the Columbia School of Journalism and now working her first newspaper job in Bristol, Virginia, a place her father liked a lot more than the New York City where she’d spent the last year. He felt she’d be a lot safer in the small city right smack on the Virginia-Tennessee border. Meanwhile, his adopted daughter, Miko, had taken to western life without a hitch, and quickly became comfortable around horses, the messes that they made, the smells that they generated. She loved them, took to them automatically, and it thrilled her father to see such a tiny thing so relaxed atop such a giant thing, and controlling it so confidently, making it love and obey her. The kid was already earning blue ribbons in Eventing and might even overtake her big sister, who’d been a national champion in that sport two years running when she was a teenager.

Now it was morning, and since it was August there was no school for Miko, so they were doing what they loved: the girl on her horse, Sam, and her father watching her canter gently about the ring. But he was not dominating. For while that had been his way as a marine NCO, it was not his way with his daughter. He leaned on the fence, and you’d have thought, There’s a cool cowboy type of fellow. His jeans were tight, framing his lanky legs; he wore a horseman’s slouch and sucked on a weed. He was all cowboyed up—the Tony Lamas boots muddy but solid, a blue, denim shirt, a red handkerchief around his neck, for it gets hot in Idaho in August, and a straw Stetson to keep the sun off his face.

It really couldn’t have been more perfect, always a signal that disturbance lurks not far away.

“Easy, sweetie,” he called, “you don’t want to force him. You have to feel him, and when he’s ready, he’ll let you know.”

“I know, Daddy,” she called back. She rode eastern, on the snooty, Brit postage stamp of a saddle, with erect posture, a crop in her hand, tall, low-heeled boots, and of course a helmet. She was equally adept with the big western rigs that were like boats upon a horse’s plunging back, but both Bob and Julie agreed that she would eventually go to school in the East, that she should have riding skills set for that part of the country, and, on top of that, they wanted to keep her out of rodeos, where too many young gals flocked because they liked the string-bean boys who rode like hell and bounced up with a smile when they went for a sail in the air and a thump in the dirt. Though with Miko, maybe it would be something else. Maybe it would be to actually do some crazy rodeo thing, like leave a perfectly good cow pony for a ride on a bull’s horns.

“She’ll probably end up the women’s bull-dog champion of Idaho, but still you’ve got to try,” he told his wife.

“If she does, she’ll have to put up with a screaming nag of an old lady every damn day,” Julie said.

So far, so good—Miko had a rhythm and a patience that even a generally stoic animal like a horse could feel and love. She had magical ways, or so Bob believed, and he would have gladly given up the other hip—or anything—for Miko.

Gracefully, she took a jump, without a twitch to her posture, a tightness to her spine, a twist to her landing.

“That was a good one, sweetie,” he called.

“I know, Daddy,” she responded, and he smiled a bit, wiped his brow, then looked up at a flash of movement too fast for good news and saw Julie coming from the house. He knew immediately something was wrong. Julie never got upset; she’d stitched up enough cut-open Indian boys on the reservation where she’d run a clinic for ten years, and kept her head around blood and pain and emotional upheaval and the occasional death. So if she was upset, Bob knew immediately it could be only one thing: his other daughter, Nikki.

“Sweetie,” he called before Julie reached him, wanting to bring Miko in before the bad news arrived and he lost contact with reality, “you come on down now, just for a second.”

“Oh, Daddy, I—”

He turned to Julie.

“I just got a call from Jim Gustofson, the managing editor of Nikki’s paper—”

Bob felt constriction through his heart and lungs, as if his respiratory system had just blown a valve and was leaking fluid. His knees went weak; he’d seen violent death, particularly as inflicted upon the young and innocent, in both hemispheres, and he had a bleak and terrifying image of disaster, of his daughter gone, of his endless, terrible grief and rage.

“What is it?”

“She was in some kind of accident. She went off the road out in the mountains, ended up in some trees.”

“Oh, Christ, how is she?”

“She’s alive.”

“Thank God.”

“She was conscious long enough to call 911 and give her location. They got to her soon enough, and her vital signs were good.”

“Is she going to be all right?”

“Mommy, what’s wrong?”

“Nikki’s been in an accident, honey.”

It killed Bob to see the pain on his younger daughter’s face; the child reacted as if she’d been hit in the chest by a boxer. She almost crumpled.

“She’s in a coma,” Julie said. “She’s unconscious. They found her that way, with minor abrasions and contusions. No paralysis, no indications of serious trauma, but the whiplash must have put her out, and then she hit her head hard, and her eyes are blackened, and she’s still out.”

“Oh, God,” said Bob.

“We have to get out there right away.”

Yet even as Julie said that, Bob knew it was wrong. His oldest and darkest fear came out of its cave and began to nuzzle him with a cold nose, looking him over with yellow eyes, blood on its breath and teeth.

“I’ll go. I’ll leave soon as I can get a flight. You book me on the Internet, then call me as I head to Boise for the flight out.”

“No. No, I will see my daughter. I will not stay here. We’ll all go. Miko has to see her too.”

“Come over here,” he said, and when he drew her away from the child, he explained.

“I’m worried this could be linked to something I’ve done to someone. It’s a way to get me out—”

“Bob, not everything—”

“Not everything’s about me, but you have no idea of some of the fixes and the places I’ve been. You have no idea who might be hunting me. You have a scar on your chest, and memories of months in the hospital when that fellow put a bullet into you.”

“He put it into me because of me, not you.”

It was all so long ago, but he remembered hearing the shots and finding her, almost bled out, along the trail, Nikki screaming, another man dead close by.

“I don’t say it’s my business,” he said. “But I can’t say it ain’t. And I can’t operate if I’m thinking all the while about your safety and Miko’s. I have to recon this alone. If it’s safe, I’ll let you know.”

It was gunman’s paranoia, he knew it. All the boys felt it, all the mankillers, good, bad, or indifferent. At a certain age, faces come to you unbidden, and you can’t place them quite, but it’s your subconscious reminding you of this or that man you took down and you think: Did he have brothers, parents, cousins, friends, peers, colleagues? Maybe they were as savaged by that unknown man’s death as he had been by the deaths of those he’d known himself, like Julie’s first husband, Donnie Fenn, such a good young man, the best, his chest torn open by the same sniper who put the bullet into Julie. Bob remembered, I killed the sniper.

But maybe the sniper’s brother was here and couldn’t get at Bob in Idaho where Bob had friends and family and knew the land and where all the creeks were, so he figured out how to draw him onto unfamiliar land, and maybe it was his pleasure to see the pain on Bob’s face by taking his family first, one by one, first Nikki, then Julie, then Mi—

He cursed himself. Every time he came home alive and more or less intact, he thought about going underground, going into his own private witness protection program. New identity, new start, new place, new everything. But another part said no, you can let it drive you crazy, it’s nothing, it’ll take your life if you let it. You win not by surviving but by living, by having the things you need and love: family, land, home.

“Please,” he said.

“Bob, this can’t be yours alone. That is my daughter. That is my daughter. I cannot stay here; I have to be at her side, no matter what it costs or what the risk. I feel that so powerfully I can hardly face it.”

“Let me go, let me figure it out, and as soon as I can, at the absolute soonest, I will let you know and you can go. If it’s dangerous at all, I will have her moved, I will hire bodyguards, I will set up a secure place for you to come. But I have to know first.”

She shook her head. She didn’t like it.

“I know I can be wrong,” he said. “I’m wrong all the time. It ain’t about me being wrong or me being—what was the word Nikki used?”

“Narcissistic. Someone who loves himself too much, even if he can’t admit it. You’re not a narcissist. No narcissist would be as shut up, cut down, beaten, bloodied, dragged, and kicked in the head as much as you. I give you that. Whatever your flaws, and God knows there are hundreds of them, you’re too insane to risk your life for this or that or nothing whatever to be a narcissist. So your scars buy you two or three days. Then we’re coming.”

“Thank you. Now I’ve got to get packed.”

THREE

As he’d just seen Miko atop a large, muscular horse, controlling it and taking such delight in the process that morning, he now stood next to his older daughter and remembered her atop the same large, muscular animals, how she thrilled at them, how she loved them, how she made them do her bidding, how they loved her.

But Nikki was far from horseback. She lay in the intensive-care unit of the Bristol General Hospital, monitored by a million dollars’ worth of gizmos. Beeps beeped, lines dashed across screens to symbolize breathing, brain activity, blood pressure, and so forth. She was still, her seemingly frail chest moving upward and downward just a fraction of an inch to signify the functioning of her taxed respiratory system.

“Those roads can be so dangerous at night, Mr. Swagger,” said Jim Gustofson, the managing editor of the newspaper Nikki worked for. “If she weren’t such a good reporter she would have come home earlier, when it was light. But she stayed, she got every last thing out of the day that she could have. Oh, this is so awful. I just don’t know what to say.”

Gustofson was a tall man in his early fifties, with a full head of hair and a shocked expression. He had repeated this statement about ten times. It was all he could say.

Bob had received the doctor’s verdict. They were in the wait-and-see stage. All the monitoring systems recorded strong life signs. She was badly bruised and lacerated, but there were no broken bones. Brain activity seemed unaltered; EKG strong, signifying no permanent damage. But she was totally unconscious and had been so now for over twenty-four hours.

“There’s no telling in these cases,” said the young resident. “She took a bad knock on the head and the whiplash was vicious in the few seconds the car bounced. She was rattled around pretty hard. We just don’t know how long she’ll be out. Classically a coma of this nature lasts a few weeks.”

“Or months or years? Or forever?”

“That’s an outside possibility. Yes sir, Mr. Swagger. But it’s rare. Usually a few weeks and they recover, their memory is foggy but in time it returns. The brain has had a shock. It realizes how close it came to death. It wants to rest and relax for a while. It’ll be back when it feels safe. She’s a strong young woman. Anyhow, Dr. Crane can tell you more tomorrow.”

“What do the police say, Mr. Gustofson?” Bob asked.

“I’ve got a copy of the report for you. But Johnson County Sheriff’s Department says their assessment is that she was driving home down the road, and some teenager, possibly high on the very thing she was investigating, methamphetamine, decided to show off. You know these rural kids get NASCAR fever with the big race less than a week away.”

“I noticed the traffic and all the activity driving in,” Bob said.

“Yes sir. Well, one of the things we’ve noted is that traffic aggression goes way up this time of year. So the cops believe some punk kid was trying to be Dale Senior to the decidedly un-hip Volvo, just for the thrill of it, the kick of it, and he got carried away, misjudged his speed and instead of scaring the bejesus out of her and getting a laugh out of his buddies, he smacked her off the road, and down the incline she went. She was lucky in one way.”

“How is that, sir.”

“They say he first hit her about three miles back, much higher up the mountain. If she’d have gone over there, the incline was several hundred feet. Rolling the whole way, then smashing into trees, she’d have been dead for sure. As it was, where she finally went off, the distance was only 150 feet or so, and she didn’t hit any of the trees head-on but rather glanced off them. The big thing is, she didn’t roll. The roll is the killer. Somehow, she outdrove him for three miles, and when he finally hit her solid, she kept the car in traction and out of the air. I’d say she saved her own life.”

Bob saw his daughter in the car, in the dark, some big punk fool in a pickup with a brainful of crystal meth and a gutful of Budweiser slamming her, laughing hard, deciding it was fun, and slamming her again and again. He’d like to have a conversation with the young fellow. He’d leave him a check for the facial reconstruction bill but not a penny for the wheelchair he’d need forever.

“Do they have any leads?”

“They have a detective on the case. I spoke to her. She’s very good, she’s broken some big cases. Thelma Fielding. She’d be the one to see.”

Bob looked at his watch. He’d taken a 1 P.M. from Boise to Knoxville via St. Louis, rented a car, and roared the whole way up I-81 to get here this fast. Now it was nearly ten.

“I’m so sorry, Mr. Swagger. She’s an outstanding young woman. We all hope for the best for her. Do you have a place to stay? The town is filling up with racing fans, it might be hard to find a room. We have a spare bedroom. The paper has rallied also and there’s lots of folks willing to accommodate you if need be, no matter how long you stay.”

“I’ll go to her apartment and stay there. The nurse gave me her effects when I checked in and I saw the key. I hope you have the address and can give me some directions. Then tomorrow after I see her and talk to the doctors on the day shift, I’ll want to go out and talk to that detective.”

“Just to warn you, this big race screws everything up. It brings in millions and millions of bucks. You could say the whole region lives off this month the year long. But the downside of course is that everybody’s all involved in it, and the cops especially. It’s a royal pain moving around town or trying to get anything normal done.”

“I’m used to waiting,” said Bob. “You might say, I was once a professional waiter. I can wait a long, long time without moving a twitch, you just watch.”

You always fear entering your own child’s private life. What if you make discoveries, learn things you weren’t meant to know, find out intimacies, privacies, discretion that a child always hides from her parents, just to save them worry or knowledge. You can learn too much.

But that didn’t happen. If she had a private life, or any secrets, it hadn’t gotten interesting yet. Nothing indicated a boyfriend, a scandal, a secret. She was dead set on doing well in this job, moving on to another job on a bigger paper and who knows what. Maybe some fancy rag like the Times or the Post, maybe running a smaller, more focused thing. Copies of those papers lay everywhere, as did magazines like The New Yorker and Time and so forth. Her books were all by journalists and novelists. That was her talent. Bob knew: You had to let them be what they could be, just as in his way, although dying young for it, Bob’s own father Earl had let his son be what he wanted, and had encouraged his talents and not held his flaws against him.

After several misturns and dead ends and an involuntary tour of Bristol, even the line in the city where Tennessee magically turns into Virginia and vice versa depending on the direction, Bob had at last found the side road that ran just next to and so close to a Wal-Mart that you’d have thought it was the parking lot, followed it behind the giant store, down a hill, into a little glade of houses, along a creek, and then up into an apartment complex. Hers was on the third floor. He saw a sheeted Kawasaki 350 in the parking lot and knew it was Nikki’s, and that she loved that bike. He wished she’d taken it to Mountain City, because on the bike no redneck high on shit and beer would have outperformed her. He’d seen her ride the damned thing. She could stay with anyone, she could stay with him—he was good—and she’d have left that cracker crashed and burning in the gully, gone home, taken a shower, had a beer and a good laugh, and then a good night’s sleep. She had Swagger blood, after all.

But the squat, boxy Volvo had saved her life, he bet. It wouldn’t surrender to the forces of gravity or physics as it roared down the incline in a cloud of dust, shedding itself of speed. It was designed to keep people alive by Swedish geniuses, and God bless Lars or Ingmar or whoever, because he’d done his job that day. It never broke, it never collapsed, and though fenders and engine and trunk had cammed inward, the integrity of the passenger box stayed intact. His daughter lived on the slenderest of threads: that she’d been able to forestall her stalker for three miles downhill, that she’d stayed out of the roll, that she’d gone over where the incline was much slighter, that the car held together, that it didn’t hit the trees head-on but rather glancingly, and that she’d been conscious enough to call it in.

Outside, trees whistled in the southern night. Was this Tennessee or Virginia? He couldn’t be sure. You had to live here for years to know automatically. Whatever, it was the South, with its dark history of violence, its strange streaks of courage, its stubbornness, its pride, its love of hunting, fishing, twangy music, and fast cars. He himself had sprung from such a place, a state with a long history of clan feuds and grudges, violence on the street, youth swollen hard on aggression and let to bloom until someone was dead. It sent men in the hundreds up the Pea Ridges of the War of the Rebellion, and most went willingly and died—nobly? Bob had seen enough gut-shot men to know there was no nobility to it. But he also knew the strange pride that compelled the young men of the South onward into the grape and musket, up that bleak Pea Ridge swept by leaden blizzards, the majority to die slowly of massive intestinal wounds, screaming in the night six days after the battle was lost or won. That was something.

The South, he thought. It made me, but am I of it? Is my legendary father of it? Is my daughter of it? Or does this have nothing to do with the South, and only grows out of something I did in some forgotten neighborhood or other, in the tangled loyalties of my twisted past.

He tried to settle down. He lay on her couch, aching for booze to make the hurting go away. He called Julie, gave her what’s what, told Miko he loved her, and then, after nightmares that weren’t quite a product of sleep but more of memory, managed to fall asleep. It had been a hell of a long day, a day like no other. He hoped he’d never have a day like it again.

It was any strip of forested road sloping down from the mountain above, a vast, high bulk of stone, sheathed in the trees that went everywhere, like a carpet or a disease. He could make no sense of the cross hatches of the tire tracks fading on the asphalt or the messed-up shoulder dirt and gravel where the big vehicles had collided at speed, or the patch down the slope laid out by yellow accident tape, now a mite ratty three days into keeping folks off the spot where Nikki’s Volvo had landed.

“I’m not exactly getting a picture,” he said to the woman detective.

“Sir, I could trace it out for you. Explain it better that way. The diagrams in the report make it clear too.”

“No offense now, I never mean offense, but I have to ask: You sure you’re up to this sort of work? It’s not a big department and all this is highly technical, it seems.”

“I have investigated traffic accidents and fatalities too. I admit, our state police accident team is better set up for this kind of thing, but the trickiness of state laws keeps them from operating off the federal and state highways. This is a county highway. So there’s a jurisdictional problem right at the start.”

“Well, I don’t want to upset nobody’s apple cart. I just have to figure out for myself on what happened. I’m sure you get that.”

“I do, Mr. Swagger. That is why I am here to help. I have been at this a long time. I’m a good detective. We’ll get him, or them.”

“Yes ma’am, I believe you.”

Detective Thelma Fielding, probably forty, was a strong woman with exceptionally large eyes, man-hands, what you’d call a big-boned woman. She wore blue jeans, tight to show off a body that was not beyond desire by any means—she had large breasts—and a polo shirt, black, with a badge over her left breast. A baseball cap carried the badge motif, but what told the world she was a professional law enforcement agent was the tricked-out .45 automatic worn in a Kydex speed holster on her hip. Behind it rode three mags, double stack. So the gun was probably a Para-Ordnance, not that Bob let her know he knew a Para from a Springfield from a Kimber from a Colt from a Nighthawk from a Wilson, and all the other 1911 models that were suddenly all the rage in self-defense and sporting circles. Next to the gun and the holster was her actual badge, wreathed in a leather badge holder, worn on the belt. On the other hip she wore her two-way, with a curly cord up to the mic pinned to her shirt collar. Oh, and the Para-Ord was carried cocked and locked, ready for speed work in less than a second’s notice.

“So I can’t make any sense of it, Detective. Can you tell me how you read it?”

“Would you want to sit in the squad car, Mr. Swagger. It’s hot here in August, and you look a mite peaked. Wouldn’t want you developing any health problems on top of everything else.”

My damned hair, Bob thought. Makes me seem 150.

“Ma’am, I’m fine, at least for a little while. I just see tracks engraved in the road, where I’m guessing my daughter’s bad boy skidded after he knocked her from the road at whatever speed he was going.”

“Sir, I should tell you what you’ve probably guessed by now. This time of year such a thing is hardly rare. These young boys git all het up on account of the big NASCAR race week at Bristol. They want to show off for each other. It can get out of hand fast.”

“Yes, ma’am. What I remember of young men reminds me such a thing is frequent.” But the young men he knew spent their aggression on jungle patrol, ready to give it all up for something this batch couldn’t fathom called “duty.”

“The theory is,” Deputy Thelma continued, “some kid decided to put a scare into the lone gal and buzzed her. Evidently she didn’t scare, so he wasn’t satisfied, so the game turned rough. He kind of lost his mind and banged her too hard and knocked her into the trees. Then he panicked, saw what he had done, and got the hell out of there. She was damned lucky she had a cellphone and called 911 before she passed out, and that we got her in less than an hour. Otherwise, she may have lain there for a week before help came.”

Bob examined the skid marks and could make no sense of them. He wanted to believe, yes, that’s all it is. It had nothing to do with him, it was the random drift of the universe, a bad news connection between a hopped-up junior in a pickup and his few-years-older daughter, all earnest desire and commitment. The cross-hatched skidmarks were all that remained of the accident because the highway emergency vehicles and tow trucks that pulled her car out of the gully messed up the shoulder bad.

“You see, the thicker tires are his; you can tell where he skidded, then peeled out to catch up to her. She veered off the road a bit, lost some traction. He hit her right to left, then came around the other side and hit her left to right. That’s what we see here. She went off right up there, down that slope, which ain’t by no means the worst slope of the road, and somehow avoided hitting the trees head-on. It’s all in the tracks.”

He felt briefly overwhelmed.

“Is there any, you know, scientific clues that might help you figure it all out and lead to a guilty party? On the TV, there’s all this crime scene stuff, makes you think it’s just a matter of shining some magic light on something.”

“Yes sir. Well, let me say that many folks have a wrong idea how detective work goes,” Detective Thelma said. “It’s the television. We shine the magic light and take something back to the lab and blow it up a thousand times and it tells us who to arrest. Not true now, never was. We do have some scientific evidence, if you call it that. I have sent both the tire tracks imprint and a paint sample I scraped off your daughter’s door to the state police crime lab in Knoxville. In a few days, I’ll hear back, and I’ll get a make and model of tire and a make and model of car, the latter based on the color. Amazing how much auto paint can tell you. Then I can circularize all the auto body shops around the three states, see if anybody brought in a vehicle for damage repair in those colors. I can then ask local jurisdictions to check on the tires, and if we get a match or two, we might be in business. If the tires are any way unique, I can contact tire outlets.”

“What are the odds?”

“Not good. Lots of folks here don’t repair their dents and dings or they do it themselves. Or if the car was stolen, maybe he’ll just dump it and forget about it, that’s something these thrill drivers do. Anyhow, that’s what the book says. Now I work a different way.”

“I’m hoping you’ll tell me.”

“I’m no genius but I have a sound appreciation of human nature. I collect snitches. What I do is, when I bust a kid on meth or grass or assault, I pull him aside and I say, ‘Look I can go forward or you can cooperate with me and this can go away, you get a fresh start and maybe you ain’t as dumb as you look.’ ‘What you mean?’ he says. ‘I mean,’ I say, ‘what do you know, what can you give me, what things you heard, where’d you buy the stuff, who’s moving the shit, this sort of thing.’ He listens, sees where his best interests lie, and opens up. I take notes. Clear up a lot of cases that way. Who broke into the Piggly Wiggly. Who stole seventy-six dollars and fifty-three cents from the Pizza Hut. How Junior Bridger afforded his new Camaro with a 344 under the hood. Other things I hear about it factor in: Why homecoming queen Sue Ellen Ramsey dumped quarterback Vince Tagetti for seeming no-’count Cleon Jackson. The answer is that Cleon’s cousin Franklin just got into the meth business big time, and suddenly the dough is rolling in. Cleon delivers to folks all over town, he’s now got a Lexus SUV, and Sue Ellen has always loved the Lexus line. That sort of thing. That’s how crime works in a rural zone of hills and hollows and small towns and big football and bad methamphetamine addictions and very peculiar behaviors. And the kids, the snitches, they take to it. Finally, for some of ’em, they got somebody to listen to them. So right now I have my snitches working full time. And somebody’ll talk. Too much beer in Smokey’s one night, he’ll talk. He’ll brag on it, how he bopped the Volvo and it felt good. The story’ll get around, it’ll get to one of my kids, and he’ll let me know, and I’ll get a name. Then I’ll bring ’em in and sweat ’em and they’ll roll over and we’ll have a case. It may take a little while, but that kind of police work is worth all the CSI bullshit in the world.”

“That makes good sense to me,” he said. “I can see you know your profession. May I call you now and again for some kind of update?”

“Why, sure, Mr. Swagger.”

“But I have to ask you one other thing,” he said. “I also know that in the real world, you’re dealing with a workplace. I know how workplaces are. You got a boss who wants progress. Soon enough, there’ll be other, bigger, fancier criminal situations and he’ll want his number one investigator on them. My daughter’s situation goes on the back burner. That’s not your choice, it’s not my choice, that’s just the way it is, right? Now, especially with this big race coming up, with all the parties, all the drinking, with your department most likely pitching in on the security arrangements for an event that attracts a quarter of a million people, I am not exactly confident that you’ll have enough time to devote to this. Not your fault. I ain’t criticizing you. I’m just saying, that’s what happens.”

“I won’t let that happen, Mr. Swagger. I will work this thing out for you.”

“And then there’s Sheriff—” he could tell, since she hadn’t mentioned by name the recently famous hero of the meth wars, Sheriff Reed Wells, of the helicopter-borne drug raid and the highest conviction rate in Tennessee, that she didn’t care for his high-handed, possibly self-aggrandizing way—“he wants cases that git his name in the paper. He wants the big raid, the splash. He doesn’t want slow, careful, patient development of sources.”

“You do know a thing or two about the real world, sir.”

“Just a bit. Anyhow, I may hire a private investigator or a lawyer with investigative skills, if that’s all right with you. Or I may do some poking around myself.”

“Sir, there are some fine private investigators in Knoxville and some fine ex-police attorneys who know the system. Yes, that would be your right, and I understand your concern. I would strongly recommend against any poking around on your own. It can be tough out here, and unless you’re a seasoned investigator, you can make things murkier, not clearer, and get yourself in a heap of trouble at the same time. These young men, they can be tough and merciless. I’ve seen killings, beating victims, all sorts of unpleasantness. I’d hate to find you victim of something like that, because you went to the wrong bar and asked the wrong questions.”

“Well, that’s sound advice. Okay, I’ll stay away and try not to get my old bones beaten to pulp and get you another case.”

“Then you and I are on the same page, Mr. Swagger. Now I’ve got to get back into town—”

Suddenly there was a squawk of electronic noise, harsh and indecipherable, and Detective Thelma switched a button on the microphone-receiver pinned near her collar and leaned into it.

“Ten-nine, here,” she said.

She listened to what Bob heard as a gibberish of squawks, now and then cut by a recognizable number. Then she pushed Send and said, “I roger and will proceed on my Ten-Forty.”

She looked over at him.

“Well, we have some strange boy in these parts who likes to burn trucks. Don’t know why but this is the fifth one in the past two months. I’ve got to get over there fast, Mr. Swagger, and run the crime scene investigation.”

“Yes, ma’am,” he said. “I will be in touch.”

She smiled, jogged off to her car, hit the gumball and the siren, and fired off.

Bob went back to the hospital and sat around for a couple of hours. He met some more of Nikki’s reporter friends and picked up on how much she was loved and respected and how angry everyone was. He told them about Thelma and was gratified to learn she had a fine reputation, had been to a number of FBI schools, had a few big cases, and was something of a local character. She’d been a raving beauty once; who knew she’d turn up as a cop and become the three-time Tennessee state ladies’ USPSA champion, which, he now realized, was why she carried the fancy automatic in the speed holster. He also was invited to dinner and turned down the invites, being too tired and depressed for much more comfort. About ten he kissed his daughter’s still cheek, and headed back to her apartment. There he called Julie and reported in on his findings.

“We’ll be there tomorrow.”

“No, please. Just give it a few more days. I just don’t know. I like this detective and she wouldn’t steer me wrong but I still have a queasy feeling.”

“Is someone following you?”

“No. And if they were, I sure made it easy on them. So no, no, there’s no sign it’s some old mess of mine, I agree.”

“Then it’s clear for us to come?”

“I got one more trick to play out. Then I’ll call you.”

It was stupid, he knew. But the tracks made no sense to him. He went to his laptop, turned it on, and called up good old Google. He typed in “Aerial photography, Knoxville, Tennessee.”

FOUR

If he blinked, he could have sold himself on the illusion he was back in Vietnam, at some forward operating base, where the helicopter was the only way in or out, and the helicopter the order of the day: taking men to and from battle, hauling out the wounded, laying on solid suppressive fire where needed. He was back in a war zone of engines somehow, and although the sandbags were missing, the perimeter security wasn’t, and the whole wide area was separated into bays so that each powerful machine was isolated from the others, and its crew and shop worked as one. No, not Vietnam, but big, powerful machines just the same. The noise of them was gigantic, a physical presence demanding ear protection, so powerfully did the vibrations fill the air and set everything buzzing to the rhythm of their firing. Everyone running about had something to do with engines, all smeared with grease, all filthy in that happy way of men who love what they’re doing and don’t care what it looks like.

Meanwhile, a secondary fact of life was the stench of high-test fuel, which lingered everywhere, just as palpable in its way as the grinding roar of the engines. If you wanted to continue the Vietnam game further, you could: Like the aviators of that long-ago, so-vanished time and place, the drivers were the aristocrats here. Thin young men in their specialized suits, sexy, and it seemed that everybody wanted their attention or merely to be in their presence.

Of course it wasn’t FOB Maria, north of Danang, somewhere in Indian country, RVN, circa ’65–’73. It was the pits, that is, the center of the track, at the Bristol Motor Speedway, Bristol, Tennessee, and what towered above wasn’t mountains full of Victor Charlie, but the enveloping cup of the speedway itself, a near vertical wall of seats for one hundred fifty thousand or so fans. The seats were largely empty, but a few die-hards sat and watched or took notes or worked with stop watches.

Bob was in the pit next to a vehicle that was just as purpose-built as any Huey or Cobra gunship. It was called “USMC 44,” a Dodge Charger in the new, blurry digital camouflage just like the boys wore outside Baghdad, with the globe and anchor emblazoned king-size on hood, roof, and doors. Mechanics and submechanics leaped around, each, seemingly, with a special job to do, as they struggled to bring it to some kind of mechanical perfection. They worked in puddles of oil and fuel, and tracks crisscrossed the concrete as in Vietnam, the tracks of running men, the tracks of rolling, smooth, wide tires, and a myriad of smaller-scaled tracks for various wheeled devices that serviced the big machine. The USMC 44 carried a special-built V8 Hemi engine so brawny it was bursting to get out, rode on four smooth, wide tires instantly changeable, and devoured some poison brew of chemically adjusted fuel. Like any tool, it sported no softness for comfort, but was a hard, serious bucket of bolts meant for one thing only, and that was to zoom full-bore around a mile track five hundred times, spitting clouds of exhaust. It had all the gizmos: the spoiler on the rear to keep it from going airborne, the shocks made of Kryptonite or some other wonder steel, the four-inch ground clearance, all engineered to make USMC 44 go like hell. Inside it was like a hard devotional place, also lacking any softness for comfort, with one seat bolted in, the doors bolted shut, netting everywhere.

He stood there, on the outside of the ruckus, feeling like a tourist. But this is where he had been told to be, and this was the time, and the various obstacles to his penetration of the most intimate secret places of NASCAR had fallen when he gave his name, almost as if he were important.

It was the good old USMC retired NCO network in action. Bob had gotten a batch of pictures taken by Dewey’s Aviation Inc. out of Knoxville, and what he saw was mainly skidmarks down ten miles of descending road on Iron Mountain, and some skell in some kind of fast mover closing in upon and trying to kill his daughter. It was, even from the air, nonsense and gibberish to Bob. But he had friends, and he called the son of a friend, who was a lieutenant colonel in personnel at Henderson Hall, or HQ, and asked if the colonel could come up with some ex-marine who’d know a lot about car behavior, accidents, skidmarks, that sort of thing. Turned out, no, he didn’t, but he had something better. Someone who was fresh off the marine PIO at HQ where he’d been a part of the team that had worked with a big New York ad agency to recruit a NASCAR driver to run the USMC emblem on his car the upcoming season. Not for charity, because there was no charity anywhere in NASCAR these days. It was all marketing, done for the money. But still, the fellow, his people, his team, they all got it, and they loved running under the globe and anchor. In fact, he was still in the running for the Sprint Cup and he’d be right there at Bristol that very weekend. Calls were made, things were agreed to, and though the USMC-Chrysler team was working 24/7, there was no problem if Bob got there at eleven today, as qualifying didn’t start till tomorrow and they were still tuning.

So now Bob was standing, when a scrawny youngster in jeans and a baseball cap came up to him, smiled, shook his hand, and bid him to follow. No words were exchanged, because the noise was so loud, and Bob followed the boy through the hustle and bustle, dodging a rolling tire someone was wheeling toward the car itself, its top half—Bob wanted to call it a fuselage—visible over a wall. He ducked and bobbed and then found himself inside a trailer home that was way nice, like a hotel suite, clearly set up as some kind of relaxation area. When the door was sealed Bob popped out his ear plugs, as did the boy, and Bob introduced himself.

“Gunnery sergeant, eh? You were some kind of cowboy hero in that war all that time ago, is that right?”

“It was mostly squirming around, hoping not to get shot, was all,” Bob said.

“Well, I’m Matt MacReady.” Bob was stunned to see that this kid was the man he’d come to see, the actual driver himself, fourth in NASCAR standings, a real comer, had a shot at winning a few nights down the road and a shot at the big cup. So young. Freckly even, with a thatch of red hair. But then the chopper aviators were all young, and if you put a helmet on them and a bird under them, they’d go into hell to get the mission done. So he warned himself against holding the boy’s youth against him.

“Pleased to meet you. Congratulations on your fine racing career. Sorry I didn’t recognize you.”

“Being recognized is overrated, Gunny, let me tell you. And most of the folks who do just want something from you, from a signature to an investment. They all seem to have fancy haircuts, too. Don’t trust a man with a fancy haircut, all smoothed up like cake frosting, you know. Hell, I just drive cars around in a circle, don’t even get to go nowhere! I end up right where I started, what’s the goddamn point!”

Bob smiled at the joke and the boy tried another one. “If this don’t work out, I guess I’ll head back to the gas station.”

“Son, from the looks of it, it’s working out swell.”

The boy grinned, pleased to have impressed a genuine hero.

“So far, so good. The cars don’t crunch up so much no more, and I take crunching up seriously because it put my granddaddy in a wheelchair for the last sixty years of his life. And they don’t burn much no more neither, that’s the best thing. My daddy burned to death in one, so I take burning seriously. Anyhow, since you don’t want to tell me how damned great I am, that tells me you ain’t no ass-kiss haircut here who wants free tix. Or no corporate glad hander wants me at a cocktail party with some of the clients where I stand around all bashful-like and the boys come up and pet me like some kind of cuddly critter. Hate all that shit, but it is a part of the business. So we are getting off to a good start. Now you tell me how I can help you. I’m guessing it don’t involve putting on the firesuit and shaking a lot of hands.”

“Nor putting frosting in your hair, nor getting petted much.”

“I’m liking this better n’ better.”

“Yes sir, well, I hope I won’t take too much of your time.”

“Let me get Red Nichols in here, my crew chief. He’s forgot more than I know. He was my daddy’s crew chief too.”

“Sure.”

While Matt MacReady got out a cell to call Red, a beautiful girl—say, the kid was doing well!—came out and offered Bob a cold drink. Bob took a bottle of juice, and pretty soon the door opened, and a man Bob’s age, wrinkled and greasy, came in.

“Red, meet Bob Lee Swagger, of the real USMC.”

“Mr. Swagger, an honor, sir. I was a motor mechanic late in Vietnam and I heard of the famous Bob the Nailer.”

“That old bastard is long gone. It’s just an old man with a bad leg here today.”

“Matt, you realize he run just as hard as you, difference is, people shooting at him. So you mind your manners around him.”

“I will,” said Matt. “I already have Mr. Swagger marked down as a serious southern man, not a haircut with a soft-gal handshake.”

“Well, let’s see if we can help him some.”

And so Bob laid it out, quickly as he could, free of nuance. What had happened to his daughter, what the police made of it, his own worries, his decision to spend $2,700 to have Dewey’s photo-recon the road, the arrival of the pictures over a fax transmission a few hours ago.

“So my hope is, you can look at the skid marks and make sense of them for me. It looks like chicken scratches to me. I figure you’ve seen skid marks before, you know how cars behave at high speed, brakes on, brakes off, how they skid, turn, wobble, go over. So you can tell me what happened. If the cops are right, and this is some hopped-up teenager, then I can rest easy. They’ll get him, I’m sure. If not, I have to dig deeper and make preparations. I will protect my daughter.”

“I believe you will. Is there any reason to expect anyone might try to kill your daughter?”

“It’s not inconceivable. She was investigating a criminal enterprise in a county known for its corruption and drug trade. That would be one thing. Another would be my involvement, over the years, in a number of situations where violence sometimes came into play. Those episodes may have made me some powerful enemies. So it is possible that someone is trying to strike at me through her. That one just can’t be ruled out. I’ve been around enough not to believe in coincidence.”

“We don’t believe in it either,” said Red. “Out here, on the track where it’s all happening at close to two hundred per, we don’t never believe in coincidence. So let’s see what you’ve got there, Mr. Swagger.”

The boy and the old man examined the faxes, not the clearest photos ever taken, but Mr. Dewey had gotten pretty damned low and he had a real fine camera. Bob felt he got every cent’s worth of the twenty-seven-hundred-dollar dent he’d put in his credit card.

“What you’ll see right away is two tracks. One is my daughter’s Volvo, though she doesn’t come into the picture till late in the sequence. Hers are much lighter and narrower.”

“Yep, he’s sailing on some heavy, wide tread, no doubt about it.”

“You can see where he tries to knock her this way and that, you can see how she gets away from him twice, and how she got enough down the hill that so when he did finally whack her off the road, the incline wasn’t so steep and the car never rolled. They say that saved her life.”

“I think it did,” said Red.

They didn’t talk for a while, except in some kind of code.

“Great traction, all the way through. He’s left footing. Seems to find the ideal line a lot. Say, I really like his angle.”

“His angles are damned good, considering the corners are all unknown. I also like how soon he gets to the ideal, early in mid-corner. He rides this one real good and ain’t fighting it none.”

“This boy’s been in a hundred-mile-per slide before, I think. Like his traction. He ain’t hardly ever on two.”

“I think so, too, Matt.”

“Mr. Swagger, you got any other pictures? What I see is a damned fine driver knocking the little foreign job off the road. I will say, this girl of yours, she’s a damned cool hand. Suppose she gets it from her daddy.”

“Her mommy, more ’n likely. Yes, I didn’t know what to make of these. Mr. Dewey told me when he was done he one-eightied and flew back up the road to make sure he didn’t miss nothing. He stayed on the road a longer time than I asked him to, and way, way back he came upon some other skids. Now, it may not be the same guy, but it sure looks like it to me. Same width of track, same density of color. You’d have to make a tread comparison to be sure, but as I said earlier, don’t believe much in coincidence.”

He handed the two photos over, and the two men looked hard at them, then back several times at the actual pocket-of-engagement sequence.

“Well,” Red finally said, “that ties it up with a ribbon.”

“It sure does,” said Matt.

“So tell me what you make of it.”

“As I say, where he’s whacking her, it’s hard to make it out, other than he’s a good driver, so’s she. The cars are banging together, speed’s up near a hundred, she keeps turning inside him, he skids out—don’t lose it though—and goes after her.”

“Yes sir.”

“But see these here? They’re bad news, I’m afraid.”

Bob didn’t want to be here. He didn’t want to find out the worst. The world was so much better for everybody if this was just one drunk or hopped-up farmboy who wanted to put a lick on another car, just like his hero, the late Dale Senior.

But that wasn’t to be.

“Now here we are, ten miles before the accident, and see this here turn he made. And here’s another one. He’s running like hell to catch up to her, like he got the news late that she was there.”

“But it’s not like he’s chasing her, in the sense that he sees her and is closing,” Bob said. “It means, in other words, miles before he makes eye contact, he’s going like hell to catch her.”

“Well, he’s sure going like hell,” said Matt. “He’s not just running flat out for the fun of it, he’s right on the edge of a very dangerous road, and take it from me you can’t get there unless you’re closing on the leader with two laps to go. Nobody goes that close to dying for the fun of it. Then here, this last curve, that’s his boldest, and damn it’s a fine piece of driving. He read the angle of the curve exactly, knew what his attack would be and how long, maybe to the tenth of a second, and he had to hold it. A tenth too long one way, he’s in the trees to the left of the road, a tenth too short, he’s in the trees to the right. He found what we call the ideal angle. It may not be the shortest angle, but it means he’s reading the input at supertime, he knows his car like he knows his own face, he goes into the curve just fine, he keeps traction at maximum—traction is speed and control—he never slides or drifts, he’s left-footing the brake while he right-foots the pedal, not easy, and at the ultimate, perfect moment he’s set up to go to the floor and hit the straightaway, speeding up not slowing down, and never wastes no time correcting or recovering.”

“That’s good driving.”

“No, sir. That’s great driving. Most civilians don’t know how to corner, even cops and good young racers. It takes time and some investment of guts and fender metal and a lot of good luck to learn the trick. You find that ideal angle that don’t feel right, but it is right. You ride that angle, at a certain point you brake but as she starts to skid, you got to play left-foot-right-foot, making the car dance, so that you can be speeding up before you’re on the straightaway ’cause if that’s where you’re stomping it, you’re already too late. And in all this, if your timing ain’t right you’re upside down in flames and hoping the foam truck gets there before your hands and feet burn off, never mind the busted neck.”

“I see.”

“Gunny,” said Red, “whoever drove your daughter off the road wasn’t no kid. He was a damned good, experienced racing driver. He had all the tricks. He’s way up there with the big boys like scrawny little tub-of-guts Matt there. He’s a professional. What he was trying to do, he was trying to kill her.”

FIVE

The Reverend Alton Grumley pronounced a mighty sermon, full of Baptist hellfire and damnation, in the meeting hall of the Piney Ridge Baptist Prayer Camp a few miles outside of Mountain City on old 167, just before it hit new 67.

He called upon God in his majesty to send wisdom to his young prodigal, he who had failed, send wisdom, humility, respect for elders, all those things a good Christian boy should show his religious mentor.

“Thou hast failed,” he said, in a power-voice, all throb and vibration. “Thou hast failed because thou did not pray for guidance hard enough. Thou must pray, Brother Richard, and give the soul in totality to the man upstairs. Only then will he listen.”

The Reverend was a scrawny old boy, with slicked-back hair, all pouf and vibrant with gray and hair oil, big, white, fake teeth, and dressed in a powder blue, three-piece suit from Mr. Sam’s big store. His sons and nephews had a joke. “Daddy’s tailor,” they’d say, “is Wah Ming Chow of Number 38 Industrial Facility, Harbin, Szechwan Province, China!” and get to laughing up a fit.

“You damned boys, the devil will take you!” he’d howl in rage, and then laugh harder.

But the boys weren’t there now. In fact only one parishioner listened to the Reverend. He was a raw-boned fella of indeterminate age—fellows like him could be thirty to sixty, all hardscrabble, southern school of hard knocks and rough roads, indomitable, relaxed, tougher than brass hobnails, not the sorts to get excited but exactly the sorts to avoid riling—who now sat in the front row of the meeting hall, in tight, faded jeans, beat-up boots, a blue, working-man’s shirt, and a Richard Petty straw cowboy hat both shabby and cool pulled low over his eyes. He wasn’t the sort who took the hat off indoors, church or no church. He had on a big pair of mogul sunglasses too, as King Richard commonly wore, and sported a mustache and a goatee, though the hair wasn’t real.

“Old man, you do go on,” he finally said. “I am getting extremely tired of all this show.”

“You was given a job, and you failed. If I wanted failure, I’d have sent my own damn sons. They so dumb, they guarantee failure, God love ’em.”

“They are dumb,” said Brother Richard, so called for his resemblance to the real Richard Petty and what was assumed to be a common NASCAR heritage. “But that’s okay, because they’re lazy, too.”

“They are good boys,” said the Reverend.

“Not really,” said Brother Richard.

“Anyhows, we in a porridge-pot o’ trouble now.”

“I agree. After all, she saw me. Not even you have seen me. If you had to describe me, you’d come up with, ‘He looks like Richard.’ So I guess they’d send out Richard on the circular. But by that time, I wouldn’t look like Richard.”

“Everyone knows that hair is phony,” said the Reverend.

“It doesn’t matter what they know. It only matters what they’ve seen.”

“Anyhow, you were highly recommended to me by at least three sources. It was said by all, ‘He’s the best. Nobody like him.’ Yet when I need you most, you fail.”

“There are some things I can’t control. I can’t control the fact that the girl drives like a pro. She must have raced go-karts. You can learn a lot in the damn little things. Ask Danica. Who knew? I’ve done that job more times than you can know, and nobody ever fought so hard or made so many good decisions at speed. If the world were fair, I’d be marrying her, not trying to kill her.”

“Yessir, but as I have noted in many a sermon, the world ain’t fair. Not even a little bit.”

“Anyhows, I am as upset as you. She saw my new face and it wasn’t cheap, not in money, not in time, not in pain. She’s the only one that’ll identify me.”

“You should have had on one of your disguises.”

“I didn’t have time. You called me and I was off. I had to kick hell to even catch her. Like to might have been smeared to ketchup by a logging truck, some of the turns I took.”

“Whyn’t you finish her? You could see the car didn’t roll. If it don’t roll, you got problems.”

“I am not smashing a girl’s head in with a rock or cutting her throat. Among other things, if you do that, then all the law knows it’s not a hopped-up kid and is a murder and maybe you got state cop investigators, maybe even FBI, and lots of trouble. It only works if everybody agrees it’s some kind of hit-run thing by some kind of speed-crazy, NASCAR-loving jackrabbit with the brains of a pea. That’s what I’m selling. But there’s an issue of what I do and what I don’t do too. I don’t kill up close where there’s blood. It’s my car against theirs, and I always win at that game. Nobody can stay in that game. If I kill up close, hell, I’m just another Grumley.”

“Car agin’ car, you didn’t win this time, Brother Richard.”

“Now I don’t like that one, Rev. This whole shebang you’ve got set up—well, someone has set up, as I don’t believe you got the native intelligence of a porcupine—”

“You are so insolent to your elders. You should respect your elders, Brother.”

“Maybe next time. This whole damn thing turns on me. You need the best driver you can get for a certain job and if you don’t have him, it all goes away. You don’t want that. So why don’t you stop cobbing on me, Alton, and pick two sons or nephews, if you can tell them apart, which I doubt—the two with the most teeth and whose eyes are far enough apart so that in certain lights they appear normal—you send them into that hospital. And since they’re such smooth operators and nobody suspects nothing yet, they can just inject an air bubble into her vein and when it reaches her heart, she’s gone. Then all our problems are solved, and we can do our job, git our money and our revenge, and move on.”

“I hope God don’t hear the disrespect in your voice,” the Reverend said. “But if I’m so dumb, how come I already sent the two boys?”

SIX

Vern Pye had the gift of gab and Ernie Grumley the talent of conviction. One was a nephew, one a son, though neither was aware of which category they fit into as names were sometimes misleading among the Reverend’s brood. After all, the man had had seven wives and six boys per wife as per certain biblical instructions, and, if rumor was believed, he had spread his seed amply among the various sisters of the various wives, whether those sisters were married to others or not. He had a way about him and a hunger, and women, for some reason, were eager to give to him that which they thought he wanted.

They all—wives, formal and informal, legal and only by custom, sisters and husbands, the progeny—lived together far from prying eyes on a chunk of hilltop outside of Hot Springs, Arkansas. From there they did various jobs for various contacts around the South that the Reverend had inherited from generations of Grumleys before him. The Grumleys, foot soldiers to the Lord and also various interested parties. That is why they’d temporarily migrated to the Piney Ridge Baptist Prayer Camp on Route 61 in Johnson County, Tennessee, at the insistence of Alton, the patriarch.

Vern and Ernie were somewhat slicker than the usual Grumley progeny. Each was smooth in his way and not too tattooed, and the Reverend, noting talent where it happened to spring up (although, Lord, why do you test me so? That quality was rare enough), always urged them to develop their talent. Thus Vern was the superstar of his generation of Grumleys. He was an aristocrat, a Pye out of Grumley, and so his blood was bluer than any other’s, uniting two lines of violent miscreants from the hinterlands of Arkansas outside Hot Springs. He had killed and would kill again, without much emotional investment, but he didn’t consider himself a killer. He had vanities, and pride. He was the compleat criminal. He could forge, extort, swindle, steal cold, steal hot, do banks or grocery stores, do hits, administer beatings, all with the same aplomb. He liked getting over on the johns, didn’t matter who or what the game was.

It helped that he was unusually handsome, with a dark head of hair and large, white spades for teeth. His eyes radiated warmth and charm; he was as smooth with a line of bullshit as he was with a Glock, and he was pretty smooth with that. He’d done a few years’ hard time, where he’d basically networked, and he had three other identities going, two wives, seven children, girlfriends among the stripper and escort population in every southern state, and a thing for young girls, which he indulged at shopping malls, clubs, and fast food joints whenever he had a spare moment. He could con a twelve-year-old into a blowjob in the men’s room faster than most people could count to one hundred.

Ernie was less accomplished. He was essentially a Murphy man, a fraudulent pimp who conned college boys out of their dollars and delivered zero in the sex department, in some of the Razorback State’s seamier venues. Basically, in today’s operation, Ernie’s job was to support Vern and learn from him, which is how they found themselves, in medical scrubs under MD nametags, walking down the hallway of the Bristol General Hospital, headed toward their destination, the critical-care ward.

It was late; the place was nearly empty. It was big enough, however, so that the concept of “stranger” could apply. No nurse, for instance, could know all the medical personnel by name or face and could therefore be counted upon to yield before slickness, sureness of authority, and the steady guidance and charisma of an experienced confidence man.

It’ll be easy.

No one suspects a thing.

The girl is an accident victim, not a murder survivor.

No security, no suspicion, no fear.

Thus the two men ambled happily, making eye contact, issuing warm “Hellos” and “Say, there, how’s the boy?”s as they coursed through the fourth floor’s spotless hallways. They even stopped now and then for a cup of coffee, to assure a patient on a walker, and to examine bedside charts. They took pulses, looked into eyes, felt throats, just like on the television doctor shows.

When they reached Nikki, it would be a simple matter. Vern, a little brighter and that much more ambitious, was to calmly reach into his pocket and remove a number seven hypodermic filled with air. He had practiced on the skin of a grapefruit all afternoon. He was to look for a blue artery that led to and not from the heart, plump up the flesh just a bit, gently inject the needle, draw some blood to make certain he’d hit the mother lode, then cram the plunger forward. This would put a bubble the size of a small nuclear missile in her bloodstream and it would jet to her heart and explode it. Meanwhile, Ernie would race to the nurses’ station yelling “Get an arrest team STAT! She’s lost rhythm!”

Then they’d quietly turn and continue their rounds.

The trick, as Vern had patiently explained to Ernie, was to do nothing suddenly. If you moved fast, if your body had a shred of fear or hesitation, it would register with witnesses who were otherwise oblivious. It was the first key of the con, to sell the mark on your authenticity, which was always done with gentle insistence, assuming correct subtextual details. For example: If you were on a job like this, you made damned certain your hands were very clean, almost pink, along with your ears, your face, any visible patch of skin. Docs become docs because they hate filth, disease, laziness, clumsiness. It’s how they feel like God. So to pass as one you had to play by the rules of the game. Another issue Vern was very big on was shoes. What kind of shoes do doctors wear? People notice shoes even if they don’t realize they do. Thus they’d parked for a bit outside the hospital in the staff lot, and noted men of a certain age, whom they took to be docs and not orderlies of some sort (your younger fellas), and noted a lot of Rockport wingtips. So they drove to the mall—not to Mr. Sam’s where all the shoes would have been made by Wah Ming Chow when she wasn’t hand-cutting powder blue suits for the Reverend—found a Rockport store, and paid for a pair each, one cordovan wing-tips, the other less fashionable, beige walkers. They scuffed the shoes against the asphalt of the mall parking lot because the docs were parsimonious and wore each pair unto death.

Now, on those new-but-old Rockports, they slowly approached the girl’s room. It was so close; it was two rooms away, which they’d discovered after an earlier quick stride down the hallway, reading names on the doors while feigning to look for a drink of water.

Here was where your lesser cons would give up the ghost. They wouldn’t play it out straight. They’d see that the room was so damned close and that the nurses were sitting at their stations on the floor without paying any attention at all to them and they’d sort of go into git-’er-done panic. They’d go straight to the girl’s room, do the deed, and get out of Dodge. Yeah, but that’s where it goes wrong. An orderly is on the way to the john and he happens to look down the hall and he sees something he doesn’t hardly ever see, which is a doc moving fast. Docs don’t move fast, not unless it’s the emergency ward and some poor fool is bleeding out or going into advanced vapor lock. Docs have too much dignity to move fast. So he goes to investigate and walks in and sees the needle going into her arm and he says, Hey what? and Ernie has to pop him with his nickle-plated Python 2.5 inch, and the whole thing goes up in flames, and Vern and Ernie end up at the wrong end of another needle somewhere down the line.

No sir, the Reverend didn’t raise no fools for sons or cousins or whatever.

So they played it out by good con discipline, riding the gag hard. They dipped in on Mr. X and saw that he was fine, then had a nice visit with Mrs. Y and noted that her color had improved and got a nice smile out of her for the comment, even if she had no idea who in hell they were, until at last, after a quick check on Mr. Z, who was comatose as well, they reached the doorway of SWAGGER, NIKKI, ACCIDENT VICTIM, and were about to—

“Say—”

They looked up, puzzled but not riled.

“Say there, excuse me, gentlemen.”

The speaker was a man in a blue suit and a crewcut, followed by another gentleman in a black suit but the same crewcut. He wasn’t a doc, as he was moving too fast and looked a little out of place. And when he got there, he was out-of-breath.

“Whoa,” he said, “more running than I’m used to, plus a terrible drive over from Knoxville. Anyway, sorry, don’t mean to be a bother, we just got here.”

“You’re?”

“Sorry again, Ron Evers, Pinkerton Detective Agency, Knoxville office. We’re setting up security for this patient, here, let me show you this.”

He struggled goofily, unsure to be busting doctors, but better safe than sorry, and he pulled out a comic-book badge just like Deputy Dawg’s and some kind of photo ID with an official PINKERTON imprimatur.

“I’ll have to see some ID before I can allow entrance.”

“Son, I’m Dr. Torrence, I’m on my rounds,” said Vern smoothly.

“So sorry, doctor, really I am, but I’ll have to get an administrator here to verify you. Pain in the ass, I know, and it’s your hospital, and all that, but her father hired our firm and his instructions were very clear. No entrance without verification. I’ve already liaisoned with hospital security, if you’re wondering. I’ll call the hospital admin right now,” and he lifted a cell.

Something scalding went off inside Vern’s head. In his younger days, he would have hit the young security guy in the throat, then kicked the other in the balls. Then he would have kicked each in the head until he was sure they were dead. Then he would have killed the girl with the knife he carried. But Vern was mellower now. Even as he felt the frustration build and build like a steam engine about to blow, he kept it together.

“Well,” he said, “no need for that. I’ll go get the duty nurse and she’ll get this straightened out.”

“Yes sir, that’s fine.”

“Come on, Jack,” he said to his cousin or brother or whatever kin Ernie was to him, “we’ll get the nurse. I hate it when procedure is violated.”

And the two Grumleys walked ever so slowly down the hall in their Rockports to the elevator and waited ever so slowly for it to come, Vern thinking, I need to kill something or get laid, preferably by a kid, fast!

SEVEN

He called her from Knoxville the next afternoon.

“Where have you been? My God, what is going on?”

“Sorry, it’s been busy. She’s fine, or as good as can be expected. The brain work is all fine, she’s just unconscious. They say they usually come out of these things in a week or two, and recovery is almost always 100 percent. So it’s looking very positive here, medically.”

“Bob, I called the hospital, she’s been moved.”

“That’s my doing. The doctors agreed it was medically sound, and so I’ve got her in a private hospital here in Knoxville.”

“What is—”

“Uh, there was an incident.”

“I don’t—”

“Unclear, and maybe I’m overreacting. But the Pinkerton agent—”

“Pinkerton agent?”

“I did some checking and I’m not sure I buy the story about the redneck kid in the pickup anymore. At least not wholly. So I hired Pinkertons to provide 24/7 plain-clothes security, three teams of two. Anyhow, as the first team was going on duty, they stopped a couple of doctors on their rounds. No big deal, nobody thought anything about it, but the docs went off to get administrative authorization and never returned. So I asked, and nobody knows who they were. Nobody got a good look at them. Only evidence they were doctors was the green scrubs and the nametags, but hell, anyone can buy a pair of surgical scrubs. It didn’t sit right.”

“So you moved her. That was wise.”

“I think it’s okay if you fly in now. I don’t want to give you the name of the hospital until you’re in town. But I’d stay on the north side, in a suburb. She needs her mother. She looks so sad, all banged up, all those wires and tubes, so still. Breaks my heart.”

“She’s strong. She’ll come through this, I know it.”

“Okay, you have my number. When you get in here and get booked in a hotel, call me, and I’ll come by. Meanwhile, I’ve got some nosing around to do.”

“What is it?”

He told her at length about the tire treads, the interpretation of the NASCAR fellows, the general indifference of the sheriff’s department, the intensifying traffic and crowding as the big race day approached, and the town filling up with campers, celebrants, drinkers, rowdy kids, and other assorted pilgrims.

“So I mean to look into it. I know you think I’m paranoid but—”

He was surprised at what came next.

“You listen to me a moment. You have gone on many dangerous adventures, leaving me to raise the child, and now I have another child to raise. Yes, I think you can turn paranoid. But this time I am paranoid too, because it is my daughter involved. So you’re not working off some crazy sense of honor or something you think you owe your long-dead father or something left over from a war nobody remembers. You’re working for me. If you think someone tried to kill our daughter, Bob, then you find them and you stop them. You stop them from harming our daughter or anyone’s daughter.”

“I will do that,” he said. “Oh, and one more thing.”

“Yes?”

“Bring some guns.”

EIGHT

Bob didn’t really approve of newspapers and had certainly never been in the office of one before. But that’s what his daughter had wanted, and as he looked at the city room, with its ranks of messy desks, its knots of insouciant young people, its phone obsessives, its listless copy editors, its harassed junior editors, its earnest techies to service the computers in mysterious fashion, he wondered why it had meant so much to her, ever since she was a child. There was nothing in his family to account for such a leaning; maybe there was a writer tucked away in some branch of Julie’s, but he’d never heard of such a thing. But he knew this: She loved it, she lived, dreamed, breathed, and ate it.

Okay, sweetie, he told himself. If this is what you want, I will try and get it back for you.

He sat in a conference room—glass-walled, affording a view of the newsroom and the staff, right next to the managing editor’s office—as Jim Gustofson, the managing editor, a tough gal named Jennifer something, and Nikki’s immediate editor, briefed him on what she’d been up to.

The gist of it was that Nikki was the cops reporter, and her specialty was the crystal meth craze that now gripped rural America, as it played across northeastern Tennessee and southwestern Virginia. She’d done a prize-winning story on the children of crystal meth distributors, who are put in foster homes when their parents are arrested. She knew the sheriffs of most of the seven immediate counties, she knew a lot of the knock-down-the-door cops, she knew the social services people, the welfare people, the educators, for the problem impacted all these areas. The stuff was pure shit; its only advantage was that it was cheap and the high it granted was intense if short lived. Once in a while you put your baby in the oven or ran over your grandmother with a lawnmower on the impression she was a troll halfling from the realm of Zelazny. But generally, like dope everywhere of every kind, it made its users useless slackers who sat around all day figuring out how to get a few nickels together for the next fix, or kitchen chemists in trailer parks who tried to cook it up themselves, all too often blowing a crater into the earth and themselves straight to hell. A few shrewdies had big labs that made what real money was available in the down-home heroin racket.

“She was preparing another big story on the shape of the problem in the immediate Tri-cities area. She’d been visiting the local police entities, trying to get a sense of what she was doing.”

“Sir, are these people dangerous?”

“Well, as they say, they only kill their own kind. Turf wars, the occasional hardhead who goes for the assault rifle when the raid team shows, bitterness over price hikes or debts owed. You know that easy money, stupid people, and hard times have a way of creating misery. Your daughter was the witness to all that. She’s damned good at her job. She’ll be moving to a bigger city soon, I’m betting. It has been a pleasure to work with her and watch her grow.”

“Yes sir. But was there anything specific about Johnson County? Some particular area she was looking at. I think I want to go poke around. It’s my nature. Annoys the hell out of people, I know, but can’t be helped.”

“You don’t agree with the police report? Thelma Fielding is a good cop.”

“She is and I liked her very much. It just don’t—excuse me—doesn’t sit right with me. That’s why I have moved her to another hospital.” He didn’t bother to tell them it was in another city. Reporters talk, people listen, that much he knew.

“Yes, she said she might have to go back,” said the woman editor, Jennifer. “Johnson County is so far from everything it’s a kind of a bad joke around here about the cultural tendencies of the rural working class, or these days in this economy, non-working class.”

“You mean the trailer trash, ma’am. I’m proud to say I am one of them pure and simple, but you don’t need to pull punches with me. I know they make the best soldiers, farmers, and family people in the world, but that same stubbornness and willingness to risk makes them sick-bad-ugly-tempered boils on the butt of humanity if they choose the dark side.”

“We’d never put that in the paper, but yes, that’s what we’re talking about. So the meth problem is particularly bad in Johnson. That’s where you see your most grotesque crimes and some of the ugliest violence. But last year they elected a reformer for sheriff, a county man named Colonel Reed Wells.”

“I have heard the name.”

“Handsome guy, famous because he was a Ranger officer in the war in Baghdad and won some kind of medal. A star?”

“Silver Star?” Bob asked.

“Yes, I think that’s right? Were you in the army, Mr. Swagger? You have something of the military about you.”

“Not in the army, no ma’am. I did a spell in another branch.”

“Well, it shows. I wish some more of my reporters had the discipline and the organization that the military teaches so well. Anyhow, Reed Wells was in the forefront of the fight against the drug. He’s your dynamo type. To the accompaniment of much publicity, he has acquired a helicopter from the army on some kind of Justice Department grant that passes surplus material on to police agencies. He’s organized a first-rate raid team, all very gung-ho. You know, guys in black with hoods and machine guns. He searches for the labs from the air most days, then coordinates with ground, then he hits ’em from above just as the ground team hits ’em from two sides. Very commandolike. Nikki said she felt like she was in Vietnam, though I don’t know how she could know anything about Vietnam.”

“Maybe she saw some old books,” said Bob.

“But here’s the thing. Johnson County leads the region in the number of meth labs raided, the number of arrests, the number of prosecutions. But the odd part is, the price of meth in Johnson hasn’t gone up, it’s stayed the same.

“Now why would that be? If the supply is drying up, the price would rise. Yet Nikki had discovered from someone in an abuse program that the stuff is just as plentiful and just as economical. That means that either a) outside sources were bringing it in, or b) there were a lot more meth labs than anybody thought, or c) there was some kind of superlab, capable of taking up the slack, that nobody had discovered yet. Finding the superlab: There’s your Pulitzer Prize for investigative reporting, and there’s your ticket to the Washington Post.”

“I see,” said Bob. “Tell me, if I wanted to figure out what she did the last day before the event, what would I look for? What does a reporter carry? A notebook, I’m guessing.”

“She had a notebook, yes. Most reporters today have laptops that they carry with them. Then they can plug their notes straight into our computer system, and it saves copying and reduces mistakes. So there should be a computer, too. And of course a cellphone. It might have numbers registered that she called that day. The police would have recovered all those things from the accident site, though of course they may be damaged or whatever. Or they may be temporarily impounded, as a part of Thelma’s investigation. But Thelma’s a decent person; if you want your daughter’s things back, I’m sure she’ll cooperate.”

“You must have some sort of list of names and numbers out there—people involved in the meth business, I don’t mean dealers, I mean all the social services people, the drug rehab programs, that sort of thing. She might have talked to them.”

“I can get you an official list. I’ll talk to Bill Carter, he did cops before Nikki got here, and I know he gave her access to his Rolodex. I’ll get a list from him.”

“That would be very helpful.”

“Mr. Swagger,” said Jim Gustofson, “I can certainly appreciate your anger at the inability of the sheriff’s department to bring this thing to a close quickly. But I’m wondering if you really want to go up there on your own and start demanding answers and kicking in doors.”

“I can’t just sit around. It’s not my nature, sir.”

“With all due respect, sir, I see where Nikki’s aggressive nature as a reporter comes from. But I would caution all my reporters not to take chances and I have to say the same to you. The people up there don’t like strangers, and they have, as has been noted, violent proclivities. You could find yourself in a lot of trouble fast. I’d hate to see a tragedy become a double tragedy and you end up on the front page of our newspaper.”

“Good advice, sir. I wish I could follow it. Most would. But sorry to say, I can’t.”

Bob called the hospital to check on Nikki, called Idaho and saw that Julie had already left for the trip to Knoxville, and then started the drive out to Johnson County but soon found himself ensnarled in traffic. He pulled over, got out a map and investigated various alternative routes, but all seemed to take him too far to the west and then back around. He decided to bull through straight down Volunteer Parkway on the premise that once he passed the speedway, traffic would lessen considerably and he could make up for lost time and still get out to Mountain City by midafternoon, where he’d begin with Detective Thelma and maybe even get a chance to meet up with the hero, Sheriff Reed Wells, Silver Star winner and reformer.

The traffic crawled along, and the closer he got to the speedway, the more festive Bristol turned. He felt like he was at some gathering of clans or tribes or something. There was a feeling of celebration in the air and no shortage of alcohol to fuel the glee. Pennants hung across the road, all the street lamps had been festooned with portraits of blasting Chargers or Fusions or Camrys roaring through clouds of dust, blazing bright with primal colors, looking for all the world like fighter planes hungry for the kill. Flags of a hundred colors flapped and danced in the wind against a bright blue sky. Every lawn bore a sign offering parking, and the cost increased hugely the closer he got to the speedway. The far hills were carpeted with Rec-Vs, SUVs, and tents, as a whole new population of occupiers and spenders moved in. They were like the Lakota Sioux just before the Little Big Horn, only in vans and sleepers instead of wikiups. Crowds thronged the walkways, and seeped into the slowed traffic. Everywhere, entrepreneurs had erected booths or tents, offering souvenirs of the fun, blankets, hats, posters, rental radio sets for eavesdropping on the chatter between driver and crew chief, food of every sort, drink of every sort—no problem with liquor licensing down here, everybody just sold whatever they wanted—straw hats after the famous beat-up Richard Petty configuration, neckerchiefs, sweatshirts, T-shirts charting the rise of the Confederacy. Damn, these folks knew how to party. No wonder they called it a nation. It was a hootenanny combined with Oktoberfest with an office party with a safe return from thirteen months in the land of bad things with a Chinese New Year with a hoedown with a rock concert and, oh yeah, the VJ-Day feeling his old man must have had after surviving—if barely—five invasions on five islands across the Pacific.

He shook his head at the frenzy of it; the intensity seemed to have increased three-or fourfold since his visit with USMC Matt and his crew chief, Red Nichols, a few days earlier, and he saw that dropping by to see them now was all but an impossibility; they were sealed off by crowds and madness as the big day approached.

Finally, he topped a low hill and saw his principal obstacle just ahead. It loomed gigantically, dominating all that was before or around it, and he saw it was situated a couple of hundred yards to the left of Volunteer Parkway. He would have to pass it to get beyond. The Bristol Motor Speedway looked like some kind of huge ship from space that had crash-landed in this part of the Shenandoah. It had a kind of familiarity to it he could not again place, but then it flashed clear. Some movie with Will Smith as a marine fighter pilot, but that wasn’t but a small part of it. It was about an invasion from space, and these huge ships came down and dominated the earth. The F-15s fired their Mavericks at it, and the missiles just popped on the perimeter because of some kind of magic shield. It was stupid, he realized, and wondered why on earth he’d wasted the time and money. Maybe the USMC fighter-pilot thing, but now he recalled after Will and the boys had put the old USMC boot up the ass of the whatever-they-weres from wherever-they-came, the big ships crashed and burned. That’s what it looked like, a giant space ship, all chrome and sleek streamline and immense scale and circularity, some kind of man-structure, too regular by far for nature, crashed and burning askew in some place where it didn’t belong, a green valley with whispers of blue mountain ridges to the east and the west.

In fact, it looked like nature had somehow been scrubbed from the scene by the thing, so dominating was the man-made structure and so active the little city that had grown up in its shadows. But then he noticed, almost as an afterthought, a high foothill, carpeted in forest, rising above the speedway. It was about a mile off, on his left, separated from the speedway by a plain now peopled with a frenzied mob, where booths and exhibits and tents had been set up. Hell, you hardly noticed the hill at all—this big lump of verticality was all but banished from vision and notice by the hugeness of the speedway and all the frenzy it sustained. He thought, Wonder why they haven’t knocked that old pile of rocks and trees down and put condos in right there.

Anyhow, he struggled down through the thick stop-and-go of Volunteer Parkway until he reached its closest point to the speedway itself, and saw that here too, everything was on an upswing. The grinding buzz of the cars qualifying inside—maybe his new pal Matt MacReady was on the track now, sailing along at about thirty-five degrees at 185 per—filled the air, giving every physical thing, including Bob’s rental car and his eardrums, a kind of vibration. Baby sister, the boys were burning rubber and high-test today!

What was new today was that some kind of trailer park had been constructed in the immediate vicinity of the structure itself and proudly wore a kind of midway carnival banner that said NASCAR VILLAGE.

It was all jammed up with pilgrims of the faith. He saw that it was a little neighborhood composed entirely of trailers, trucks, and vans that had the specialized capability of converting to retail outlet by opening up into a kind of high counter. From behind that counter, dozens of men and women, all in NASCAR regalia, sold yet more souvenirs, most all of it driver oriented, worshiping the cult of the guy that pressed the steel around the oval at speed and risked death in the process. He had time to examine the setup at length, because the traffic had stalled almost to a creep, and it wasn’t long before he noted the Matt MacReady trailer, just as big and busy as any of them, with young Matt’s face emblazoned everywhere and the USMC 44 digital-camouflage pattern spread everywhere.

You couldn’t but think about the money. If it was a religion, part of the observance was the cash transaction, as dollars were traded for official NASCAR gear and the official stuff evidently demanded a premium over the Chinese crap that the imitators and hustlers sold in their little stalls across the way.

Someone’s sure getting rich, he thought. All that damn money. Turns people to fools.

Then at last the traffic cleared, and he sped away from NASCAR Village and the speedway toward the green mountains ahead.

NINE

Why, O Heavenly Father, why, he beseeched. Lord, how thou tests me. Lord, I am thy humble servant, please send me relief.

God was busy. He didn’t answer.

So the Reverend Alton Grumley was left to his own bitter devices, and they told him, goddamnit, things wasn’t happening as they’s supposed to. Curse that girl!

He left his tiny office off the gym floor of the rec center of the Piney Ridge Baptist Prayer Camp and stepped out into the heavy, pressing heat of an August afternoon in Tennessee, and in a yard meant to accommodate Baptist jumping jacks and deep-knee bends, saw before him sweaty men struggling with an entirely different set of rigors.

“Jesus Christ, no,” shouted Brother Richard to a gaggle of Grumleys who fought with a device at the base of a large truck. It was a graceful, but surprisingly heavy, steel construction that rode its own smallish steel wheels. It was called a hydraulic jack, and was used for lifting the left or right half of a vehicle off the ground. It was crude, old, disobedient, and annoyingly stubborn. It hated Grumleys and Grumleys hated it. What they had to do with it, they had to do fast. Getting Grumleys to do something fast was like getting cats to dance. It just hardly didn’t ever happen.

“You monkeys!” screamed Brother Richard to all the sweaty, tattooed Grumley beef—the sun was high, the sky cloudless; bugs and skeeters, drawn by the stench of flushed Grumley flesh, swooped and darted. “You can’t do nothing right. You, balding guy, what’s your name again?”

“Cletus Grumley, Brother Richard.”

“You don’t come across when he’s trying to get the air wrench on the lugs. You wait till he’s got ’em coming out, then you git on around. It’s gotta work smoothly or you get all tangled up, the tires roll away, and many a race, in fact most races, are lost in the pits where the big muscle boys like you haven’t practiced enough, and it ends up looking like a Chinese fire drill.”

“Yes sir. But Mosby stepped on my heel, Brother Richard, which is why I done spilled forward. Wasn’t going forward, wasn’t meaning to, just got tripped up by Mosby.”

“Mosby, you a cousin or a son? Or maybe both?”

“Don’t know, sir. Heard it both ways. Not sure which gal is my real ma. Was raised by Aunt Jessie, who may have been the Reverend’s third wife, or maybe his fourth. I tripped on Cletus because someone, either Morgan or Allbright, pushed me.”

“Morgan, Allbright, slow down,” said Richard. “Slooowwwww downnnn.” And he tried to indicate calmness, lack of excitement, craziness by a kind of universal gesture for calming, pressing both flattened hands down as if to say, “Bring it down a notch.”

“It’s Morgan’s sweat,” said Allbright, “it stinks so it makes me want to throw up.”

“Ain’t my sweat,” said the one who had to be Morgan, “it’s your own damn farts you be smelling, Morgan farts more than any white man in this world and most Negroes.”

The issue was syncopation. An air-driven power wrench and the high-strength hydraulic jack had to be dragged sixty feet, set under the edge of the truck, and the truck jacked up. The power wrench had to tear loose the lugs. The old tires had to be yanked off and dumped, the new ones slammed on, the lugs power-wrenched tight. It had to be done fast, really fast, and the boys had been trying so hard. But maybe this wasn’t a Grumley sort of thing. There was no one else, though, time was short, and Race Day was approaching.

“Okay, boys,” said Brother Richard, “you knock off now. We’ll do it again later when it’s cooler. And don’t let Allbright eat no beans tonight, or cabbage neither.”

Richard, wiping his neck with a red handkerchief, came over to the porch where he’d seen the Reverend watching grumpily.

“Well, sir,” he asked, “you tell me. Were these boys just raised by pigs or were they suckled by them too? Or maybe sired?”

“You are the Whore of Babylon, Brother Richard. That wicked tongue will get you smitten, Brother Richard.”

“Not till after you’ve had your Race Day fun, old man. We both know that. So I will amuse myself as I see fit until we have done our jobs, and by that time, you will be so rich you won’t have any thought for Brother Richard and his sharp tongue. Now, what’s going on with the girl?”

“I have just heard,” the Reverend said, “that that daddy of hers has moved her.”

“Damn!” said Richard.

“Damn is right. She wakes up and starts singing, we are fried in batter. Maybe she won’t wake up before we move. Or maybe she’ll die or something.”

“You can’t take that gamble. You know well as I do, that girl is trouble. She has seen my face and she knows enough to tip off your plan; she makes a single phone call to ask a single question to someone who knows a little something, and we are finished. You’re supposed to be a crime lord. Do something criminal.”

“Well, son, that’s the problem. If we find her—she’s got to be in either Knoxville or Raleigh, as he moved her by ambulance, that much I know—if we find her and make sure, then we expose completely the idea that what happened to her was part of a plan, or a necessity to protect a plan. And maybe that makes all their security go up. And the plan is based on their overconfidence that no further security is needed, as you well know.”

“I do know, just as I know,” said Brother Richard, “that the plan is damned smart. Don’t believe nobody never did what you’re trying to do the way you’re doing it before, so how could they figure it out? It’s so damned smart, I also know you, Grumley, didn’t think it up. No sign of a Grumley pawprint anywhere on it. Your ilk may screw it up if they can’t get the goddamned tires switched off fast enough and we become peas in a pod for the police shooters. But I think they’ll just manage it.” Like many men in his profession, Brother Richard had a clear view of what was necessary for his own survival.

“No,” he explained, “you can’t just hope she doesn’t wake up or if she wakes up, she doesn’t remember. Even if she wakes up in six months, she may know enough to lead law enforcement straight to you, and I know you’ll roll over on me like a mangy dog with an itch. That, plus she saw my new face. I can’t have her helping a police artist by drawing a good picture of my new face. I spent a fortune on this face and it hurt like hell for months. I need a new face to operate, you understand? Old man, you have to act on this now and permanently.”

“Mark 2:11. ‘Get up off your pallet and go to your house.’ Rise, you cripple, on the strength of faith in the Lord. Walk, pray, work, and triumph. If the Lord is our shepherd, we shall not want.”

“It ain’t wanting I’m worried on. It’s arresting. They git me, I go to the chair. Then it’s frying.”

“You think you know all, Brother Richard. Even dumb old Reverend Alton knows it’s now a needle.”

“Chair, needle, you still end up dead. I am the Sinnerman, as I have explained. I do not want to face a day of reckoning. I will run from the Lord and try and hide in the sea or the moon or the mountain all on that day. You, you’ve got no worries.”

“I can face my Lord proudly.”

“Of course. Because you were born a snake and someone put a mouse before you and you ate it. You liked it, and that was it. You became an eater of mice. More mice, please, that was your code and you never gave a damn about anything. More and more mice you ate, and you never thought of the family life of the mice, the culture, the fantasies and religious structures of the mice, the history, theory, and music of the mice. For you, it was an easy enough thing, it was your nature. You eat mice. End of story.

“Now me, I chose to become a snake, for my own born-in-hell reasons. So I know that mice have as much right to life as I do, and that they feel every pain and fear and hatred that I do, love their kids, make the world go on, fight in wars, work in or build factories or houses. I empathize with mice. So when I eat a mouse, I know what agony I release in the world and knowing that, I take pleasure in it. Your code: More mice, please. Mine: I revel in the agony I release, and it suits a certain twisted-sister part of my brain, it fulfills me. That, Reverend, and I am proud to say it, that is sin.”

“I cannot believe a blasphemer like you, Brother Richard, thinks it appropriate to lecture me on sin. You must wear the number of the beast somewhere on your body.”

“No one knows less about sin than a Grumley. Y’all are basically animals. You may not even be mammals, I’m not sure. You just do what your instincts tell you, and in a funny way, it is God’s will. Lord, what snakes these Grumleys be.”

“Hail, Hail, the Gang’s All Here” announced itself for one moment, interrupting this important eschatological dialogue, and of course it was the Reverend’s cellphone, which he took out of the inside breast pocket of his powder blue Chinese suit.

“Hallelujah,” he said. “You sure? Hallelujah!”

He snapped the phone shut.

“It seems that damn girl’s father has showed up and is asking questions. Oh, Lord, another test.”

Fuck, thought Brother Richard.

“I will send Carmody and B.J. to watch on him. If we have to, we’ll have to take him down. He is old and harmless, can’t hardly walk straight, his hair’s all grayed out, but you never can tell.”

Another mouse, thought Brother Richard.

TEN

“Glad you came by,” said Detective Thelma Fielding, putting out a hand which turned out to conceal a strong grip.

“Should have worn a gas mask,” said Bob.

“Ain’t it the truth. You get used to it.”

She was referring to a strong scent of atomized carbon that filled the air and left a sheen of grit on all the flat, polished surfaces. Clearly it had drifted over from the coal yard next to the sheriff’s department, which sat in the old train station that had been converted three years earlier when the passenger service closed down.

“Nobody foresaw that when they started dumping coal there. Now we’ve had OSHA in here six days a week, and they finally decided to condemn this old building. A shame, it was a nice building once. Now it’s got grit everywhere and nobody can stand it. Next spring, we move into a new building across town.”

“Well, that’s something. Must be hell on white glove occasions.”

She laughed at his joke, which even he didn’t think was that funny. Then she said, “I have some news for you.”

“That’s great,” said Bob.

He sat at her desk in the sheriff’s department, seeing it was neatly kept with a stack of files in an ONGOING vertical holder. There were a couple of trophies as well, displaying a little gold man holding a pistol atop a plastic, imitation-marble pedestal, reminding him that Thelma had won some shooting competitions, which perhaps explained her fancy .45 in its strange plastic holster. He decided to try and get a gander at the inscriptions on them, but couldn’t from his angle. She was the same as before, khakis and a polo shirt, her gun held tight to her waist in that plastic holster, her arms oddly strong, as had been her grip. Her ducktail blonde hair had just been worked on and her face was tan, her eyes expressive.

“Also, Sheriff Wells is in, and I think you want to meet him, don’t you, Mr. Swagger?”

“Yes ma’am.”

“Well, the best news is, we got a paint and tire match from the state police crime lab in Knoxville. Just came in.”

She reached over, took a file marked SWAGGER NIKKI, INCIDENT REPORT CF-112, opened it, and took out a faxed form.

“They say it’s a color called cobalt silver, found on Chrysler Corporation vehicles, notably the Dodge Charger, the Magnum, and the Chrysler 300, their muscle cars. The tire is a standard Goodyear 59-F, and damned if that doesn’t coordinate with a stolen car of a week earlier, a cobalt silver ’05 Charger. Lots of Chargers go missing this time of year, because the Charger is the big hoss of NASCAR and every punk kid or crankhead is in a Charger kind of mood. So this one was stolen in Bristol, and my guess is, whatever kid did it got himself liquored up and went out looking for someone to intimidate that night. As I say, I have my snitches working. I will circularize, but usually folks don’t take stolen cars to body shops, so I doubt that will pay off. They just dump ’em in the deep woods and maybe we find ’em and maybe we don’t, and if we do find ’em, maybe we can take prints and maybe we can’t, and if we can, maybe we can ID the car and maybe we can’t. Probably can’t. But I know who steals cars around these parts, and I’ve got some fellas you wouldn’t invite to dinner or let your daughter date looking into it. So I’m sure we’ll come up with a name and then we’ll go visit him.”

“I hope you let me come along on that one, Detective.”

“Mr. Swagger, you don’t have some vigilante-kickass thing in mind, do you? We can’t let that happen and if you—”

“No, no, ma’am, an old coot like me? No ma’am, I know my limits. I just want to be as involved in this as possible.”

“Well, we’ll see. Can’t make any promises. Probably not a good idea, but I am noted for sometimes making the wrong decision. More to the point, when your daughter awakes, we’ll want to interview her. What’s the word on that?”

Bob gave her a brief summary of Nikki’s medical situation, leaving out the detail that he’d moved her, leaving out as well the results of his independent investigations.

“You will call me when she’s ready to talk, sir? I know you’ve moved her and I am not even going to ask where, because that’s your business, but I know you will call me as soon as an interview is possible.”

“You don’t miss much, do you, Detective?”

“Miss things all the damned time, but try not to. Supposed to pay attention, that’s what they pay me for.”

She smiled, her face lit up, and Bob noticed what a damned attractive woman she was.

“Okay,” she said, “let’s go and see the boss.”

The office said war. War was in the pictures, the officer in lean camouflages standing with an M4 next to Middle Eastern ruins or in front of huge vehicles with guns everywhere, some airborne, some treadborne, all desert tan, all speaking of war. A plaque with medals on the wall said war, the Silver Star the biggest of them, but there were others, impressive, a collection of a man who’d been in hard places, taken his fair share of risks and been shot at much, and had lived to tell about it.

Sheriff Wells was tall, thin, hard, and tan, with close-cropped graying hair, sharp, dark eyes, and a languid way of draping himself, as if to say that having seen most things, nothing on earth would be of much surprise. He wore the brown of the Johnson County Sheriff’s Department, with a gold star on his lapel, and a stock Glock pistol in his holster, as well as the usual duty getup of the police officer: the radio unit with curly cord mic attached to his shirt lapel, the taser, the cuffs; none of it taken off, because he had to set the example to his men and women that the gear can save your life. You wear it all the time, that’s what you do, comfort is not a part of the bargain.

“Mr. Swagger,” he said after the firm handshake and the direct look to the eyes without evasion or charm, “nice to meet you, though of course I wish the circumstances could be better. How is your daughter at this point?”

Bob told him, succinctly, keeping it tight and straight, as if he were himself back in service, reporting to a superior.

“Well, we all hope she’s going to be all right. I hope Detective Fielding has kept you abreast of our efforts. If you need any help, please feel free to contact us. Sometimes a criminal act is harder on the victim’s close relatives than on the victim herself. I know how the thought that someone tried to hurt your child can haunt a father or a mother. So please, feel free to call us. For our part, we’ll work hard to keep you in the loop. I know how tough it can be to go weeks without hearing a thing from the police. I’ve ordered all my officers to call each victim or next-of-kin once a week to keep them up-to-date on any investigation or legal proceedings. That’s our policy, and maybe you’ve guessed that although I am a sheriff by appointment I am still a full-bird colonel by inclination, and when I set a policy it is followed.”

“You sound like a straight talker, Sheriff, so can I ask you a straight question or two and set my mind to ease?”

“You surely can. Go ahead, Mr. Swagger.”

“I expressed this to Detective Fielding, as well. I know you’re all caught up in busting meth labs and you’ve got this big race in Bristol and you’re part of the manpower commitment for security on such a big deal, and I do worry if there’ll be time to investigate my daughter’s situation hard, given all that.”

“It’s true most of our issues are manpower issues, that plus the goddamned coal dust on everything. But given the size of the department, it’s a hard thing, patrolling a county that’s several hundred square miles in area, most of it wooded, much of it mountainous, what with our problems with narcotics interdiction and this damned race. So we’ve got a lot on our plates. But please know that I try and run a professional department, and we will give this thing our best effort as time allows. My motto is: No back burner in my department. Everything’s front burner in Johnson County. You have my word on that.”

“Thank you, Sheriff.”

“Now, I did want to say something to you. Detective Fielding mentioned to me that you had these doubts, which are entirely appropriate, because I know how upsetting something of this nature might be. But she also said that you had mentioned poking around on your own.”

“That is my nature, sir. I am a physical man. Though you may still hear some Arkansas in my voice, I live in the West, and in the West, we are used to doing things for ourselves. It’s not that I doubt Detective Fielding, or the department. I just know, however, that there’s only so many hours in a day, and there are pressures on you all the time. So, yes, it was my idea to poke around a bit. Is that a problem?”

The sheriff said, “Look, Mr. Swagger, I don’t mean to be disrespectful, but that newspaper and your daughter weren’t beloved among some people around here, any more than I am. I take my chances, I suppose you could say she took her chances. She was focusing a light on methamphetamine in Johnson, and folks don’t like that. If I had known she was going to some of the places she went—she was a brave girl, I don’t think there’s any doubt about that—I might have cautioned her or sent a unit into the vicinity just in case. Now it looks like you might be poking in those places too. I’m talking the places where the meth addicts do business, where the trade is practiced, where the stuff is cooked, all of them unsavory places, all of them volatile. So I really don’t want to be worried about you too. My mission is to close these places down, not look after an older fellow in over his head.”

“I see what you’re saying. Still, if someone tried to hurt my daughter, I’d want to get him off the street and into jail as fast as—”

“Sir, you might rile somebody, and a fellow of your age wouldn’t stand much of a chance against young toughs with secrets to hide. Were you in the service?”

“Did a spell in the marines a while back,” Bob said.

“Well, don’t let that give you delusions of grandeur. Some of these hardscrabble Tennessee boys are tougher than nails and they can go off fast and do some bad damage. Put some liquor in ’em or some crystal or both hootch and crystal and they can be downright mean, even murderous. I’d hate to find you beaten to a pulp in a ditch or, worse, dead in a ditch.”

“Me too,” said Bob.

“I was a soldier for many years, Mr. Swagger. I was executive officer for an armored combat brigade and went to Iraq twice, three times if you count my time in the sand in the first war when I was a lieutenant. It’s part of my brain. And I still am a soldier, only now the war’s against crystal meth. But I have sadly seen a lot of violent death in my profession. There’s a saying—‘When the shit happens, it happens fast’—that’s entirely accurate. I’m telling you, around here in some areas, it can go to combat fast. Combat is fast and scary and it takes a trained professional to survive, much less prevail, in that environment.”

Bob sat still, working hard to keep his face uninteresting. But he knew that colonels were very rarely in combat. They supervised, they controlled, they kept radio contact, they took reports, they laid plans and bawled out lieutenants and captains when things went wrong. But they didn’t look through the scope, squeeze off the round, and watch a man jack hard then melt into sheer animal death. They didn’t see what the shells did to the people they caught in the open, how it made a mockery out of any notion of human nobility when you were just looking at freshly butchered meat. They didn’t know boys who’d never been fucked, not even once, died screaming and calling for mommy. There was a whole lot about war colonels didn’t know.

“Yes sir.”

“Do you get my drift?”

“You are trying to be polite, but you are telling me to keep my nose out of things or I might get eaten up.”

“Just about that, yes. Let the trained professionals handle it, do you hear?”

“Well, I’ll be careful, I swear to you. Fair enough?”

“I’d rather have your word that you’ll go sit by your daughter’s side. That’s where you’re needed.”

“Yes sir, I hear you.”

“But I don’t hear you agreeing.”

“I have a nature to follow, that I can’t deny, sir.”

“Now you are being polite and telling me to go to hell. Mr. Swagger, you can get yourself in so much trouble so fast around here. I miss my command imperative to reassign you to kitchen duties or public information. But I do know trouble comes in two forms. Trouble with them, meaning the bad guys, trouble with us, meaning the good guys. It’s dangerous for an inexperienced man. Were you ever in combat?”

“I did some time in—”

“I tell you, Mr. Swagger, it’s not pretty. You cannot believe what a bullet can do to a human body.”

“Yes sir,” Bob said.

“Well, I’m not getting from you what I want and I can’t compel you to give it to me. But I have to warn you that we don’t recognize righteous lawbreaking, meaning I can’t cut you any slack. I can and will arrest you on a lot of silly little things like impeding a lawful investigation or disobeying a lawful order if I find you poking around. I’m so hoping I don’t have to go that route on a man of your age.”

“Yes sir,” said Bob again. “Now let me ask you one last thing. My daughter had personal effects with her that day. I’m guessing you retrieved them from the wreck. I’d like to have them.”

“Thelma, what’s the disposition on that?”

Detective Thelma briefly checked her file, then looked up and said, “We recovered a laptop, seriously damaged by the wreck, a cellphone, her purse, her keys, a Reporter’s Notebook.”

“Any of it part of the investigation?”

“It’s all pretty much busted up, Sheriff.”

“Then I think we can let Mr. Swagger have those, don’t you, Thelma?”

“Yes sir,” she said.

“Okay, Mr. Swagger, Thelma will get those for you. I’ll walk you out. Stop somewhere and blow your nose hard to get all the dust before it settles in your lungs. We’ll all probably die of the black lung. Anyhow, I’ll shake your hand, sir, and tell you once again that I hope to hell I don’t run into you in booking or the morgue.”

ELEVEN

Mountain City, population two thousand five hundred, was built along the stems of the crossroads of 421, 91, and 67 in a valley between mountain ridges, and it had ridden up the mountainsides in some places. Like towns anywhere, it had its nicer side and its not-so-nice side; its profusion of fast food on the big roads leading out of and into town; its shabby, ignored old main street; but also its share of beaten-down strip malls off the main drag. But in one of them he found a computer store and went in, finding it full of bustling, earnest young geeks, exactly the kinds of boys who wouldn’t end up in the United States Marine Corps. They were all gathered around a monitor that showed some kind of war scenario, mainly beefy Special Ops types with super weapons destroying giant insects with their own set of super weapons. Finally a boy looked up and lumbered over.

“Can I help you sir? Whoa, that looks like toast.”

He was referring to the laptop with its spidery fracture lines knifing jaggedly across the bent screen, the scuffed and cracked plastic, the keys out of whack or sprung, the whole mess looking finished for all time.

“I don’t know if we can do much with that,” the boy said. “You might have to replace the whole unit.”

“I’m guessing y’all have a genius here,” Bob said. “All these places do. Some real smart kid—all the others dislike him he’s so smart, he wins the alien games all the time and he doesn’t mind letting you know what a geek you are?”

“Charlie. How did you know?”

“I just figured it out. Anyhow, Charlie should be at Caltech or MIT except he flunked out of community college or got busted for marijuana or some such and he don’t mind telling you how much more he deserves.”

“That’s Charlie. He flunked out of Vanderbilt. Math scholarship. It was the games. He is good with the games. He’s the best. You can’t beat him.”

“I’d like to see Charlie, please.”

Soon enough, Charlie was put before him, a surly kid in a hooded sweatshirt, still wearing a smear of acne, but no needles or pins through his flesh.

“Charlie, I hear you’re pretty smart.”

“Know a thing or two. Can’t help you with that box, though, mister. It’s completely wasted, I can tell you that.”

“I don’t want it fixed, Mr. Charlie. I want it mined.”

“Mined?”

“Yeah, I want you to dig out the hard drive and salvage what information you can—”

“Data.”

“Data, yeah. Whatever you can, particularly in the last few days. It was beaten up in a car accident last Thursday. Today is Tuesday. I’m particularly interested in the day of the accident.”

“Mister, I don’t know. Looks like someone took a hammer to it.”

“Does, doesn’t it? Maybe the FBI could tell me, but maybe you know more than the FBI, wouldn’t surprise me. And you’re here and the FBI is in Washington, D.C.”

“Are you with law enforcement, sir?”

“No, just an amateur at all this.”

“Well, I can make a try. It would be expensive. I charge—”

“Charlie, wait a second.”

He pulled out a stockbroker’s checkbook, dated it, signed it, but left the name and amount blank. He handed it to Charlie.

“You start now. You work hard. You say goodbye to blowing up monsters from space for a while. This is a maximum effort. And anything you learn, you call me ASAP on my cell, no matter the time. And when you’re done, you’ll know what you’re owed. You fill it in on the check and go cash it and that’s all there is to it. Are we on the same page?”

“Yes sir. I’ll get busy right now.”

“Good man, Charlie, knew I could trust you.”

Bob checked into the Mountain Empire Motel, and set about the melancholy task of examining what remained of the effects his daughter carried that day. The first, of course, was her key ring, which held the Volvo key—thank God he’d bought her a strong automobile for her first job; maybe it had saved her life—and what had to be the key to the Kawasaki he saw parked out in front of the apartment building. That one was particularly biting, as it recalled many happy hours he’d spent bombing across the prairie outside Crazy Horse on his own bike, where he’d built the new house, and she’d joined him. She couldn’t keep up on horseback, so she’d bought a bike, a Honda 250, and the two of them went on bounding rides over the low hills, under the huge sky in the baking heat. Those were good days, maybe his best, and, he remembered thinking, maybe more necessary than he acknowledged.

It was about then his hair started to turn; it was about then he started having the dreams.

He saw the yakuza swordsman with his perfect English and his smart, feral eyes, and his swordsman’s ambition, and he knew that what everyone told him was true: when you saw this man, you were looking at death.

The last face-off in the snow, on the island.

What was he doing there? What had consumed him with the idea that with his week of training, suppleness from six months of cutting back brush on his desert property, and his anger, that he could stand against this guy? It wasn’t David against Goliath, it was little Davy the three-year-old against Goliath-san. But he’d waded in, delusional, and learned in seconds he was overmatched. Now and then, as the fight wore on, he’d unleash a good combination, his four-hundred-year-old Muramasa blade cleaving dangerously close to the Japanese killer.

But the man was playing with him. It was killer’s vanity. It was a little game. He knew he’d die when the man tired of it, when the macho chit-chat between them no longer amused him, when the magic hour came, and civilians started coming into the zone.

There was a moment where he had nothing, he’d lost everything. His lungs were blown, he was bathed in sweat, fatigued, as the other swordsman stalked him. It was all gone. He remembered the despair: why did you ever think you could do this? Why didn’t you bring a gun? Pull it out, blow a 230-grain hardball through the guy and that was it. But no, you had vanity too. You could be in this game too. Fool. Bitter fool on the slippery edge of extinction.

No, he didn’t think that. There hadn’t been time in the fight. That was imposed later by his subconscious as he reconstructed it in the dream state. And in the dream state, night after night, he saw the yakuza laugh and cut, and open him deeply. He saw his own blood spurt and felt the dizzy weakness fire through his body, felt his knees give. Then he imagined the man making a witty riposte—“Sorry, cowboy, time to catch the last stage out of Dodge” or something—and then drive forward on the horizontal (shimo-hasso) and take his head. More than once he awoke with a scream in a sweat, seeing the world go atilt and then to blur in the eight seconds of oxygen and glucose a detached brain holds to sustain itself, felt the separation, felt the loss.

Why had he survived? That was the mystery, as strange to him as anyone. He knew only that at a certain late moment, he realized he had a steel hip and he remembered some bit of samurai gibberish—“Steel cuts flesh, steel cuts bone, steel does not cut steel”—and pivoted and opened and the target was too great. Exhausted himself, the great yakuza killer took the easy way out, drove the blade through the opening and felt it torque out of control when, an inch into Swagger, it hit the metal that was harder than it was.

Bob came off the blow and cut him hard upward, belly to spine, and that was that.

You were so lucky, he thought. Gunfighter’s luck, arriving in the middle of a sword fight. Or maybe it was just that his subconscious had figured out a way to beat the guy, and it e-mailed him the info just in time. Maybe it was just that he came from fighters and sired fighters and had a strange gift for fighting. But he knew this: You will never be that lucky again. Your weakness turned into your strength and you figured it out one one-millionth of a second in time. The memory came at night and each time it came, it left his hair grayer.

The cycle banished that. It buried it. So much sensation, so much freedom, so much beauty, so much damned fun. What’s better than to be racing across the wide-open prairie with your child, who makes you so proud, and the sense that once again, you survived.

Then he’d come back and it would be Miko’s turn and they’d work with her on the horse in the ring. He’d think, Never got rich in money but got rich in daughters, and that’s even better.

He put it down when it was too much for him, and quickly called his wife.

“I’m here,” she said. “We’ve got a room in a hotel across from the hospital, and I’m here with her now. So is Miko.”

“Is there any change?”

“It’s looking good, the doctors say. She could wake up any minute. She stirs a lot, more like she’s asleep. It helps her, they say, to hear our familiar voices. So I’m very optimistic.”

“Did you—”

“Yes.”

“Good. I’m in Mountain City. I’ll try and get over there soon. I don’t think it’ll be tonight but tomorrow sometime.”

“I’ll be here all day,” she said.

“How’s the security?”

“They’re good people.”

“Okay, good.”

“Love you.”

“Love you.”

Next, he turned to Nikki’s cellphone, particularly to the CALLS DIALED folder. But somehow the thing was frozen up. None of the functions yielded information. But hadn’t she called the cops from the wreck before she slipped off? He made a note to check with some phone expert to see if that indicated something or if it was a common occurrence when phones were damaged.

Then, at last, he turned to her Reporter’s Notebook, a standard 3 x 6 pad held together by spiral rings. At first its pages were densely covered, and he saw that it was her interview with the sheriff. Then a page or so documented the raid, mostly scattered impressions like “rush of air…helicopter lands just as team hits…kid cops seem to be having time of their life. Pathetic suspect, Cubby something, sad little mutt.”

He paged through it carefully, reading items from her later interviews:

Jimmy WILSON, 23, Mtn C. Drug Rehab Clin, “It’s so hard, it’s everywhere and it ain’t no more expensive, don’t know why.”

Or

Maggie CARUTHERS, Carter Cnty, didn’t get address, “Used to come to Johnson for drugs, pushers everywhere. Then all the busts, stopped coming, but head price was same, came over and it was still everywhere, maybe even cheaper.”

“SUPERLAB???” Nikki had written. “Where is SUPERLAB?” in another place.

But it petered out, with no next step, no list of appointments. He could glean a little. She’d started at the sheriff’s department in the morning, gone on the airborne raid with the sheriff, then gone to the drug abuse center and spoken to three people, then the rehab center and spoke to four, including a supervisor. Then…nothing. But how long would that have been? Would it have taken up the whole afternoon? The accident was at 7:35 P.M., according to the clock in the Volvo.

Where had she gone, where had she been?

He looked carefully at the notebook, trying to determine if there was any sign of tampering, but there was nothing apparent. Then it occurred to him to count the pages.

Very carefully, he turned the leaves over and came up with exactly seventy-three.

Hmm, seventy-three?

Now it’s possible all Reporter’s Notebooks have seventy-three pages. But that struck him as odd, wouldn’t it more likely be an even number, like seventy-five? He looked into the spirals for signs of, what were they called, hanging chads, little nuggets of paper residue left from some kind of tearing operation? Nope, nothing.

He went to the last page with writing on it, guessing that if pages had been removed, they’d have been at the back. He found nothing. Well, maybe nothing, maybe something. He found a light set of inscriptions, the tracks of a pen against a paper that had gone through and recorded on the next sheet. He couldn’t make it out, but took it into the bathroom, where the light was stronger, and holding it a variety of ways to capture the right proportion of light and shadow, came across something interesting. It seemed to say:

PINEY RIDGE BAPTIST PRAYER CAMP

And it also said…“gunfire”?

TWELVE

The Grumleys were the Special Forces of southern crime. The Reverend raised them, homeschooled them, taught them the ways and means of crime, strong arm, grift, con, theft, and murder, exactly as they had been handed down through generations to him. He kept them sequestered on the mountaintop compound halfway between Hot Springs and Polk County in Arkansas, while preaching hellfire and damnation on Sundays to keep his religious education accreditation and as excellent camouflage. He only trusted family; family was the magic bond that made the Grumleys invulnerable. No Grumley had ever snitched out another Grumley or a client, as was well known and part of the Grumley magic. But to keep the enterprise going, the Reverend had to procreate heroically. His real product was progeny. Fortunately, he was a man who had found his true calling, and with women he was dynamic. He had had seven wives and none had ever left him. The divorces were pro forma to keep the law at bay, and some of the girls may not even have known they were divorced. He had children by all of them, by most of their sisters and a ma or two. He even had a thing for a bit with Ida Pye of Polk County, and out of that got his spectacular boy, Vern. Though Vern, for all his skills, had issues of pridefulness as demonstrated by his refusal to take the Grumley name. Alton’s brothers contributed their own seed, and the result of all the crossbreeding and the endless nights of bunny-fucking was a tribe of criminals higher by far than scum, more disciplined by far than trash, and, perhaps best of all, not the brightest of all the boys in the trade. It was a Grumley breeding principle to eschew intelligence, and when a boy or a girl was born with an uncommon mind, he or she was sent to private school far off, then college, then exile. Those kids had prosperous, if lonely, disconnected lives, and never knew they were damned by IQ. Their superior intelligence was known to beget inferior criminality, because they had imagination, introspection, questing natures, and occasionally the worst attribute of all for criminals, irony. They were poison.

It was known among the crime bosses of the South that a Grumley on the team meant success. Grumleys were hard, tough, loyal mercenaries. Grumleys could kill, rob, swindle, beat, intimidate anybody. If a snitch had to be found and eliminated for an Atlanta mafia family, a Grumley could get the job done. If a bank had to be tossed in Birmingham, a Grumley team took it down. If an issue of enforcement came up in New Orleans, a Grumley fist settled the issue. If a loan was past due in Grambling, Louisiana, a white Grumley was dispatched, and it was known that he would be fair and honest in his application of force, would never use the word “nigger” and therefore ruffle no hard feelings. He would come, beat, collect, and move on. It was only business, and everybody appreciated that high level of professionalism.

It was known too that Grumleys didn’t go easily, and that was part of their reputation. If he had to, a Grumley would shoot it out with the whole FBI. He’d go down with a gun in each hand, hot and smokey, just like an old-timer from the golden age of desperados; he didn’t mind shooting, he didn’t mind taking fire, and he didn’t mind the odds against him heaping up to a thousand to one. He wouldn’t be one to negotiate. This of course meant the cops stayed away if at all possible, but if not possible, they treated Grumleys roughly, out of their deep fear. No love was lost, no sentimentality attached, no nostalgia generated. Cops hated—hated—Grumleys and Grumleys hated right back, hard and mean.

Grumleys were handsomely paid for their efforts, which is why it was so strange for twelve of the youngest and the most promising to have been called from prosperous enterprises in this town or that city, and gathered, under the Reverend’s watchful eye, to this isolated chunk of Baptist Tennessee. Called for a caper that even they themselves didn’t fully understand, under the supervision of a strange fellow calling himself—or come to think of it, called by them, for he called himself nothing—Brother Richard. Who taught them not how to bust safes or short-wire alarm circuits or tap into computer data banks, but how to change truck tires at high speed. That was really all they knew—except for all the shooting practice, which, hot sweet mama, promised some fun!—and damnit, it was beneath them to do such manual labor under so cruel and arrogant a leader. But the Reverend insisted, and in the Grumley universe, his word was law. He sold obedience and loyalty and it was their job to offer obedience and loyalty.

And thus it was that two other Grumleys, two hard ones, named B.J. and Carmody, were assigned to stay with the damned girl’s daddy as he had adventures in Mountain City. What they saw was an old coot with a bristle of white-gray hair and a bad limp. They differed on what exactly he represented.

B.J.’s opinion was strong.

“Hell, he ain’t nothing but an old man. This here’s a waste of time. That coot can’t get nothing done. Blow in his ear, he’ll fall down.”

But Carmody, by trade an armed robber and occasional assassin, had a different opinion.

“Don’t know, brother. He looks old, he moves old, but first up, I don’t like how tan he is. Tan means he’s outdoors a lot and if he’s outdoors, he’s might to be all spry and peppy. I’d like to git a close-up look on that face and see how much age he wears. Maybe he ain’t all wrinkly. I just know gray hair and a limp makes a man look old and feeble, but looking ain’t being. He may have a jump or two might surprise us.”

“You are a fool, Carmody. I say we go on in there, brace him hard, tell him this ain’t his part of the country and he’d best return to the old folks home and watch him run. He will run scared like a rabbit, I guarantee.”

“He’s got some sly, I’m telling you. Some men have natural sly. They see into things, they git what they want, they ain’t got no need to show bull-strong like your lower-class white thug, them thick-necked fellas the eye-talians think are so tough. Man, wish I had a buck for each one of them I saw fall down and not get up—”

“You do have a buck for each one of them you saw fall down and not get up.”

“You know what, I do. Anyhow’s, I’m not at all convinced this fella ain’t your natural sly.”

They were parked in the parking lot of a Hardee’s across the street from the Mountain Empire Motel, where the old man had gone to ground. It was boring duty, in a one-horse hick town rimmed by mountains and fueled by fast food. No decent whores anywhere in sight, though maybe a fella could get his motor oils changed somewhere in the little burg’s Negro section. That may have had more to do with Grumley lore, out of Hot Springs’ colorful past, however, than anything real.

“Ho-hum,” said B.J. “Ho-fucking-hum.”

“Oh, wait. Lookie, brother, that’s him.”

It was. They saw the old guy hobble out of his room, lock it solid, and limp to his dumpy rental car. In a few seconds he had it fired up and headed back down the road, turned left onto the big, wide stretch that was 421. They followed. In just a bit, he pulled into the low, log-cabin structure that represented the Johnson County Welcome Center, just east of town.

B.J., driving, let him get into the building before pulling into the parking lot; it was Carmody who drew the duty of trying to get in close and get an overhear.

He entered the low old place, finding it a museum in one half and a travel office in the other, with racks of maps and tourist brochures for local attractions, such as they were, and an earnest crew behind desks servicing the visitors. Indeed, the girl’s dad was talking intently to an old lady, and Carmody boldly slipped near, reaching for a bed and breakfast brochure on the table, and listened.

“—so many Baptists around here, you wouldn’t notice if a new one came or an old one went, I swear.”

“Yes ma’am,” he heard the man say. “This one would be new, I’m guessing, not a church but some kind of prayer camp. Piney Ridge, I th—”

“Piney Ridge! Well, sir, why didn’t you say so! Piney Ridge is where Reverend Elmore Childress had his needy child’s camp in the ’70s, until the, er, unpleasantness. Since then that property has sat vacant. If this new fellow wanted a place for a prayer camp, that would be the place, and who’d notice, all the Baptists around. Now my people are Episcopalian and have been, and it’s nothing agin’ the Baptists, but there’s something a little Roman about their service if you get my drift and my sister Eula—”

And on and on the old blue-hair went, but Carmody was free of the politeness that required he listen. He snatched up the B&B brochure and, trying to keep the leap out of his steps, slid out the damned door.

“You see a ghost?”

“No sir. That bastard’s already onto Pap’s place.”

“What? How the hell.”

“Damn, I didn’t get a good look at him. Well, looks like Pap may be eyeballing him himself.”

He pulled out his cell, punched the Reverend’s number. Meanwhile B.J. set the car in motion, eased out of the space and lot, and buzzed a little down 321 toward 61, just to be less visible when he took up the tail on Old Man Swagger the next time he moved.

“Pap!”

“What is it, Carmody?”

“Pap, he knows!”

He explained what he had learned to hushed silence on the other end.

Finally his dad said, “Blasphemy! Blasphemy, damnation, and hellsmoke! That tricky bastard, what is he up to?”

“Pap, if he drops by—”

“He won’t see a damn thing, that I guarantee you. Now you boys, don’t you lose him. We will stay with this trickster hard and if we have to we will snuff him out. Do you hear me, boys?”

“I will tell B.J.”

“You boys load up and lock but keep your thumbs on them safeties. If it comes to it, you may have to shoot fast and put him down hard.”

THIRTEEN

Bob followed the old lady’s instructions, drove the rental up 421 another couple of miles and found 167, with signs pointing out an airport. He turned, headed through flat farmland, though ahead a ridge of mountains rose like some kind of black wave against the surface of the earth. He passed the airport—dinky toy planes, one-engine jobs—rose through foothills, and then was in the higher elevations. The road had been engineered to find its way between the ridges, and he slid through valleys and passes, seeing many private drives off either side of the road. Then he noted his fuel light blinking and not knowing how much farther the drive would be, pulled into a grocery store. LESTER’S GROCERY, the sign said. It was a solitary white structure lodged into the slope, with a set of gas pumps out front. He filled up, decided he needed a Coke or something, and went in.

The place was dark and grubby, staffed by a lounging boy with acne and too much belly and a surly attitude. Bob got a bottle from a cooler, went to the counter, and paid.

“Say, you familiar with a Piney Ridge Baptist Prayer Camp up this way? Lady at the tourist center told me it should be along this road.”

“No sir,” said the boy, making no eye contact.

“How about a sudden influx of new younger men, in clumps, keeping to themselves, looking prayerful and pious? Ring a bell?”

“No sir,” said the boy.

“Son, you said that so fast it seemed to me you’s most interested in ending the conversation, not thinking hard for an answer. Same as last time. Here, look at me. Look at my eyes, see that I’m a human being too, try and help me out. Be surprised what good things can follow from that.”

Sullenly, the boy looked over. Bob saw “boy” was the wrong word. Guy was maybe in his mid-to late twenties, though still riddled with the face blemishes of adolescence, while the features of his face had gone all lumpy with excess weight here as on his body. He made the briefest of connections, then bobbed away.

“Sometimes some fellas come in. New fellas,” he finally said. “Don’t seem no Baptists though. Seem more like hoodlums. Tough guys, don’t know where they’re from. Just show and buy up beer and Fritos and smokes and pork rinds, keeping to themselves, paying in cash, making comments about Lester’s store and how shitty it is. Don’t like ’em much.”

“Good,” said Bob. “Thanks a lot.”

“Yes sir,” said the boy.

Something reminded Bob of a certain kind of young marine, the loser kid who joins the Corps as a way to start over, to have a new life, to do something well and right. Some of ’em don’t make it, and it’s just more fuck-ups until they’re gone with a new set of grudges. But now and then you find one who gets to the top of the hill and goes on to become a real marine, and maybe has a life he couldn’t have imagined when he was fat, pimply, and sullen without friends and hated by everyone, most of all himself.

“That wasn’t so hard, was it?”

“No sir.”

“It ain’t my business, but a young fellow like you shouldn’t be cooped up in a nowhere place like this. And those guys, Baptists or not, are right about how shitty Lester’s store is.”

“Yes sir,” said the boy. “I know that.”

“Can’t you get a better job?”

“No sir. Can’t seem to get my letters straight. Didn’t do well in school, quit after two years. Don’t test out good enough to get into the service. Like to be in the Air Force, work on planes. Love planes. But can’t pass the tests. Lester’s only fella that would have me. I think he knew my daddy.”

“Maybe you got something wrong with your eyes or some little deal in your brain makes you see the letters in the wrong order. There is such a thing, you know. You should look into it.”

“Yes sir,” said the fellow.

“You should get yourself tested.”

“Yes sir.”

“Well, I can tell from the way you say it you don’t mean a word of it. Son, don’t give up. Take some free advice from an old goat with a limp who’s been around a block or two in his time on earth. Some social service deal in town or off in Bristol or wherever will test you for free and if you have a thing wrong, come up with a way to fix it up. Give it a try. You don’t need to do this shit forever.”

The boy looked at him from darkest abject misery, then smiled. It seemed nobody had ever talked to him like a human being before. The smile showed surprisingly good teeth and maybe a little brainpower in the eyes.

“I will look into it,” he said.

“Thatta boy,” said Bob.

“By the way, that Baptist place got to be the old Pioneer Children’s Camp, where I think a man hung himself when they caught him diddling little children back some years. I heard someone rented and moved in. It’s four miles up on the left, black metal gate, locked all the time. They painted it over so the black is shiny but I don’t think they changed the Pioneer sign.”

“You do know a thing or two,” said Bob.

Bob got there soon enough, and it was as the fellow had said, the gate was newly painted though the sign that read PIONEER CHILDREN’S CAMP was still shabby with age. A dirt road led off into the forest, disappearing as it wound through the dense trees in a few yards. The gate was still sticky in the August heat and it seemed a lot of bugs had landed and found their fate to be paralyzation in the thick goop someone had slopped all over. Bob looked for a way in, thought it wrong to just climb over the gate, and then saw a ’70s-style intercom relay on the gatepost.

He pushed the sci-fi plastic Speak button.

“Hello there.”

Through a rattley smear of electricity the answer was nothing more than a “Can I help you?”

“Name’s Swagger,” he said. “My daughter was the one nearly killed in an accident on 421 on Iron Mountain out of town last week. I’m looking into the circumstances and have information suggesting she stopped off here. Was wondering if I could talk about it to someone, the bossman I guess.”

The cackly soup recommenced to jabber from the speaker and Bob thought he heard a “Certainly.” A clunk of some sort announced that the lock had been sprung from afar, so he opened the gate, drove through, then closed it behind him. The road twisted through trees, then between a couple of foothills, and came finally to an open valley behind elevations that formed obstacles that were green and high but somewhere between hills and mountains. Maybe what eastern people would call mountains, but certainly not what a westerner would so label.

He saw a small, white chapel standing alone; a barn; a kind of exercise yard of pounded dirt; a schoolbus, yellow in the sun; a dormitory, and a kind of gymnasium, all of the buildings constructed with sturdy tin, tin-roofed, and a little shiny. Ballfields, basketball courts, and the crater of an old and unfilled swimming pool also used up the open space until the forest took over again, and shortly thereafter, the mountains began their skyward inclination.

He parked next to the bus in a parking lot where a lot of vehicular traffic had worn a lot of grooves. But no other machines were in sight, and as he closed his door, he looked up to see an old buzzard in some kind of powder-blue three-piece suit approaching, a cross between Colonel Sanders and Jimmy Carter, with the former’s corn-pone stylings and the latter’s hidden hardness of spirit.

“Mr. Swagger, Mr. Swagger, we are so sad about your girl,” said the man, rushing urgently to him, laying a little too much courtly southern-style bullshit on him.

Bob stretched out a hand, felt a grip stronger than you might expect, saw blue, deep eyes, pink skin; smelled cologne, saw white fake teeth and a bristle of a genteel mustache, as the older fellow announced himself to be one Reverend Alton Grumley of the New Freedom Baptist Church, Hot Springs County, Arkansas. He was up here with a constituency of young men who wanted quiet and solitude to pursue their Bible studies. The Reverend had waves of moussed hair—possibly real but almost certainly not his own by birth—and the pinkness of the overscrubbed. He told Bob that he was welcome to stay as long as he wanted and the Reverend would answer any question.

“Sir, thanks for the time.”

“Come on in, set a spell. I’ll answer any question I can to put your mind at ease. Oh, the poor dear. That’s sad, and a parent’s pain is sad as well.”

The buzzard, fretting about Nikki, led Bob to a porch that overlooked the athletic fields, and in time a well-prepared young man in a white shirt and dark trousers came out with a pitcher of iced tea, and the two men sat talking and sipping.

“She was such a nice young lady,” said the Reverend Grumley.

“My first child,” said Bob, “so you can see my concern.”

“How is the dear girl?”

“She shows signs every day of improvement. Yet she’s still in that coma. They say she could come out at any moment, or never.”

“Don’t mean to give you worries, but have you thought of moving her from Bristol? To a bigger city with more sophisticated hospitals?”

“Actually, I already did that. She’s in Baltimore now, where they’ve got the best medicine in the world.”

“I see,” said the Reverend.

“Yes sir, the world famous Johns Hopkins.”

“I have heard of it,” said the Reverend. “I’m happy she’ll have the best care. She’s fortunate to have a father who has resources.”

“The horses have been kind to me. I own a series of lay-up barns across the West, where they take their horses seriously. What’s the money for, though, if not your own children?”

“True enough. Now the police say it was some unruly young man trying to be a NASCAR star that caused the accident, at least according to the paper. Is that the accepted version?”

“It is and I have no cause to doubt it. Still, I want this boy caught, so he won’t do the same again to another man’s daughter. Now the sheriff’s department in this little county is all stretched thin because they’ve got to provide a detail for the big race, that plus Sheriff Wells’s helicopter raids on the meth labs that you’ve read so much about, which seems to be his obsession at the expense of other duties, so I worry this issue may have slid to the back burner. I am poking about to see if there’s any need to hire a private investigator.”

“Tell me how I can help you.”

Bob said he was reconstructing that last day and was curious as to why she had come out here, given the fact a Baptist prayer camp didn’t seem the sort of place to conceal a methamphetamine lab, which was the original intent of her assignment.

“She was just doing her job,” the old fellow said. “She’d evidently heard reports of gunfire from out here and made a connection between guns and criminals and drug lab security, that sort of thing. But I explained to her…here, come with me, Mr. Swagger. Let me set your mind at rest.”

They walked across the yard, then the field, and came at last to a small structure, a kind of open hut. Bob looked inside and saw a robotic-looking electric device that was like something out of an old black and white science fiction movie, with pulleys and fly wheels and an arm along one side; a stack of orange clay disks sat in a kind of magazine assembly up top. Of course he knew what it was; an electric trap for sporting clays, skeet or trap.

“It throws birds. Clay birds.”

The Reverend opened up a cabinet, and inside were three over/under shotguns.

He took one, an old Ithaca, broke it open, and handed it to Bob, who looked at it as if he’d never seen a gun before.

“Many nights the boys gather here and fling birds, then try and hit them as they sail off. It takes skill, concentration, judgment, a steady hand. Philosophically, it expresses endorsement of our beloved Second Amendment, the discipline to master the gun, the wisdom to use it wisely. Discipline and wisdom, exactly what it takes to lead a life in Christ. I’d rather have the boys doing something like this than playing basketball or touch football, where they smack against each other, where strength and size count more than skill, and cliques and grudges are formed. Unhealthy.”

“I see.”

“And when I explained to your daughter that to the locals—we’re not socializers out here, we need the silence to concentrate on the Book—that to the locals the sound of the guns in the twilight was almost certainly what they took as suggestion of some kind of drug activity, she understood in a flash. She smiled, apologized for interrupting, and went on her way.”

“I see,” said Bob.

“Really, that’s all. Here, watch me with the gun.”

He took the gun back, dropped two red cylindrical shells into it, and snapped it shut.

“Used to be pretty good at this. Go ahead, turn on the machine there, it’ll throw a pair and you’ll see.”

Bob examined the gizmo for a switch, found it, snapped it, and the thing clacked and whirred to life; two clays descended from the stack, rolled to the arm and settled in some kind of grip; the arm suddenly unloosed itself with a spring-driven force and flipped the disks in a curving path across the field.

Smoothly, the Reverend brought the gun to his shoulder as he pivoted in rhythm to the rushing saucers in front of him, and he fired twice in the same second. Both birds dissolved in a puff of red dust.

“Ow, that’s loud!” said Bob, clapping his ears.

“Sorry, should have given you plugs or muffs. Yes, the guns do make a bang, though you get used to it. The boys do it over and over. You can adjust the trap to throw birds in an amazing variety of ways.”

“I see,” said Bob. “Now I get it.”

“Yes sir. Would you care to try a pair?”

“Thanks, Reverend, but I don’t care for guns. Haven’t touched one in years.”

“That limp of yours, I guessed it might be from a war.”

“You’d laugh if I told you. Nothing so dramatic. In Japan, a fellow who was demonstrating an old-fashioned sword. He slipped and cut me. Imagine how surprised he was at how his demonstration turned out.”

“I hope you sued him but good.”

“No, there was no point. He learned his lesson. Anyway, that’s all forgotten.”

“So, would you like to see the place? Or stay for supper? Or, I know, the 4 P. M. prayer service? Very calming, serene, a sense of connecting with God’s way.”

“No sir, you have solved that little mystery right swell.”

“Good, sir, I am pleased. Now let me press on you something I give all visitors. It’s a very nice King James Bible. We give them out quite freely. I gave one to your daughter, and she seemed grateful to receive it.”

“Sir, I believe there’s one in my hotel room.”

“But this is a gift, and as a gift you might someday turn to it and find wisdom and succor. You’ll pay no attention to a hotel room Bible.”

“True enough, I suppose.”

The old man trundled off and returned with the black book in his hand. He gave it over to Bob.

“With that, I believe I have made a friend for life,” he said. “I’ll not beg you to read it. But some night on the road, you find yourself hungering for something, I think you’ll find nourishment within its pages.”

“Thank you, sir. I’ll go on now, and try and locate other witnesses to my daughter’s adventures. Then I’ve got to call the hospital to check on her.”

The Reverend walked him to his car, along the edge of the grass, and it was there that Bob noticed that whoever had raked out the dust field had missed a spot at the margins, and at least twice he saw some strange tracks, wheel grooves about twelve inches apart, deep and evenly cut, indicating they had borne something heavy. It rang a bell but didn’t call up an image, and he wondered where he’d seen it.

But then he was at the car.

“Again, Reverend Grumley, thanks for your cooperation and understanding and hospitality.”

“It’s a privilege, Brother Swagger. You’re not a Baptist, I fear?”

“No, sir.”

“Well, you don’t need to be a Baptist to figure in my prayers, sir.”

“I appreciate that, sir.”

Bob headed back to town, but pulled over to the shoulder and stopped the car.

I need to get all this straight, he thought.

Do I have something or is it all coincidence, and my own vanity has got me believing there’s some deep conspiracy here because I’m so damned important?

He tried to think it out, each step at a time.

Attempt at murder by professional driver. But what’s the hard evidence that it’s a “professional” driver? The interpretation of two expert race people on some aerial photos. They’re not professional accident investigators whose word could be trusted. Maybe they sensed my need to believe and without meaning to, fed into it, to make me happy. But they were so convincing on the subject of cornering, and clearly had a mountain’s worth of experience at that arcane art. That is my best evidence.

A second though admittedly unspecific attempt at the hospital. Maybe it was, maybe it wasn’t. The Pinkerton security man, who seemed solid enough, just stated that some “doctors” tried to gain entrance to Nikki’s room. No one ever saw them again, no one had ever seen them before. Still memory and chaos play tricks on people’s minds, and given that it was a big, busy hospital, it’s easy to understand how it could have been legitimate.

The possibly missing pages and the destruction of the recorder and laptop. Also: no Bible. Again, interpretation, not fact. She could very easily have torn the pages out herself, and the electronic items could very easily have been smashed up in the crash. The Bible could have been so generic that it wasn’t recorded as hers, or maybe it was thrown clear of the crash.

The odd sense of perfection at the Church camp, as if it had been oh-so-hastily cleaned up, and Reverend Grumley’s seeming to fish for information on Nikki’s progress while mildly cooperating. Again, it was the nature of religious establishments to keep themselves extremely tidy, although the skeet trap in the shed was an unusual touch and it might well double as a kind of subterfuge under which a lot of gunfire could be explained away innocently, just in case of curious visitors such as himself and Nikki. Not completely unlikely but again provocative.

The strange tracks in the dust. They reminded him of something, but what? And why couldn’t he remember it? Where had he seen such tracks? On the other hand, why were they so strange? Could have been some kind of cart wheeled out for maintenance of the skeet trap, could have been the gardener’s cart for—but a gardener’s cart would be wider. Why would it be so narrow?

And finally:

The fact that he was being followed. Maybe that was the best thing. It couldn’t be Thelma’s department, because they didn’t have the manpower to detach two boys to play tag with an annoying stranger all day long. But two boys had been playing tag with him all day long, ever since his visit to the sheriff’s office. So someone in the department had a contact with someone he shouldn’t have. The tail car was a Ford Crown Vic, beige. He’d yet to make direct eye contact with it, because a sniper develops instincts for when he himself is being hunted. Bob had the experience to know that you never let your hunter know that you know he’s hunting you, so that in actuality, you’re hunting him. So when the prayer camp showed up all clean and sparkly, it was no surprise, because the boys following him in the car—they had passed him, and he knew they were waiting around another two or three turns in the road—had seen him heading down 167. They’d called ahead to the Reverend, who got his boys off on a quick and hasty clean-up, so that when he got there he’d be welcomed warmly, and nothing of suspicion would be around.

Okay, he thought, this is an interesting game, all of a sudden. So what I will do is go back to my room at the Mountain Empire and set a spell, and after dark, I will sneak out a back way, and cut open their tires, and then, unfollowed, I will head back here and see what I have got and—

His cell rang.

He answered, hoping it was Julie with good news about Nikki, but saw an unknown number in the display.

“Swagger.”

“Mr. Swagger, it’s Charlie Wingate, you know, at Mountain Computers.”

“Yes, Charlie.”

“Well, I did some work and couldn’t come up with much, but I did get it to print out some script and I managed to decode a little of it.”

Bob understood that the kid had somehow gotten something off the hard drive.

“Go ahead.”

“Well, it was numbers, the numbers ‘three-six-two.’”

“Three-six-two?”

“Yes sir. And I could tell that it was a sequence of three numbers, a dash, then four numbers. It was the last three numbers in that sequence.”

“A phone number!”

“That’s right. So I know a cop and he has a reverse directory and—some computer genius—I just found all the numbers by hand. There’s only about three thousand people in the county—we found seven numbers ending in three-six-two.”

“Go on.”

“Five were just residences—I have those numbers for you—one was a day care center.”

“Yes.”

“And the last was a place called Iron Mountain Armory. It’s a gun store on the north side of town.”

“That’s great, Charlie. When you write out that check to yourself, throw in a million-dollar tip.”

FOURTEEN

This one wasn’t stolen, it was rented, although the credit card used to rent it was stolen, by the ever-slick Vern Pye.

He’d moseyed about the mall in Johnson City, eyeing teenage girls, especially the ones with them little bubble asses. You know, no real bounce to ’em yet, but tight, kind of bursting against the cotton of the shorts and—He saw a fellow just about his own age, height, and coloring, close enough to pass as Vern in thumbnail photography but not nearly as handsome. He jostled the fellow in a knot of other shoppers leaving the big K, smiled, excused himself, and walked away with one wallet but without another one. His fingers were that fast and that good. What was that all about, you might ask? Vern knew that what gave away the stolen wallet, sooner rather than later, was the absence of the weight. So when he lifted leather, he replaced leather, usually with a few fives and ones in it. That way the mark wouldn’t note the absence of the weight on his hip. Later, when he reached for his wad to pay for something, that’s when he’d make the discovery that he’d been boosted. There were a few instances, though, where a guy had actually pulled the new wallet out, plucked out a five, paid, put the wallet back, and went about his business! Some people don’t pay no attention at all.

The truck, yellow with two up front and eight in back, came from Penske and was a 7-stroke Ford diesel mover, as had been all the rest of the trucks (well, Fords, not movers necessarily), though this was an ’06 when the others had been ’04, ’01, and even a ’99, which Brother Richard had not been able to use because its electronics varied.

So now the three of them—Brother Richard, Vern, and his ever-present sidekick and buddy, Ernie Grumley, sat in Vern’s very nice Cadillac Eldorado along a completely deserted road in the Cherokee National Forest a few miles west of Shady Valley. Vern and Ernie smoked their Marlboros, enjoying the mellowness and getting ready for the show. The yellow Penske renter sat nearby.

“Looks perfect,” said Brother Richard.

“As they always are, Brother Richard, I do good clean work, you know.”

Vern was anxious that he not be confused with the lower class of Grumley, whom Brother Richard was known to despise.

“Okay, I’m guessing under sixty seconds today.”

“Can’t bet agin’ you, Brother.”

“Got that stopwatch?”

“Yessir.”

“Okay, watch me go.”

“All set.”

“You call it, Ernie.”

“Yessir. Ready…set…go!”

And with that Brother Richard was off. Besides certain tools, he carried with him a strange rig that consisted of a small, green plastic box with “Xzillaraider 7.3” imprinted on it, a swirl of heavy wire with electronic interface clips at one end, with a more complex swirl of lighter wire—one for power, one for grounding—a bypass, and a switch connecter. It was the Xzillaraider 7.3 unit from Quadzilla, of Fort Worth, a truck performance shop known in the biz as the cleverest in coming up with ways to gin up the power on a diesel engine. There were other techniques, of course. You could even cut the diesel fuel in the injector by forcing propane from a tank and get a significant power swell. But who wanted to be messing with propane in the middle of a gunfight? Not Richard, no sir. So the Xzillaraider was the best for his purposes. It was a genius-level mesh of electronics that essentially took over the brain of the diesel in the Penske and increased performance parameters. It fed more fuel to the engine. More fuel meant it burned hotter, and there was your power upgrade, sometimes up to 120 extra horsepower and a torque gain of 325 foot-pounds. The problem was, you had to monitor the temp, because if you didn’t, you could melt or ignite the engine. The additional problem was that Richard wasn’t going to have time to mount temp gauges and all the wires of the gizmo, not in a gunfight. His problem was to find exactly how few wires he could connect and still get the maximum power boost without bothering with all the safety devices. It just had to run for a few minutes, and after that, it didn’t matter if the truck burned or not.

He moved swiftly, but didn’t try to push it, got to the engine of the truck, and opened the hood. Where others might have seen complexity, confusion, terror, he saw the universe of his upbringing, the nurture of experience, the thrill of God-given genius about to be engaged. Expertly, he reached deep into the engine space beyond the big architectural structures, and into the nest of wires, found the MAP sensor, directly behind the fuel filter bowl. He quickly disconnected the factory connector and connected the Xzilla harness in its place, plugging in the male connector to the harness. He cut away the wires connected to the injection pump and attached the blue wire tap to the wire closest to the engine block. From that point on, it was wire work. He had to know which wires to cut, which wires to reconnect, all of them color coded. Quickly he grounded the engine—ugh, was it really necessary to unscrew the negative terminal connection, no, not really—and then cut a hole through the rubber grommet to the right of the master cylinder assembly, and shoved the wire harness through it into the cab. He dashed into the cab, and didn’t bother to mount the switch but simply began plugging the wiring harness into the module itself, that little green box, where the gods of engine monitoring lived and worked. He turned the key and watched the module’s blinking LEDs finally signal success after running through the sequence, settling in the red, the highest power zone. He turned the key further, and after a grinding clunk and another turn of the key, the engine burst to life.

And, brother, did it burst. The sound was almost like no engine on earth, a guttural blast, full of implications of the explosive, and it rocked the entire vehicle. He could hear the engine revving insanely, suddenly injected with a power beyond measure, almost too much for the confines of the combustion chambers. It was on steroids! It was the Barry Bonds of truck engines!

“Fifty-seven four,” yelled Vern, “a new record.”

Brother Richard goosed the pedal, and the engine howled demonically, yet it didn’t burst into flames.

He had it. He finally had it. And pretty goddamned near time too! Talk about cutting it thin, why the deal was only a day or so away and—

Suddenly he saw the paint on the cantilevered hood begin to bubble and crackle, and that meant flame, invisible to the human eye, had burst out of the engine.

Shit!

He rolled sideways, hit the ground, and kept rolling as he heard the tell-tale whoosh of the fuel in the tank igniting, not exploding—it wasn’t under enough pressure—but flinging a blade of hot-star radiance a good thirty bright feet in the air from under Mr. Penske’s fine vehicle, bleaching the color from the day for just a second. Then the flames settled back into your normal total-toast truck burn, licking and eating and devouring, issuing the rancid odor of scorched metal, melting plastic, burning rubber.

Vern carefully backed out in the Eldorado, threw out his cigarette, turned on the air conditioner to full to evaporate the sweat on the men’s brows. Soon enough they found a main road and were well gone by the time the fire trucks and poor Detective Thelma Fielding showed up.

“Lord A’mighty, that was close,” howled handsome Vern, aflame in delight at the excellent adventure. “You’se almost tonight’s meal.”

“I’m too tough to digest, I’d keep you boys up all night with stomach pains.”

“It ran good for a while, though,” said Ernie.

“Yes, it did,” said Richard. “I think that’s it. I don’t think I had it grounded right. You’re supposed to remove the nut at the negative battery cable and attach the black wire. I didn’t take the nut off, but just wound the black wire around the terminal. Naughty, naughty. Next time, I will take the few seconds to remove the nut. It’s time well spent, and we will be close enough for government work, you’ll see.”

“You sure, Brother Richard?”

“Sure, I’m sure. All on that day, I’d hate to burn like a bonfire ’stead of running like a stallion.”

“Burning hurts,” said Vern. “Case you hadn’t noticed.”

“So I hear. Saw a fellow burn to death once. Lord God, he screamed. I had the distinct impression he wasn’t enjoying himself a bit.”

“Nor will you, Brother.”

“True enough, Brother. Well boys, get that old fraud of a daddy or an uncle or a molester or whatever polysexual archetype he’s playing this week to pray hard for you and me or else we’ll all arrive in hell pre-fried, COD. We’ll be a goddamned bucket of Colonel Grumley’s chicken, extra crispy.”

FIFTEEN

Bob drove through the town of Mountain City, sped along a picturesque route toward Virginia, and soon enough found Iron Mountain Armory. Of course it had a sign reading GUNS AND SURPLUS, and of course it was in an old Quonset hut with trees clumped around it with a small parking lot in front of it on Route 91 heading north. The mountains were to its left, casting late-afternoon shadows that buried the place in dimness. But he could make out a large-scale wooden .30 caliber Browning air-cooled mock-up at the apex of the corrugated steel building’s curve. The old trainer showed cutaways displaying red bolt faces and chambers, which must have taught six or seven generations of machine gunners their tricks before going on the surplus market and ending up on every gun store roof in the South. The gun was rotting, though its stout four feet of mock barrel, swaddled in cooling sleeve with the omnipresent grid of round perforations, certainly looked menacing enough. The place, like the old machine gun model, had that beaten-down quality to it, a sense of better times having gone by, interior rot under the paint.

He walked it to find what he expected: ratty old trophies of bucks and bulls long since killed, fish in waxy midleap glowing against polished wood plaques, racks of rubbery rain ponchos, utilities, BDUs, netting, shovels from half the world’s armies, web gear, Chinese knock-offs of current sandbox dutywear, Multicam and digital-camo patterns everywhere, lots of gun safes, sunglass cases for that super–Tommy Tactical look, and behind the counter fifty or so rifles racked butt down for easy examination. The front case had another fifty or so handguns, mostly the black plastic stuff that was taking over the market, little of the blue steel and walnut motif that Bob and his generation had learned to shoot on except in the used box. ARs were the predominant theme, gun safes second, and hunting only a third.

Fella came up to him from the counter, older gent, heavyset, eyes dead, not your natural-born salesman type.

“Help you, bud?”

“Hope so, sir,” Bob said. “You the manager?”

“Close enough.”

“My name’s Swagger. My daughter is Nikki Swagger. If the name’s familiar, it’s because she was the girl reporter from Bristol who had a bad car accident a week back on 421 coming down the other side of Iron Mountain. Someone tagged her and she’s still in a coma.”

“Sorry for your daughter, bud, but what’s it got to do with me?” the guy said. But Bob thought he saw just a flash of dread and the beginning, soon quashed, of a guilty swallow. Maybe the fellow was just a nervous type.

“Well sir, my girl wasn’t into guns or anything, which is why I thought it odd that on her laptop we came up with what appears to be the phone number of this place. I don’t know why she’d call or come by, but she may have. I’m trying to track down what happened that day.”

“The papers said it was an accident. What difference does it make what she did? Accident don’t follow no plan. It just happens.”

“I know, but there are some discrepancies in the official account. I’m just poking about trying to make sense of it all, sir. Sure it don’t amount to nothing, but I have to do something while I’m waiting for my daughter to come back to me.”

“Well, I don’t know if—”

“Here, let me show you her picture. Maybe it’ll jog a memory.”

He pulled his wallet, showed the man a nice picture of Nikki at last year’s graduation, so beautiful, so young, so vulnerable.

The man didn’t really look at it, just said, “No, no, believe me, we don’t get many young women on their own in here, and I’d remember. Sometimes a young fellow comes in with his girlfriend and sometimes the wife comes along to buy the Glock for home protection, but almost never will you find a girl like that in a place like this.”

“I see.”

“I’m real sorry for your troubles, but I can’t help a bit.”

“Uncle Eddie—” came a call from a workroom behind the counter, and a kid peeped out. “You sure on that? I seem—”

“Billy, goddamnit, you git to work. You got a lot of ammo to break down and get shelved. I don’t pay you to palaver.”

“Yes sir.”

“Goddamn kid,” said the man to Bob. “Girl crazy. Catch him reading them dirty magazines one more time instead of breaking down all that .223 and his ass is gone, I don’t care what Margaret says.”

“I see,” said Bob. “Yep, good help is hard to find these days. What about a phone call from a woman? There wouldn’t be a pretty face associated with it.”

“Mister, I get nothing but phone calls, some of the damnedest you ever heard. Can I rent a machine gun? Will you guarantee a deer? How come Wal-Mart in Johnson City has it for $324.95 and you got it for $339.95? Is a nine millimeter more powerful than a .38? What’s the best gun for home defense? Can I buy a gun like the soldiers use? So maybe I got a call from her and maybe I don’t, but I sure as hell can’t answer you one way, the other with certainty. Billy, you get any calls?”

“No sir,” said Billy, yelling from the back. “None that I can remember.”

“That seems to be all she wrote, sir. Unless you want to buy a nice SKS for under a hundred?

“What’s an SKS?” asked Bob.

“Chinese military rifle. No, I don’t think you’re the type.”

“Anyhow, thanks. You got me scratching another one off my list.”

He turned and left.

The Reverend Grumley was thinking about fucking, as he almost always did when he wasn’t thinking about the next few days. He hadn’t fucked in about three weeks now, and the ordeal was getting harder and harder. The images poured over him, all the holes that he had filled, all over America, how the gals just seemed to want to give a man of the cloth a reward for all the natural good he brought into the world. He was going insane! Some of the damn boys beginning to look pretty good to him! But the last time—

The phone rang, he answered it there in the office of the chapel, and it was B.J. and Carmody, reporting that goddamnit, that fellow had somehow gone straight, straight in a goddamned beeline to Eddie Ferrol’s Iron Mountain Armory. How in hell he make that connection? He’d been in the goddamn county two hours and already he’d made two big connections on…

The Reverend got the whole story, the fellow’s sit by the roadside, going over notes, then speeding off.

“He see you?”

“Nah. Carmody’s too good a driver.” B.J. was always boosting Carmody and Carmody, B.J. because they knew in the scheme of things, they were second-stringers to the more glamorous pairing of handsome Vern and Ernie. See, that’s what the Reverend hated. All that competition, the formation of cliques and rump groups and bitter outsiders. It made for bad business. And if he wasn’t mistaken Carmody might actually be Vern’s half brother, rather than cousin, but, hmmm, he’d have to work that one out later as these issues were never too clear. But now wasn’t time for lectures on brotherliness.

“You got him?”

“Yeah, he’s in there now. We’re parked a good three hundred yards down the road, eyeballing him with glass.”

“Okay, hang tight. This here thang’s gittin’ a little hard to handle. Soon as he leaves, you call me and I’ll call Eddie, see what’s what.”

“Yes sir.”

“What y’all packing?”

“I’m .45, Carmody’s .40.”

“Git ’em ready. May have to go to guns.”

“Yessir.”

“I’ll try and think some plan up. You know, something—”

“There he is.”

“Okay, you hang tight.”

He hung up, went to his wallet to find Eddie’s Mountain Armory number, but before he did, the phone rang again.

“Reverend!”

“Eddie, hear you had a visitor!”

“Goddamnit, Reverend, you done promised me nothing, nothing like this going to happen. It was clean, it was legal, it was okay, we had the paperwork and everything, and goddamnit, first that gal shows up with that cardboard piece of box top and now her goddamn father, asking questions.”

“The old gray-haired guy?”

“Didn’t look so goddamned old to me.”

“Tell me what he asked. Tell me what he knew. Did he know much?”

“He said he’d heard she called or come out this way, it was on her laptop.”

Eddie narrated the story of his conversation with Swagger.

“But he didn’t seem to know nothing about what you got for me, what its possible use was, what we had planned?”

Eddie said no.

“He had no clue. He’s just grasping,” the Reverend said.

“Maybe not, Reverend, but he sure come close, and when this thing goes down there’s going to be all kinds of commotion, and he might be the one to figure it out. So even if he don’t got no idea now, maybe he will then. You said nobody could connect all this up, and goddamn it’s already been connected up.”

“Settle down, Eddie. I see now I got no choice. It’s too close, too much is at stake. Okay, you sit tight, the Reverend will figure on it.”

He hung up, repunched B.J. in Carmody’s follow car.

“You got him.”

“Yeah, some bad news too.”

“Okay.”

“Don’t know what this means but he didn’t go straight to the car. He went around back. He’s back there five minutes. Ain’t there an entrance or something? I don’t know what he’s looking at or doing back there, but when he come out, he made a beeline to the car, and now he’s headed back into town.”

“You stay with him, you understand, while I work out a plan.”

“How’s this for a plan. We pop him. There’s the plan.”

“You idiot. Why’d he get killed? You get state polices in here and they much smarter than the Johnson Smokies and the whole goddamn thing crashes and burns just a few days before. Got to come up with some way to get rid of him that don’t look like Grumleys done the work on contract for something else big. That goddamn Sinnerman is out blowing up trucks with my boy Vern, and I can’t use him again, like on the gal. You stay with him, you hear? Meanwhile, I’ll think something up.”

“Reverend, in 1993,” said Carmody, evidently taking over the cell while driving, “I worked a Memphis hit where we waited till the mark was in a little store. We walked in, shot him dead, beat the shit out of the storekeep, took all the money and some peanut butter, and was gone. They never ever made it to be a hit. They may have suspected, but they never could do nothing about it. How’s about that one?”

“Hmmm,” said the Reverend.

“Could goddamn work. You’d get Thelma and that photo-crackpot sheriff and maybe some Mountain City fellows, but they’d be thinking robbery and they’d never link it to nothing else. They’d say, damn, this family sure did run out of luck when it come to Johnson County.”

“You make certain you don’t kill the clerk or any of the other witnesses. Scare hell out of them, you hear? So the cops have to wring necks just to get descriptions. Got it?”

“This one’ll be fun, Daddy,” said Carmody.

SIXTEEN

Bob went to the car, then stopped and looked back. Only one grimy window of the Quonset fronted the parking lot, and he could see that no one was eyeballing him. Maybe they were listening, so he went to his car, turned it on, gunned the engine, then turned it off. He got out, walked at an angle to a path around back, and followed it. There he found the receiving area, an open garage door and a loading dock. He leaped up some steps—ouch, the pain in his hip stabbed at him!—and slipped in. There he found the grubby assistant on his hands and knees, applying crowbar to a crate of Russian 7.62 x 39mm ammo, by which rough process he liberated twenty boxes, junked the wood, and loaded the boxes on a cart for eventual shelving.

“Howdy,” Bob said.

The kid looked up, one of a type. Sallow-eyed, furtive, maybe a little brighter than the poor boy in the grocery store, backwoodsy but not an idiot.

“You ain’t supposed to be back here, Mister.”

“And you ain’t supposed to contradict the great Eddie when it comes to remembering things.”

“Sometimes I speak out of turn.”

“Well maybe you have something to say worth hearing,” said Bob.

“Why’d I tell you a thing? ’Round here, folks treasure loyalty.”

“What I see in you is righteousness. You’re stuck with a moral center. So you’ll know that if it was my daughter in here, I have a right to know, and Eddie ain’t got no right to clam up.

“Eddie’s not righteous, that I’ll say. Some things I know could—well, that ain’t your business.”

“But this young woman is,” he said, handing over the picture of Nikki.

“She’s a fine-looking young gal,” said the boy. “I have to say, she deserved a lot more than getting knocked into a ditch by an asshole playing Mr. Dale, the senior.”

“I’m looking for him. He and I have business.”

“Hope you find him. Okay, here’s what you want to know. Yep, she was here that afternoon, late then, near dark, like it is now. Close on closing time. I heard her voice, and knew it was a younger gal. I peeked out and got a good look and damn, she was a beautiful young lady, sir, if you don’t mind me saying so.”

“Takes after her mother. What was it all about?”

“Well, took a bit of squirming and I come in late on the conversation, see, I wiggled over there—” he pointed up the wall to a hazed window that separated the backroom from the store itself—“and I popped the window a bit. I suppose, I don’t know, you might think bad of me, I just had to figure out what it was, sorry to say, had to get close or—”

“She’s an attractive young woman. You’re a young guy, you have hormones. It’s only natural.”

“Yes sir, thank you. Anyway, she’s asking about something. The Bible, I think.”

“Hmmm,” said Bob. “The Bible.” That Bible again. Somehow between leaving the Reverend’s prayer camp and showing up here, the Bible had become important.

This connected with no theory of his daughter he could imagine.

“She had a Bible. And they’d been talking about a passage, I think that was it. I was forty feet away now.”

“What passage?”

“Mark 2:11.”

“Mark 2:11. And she had a Bible?”

“Unless they make other books that have black imitation leather covers and gold page edges. It was a Bible. It was Mark 2:11.”

“Why’d she come to a gun store to ask about the Bible? Any ideas?”

“Well, Eddie is a lay preacher. He does know the Book. Maybe she asked someone to help her on a Bible passage and they said, hell, just down the road, Eddie Ferrol knows his Bible times backwards and forwards. Makes sense to me.”

“Yeah. Possibly. And that’s it?”

“Well, yep, except…”

“Except what, son?”

“You didn’t never hear this from me.”

“I never even talked to you.”

“You will go away and not come back into my life.”

“Yes, I will.”

“Eddie’s twitchy anyhow but suddenly he’s real twitchy and I hear him on his cell, he goes way over in the corner so nobody can make out what he’s saying, and he’s like, totally twitched out, almost in tears, almost crying, almost sobbing, and then he’s calmed down somehow by whoever’s on the other end, he says ‘okay, okay.’ Then he hangs up. He comes looking for me, tells me to go home early—that’s a first, let me tell you—and only time I ever saw him look like that was two years ago when his wife left him and he went on a binge. I know he binged hard that weekend, and was a grouchy son-of-a-bitch for—well, till now.”

Bob knew what happened.

Somehow Nikki revealed through a Bible passage that she knew something and it scared the hell out of Eddie and as soon as she left, he called whoever he was in this with, whoever he was working for, and they called the driver fast and he raced after her, which is why he had to leave rubber up and down Iron Mountain and only just caught her, and did his killing thing then. Only she’d gotten too far down the slope and she was too good and he didn’t get that roll on her, and so she survived.

Boys, he thought, I’m getting close. And then we will have our business.

But then another thought hit him.

“You go look. You tell me what Eddie’s doing right now.”

The boy went to the hazed window, cracked it, and peeked out.

“Just like then. He’s over in the corner talking on his cellphone and he’s all twitched up.”

SEVENTEEN

It was getting dark, and the two boys on him weren’t holding back anymore. They’d gotten up close, maybe two hundred yards out.

Could do a sudden turn, shake ’em.

What would that accomplish? You forestall confrontation, certainly violence, but a cost: you tell them you’re onto them and suddenly you’re the object of a manhunt here in Johnson County and you don’t have any weapons. Maybe you don’t even shake ’em, they’re damned good, they run you down and that’s it, you’re dead, after all you’ve been through, some white trash peckerwoods take you down in a gully in Passel o’ Toads, Tennessee, or wherever the hell it is.

No. You keep surprise on your side, make it work for you. Make them think you’re an idiot. You’re just bob-bob-bobbin’ along, singing a song. You don’t know a thing. You’re an amateur. They’re the professionals.

I need a gun.

That was what it came down to.

Without the gun, he was an old goat with a limp, a gray-haired fool in over his head. And he had two gunmen on his tail because he’d done exactly what his daughter had done, somehow cut trail on somebody’s plans, even if he didn’t know those plans himself or hadn’t figured them out. Something would be happening soon though, else why the urgency to kill his daughter and now to kill him?

Whatever, it came to one thing: I need a gun. God made men but only Colonel Colt can make them equal, for without the gun the old, the young, the weak, the meek, the silly, the soft were nothing but prey to the hard and ruthless predators of the world, no matter what the rules say. Rules are written for nice people in well-guarded zones who laugh and chatter and enjoy their little jokes at cocktail parties, but here in the hard world where the shit happened fast and the blood gathered in lakes on the wet pavement, without the gun you were just roadkill anytime anyone decided such a thing. You lived at their whim and when they decided to take you down for whatever reason, down you went, cradle and all.

Fuck, why didn’t I bring a gun. I am on the goddamned bull’s-eye and I need a gun and there’s no place I can go without—

He thought: Drive to the sheriff’s department. Go see Detective Thelma. Spend an hour or two there until you figure out what—but they’d wait. So tell her everything. She’d laugh, then she’d be pissed, because his findings directly contradicted hers, and she’d shoo him out the door and where’d he be? They’d wait for him and take him when he was available. They were hunters, they waited for their shot.

Then he got his hard, cold Bob the Nailer mind back, and he thought, How will they do it? They can’t do me with a car again, it would be too strange. It has to be a firearms thing, a shooting. What, they’ll take me, put me in the trunk, drive me deep in the forest and shoot me, then bury me. It’ll be days before anyone figures out I’m missing. That would be one way.

But even then, questions, things hard to control, things hard to foresee. Someone might find the car too soon, or someone might see them, someone might hear them, I might get close enough to hurt them or get a gun away from them, they don’t know who I am. No, they’d much rather shoot me dead from twenty-five feet and leave me. How would they do that?

Then of course he saw how it had to happen.

He realized he had one card to play, and that was, he could control where the thing took place. And he could only come up with one answer.

He picked up the cell, tried to remember the name of the goddamned place, then produced an image of the sign, LESTER’S GROCERY, on Route 167.

He punched 411, gave them the town and name of the place, waited for the connection, and shortly enough, after three and a half rings, he heard a familiar voice.

“Yeah?”

“Is this Lester’s?”

“Yeah, who’s this?”

“You recognize my voice. I’se just in there two hours ago. Old guy, gray hair, limp, gave you a little lecture.”

“Yes sir, I remember.”

“Okay, son, you listen hard to me, son. This ain’t bullshit. Okay?”

“Yes sir.”

“I’m going to get there in about five minutes, maybe goddamned sooner. I will park, come straight in. As I park, you’ll see another car pull in behind me. In a bit two fellas will get out of it. They will have masks and guns—”

“Oh, shit,” said the boy. “I’ll call the—”

“You don’t call nobody. Ain’t time, sirens’d chase these boys, they wouldn’t show, you’d look like a fool and so would I, and I’d still be dead by morning. You understand?”

The boy made a sound that sounded like a cross between a whimper and a gulp.

“Son, you listen to me and you will come out all right. You reach under that counter and pull out the gun stashed there, an old Colt I’m guessing. I know you got one there, ain’t been cleaned or checked in twenty years, but it’s there, and let’s hope it’s working. Just take it out so I can reach it easy. I will come in, take it up, and git ready. Then when the two men in masks come through the door, you hit the deck. I will take care of them.”

“I—”

“We will get through this. It’s the only way, and you may even get your picture in the paper and a date with Mary Sue.”

He’d passed through town, turned right up 167, and by now it was full dark, and he was winding up in the hills, scooting by the odd little house here and there, otherwise alone on the road except for the headlights of his pursuers a couple hundred yards back.

“I just put the gun on the counter,” said the young man.

“We will get through this.”

“Oh, this is too good,” said Carmody. “He’s going back to that grocery store he stopped at earlier.”

“Maybe he’s going to visit the Reverend again.”

“Maybe. But he’ll stop there I’m betting and he thinks he can get something else out of that dumb clerk. Oh, this is too good. This is just what the doctor ordered.”

Carmody was driving, of course, so he reached into his belt and touched the piece he always carried, just to make sure it was there. It was a SIG P229 in .40, with thirteen fast-moving, husky hollow-points tucked into the magazine and another in the chamber.

Meanwhile, B.J. was rummaging around in the glove compartment, where he came up with two balaclava hats, which could be peeled down to make face masks, either for cross-country skiing or armed robbery, depending on the Grumley mood. He got them, then drew his own weapon from his shoulder holster, a stainless steel Springfield .45. He took the safety down, performed a chamber check to make certain there was a 230-grainer nested just where it should be, put the safety back on, and reholstered the gun.

“We goin’ kick some ass,” he said, the blood rushing to his extremes, and his breathing grew harder and shorter.

“Yes, we are, we are for sure,” said Carmody.

Bob pulled into the parking lot.

They think they’re hunting me; I’m hunting them. It felt familiar and now, from somewhere, his battle brain took over. Even as he walked to the store, past the pumps, up two steps, he felt things slowing down yet at the same time enriching in color and texture, as if his vision were mutating to something beyond excellence. His muscles were turning to flexible iron, his breathing was growing nutritious, his hearing super-attuned, so that every sound was crisply isolated in the universe.

He walked down the wide main aisle to where the boy stood, awash in fear, his body rooted stiffly, his eyes too big, his lips covered in white chalk. Bob could see the gun, made it out to be an old Colt New Service and guessed that it had to be either a .45 Colt or a .44–40. It was like a gun out of an old movie, from an old America, huge, blue and gray where the finish had been eroded or spotted off by exposure to blood. It was a humpbacked thing, big for the big men who lived big American lives in the generations before, and unusually heavy for its size, possessed of an almost magic density which in turn gave it a density of purpose. He took it up, felt the checked wood grips worn flat, almost smooth, ticked open the cylinder lock and spilled out that tube to see it sustained six brass circles, glowing in the fluorescent light. Each circle wore a smaller circle in its center, the primer, and around each was inscribed .45 COLT. He snapped the cylinder shut, not hard and flashy like the fools in the movies did, but with a soft, almost gentle touch. For a revolver, even a big old boy like this one, was a gentle mesh of the strong and the delicate, an intricate, frail system of pins and levers and springs and arms that had to work in perfect synchronicity, in a very nineteenth-century sense of mission, for it was a relic of that far century. He felt it and its solidity immediately reached out and embraced him. For Bob Lee Swagger, it was like reentering a cathedral; this is where he was raised to a faith and it had never let him down and he would not let it down.

He heard the door opening, he saw the boy’s eyes widening, which told him what he needed to know, that indeed, masked, armed men rushed at them.

He turned, the gun came up fast in both hands, and if he noticed a large man in black, with a blackened, hooded, furious face and a black gun coming up, he didn’t have time to mark it. For in the next nanosecond he pressed the big old Colt’s trigger twice, and with each crank, felt the gun’s complexities occurring. All the systems were in perfect mesh, as the trigger came back under the muscular pressure of his finger, the cylinder rotated under the same spring-conveyed pressure, the hammer drew back, exactly as Sam Colt or some forgotten, genius engineer working for him had planned it back in Hartford under the big gold dome and the dancing pony at the turn of the century. As the sight blade rose and became all there was in the universe, the hammer fell, and in three tenths of a second he sent two 230-grain lead fatboys on their way to somebody’s low, center chest, where they tore, an inch apart, through skin, muscle, and rib and blew out large, atomized chunks of heart tissue that spewed crazily throughout the chest cavity.

That one went down with a thump to the floor that sounded comic against the huge reverberation of the two powerful revolver blasts in the closed-in space before he got his own gun up.

The second guy was not dumb and, even as he knew his partner was hit fatally and that they had been the victims of, not the perpetrators of, surprise, he moved laterally, disappearing behind the rank of shelved can goods before Bob could get a fatboy into him. Bob moved back, using the shelf island exactly as his opponent did, as a shield between them, aware it was not cover but only concealment, and suddenly red spray and diamonds filled the air—everybody’s ears had switched off so there was no noise—as the gunman fired three times on the oblique, guessing where Bob would be and hoping that blind shots would bring him down.

Bob was not where the fellow guessed, as he’d moved to his own left and meant to come around hard left, hunched over and just showing a little flesh along with the big piece of Hartford iron. The gunman saw his mistake and turned to correct it, when he was hit in the face with a large can of Crisco that arrived in a tight spiral and smacked him hard. He lost a step, then bent to fire, but Bob was too far ahead on the trigger curve, firing another controlled pair that sounded like one, these a little more widely spaced, one emptying quarts of coffee, Coke, and fried eggs as it tore through his stomach, exiting against the instant coffee in a puff of brown dust, the other blowing out even more lung tissue and spinal fluid as it took him on a dead central angle. He went to his knees, dropped his silver 1911, vomited blood copiously, and fell forward, his butt up in the air, in a comic kick-me pose, and in that frozen joke settled and died.

“Jesus Christ,” said the boy.

“Good throw,” said Bob.

“I never hit anything I threw at before in my whole life.”

“Well for one second, you were Peyton Manning. Thank God it was the right second.”

“I have to sit down.”

“Don’t have time. You listen to me. I have stood and fought with many brave men in my time, which includes three tours in Vietnam and a whole lot of other crazed stuff. You can fight with me any time and you belong with those brave friends.”

“I—I—We did it.”

“Yes, we did. Now quick, you take this gun, and fire the last two shots out the door.”

The boy took the gun, it seemed heavy for him, and tremblingly, he struggled with the heavy trigger and finally managed to get one, and then another shot off.

“Good work. Now you have powder residue on your hands and the police will take note of that. You see how it happened. They came in, guns out, but you drew and fired, hit the first one twice out of your first three shots, then the other one fired from behind the shelf, missed, you scooted to your left and fired three more times. Then you called the police. You got that?”

“You—”

“Me, I wasn’t here. You don’t know jack about anyone else. You saw masked men heavily armed, and you shot. These two may turn out to be wanted or to have paper on ’em. Any reward is yours, and anything you can get off this deal, you go ahead. You deserve it. You stood and fought. I’d pick up that can of whatever you threw, wipe it off, and put it back on the shelf. Don’t need to tell nobody about that. They shot, you shot, you won. End of story. Are we clear?”

“Yes sir.”

“You did good, young man. You’re a hero, okay?”

“Well, I—it’s, um, I—”

“Okay, I am out of here. You can get through this. You just tell ’em the same thing over and over and nobody can doubt you. Just stick to the simple story. I know you can do this thing.”

“Yes sir.”

“So long, now. I will call you in a few days to check up.”

“Who are you?”

“It don’t matter. I’m the guy in the movie who leaves without explanation, okay.”

“You’re Clint Eastwood?”

“If that’s his name, then I guess I’m him. So long, son.”

EIGHTEEN

It took a while for the news to get there. Of course, since Lester’s Grocery was only four miles as the crow flies from the Piney Ridge Baptist Prayer Camp, the boys all heard the sirens wailing in the night as various police arrived at the scene. No one said a thing. It could be, it could not be. Who knew, who could tell?

But time passed and there was no news from Carmody and B.J. You’d have thought they’d call in right after, but maybe the boys went to town instead of beelining back toward the camp, and were even now carousing in some low crib they’d found out about, drinking and wailing and whoring because they knew that they’d done the Grumley work well.

But after two hours, the Reverend sent Vern and Ernie in Vern’s red Caddy down 167 to see what the ruckus was, whether or not it had anything to do with Carmody and B.J. The call came a few minutes later. The Reverend took it.

“Reverend, we are here at Lester’s.”

“Yes?”

“Whole mess of folks, all the cops in three counties, state boys, the works. Crime lab, that detective Thelma Fielding and Sheriff Reed Wells, maybe even FBI up from Knoxville, TV stations, newspaper and radio reporters from all three states, the whole shebang. Even civilians are pulling in, drawn by the light and the ruckus. They can smell the blood in the air. We can’t get close, they’ve cordoned it off, but quite a crowd has gathered.”

“What’s the word?”

There was silence, as if neither Vern nor Ernie wanted to bust the news. Finally it was Ernie, who said, “Rumor here in the crowd is that some punk kid shot it out with two armed, masked desperados. Killed ’em both deader n’ shit.”

The Reverend looked for other possibilities.

“Don’t mean a thing. No sir, first off, no punk kid is besting Carmody and B.J. Grumley, no sir, not now, not ever. It has to be coincidence, you know, that brought some Joe Blows into the kid’s gun sights, even if Carmody and B.J.’s off roaming around to make a job on someone so as to make it look robbery-like. I know the good Lord wouldn’t take two Grumleys from me, no sir, not with this big thing coming up two days off, and me needing every damn man. So you just—”

And then he sort of ran out of words.

“Sir,” Ernie finally said, “thing is, I think that’s Carmody’s car in the lot, I can make it out. And it’s impounded and they’re dusting it for prints even now and a tow truck is here.”

“Oh, damn. Damnation, hellish damnation, flame and spark, damnation. It just can’t be.”

“Sir, I am only telling you what I see.”

“Was there anything about another fellow? There’s a shootout, our two boys, they gone, but they got another fellow, right, tell me that’s what it’s about.”

“Sir, ain’t heard nothing about no other fellow. Only about this clerk, what a sad-sack shmo he was, only this time he came up aces, a mankiller of the first rank, chest to chest and muzzle to muzzle, he shot it out, and they’re down and gone and he’s a hero of the highest damned order.”

The Reverend let out an animal howl of rage and pain, deep soul ache, the blues, whatever you may call it. A Grumley—no, two Grumleys—had passed. His scream so rent the air that from the rec room, where they’d been lounging, playing cards, watching TV on fuzzy black and whites, drinking, just palavering, his progeny and kin came to see him and take the message of despair and vengeance he was putting out.

“You learn what you can, boys, then you head on home,” he told Vern and Ernie.

“Yes sir.”

The Reverend looked up at his flock.

“We lost ’em, boys. Both ’em gone to the maker. It ain’t right.”

“What happened, sir?”

He told the story as he’d heard it.

“No way, uh-uh, no Grumley going down in a fight with that pudding-ass kid,” seemed to be the consensus.

“Pap,” a voice came, “this boy, he couldna gotten the goods on Carmody and B.J. Carmody’s a good shot. He had a knack. He’d shoot the ankles off a fly.”

“B.J. ain’t no slouch either,” said another. “Remember in 0 and 6, he shot it out with two big black dudes in an alley in St. Louis, and though he got punctured himself, he made sure he’s standing and they’s bagged by the time that fight’s done.”

Several of the wilder Grumleys wanted to lock and load and head out for hot-blooded vengeance that very second.

“We got the machine guns, we can blast the holy Jesus out of that town in a minute and a half. With that big gun we can blow down all their church steeples, we can take that fat sad clown and hang him upside down in burning tar in the town center.”

It was at this time that Vern Pye and Ernie Grumley returned from their melancholy mission, and they got there in time to hear all the talk of rage and vengeance, of burning the flesh of the Grumley killer, of razing the municipality that spawned him, or wreaking biblical vengeance on the transgressors. Through it all handsome Vern kept himself calm. Finally and calmly he spoke.

“Now you listen up, boys. Listen to Vern. I am the oldest and the most experienced. I am maybe the most accomplished. I have three homes, three wives, gals, money in the bank, and know some country-western stars. So let me share some wisdom. May I speak, sir?”

The Reverend considered, then said, “Son Vern, you may speak your piece in the Grumley fashion.”

“Thank you, Reverend. You boys, you’s all a-rage and full of the fires of hatred and vengeance. You want to go in and flatten that place, and teach every last man and woman in it the fear of Grumley justice, and I don’t blame you a bit. But we are men of a certain creed who live by a certain code and have certain responsibilities. That is at our center and is as fierce to us as our Baptist faith and our willingness to shed and spill blood. So I say hold it in, cousins and brothers. Hold it in cold and tight and squeeze it down.

“Now we have a job we’ve contracted to do. We’ve worked hard on it. We’ve prepared and sacrificed. We’ve taken a stranger into our midst—” he indicated Brother Richard, who was slouched beneath his Richard Petty cowboy hat and fake sideburns at the rear of the room—“and let that stranger use his waspish words against us, as if he’s some kind of high and mighty. We do that because it’s part of our contract. We are professionals of a creed, brothers and cousins, and we will be true to that creed. So for now, it is my conclusion there should be no blood spilling, and that clerk should be left alone to enjoy his few minutes of glory.

“But I swear to you, and you know that Grumley to Grumley, Grumley word is holy, I swear to you that when this done finished, then we will get to the bottom of this. We will have a nice long chat with that lucky boy and we will find out what transpired and we will ascertain blame and we will pay out justice, eyeball for eyeball, earhole for earhole, heart for heart. We will inform the world that Grumley blood is too precious to be spilled, and when it is, hell visits in due turn.”

This did not mollify the Grumleys. It was not what they wanted to hear. They turned back to their father and spiritual leader.

“Is that it, Pap? Is that what you want?”

“I have considered. I see deeper into this. It’s not about that clerk. I agree he be no match for any Grumley, much less two. I see another hand at play.”

He paused.

“Who, then, Reverend?” asked Vern. “Who is the master in all this?”

“I think that goddamned old man, that gray-headed fella come in earlier, the father of that gal? You seen that fella? Something ’bout him I didn’t like. No, can’t say I didn’t like him, wasn’t no issue of liking. Was more like, he’s too calm for what he says he was. I shot a coupla clay birds for him and he said, ‘Ow, it’s so loud.’ He said, ‘Aw, I don’t like guns.’ He said that but he’s in my vision when I’m shooting and he didn’t jump none when the gun went off, as if he’d been around the report of a firearm a time or two. And he told me this odd story about how he’d got cut up in Japan, his hip laid open, but there was no point in suing the fellow what cut him, and he told that story, which made no sense without a further explanation, almost for his own private pleasure. He’s takin’ pride in it. He’s taking pleasure in some memory of some event of triumph.”

“He some kind of undercover man, sir? Is that what you’re saying?” a Grumley wondered.

“I don’t know whose agent he is, if he really is that gal’s daddy, or he’s playing a game or what. But I have done this work many a year and have developed a nose for certain things. And I got a peculiar aura off him—it’s what now I see is mankiller’s aura. There are some born to kill with a gun. They have the steel for snuffing out life with a piece of flying lead, don’t feel nothing about it. There was a breed of lawmen like that once, mankilling cops, old timers who weren’t afraid of going to the gun. I didn’t think there’s men around like that no more. Thought the last of them died years ago when they stopped calling killing a man’s job and made it like a sickness, so a man who wins a fair gunfight should feel ashamed and go into a hospital. That’ll drive your mankiller into retirement or the graveyard faster’n anything. That’s the only enemy he can’t never beat, except maybe a Grumley boy. But this old man’s one, you should know his kind has been the kind to hunt our kind since ancient days. Never thought I’d see his like again, thought that breed was vanished from the earth, but I think he’s back and hunting us.”

“So what’ll we do, Reverend?”

“Well, only one thing to do. Now we hunt him. Grumley business come first. Without Grumley, there’s nothing but chaos. Family matters most. So we must hunt and kill this bastard, and I want y’all out on the streets so as to mark him down and then we’ll finish him but good. Maybe we get done in time for the job, maybe we don’t. But Grumley come first.”

NINETEEN

Bob realized as he left Lester’s Grocery and the clerk that without his keepers, he now had a free shot to Knoxville, could check on his daughter, talk to his wife, and pick up some firepower. He turned right out of the parking lot, drove up 167, ignoring whatever mysteries lurked behind the locked gates of the Baptist prayer camp, hit 67, and soon crossed from Johnson to Carter County, on the way west to 81, which would take him south.

Immediately it was apparent that Carter was a richer county by far. It had a man-made lake, marinas bobbing with pleasure boats visible even in the dark, bars, restaurants, vacation homes, nightlife. At one point a couple of Carter County sheriff’s cars roared by him, sirens blazing, lights pumping, and now and then a Tennessee Highway Patrol vehicle sped by, all of them clearly headed to the site of the shooting, where that boy had to hold his line for at least a few more days. Maybe when this straightened out, Bob would speak up, explain himself to Detective Thelma Fielding, take the kid off the spot and face what consequences there might be. But it seemed to him that there should be none, besides his leaving the scene of—well, of what? A crime? Not hardly. Fair, straight shooting in defense against armed men who had masks on who were moving aggressively toward him. Pure self-defense if the law was applied right.

Other things on the to-do list. Make sure to check the press accounts and see who these boys were. The second fellow had moved well and intelligently, brought fire, clearly a veteran of previous firefights of one sort or another. A professional, to be sure; he’d have tracks, associations, a record, all that which could tell an interested party a thing or two.

And then there’s the issue of Eddie Ferrol, Iron Mountain Armory owner. Talk to him and someone tries to kill you. Who is he? Why is he in this? He doesn’t seem smart enough, tough enough, ruthless enough to be a big part in anything criminal, yet for some reason he has an amazing influence on events. Why is that? What does his knowledge of the Bible, particularly Mark 2:11, have to do with anything? Why does even abstract, useless knowledge of this passage equate to an instant murder attempt? Eddie looked like the sort who’d spill his beans easily enough. But almost certainly, he’d go to ground and make himself hard to find. He certainly wasn’t going back to the gun store, that was for sure.

And what was his own next move, after his time in Knoxville? Should he come back to Mountain City and continue to ask questions in hope of coming across a Mark 2:11 explanation? Would he be targeted again? Would people pick up on him, report on his presence, help a new squad of hunters locate him? Should he go on to Bristol, return to Nikki’s apartment, spend some time there, at least through the weekend’s big race activities, then hire a private eye, stop improvising, do this thing like a grown-up with a mind toward clearing it up and making sure it was safe for his daughter to resume her life?

He got into Knoxville at midnight, realized it was probably too late to call his wife in her motel—the call would awaken Miko and wouldn’t be appreciated. So he found an Econo Lodge off the big highway and paid in cash. He hadn’t realized how tired he was and that he’d been going hard without sleep or food. The food could wait. He went to bed in the small, cheap-but-clean room after a shower, and fell into a sleep full of portents of children in jeopardy and himself in various gaudy, symbolic shapes, unable to do anything about it.

You wouldn’t associate the word “coma” with Nikki. She looked rosy and merely asleep. Everybody was full of hope. The doctors reported that her vital signs were strong and that she stirred, showed normal brain activity, and responded to her mother’s and sister’s voices. They all thought it would be a matter of days, maybe even hours before she awoke.

“She is such an angel,” Bob said, holding Miko close.

“Daddy, maybe she’ll wake up today.”

“I hope she does, sweetie. I hope and pray she does. You and Mommy, you’ll stay here and watch over her.”

“Yes, and the Pinks will guard her so nobody can harm Nikki.”

“Yes, honey, they’re very good men.”

He put Miko down.

“Now Mommy and I have to talk. Honey, you stay here for a minute, okay?”

“Yes, Daddy.”

He and his wife walked wordlessly down the hall to a visitor’s lounge, where they bought bad coffee in Styrofoam from a vending machine and sat at a blank table in a blank room.

The first thing he said was, “I have satisfied myself that this thing did not come upon Nikki out of something I did some years ago, when I was off doing this or that. It seems that she cut trail on some kind of plan—I don’t know what it is. But somewhere in Johnson County there’s a group of very bad fellows who are planning something equally bad, and Nikki picked up on some aspect of it, and they had to finish her as she was going about her business, trying to do an overall story about methamphetamine use in the county. She’s innocent; she was just a young woman full of life who ran afoul of bad customers. She may not have even known what it is, but it has to be something she was close to figuring out and that’s why it’s so dangerous. Now I know what the clue is, and now people are coming for me.”

He told her his story, each discovery at a time, each event at a time, including Mark 2:11.

When he told her he’d killed two men the night before, her gaze showed nothing. She had changed. It was her daughter; her rage and instinct had been aroused and now she understood that she could not allow anyone—anyone—to harm her daughter.

“You can’t go to the police?” she finally asked. “Wouldn’t that be the wisest thing?”

“Well, I’m not sure how they figure into it. I think this Detective Thelma Fielding is okay, but the sheriff is a pompous son of a bitch with his eye on something else. Loves publicity, won’t stop talking about his time in the war. But the real problem with them is they got it all figured out to be a bad kid on a binge, looking for somebody to squash. That’s all they see, that’s what they want to see, that’s the file it’s in. They think it’ll just be a day or so till somebody snitches him out, and meanwhile they got other fish to fry. So if I go to them, I have some kind of institutional inertia working against me to begin with. Then I have to explain why I ran out after the shooting, what my suspicions are, and their minds aren’t equipped to deal with any of that yet. It’s too much information, too fast, and it challenges the way they do business. It’s like the Marine Corps used to be on snipers. They just don’t want to know about it. Took a war to change their minds.”

“What about the FBI? Can you call Nick Memphis? He’d drop anything to help you. At least he can put Bureau resources behind you, and your learning curve will be much quicker.”

“Hmmm,” said Bob. “You sure you haven’t done this before? That’s a great idea. No, that didn’t occur to me because I been so goddamn caught up in my own drama and not thinking straight. Yeah, I will call him first thing, and see what he can get me.”

“Can you handle this? You’re older, Bob. Maybe not so fast. Maybe your mind is a little slower than it once was, as well as your hands. And maybe this time you’ll run out of luck, you know that. You’ll end up face down, shot by some kid with a .22 who has no idea he’s just murdered Achilles.”

“I may run out of luck, sure. And I ain’t too happy to be a hunted man once again, and to have to go to guns once again. But it’s come, and I told you, I will do with it what I must. I need you behind me.”

“But it seems since Japan you’ve had doubts, even fears. I know. You thought I was asleep, but many’s the night you woke with a start, all asweat. In this kind of game, you can’t have doubts. You’ve said that many times.”

“If I was working for a government or a sheriff’s office, I might have doubts and they might get me killed on the job. But I am working for my daughter. So those doubts don’t count. They went away. I have no doubts, and last night, it was the same old Bob Lee back, gun in hand, shooting for blood, making the right moves. I do need one thing. I need you behind me.”

“I am behind you.” She reached into her purse and pulled out a set of car keys with a Hertz emblem on the ring. “It’s a blue Prism, Tennessee LCD 109953. I parked on the fourth floor, where there’s fewer cars, but not on the roof, where somebody in an office could see you. You pull up to it, trunk to trunk. There are some goods inside. I went to Meachums and asked Mr. Meachum what kind of rifle he recommended for self-defense in a ranch house. He was very helpful. Didn’t have any trouble on the flight. Locked case, declared firearm, the gal at the counter didn’t even want to look inside. The handgun was yours, under the mattress. I bought ammunition for it and the rifle and spare magazines. It’s all in the trunk. I spent last night loading magazines. The rifle is supposed to hold thirty but I could only get twenty-eight in.”

“Twenty-eight is fine,” said Bob. “It’s better. Less pressure on the spring. More reliable that way.”

“The handgun magazines loaded fine. Ten in each, ten of them.”

“Thank you,” he said. “Now I’m going to go. I think I have to get back to Mountain City. I can’t let them think they’ve run me. They have to know they’re in for a fight and if they’re scared, maybe they’ll make a mistake.”

She said, “You find the men who tried to kill our daughter. You take care of them.”

He kissed her, took the elevator down, went to the garage and moved his car up to hers. Satisfying himself there were no other people on the floor, he opened her trunk.

The rifle was in a Doskocil plastic travel case. He unlatched it to see what Meachum had come up with. His first thought was “Shit,” because it was an M16. Well, an AR-15, as the civilian variant was called. As a man of the .30 caliber, he’d always despised the pipsqueak .223 of the classic AR platform with its tendency to bore tiny holes in people, keep going and kill the talented orphan-kid piano-prodigy while the bad guy didn’t blink an eyelash and kept shooting. And he noticed it had all sorts of gizmos bolted on—an EOTech holographic sight that looked like a TV set, a forward vertical grip with a Surefire flashlight built into it at six o’clock, just under the muzzle. And the muzzle—well, it looked a little wider. He bent close, tried to make out the barrel marking in the dim light, and saw that it read DPMS 6.8mm REMINGTON SPC. As he transferred the gun and case to his trunk, he saw a few extra boxes of ammo, Black Hills 6.8, cracked one and discovered a short round that had a big bullet. Let’s see, 6.8, that meant about .270 caliber. And then he remembered hearing that in the sand, the Special Operations people were so pissed at the poor one-shot, take-down ratio they were getting from the .223, some of them worked with some people at Remington to come up with a bigger, more powerful cartridge. It functioned in a system using an AR lower, and only required a new upper, thus saving the government millions of dollars. If the government adopted the cartridge, it only had to buy the top half of five hundred thousand new weapons. Maybe that would happen, maybe it wouldn’t, but the cartridge had been combat-tested and was said to put ’em down and keep ’em down. That pleased him. She had done well.

The handgun was a .38 Super, his own 1911 model Kimber, a very nice gun that as he got older he appreciated more for its lack of recoil and muzzle flip in fast strings, while completely identical to the .45 in handling and operating procedures. The extra boxes indicated the load Meachum had chosen was the CorBon 130-grain jacketed hollow point +P+ ammo. His Kydex holster lay beside the case, amid the ammo boxes.

Locked and loaded, he thought. Loaded for bear or whatever.

His cellphone rang.

He looked at the caller ID and saw that it was Detective Thelma Fielding’s number. He thought a bit. What do I do? Maybe that kid broke. She wants me to come in so she don’t have to put out an arrest warrant. Maybe I ought to call a lawyer. Meantime, I have an arsenal in the trunk and no place to stash it. Damn, I wish that boy had lasted longer. Thought he had the stuff for it.

He could just not answer, of course. But what would that tell her?

“Hello.”

“Mr. Swagger.”

“Yes, howdy, Detective, what’s up?” Trying to be nonchalant, just in case.

“Sir, we’ve had a break in the case.”

“A break?”

“Yes sir. Soon’s I get free and clear of an unrelated shooting took place last night, I’m going to make an arrest. Fellow named Cubby Bartlett, a longtime meth dealer. He’s the man who tried to kill your daughter. Got him cold. Someone snitched him out and I’m going to pull him in.”

Swagger didn’t know quite what to feel—relief that the boy had held steady and hadn’t given up his name, or laughter that poor Thelma seemed way up the wrong tree and barking hard. Or maybe in some way this Cubby Bartlett fit into it.

“Sir, you said you wanted to be there for the arrest. Now if you give me your word you won’t cause no trouble, I will let you sit stakeout with us tonight and watch as we bring him in.”

“I’ll be there,” he said, and she gave him the details.

TWENTY

“You’re an idiot,” said Brother Richard.

“Brother Richard, if we don’t do this here job, and it looks like we won’t, then your ass ain’t worth a cowpie in January. So I’s you, I’d get myself long gone, ’cause when Grumley business be finished, my boys may remember how mean and disrespectful to them you’s been. And when that happens and specially since they have the taste of blood on their tongues, maybe they get a hunger for you.”

“You’re an idiot,” repeated Brother Richard.

“Grumley come first,” said the Reverend. They sat in his office off the gym floor of the rec center. The boys had already locked and loaded and headed out, just to keep a watch and see if and when that fellow came back into town, after which point all Grumleys would coordinate and vengeance would be taken, as it mightily should be, amen.

“Don’t you think you’re overstating the drama of the two men you lost? Those boys were professional strong-arm men. They were begotten of and by violence. That’s the life they chose. They lived high on it, scoring kills and drugs—”

“My boys don’t take no drugs!”

“Yeah, you don’t work with them on a daily basis like I have the last few weeks. I know Grumleys a lot bettern’ you, old man. Anyhow, those two, Carmody and Blow Job—”

“Damn you to righteous flame, you bas—”

“Carmody and Blow Job had the kills and the swag and the dope and the whores and probably even a good girl or two along the way, because there do seem to be some good girls who find outlaws amusing. They lived a life of the superego unrestrained, like few men, the great thrill of the criminal lifestyle and its secret true reward. They ran hard and lived hard. It was always in the cards that at any second of any day they could run into some country cop who knew how to shoot, or take a corner too fast and smear themselves on the concrete. That’s the cost of doing business in the business of violence, and it turned out that their number came up. It’s an anomaly, it’s unfortunate, from your twisted-sister viewpoint it might even be a tragedy, but it is what it is, and there’s no money in it for any of us and we have worked too goddamned hard to give it up for some nickel-and-dime sense of vengeance on someone who, after all, was only defending himself in a square gunfight and appears to have been faster on the trigger and truer on the aiming part than your boys. Vern was right. Vern’s the smartest Grumley.”

“Sir, you do not understand family. And I am disappointed in son Vern.”

“Sir, I do understand family. No man you ever met understands family more than me. Now, I’ll tell you what’s interesting in all this. It’s my sense you have been looking for a way to fail. I believe you were coerced into this plan by someone smarter and tougher than yourself, because it is too clever for a fellow like you to think up. You’re no strategist, your only product is the rawest of force. That’s what you sell, that’s all you know. But this thing is too cool for words and you are about to give it up not in spite of your best instincts but because of your best interests. You want an excuse to fail, to go down in some fucking massacre shootout in a blazing barn, a gun in each hand. You have ‘death wish’ written all over you, goddamnit.”

“You have fancy words, Brother Richard, and you speak cleverly but your words ain’t but spit compared to the Grumley family tra—”

“What’s he got on you? Bet I know.”

This threat alone, of all the things Brother Richard had said, shut the old geezer up. And when that happened, Brother Richard knew he was right and bored in for the kill.

“It’s gotta be a sex thing. That lizard of yours, that baby’s got to feed, what, three, four times a day? You’re omnisexual, polysexual, metasexual. You’re unisexual. There isn’t a word for what you are. It seems to run in the godhead biz. Wasn’t David Koresh and that Jim guy who fed all those people Kool-Aid the same? Yeah, yeah, that’s it, isn’t it? You have all those kids, all those wives, all their sisters, it’s all about the Reverend Alton Grumley getting his wand wet three, four times a day, even at your age. I will say, you are probably more full of sperm than any man born since Genghis Khan, father of us all, not just because you know family conspiracies are the only conspiracies that work and so you need a lot of family, but also because you have a weird gene that makes you have to fuck three or four times a day. I bet you have a cock the size of a trailer hitch, come to think of it. It all fits together—your golden tones, your soothing ways, your clank of sanctimony, your secret ruthlessness. Boy, you are one huge, perpetual-motion fucking machine. You even see it in Number One son, Vern. I picked up on the way his eyes light on the youngest, flattest, hottest, sluttiest twelve-year-old. He fixes on one of them, he’s lost to the cause. You’d best hope that when the big day arrives, old Vern’s got his mind on business, not on the shock-absorber-sized boner in his pocket. We need Vern’s sagacity, or rather, normal Vern’s sagacity, not het-up Vern’s insanity.”

The Reverend seemed to be getting a little crazy. The Y-veins on his forehead pulsed, his eyes sank to the size and color of ball bearings, his breathing grew harsh and shallow, and he clenched and unclenched his big hands. He looked like he wanted to strangle the life out of Brother Richard and was but a second from doing it.

“But let’s leave poor Vern out of this. He’s only your pattern played out, what chance did he have with a pa who was so sexed up sometimes he didn’t care what kind of hole he put it in, am I right? Oh, that’s the pattern, I see it now. He’s got video on you and some chicken, right? Some boy whore. Some boy-child even, one of those classic cases of the holy man who can’t keep his mitts off of little Billy and Bobby and tells them God commands them to drop their drawers? Oh, that’s it, I hadn’t seen it till now, that’s got to be it.”

“Sir, you are the Whore of Babylon, the Antichrist, hiding behind a smiley demeanor and a charming patter, but truly inside, the Beast.”

“Arf, arf,” said Richard. “Now I see. You’ve been leveraged into this job, and there’s nothing you can do about it. But you cannot accept it either, because the fulcrum on which it turns is your own darkest secret, the one that would destroy you in front of all Grumleys. So your attitude is classic passive-aggressive, and the longer it goes on, the longer it annoys the bejesus out of you. So now you have it: an excuse to quit, an excuse to fail, an excuse to die.”

The Reverend looked skyward.

“Lord, help the Sinnerman all on that day. He has nowhere to run to. The moon won’t hide him because it’s bleeding, the sea won’t hide him because it’s boiling. With his education he comes up with terrible ideas and he contaminates those who believe. Lord God, smite him, and take him with you and give him a shaking and a talking to, so that he knows why it is you’re sending him to an eternity of burning flesh in the dark and sulphurous caverns of hell.”

“Who writes your stuff, Stephen King or Anne Rice? Anyhow, let me tell you: Call in the boys. Settle ’em down. We need ’em calm and collected for Race Day. We can do this thing, I tell you, and I can have my little run through Big Racing’s peapatch. And we can all go home rich and nobody, nobody, will ever forget the Night of Thunder. Okay? Concentrate. That’s how you beat your tormentor. You pull the job, you get the money, you get your film-at-eleven-minister-fingerfucks-choirboy back. Living well is the best revenge. Oh, and a few years down the line, you go back and kill the shit out of whoever was blackmailing you.”

The Reverend looked at him sullenly.

Richard continued. “Apostate speak with wisdom, no, old goat? Infidel know thing or two, eh, Colonel Sanders? Think on it. Think on it, for God’s sake. Now I’m going to leave. I have to get into Bristol and get a look at my little peapatch, so I can prepare my own kind of fire and brimstone for what’s coming up next. I’m not even going to demand that you change your plan and call those boys in, because I know you will.”

“Thou art sin,” said the Reverend. “Thou wilt burn.”

“Just so I don’t roll,” said Brother Richard.

TWENTY-ONE

On the way back to Mountain City, Bob tried to call Nick Memphis, special agent, FBI. He had Nick’s own private cell number, and he punched in the numbers as he drove north on 81 from Knoxville in the setting afternoon sun. But there was no answer, only Nick’s voice mail. “This is Memphis. Leave a detailed message and I will get back to you.”

“Nick, Swagger. I have to run something by you and sooner would be so much better than later. Call me on this number please, bud.”

But Nick never called him back.

He was disappointed. He loved Nick. Years ago, so long ago he’d repressed it and most of the memories had vanished, Nick had believed in him. He was on the run, set up by some professionals, briefly number one on the FBI hit parade. Every cop in America was gunning for him. Then along came Nick, who’d looked at the evidence and saw that the narrative everybody was dancing to simply couldn’t have happened. By the laws of physics, too many anomalies, too many strangenesses. Nick looked hard into it, then hard into Bob’s killer eyes, and believed.

Bob knew: He was reborn that moment. That was the moment he came back. That was his redemption. That gave him the strength to play it out, to go hard again, to find the lost Bob the Nailer and put the drunken, self-pitying loser-loner behind him. Nick’s faith became Julie’s faith became Nikki’s faith became Miko’s faith, all in a line, and let him be what he was meant to be, what he’d been born to be. And it let him almost, after all of it, get close to the one god he worshiped, his great, martyred father.

But Nick wasn’t there. Where the hell was Nick?

So he called the number he had for Matt MacReady.

Again, he just got the machine. “This is Matt. Leave a message.”

“Matt, Swagger here. Boy, hate to bother you so soon before a race. One question: Recently I saw the tracks of some kind of machine. Steel wheels, maybe eight or ten inches apart, cut deep in the dirt. Hmmm, I recall all kinds of tracks in the pits when I visited you. Any idea what those kinds of tracks could be? Sure could help me. Thanks and good luck on Race Day.”

He did catch up on the news from a Knoxville twenty-four-hour radio station. According to the reporter, the two dead men in the Johnson County Grocery Store shootings had been identified as Carmody Grumley and B.J. Grumley, both of no fixed address, both known to have organized crime connections and thought to be part of a mobile, shifting culture of strong-armed men used in various mob enterprises over the years. Each man had a substantial rap sheet. Young Terry Hepplewhite, the grocery clerk who shot it out with the robbers, was being hailed as a hero, though he had yet to meet with the press and tell his side of the story.

Grumley, he thought. The Grumley boys. What is this Grumley? Another question for Nick, who could dig up a file on Grumley.

Instead of going to his motel, where he thought these Grumleys might have had lookouts waiting, Bob went to the first church he saw, which was John the Revelator Baptist Church of Redemption. Just a one-story building with a steeple that hardly went up twenty-five feet, it wasn’t a mighty structure but had a rough quality, as if it had been slowly assembled brick by brick in the humblest of ways. When he entered the hushed devotional space, he first thought he’d gone astray, for two worshipers were black, and it occurred to him that their memory of large white men in jeans and boots might not be all that warm. But shortly a young black man in a suit and tie came out of a walkway and came over to him.

“May I help you, sir? Do you come to worship? You are welcome.”

“Thank you, sir,” Bob said. “But actually I have a biblical puzzle to solve and I thought someone here might pitch in.”

“I can try. Please come this way.”

The doors led Bob to a spare office with many Bibles and other books of religious persuasion occupying the shelves on one wall.

“Have a seat. My name is Lionel Weston, I am the pastor of John the Revelator.”

“My name is Bob Lee Swagger, and I’m greatly appreciative, sir. This has to do with a passage that has come to my attention. My daughter was interested in it before an accident she had, and I’m wondering what it could mean.”

“I’ll try.”

“Mark 2:11.”

“Ah,” said the Reverend Weston, “yes, of course. ‘Arise from your bed and go to your home.’ Or sometimes, ‘Arise from your pallet and go to your house.’ Christ has just performed a miracle. He had restored mobility to a paralyzed man. Doubters have assailed him even as worshipers have brought the sick and malformed to him. Not from ego, not from pride, but from compassion, he has restored this man’s limbs to strength. It’s one of the great miracles of the text. In fact, one might say those words express the pure joy of God’s power, his ability to restore the infirm through faith. Does that help, Mr. Swagger?”

Bob’s puzzled expression evidently communicated a truth to the minister.

“Possibly it has metaphorical meaning to your daughter. She’s saying, ‘I can walk.’ Her sickness has been cured. She’s had a revelation of sorts. Was she in spiritual or physical pain?”

“Sir, I don’t think so. In fact, this muddies up the waters considerably. Could it be a code, a code word, a signal?”

“Mr. Swagger, I don’t think God talks in code words. His meanings are clear enough for us.”

“You are right, sir, and I am very grateful for your wisdom. I have to think on this and see how it fits in.”

“How is your daughter?”

“She’s recovering. I would ask her, but she’s still unconscious.”

“I will pray for her.”

“I greatly appreciate it, sir.”

“I will pray for you, Mr. Swagger. I hope you solve your riddle and straighten things out. I see you as a man who is good at straightening things out.”

“I try, sir. Lord, how I try.”

Leaving the church, he checked his watch and saw it was time to head to the sheriff’s office. He contemplated whether he should slip the Kydex holster with the .38 Super on, and in the end concluded it would be a bad idea, a careless move, an accident. Detective Thelma would see that he was armed, which could lead to embarrassing questions, even charges.

He got there at eight, pulling into the lot.

Agh, that perpetual shroud of coal dust that hung over this neck of the woods hit him. In a second he’d have a headache. No wonder they were getting the hell out of here. Bob walked into the station and a clerk nodded him back to the bullpen area where Thelma stood by in her polo and chinos while three SWAT officers with MP5 submachineguns and AR-15 shorties were gearing up for the night’s event.

“Mr. Swagger,”

“Detective Fielding.”

“This is our Fugitive Apprehension Team.” The guys, beefy cop types. Two white, one black, in their twenties with short hair, thick necks, and the look of middle linebackers, nodded at him without making any sincere emotional commitment.

“Wow, you must be expecting some kind of gunfight. You look like you’re going on a commando raid.”

“You just want to take precautions. I doubt Cubby has a fix on going down hard. He’s a gentle soul, as long as he isn’t lit up on ice.”

“I hope you’re right.”

“All right, sir, you drive with me, and the FAT guys will follow in their van. Let me brief you. I will park down the way and you will stay in the car; we’ll wait for the van to park and the boys will take up entry positions in the rear. Then I’ll signal Air and my brother Tom, who’s the sheriff’s helicopter pilot—”

“Your brother’s the pilot?”

“Tom was shot down as an army aviator three times in two wars. The last one, in Baghdad, was bad. He had some problems and had to leave the army. Maybe I started this whole drug-war thing, because I put through the Justice Department grant paperwork to get us the bird so my brother would have someplace to go.”

“I see. Impressive. You helped him.”

“I tried, but you know the law of unintended consequences. Now I worry that—oh, never mind. Let’s get back to it. Tom will bring the ship in, and his copilot will work the high-intensity beam in case Cubby tries to run. I’ll go in and knock and tell Cubby he’s coming with me. It should go fine, but if he bolts, he’ll just run into these fellows and if he goes violent on us, then we’ll have to run him down. But I’m not betting on trouble.”

“Okay.”

“You just stay in the car. When we bring him in and book him, I’ll let you listen from the next room to the interrogation. Cubby’s no master criminal, believe me; he’ll give it up fast and I’ve set it up with the Prosecutor’s office to have him indicted in the morning. Paperwork’s all done. Then it’s just a matter of making sure Tennessee justice don’t drop the ball, and I will watch that one very closely.”

“I thank you for taking me along. I appreciate it.”

They sat on a tree-lined street in what could never be called the nicer side of town, a run-down section east of downtown where the old houses—shacks more like it, maybe at best bungalows—leaned this way and that. And you had the sense that a lot of police action had taken place there before.

“I’ve been busting Cubby for ten years, off and on,” Thelma said. “He’ll go clean for a while, maybe as long as six months, but he’s always gone back. Sad to see such a handsome man give his life away for nothing. He’ll gin up a lab, he’ll deal a little, he’ll snitch out somebody to buy more time, just scuffling along, waiting for a way to amp the scratch to buy another bag of the stuff. Man, it’s the devil’s business, what it does to folks. You have any addiction problems in your family, sir?”

“Detective, I am not proud to say that I had some troubles with the bottle years back and to this day I miss my bourbon, but one sip and I’m gone. It cost me, and I finally beat it down, though now and again, under trying circumstances, I will break down and have a drink. I usually end up in the next county engaged to a tattooed Chinese woman.”

She didn’t acknowledge his joke.

“But my daughter’s never had a thing to do with it, and only now and then drinks a glass of wine. We’ve been so lucky.”

“Yes, you have. The wrecked families I’ve seen.”

“Let me ask you: You’re sure on this boy?”

“Sure as sure is. He has a brother who has a car that matches the vehicle ID’d on the state forensics reports, the cobalt ’05 Charger. I checked this morning—it was a busy morning—and in fact Cubby had the car and in fact it’s banged up where he hit your daughter. I looked at the car and I think we can make the presence of your daughter’s paint in the gash along the side of the Charger.”

Bob was thinking, What the hell is she talking about? Who is this Cubby? Is he working for Eddie Ferrol, or some mysterious Mister Big, the Godfather of Johnson County? How’s it all connected? What does this detective know of his connections?

“You’ll check on his associations once you get him locked up? Be interesting to see if he was—”

“Working for somebody. Last person he worked for was Mr. McDonald, of the hamburger chain, who fired his worthless ass in three weeks. He was never able to master the deep-fat fryer.”

“Maybe he has other connections, criminal connections.”

“Doubtful, Mr. Swagger, but if so, we’ll find out tonight when I run the interrogation.”

“Yes ma’am. Now on another thing, this sheriff’s making a big splash with his chopper. But I hear the price of the stuff hasn’t gone up, which you’d expect if all the labs were being closed down. What’s the feeling?”

“Nobody knows. Maybe there’s a superlab somewhere, but you’d think you’d smell it, because manufacturing crystal meth in quantity produces a terrible, rotten egg smell. Or maybe it’s being trucked in from somewhere. Don’t know if you know it, but there’s a shooting last night, some grocery clerk got lucky and killed two robbers. The robbers were interesting: real serious bad actors, your white-trash professional heavy hitter, with rumored contacts to a batch of mobs all over the South, and participation suspected in a dozen armed robberies. Them boys ran out of luck in the worst possible way last night. Anyhow, way my mind works, I’m thinking, maybe they muled a load of ice from somewhere deeper south, and that’s where the stuff is coming from. I don’t know what else would explain their presence here. It would go to someone who knew the area, had ambitions, and a lot of criminal skills. Don’t know who that would be. You see any criminal geniuses hiding at Arby’s on the way over?”

“No ma’am, but there’s a shady dude at the Pizza Hut.”

This got a laugh out of her, but her mind was elsewhere, really, as she scanned the shabby front of the house down the street.

“Adam-one-nine, you there?” came a squawky call on the radio.

She spoke into her throat mic.

“Adam-one-nine copy.”

“Adam-one-nine, we in place. You can go any time.”

“Air-one, stat. You there, Tom?”

“I read you Adam one-nine.”

“Tom, you bring it on in and when you see me at the front door, you have Mike open up with the big lamp on the back of the house, you got that?”

“I read you, Adam one-nine.”

She turned to Swagger.

“Please don’t make me look bad. Sheriff doesn’t know about this. But I figure the dad gets to watch as the fellow who tried to kill his daughter goes down.”

He could tell she was uneasy, and the breath came hard and shallow. She ran a dry tongue over dry, cracked lips, and for one second did something amazingly feminine that totally contradicted the image of a tough cop about to make a bust. She grabbed a role of lip balm from the dash, and smoothed it, dainty as an expensive French lipstick, across her lips.

“Yes ma’am,” said Bob, as she got out of the car and walked slowly to the front door.

He wondered why they didn’t do it bigger; ten cars, lights flashing, loudspeakers. But maybe that would spook an icehead like this Cubby, legendary maker of bad decisions, and the next thing, there’d be another big gunfight. Give Thelma the benefit of the doubt. She’s done this, you haven’t. You don’t know so much, and as it is you are riding the raw edge of a term in jail on any one of a dozen charges.

So he sat back and watched the police theater.

Thelma arrived at the doorwell, hesitated. Her hand flew to her pistol, made certain it was where it should be and that the retaining device still held it ready and secure until the moment she drew, if she drew.

She knocked.

She knocked again.

No answer.

She slithered next to the door jamb and edged the door open. She had a Surefire in her nonshooting hand, and she used it to penetrate the darkness. He heard her yell, “Cubby? Cubby, it’s Detective Fielding. You in there? You come on out now, we’ve got business.”

There was no answer.

Don’t go in, Bob thought. One-on-one in the dark of a house against a violent offender whose head is all messed up on account of the skank he eats and makes every day, who’s paranoid, maybe crazy, oh lady, don’t go in, it isn’t necessary. Drop back, watch the exits, call for backup, let the boys in the Tommy Tactical outfits earn their dough.

But Thelma slipped in.

The moments passed, and before he knew it Bob had gotten out of the car and crouched in the lee of its wheel well, watching, waiting for shots or something.

Oh, Christ. Through the windows, he could see the beam of her flashlight dancing against the walls and ceiling of the dark interior of the small place, which couldn’t have more than a few rooms.

Come on, he thought. He wanted to see her come out with the suspect cuffed, and the boys with the guns come racing around the house to take him away. Nice job, great job, good work, good old Thelma but—

From under the line of the house—it must have been a cellar window cut against a gap in the foundation—he saw someone squirm free, low crawl across the yard into the bushes lining the house next door.

Suddenly a flash-bang erupted in Cubby’s house, the loud smack of percussion breaking the still of the night, and the helicopter dropped low and its light came on hard and bright. The sounds of windows breaking, doors being busted in told the story: The FAT guys were assaulting from the rear. Maybe Thelma had him or he’d clonked her and she’d just awakened and given the green light to the FAT team. But the shadowy figure that had slipped out and squirmed across the yard suddenly broke from his hiding place and began to run crazily down the sidewalk, trying to put as much distance between himself and his pursuers as he could. He raced right toward Bob, who had a sudden almost comic memory flash over him. It was so football, the running back, broken free of the line of scrimmage, scurrying down the sideline, the lone safety, the only man between him and the end zone. He knew it was a bad idea, a sixty-three-year-old man with a bum leg and everything, but it didn’t matter what he knew, it only mattered what he did, which was to launch himself, run through his sudden hip pain, find the right angle, and close the distance.

At the last second, Cubby saw him and from somewhere produced a handgun. But Bob was too far gone and just plunged ahead, driving his shoulder hard into the man’s ample gut, trying to drive clean through him and bring him flat to the ground, hearing some ancient coach from somewhere back in the Jurassic scream, “Drive through him, Bobby, take his legs out, give him your whole damn shoulder, explode through him.” And that’s what he did, textbook perfect. Both men went down in a bone-bruising crack, lights flashing through each head, knees abrading bloodily on the pavement as they tumbled, limbs flying, breaths knocked free.

He didn’t feel the knee to the head. It couldn’t have been planned. It was just one of those football things, when two flying bodies collide and torsos hit with the smack of wet meat falling off the table, legs and arms go screwball. And it so happened that Cubby’s knee flew up in a spasm as his breath was belted out of his lungs, and the knee hit Bob flush upside the head, a little forward of the ear. It was having your bell rung, and Bob’s rang so loud it knocked pinwheels of light, illumination rounds, spasms of tracers, sparks from a bonfire, fly legs and spider heads through his brain. He went to the ground all tangled with Cubby, but his limbs and his brain were momentarily dead. In a second, he came back to consciousness first to sound. The sound of running steps. The sound of a powerful helicopter engine. Then came light as the copter nailed Bob and his prey in the bright circle of thirty-five hundred lumens, and they were like as on a stage, shadowless and drained of all color except the lamp’s eerie cold pure moonlight. He blinked, felt the pain, tried to breathe, and realized Cubby had linked himself to him with an arm around his throat tight, squeezing off the breath until Bob coughed and shook and the grip loosened a little.

“Goddamn you, Mister, you keep still or I will put a goddamned bullet through your head,” Cubby yelled so forcefully that the message was conveyed just as eloquently by the jetstream of saliva that hit Bob. Bob saw something in his peripheral vision and felt it go hard against his head. He recognized by its circularity that it was the muzzle of a revolver.

Oh, fuck, he thought. Now you have gone and done it.

“Goddamn you, Thelma—you said—you said—Goddamn you, Thelma.”

“Cubby, you hold on now. Don’t you do nothing stupid. That fella ain’t a cop, you got no grudge against him. You let him go and put the gun down and we’ll get all this straightened out.”

He could see her, about twenty-five feet away, just out of the cone of illumination; behind her, the three FAT officers had gone into good strong kneeling positions, their weapons jacked dead on the target, which he hoped was Cubby and not himself. Aim small, miss small, boys, go to semi-auto, think trigger control and breath control, he thought, gasping for air.

“Cubby, don’t do anything stupid,” Thelma said in a smooth calm voice, walking into the light looking calm, more like a mom than anything. “You just let that fella go. Put the gun down and we’ll work our way through this.”

“Thelma, no! You said, you said—no, I ain’t going back to all that. It ain’t right. Goddamn, oh, why this happening, why why why? I had her licked this time. Oh God, they’s in my head, I hears ’em yelling. Oh Christ. No, Thelma.”

Bob was thinking: Where’s the fucking sniper when you need him? Did he have a Little League game to coach or something? A good man on a .308 and a solid position could send 168 grains of Federal’s best match load through Cubby’s eye and into his ancient snake brain and end this thing in the time it took the bullet to fly at twenty-three hundred feet per second to its target. But there was no sniper, just the woman cop and the three young Tommy Tacticals looking shaken as they crouched, trying to keep good muzzle discipline.

Thelma took another step. She had guts and how. This screwball could pop one into Bob and whirl and fire and take her down before she cleared leather. Of course the three Tacticals would each heroically dump a magazine into him, but both he and Thelma would be beyond caring. Why had he done such a stupid thing? Where could Cubby have gone anyway, cranked as he was on the ice that ate holes into his brain? But his grip on Bob and the force of his wrist against Bob’s throat was iron, and Bob struggled again for air, while smelling his rank body odor, and feeling the fear and craziness vibrate through Cubby’s flesh.

“Don’t you move goddamn you,” said Cubby, pressing the gun muzzle so hard against the thin skin at the crown of Bob’s head that he cut it. A trickle of blood oozed out, and Bob felt the warmth of the liquid and then the sting of the wound.

“Cubby, you just calm down. Nobody has to get hurt now, I’m telling you.”

“But you goin’ send me back. Don’t know why I did it, Thelma, don’t remember none. I don’t know, I been so high for so long don’t think I hit no car, but goddamn I got voices saying you hurt a girl you hurt a girl. Wouldn’t hurt no girl, Thelma. Like them girls sometimes they nice to me. God, they in my head—it hurts. I can’t go back—I can’t go back. It ain’t right—I didn’t do nothing, I don’t want to hurt nobody. God, Thelma, it just ain’t right—I can’t do this no more—it’s just no good no more. Oh, Thelma, you said you’d help me—I am so sorry I can’t—”

Bob heard the oily slide of the hammer against the constriction of the frame, as Cubby drew it back, then the slight vibration as it locked. The gun was now cocked, his finger on the trigger, just a single-action jerk away from firing.

“Thelma, I will kill this boy—you go way—y’all go way—put down your guns, let me go. Don’t want to hurt nobody. Please, please, it don’t have to be this way, but goddamn I will squeeze on this here boy—you just lay down your guns and—”

Thelma drew and fired with a speed that was almost surreal. Bob had never seen a hand move so fast, so sure, so smooth, so clean. It was like a trick of physics, a speed beyond the influence of time, that seemed to come from nowhere, elegant, controlled, blazing. It was professional shooting at its finest.

He saw the flash, saw the slight buck of the automatic as its slide jacked in supertime, saw the spent shell flip away, caught in the light, and even felt the simultaneous vibration as whatever she’d sent off hit its target. The sound of bullet on flesh is always the same, dense and wet and full of the sense of meat splattering and bone shattering, yet compressed into a nanosecond. He actually felt Cubby die instantly, the vivid vital flesh in supertime again alchemizing to dead, directionless weight, pulled on by impatient gravity. As Cubby fell, his draped arm brought Bob down with him harshly, and they landed in a heap and the handgun, still cocked, bounced away.

Bob wriggled free and saw that Thelma’d hit him left of the nose, maybe an inch, and that the bullet had drilled a perfect round black hole, which, in another second, began to release a surprisingly thin gurgle of black fluid. Then his nose began to bleed, not copiously, just a trickle of black as blood under pressure sought escape. The man’s eyes were open, and so was his mouth. Behind him, a ponytail fanned out on the sidewalk in the harsh light, and a puddle of exit-wound blood, black in the illumination, began to delta outward through the hair. That must have been a hell of an exit. He wore a cut-off Ole Miss T-shirt, a pair of tight jeans, and was barefoot. His feet were dirty with long, animal-like toenails crusted with grime.

Bob stood up.

“Mr. Swagger, are you all right, sir?”

“I am fine, Detective. That was some shooting,” he said.

“I am so sad I had to drop him. Only had to do it once before and it shook me up for a year.”

“I am glad you were over your shakes tonight, Detective.”

The other three officers had gathered around, and Thelma put her pistol away, and knelt next to the fallen man. She pried the gun from his fingers—a Smith K-frame, probably in .38—decocked it, and expertly popped the latch open, letting the cylinder rotate out.

They both looked into it.

“Empty,” she said. “Well, I couldn’t wait. I had to put him down.”

“You made the right decision, ma’am.”

“Thelma,” one of FAT kids said, “you didn’t have no choice. You did the right thing.”

“That’s right, Thelma,” said another. “Don’t you worry about it. Nobody could fault you.”

“You sure you’re okay, Mr. Swagger? Maybe when the medical people get here you might want to have them look at you.”

“I’m fine, I’m fine. Maybe it’ll hit me later, but right now it just seems unreal. Detective, where’d you learn to shoot like that? I never—”

“Thelma’s three-times running ladies’ USPSA champ of the Southeast Region, Tennessee, North Carolina, and Kentucky. She could go pro, she’s that good, Mr. Swagger. Para-Ord sponsors her. You’re lucky she’s here. She’s probably the best shot of any law enforcement agent in this part of the country. Maybe the whole damn country.”

A cruiser, its lights running hard, pulled up, and then another and another, so on until general delirium took over the scene.

TWENTY-TWO

The thing was, you couldn’t smoke. He might see a lit cigarette glowing in the otherwise-darkened interior of Vern’s red Cadillac El Dorado, then bolt. Agh. So both Vern and Ernie, in cranky moods, sat grumpily scrunched down in the car in a dimly illuminated zone of the parking lot of the Mountain Empire Motel. Neither had had a cigarette in hours. It was a little after midnight.

“I might sneak out and run around back for a smoke,” said Ernie.

“You will not, cousin, no sir. And take a risk he pulls in just as you’re in his lights? That’s how it’ll happen, you know it is, that’s how it always happens when you give in to your hungers on a job. You be a good bad guy now, and do what Daddy has said. We may get a kill out of this tonight and then we can smoke our asses off.”

“Vern Pye, I don’t mind saying, I didn’t enjoy your tone with me just there. Didn’t say I’d do it, now, did I? No sir, said I might. Just talking. You’re so high and mighty, I see your eyes go all buggy anytime a piece of hot under the age of fifteen with no tits goes on by. Please watch that tone, Vern.”

“Well, excuse me, sir, I’m just trying to get the job done right and proper so I can go back to my regular line of business. And what kind of gal I take a fondness toward ain’t nobody’s business. I will say, this here stay in scenic Mountain City has been as hard on me as it has on you, cousin.”

“You don’t even want to be here, that is why you are in such a punky mood.”

“No, I don’t. This is not the right move. But if the old man says do it, I have to do it and so do you, even though you agree with me and not him.”

“All I know is, he says go, I go. That’s how it is.”

“Even now in this car alone you are afraid to defy him.”

“Maybe I just respect the rules, is all. And if you don’t, no cause to turning all crabby on me.”

But then a car pulled into the lot. Both squirmed down a little, both noted that it was indeed a small Ford or Toyota, the sort the rental companies generally provided. It prowled, looking for spaces, and found one close to Room 128, which they knew to be the hit’s.

“Could be,” said Vern.

“Pray to God,” said Ernie. “Or maybe it’s a teen-age gal in short-shorts and a halter with the new issue of Tiger Beat.”

“Asshole.”

The fellow got out, slid around to the trunk, opened it, took something out, and held it tight under his arm, looked about for signs of something not in place, and then moved gently toward the room. But it was the limp that gave him away for real. It was like he had pain in that right hip from more than a single wound. He was also moving stiffly as if bandaged in a dozen or so places. He paused, took a look around the lot again, satisfied himself that it was all clear, then bent to open the door, slipped in, and locked the door behind him.

“Hot doggies,” said Vern. “I can taste that Marlboro right now.”

“He’s the pilgrim, all right. Can’t believe a old gray-hair like that dusted Carmody and B.J., but now’s the night he learn it don’t pay to poke at Grumley.”

“That’s holy Baptist writ, right there, cousin.”

Vern slipped his Glock .40 from the shoulder rig and edged back the slide to make certain a shell lay nested in the chamber, while Ernie, a wheel gunner with an engraved El Paso holster on his belt, did the same with his 2.5-inch-barreled, nickel-plated Python full of .357 CorBons.

Vern had figured it out.

“I say we wait a bit. Let him get settled in. Brush his teeth, check the lot through the window, make his calls, maybe have a sip or ten on that bottle of bourbon he done brung into the room, get all settled and snuggly, then we kick the door and empty our guns into the guy on the bed who won’t know what hit him, and then we head out fast. You okay with that, cousin?” Vern asked.

“Sounds like a plan,” said Ernie. “Should we call your daddy?”

“Don’t know about that. You look more like him than I do. It’s in the nose and the mouth.”

“I don’t like powder blue. It don’t bring out the color in my eyes. And I don’t wear no white fright wig so’s to look like that chicken-pushing Confederate colonel. My ma never said he was my daddy. He’s the only one.”

“Ooo, doggie, I see I done touched a nerve.”

“Hell, cousin, he’s probably both our daddies by both his sisters. Now what’s that tell you about the old man’s judgment? So why’d we want to call him?”

“I think my ma’s his daughter, not his sister. He do like to stir the soup, don’t he? Anyway, I’m thinking we ought to bring other boys in. Maybe someone with a shotgun to blow the door, then step aside.”

“He brings that shotgun, he ain’t gonna want to step aside. He’s going to want to put a couple of double-oughts into the guy in the bed, watch the fur and feathers fly. Then we ain’t done nothing but been good little scouts. It don’t do me no good. ‘You hear, someone dumped two Grumleys and old Vern Pye hisself went after and put the man down hard.’ I want that said about me, and I want a reward for three hours without a cigarette.”

“That’s cool by me.”

They settled in, waiting as the seconds dragged by. What, another hour? An hour was too long. Half an hour would do. But as the time crawled by, doubts appeared.

“You sure you don’t want to call the old man?”

Vern said, “He’d just want to come out hisself. Then we got to wait on him. We got to wait while the whole thing comes together. That’s two more hours without a smoke.”

“Or a poke.”

“You see anything pokable here now? No sir. Anyhow, I say, we do it, we’re gone, it’s over and it’s smoke time. Then we get back, then we go on the main job, then we get our swag, then we go about our business and put this here time in the prayer camp behind us. You can go back to your job in the warehouse, I can go home to one of my three wives, or maybe a stripper, or maybe pick me up something new and fresh.”

“Somewhere in there, can we throw in a shot of tequila? A shot of the worm, damn, that’d be just swell.”

“Yessir to that.”

“Yessir to the worm.”

But a few minutes later, it was Vern who said, “Hell. I just don’t know what’s nagging at me. Too long without a pop, my nerves are shot. Don’t want to make no mistake. Call him. Make certain.”

“Okay.”

“Keep it quiet now.”

Ernie slipped his cell out, ordered it to call the Reverend, and heard the rings, one, then two, then a thir—

“What is it, boy?”

“Sir, we got him. He just come in. Been in his room ’bout half hour now. Vern and me’s fixin’ to visit and leave hair and brains on the wall. Just want—”

“No, no, no,” said the old man. “Haven’t you heard? Already a shooting in town tonight, some meth dealer got wasted by Thelma. Man, you go and shoot the town up, it’s going to be like Dodge City here and we get the state cops and the FBI and all them other boys. They already here, I’m betting.”

“Daddy, I can nail him in ten—”

“No, boy. I changed my mind. Too much of a risk. We have a big job. Now here’s what I want. You and Vern, you head on into Bristol. I’m betting he’s staying at his girl’s apartment, and I got that address. You set up over there. After the big job is done, he’ll be there. That’s when you hit him and finish this business but good, in the Grumley way.”

“Yes sir. Does that mean, if we don’t go on the big job, we don’t git our share of—”

“No, it does not. You get full share. You just don’t meet up at the camp ’cause we’ll be long gone and spread to the four winds after Race Day. You call me a week down the road, and I’ll have your share for you. Just as promised.”

“Thank you, Daddy.”

“You follow me?”

“I do, sir.”

Ernie clicked off.

“Well?” said Vern.

“Smoke ’em if you got ’em,” said Ernie, lighting up a cigarette.

TWENTY-THREE

Swagger awarded himself a good night’s sleep, as he’d been running without it for two or three days. He’d gotten back from giving a deposition at the sheriff’s office around midnight. He jammed a chair under the doorknob to hang up any unexpected intruders, stuffed his pillow under the blankets to represent a fellow sleeping on a bed, and took his rest in the bathtub, boots on, with the Kimber .38 Super as a pillow. He had good, deep sleep, slightly broken by dreams where his father told him how disappointed he was in the man Bob had become. But this theme presented itself so often it didn’t bother him. It went with the privilege and the luck of being Earl Swagger’s son.

He awoke at ten, took a shower, rebandaged the cut on his knee, checked on the swelling around his eyes to see that it had gone down a little, took three ibus, then changed into new jeans and a new polo shirt. Next, rather than breakfast, came coffee brewed in the room’s coffee maker. Then he got down to it. His first call was to his wife.

“Well howdy,” she said, and he sensed from the joy in her voice something good had happened.

“Is she awake, Julie?”

“She was. For almost a whole minute. She sat up in bed, looked at me, and said, ‘Hi, Mom.’ Then she smiled at Miko and said, ‘Hi, little sister.’ Then she lay back down and went back to wherever.”

“Oh, great! Oh, that’s the best news! What do the doctors say?”

“It’s how they come back. It’s never, ‘Hi, what’s for breakfast? Let’s go to the movies.’ It’s a slow swim out of the dark place. She may have short periods of wakefulness for a few days going before she comes out of it completely. So they’re very, very optimistic. Sometimes the victims don’t remember a thing, but she knew who I was and who Miko was. Oh, it’s such good news. Can you come soon? It’d be so good if you were here when she really came out of it.”

“Well, damn, I’ll try. There are some things, some issues, I have to deal with.”

“There was more shooting last night out there.”

“I didn’t fire a shot. In fact, my gun was still in the trunk. I come through it all right, except for a cut knee and a swollen forehead. They’re even calling me a hero and some TV station wanted an interview. I told ’em to call my PR rep. Anyway, I’ll call back in a bit. It still ain’t—isn’t a good idea for you to call me. I just don’t know where I’ll be and the sound of the phone might not do me any good.”

“Okay. But please come soon. Oh, I am so excited.”

“The news is great, honey.”

The next thing he did was call Nick Memphis again. Nope, no answer. Where the hell was he? It wasn’t like Nick to disappear. Maybe he was overseas or something. Anyhow, Bob just left the same message. Then he called Terry, the grocery clerk, to see how he was doing, but got no answer. He left a message. A second later the call-back came.

“You all right?” Bob asked. “Holding up?”

“Sir, it’s been great. I been on the TV a bunch of times, I got calls from some producers in Hollywood, I been in all the papers. Is that okay? Am I handling this correct?”

“You ride this for all it’s worth, you hear. You owe me nor nobody nothing. You leverage it for all you can get out of it. If you want, I won’t never call again, Terry.”

“No, no, sir, call me. I want to know what’s going on and I may need your advice. Also, I feel guilty being called a hero—”

“Which is the true mark of a hero. All heroes feel that way. I’ve known a few. But don’t kid yourself, you stood and fought against two armed men, you took one of ’em down, put him on the floor and really won the fight while all I did was squeeze a trigger a few times. You are a hero, son. Even if you don’t believe it. The rest is meaningless details.”

“Yes sir.”

“Now I can’t tell you anything about the entertainment field. It’s full of sharpies and you’d best keep your hand on your wallet is all I know. But you do call me if you have any trouble, you see anyone dogging you. And be careful. These fellas was working for other fellas. You hear me?”

“I do.”

The next call was to Charlie Wingate, the boy genius in the computer store.

“Any more for me, Charlie?”

“Mr. Swagger, this hard drive is totally fried, near as I can tell. I only got that little bit, I’m afraid to say. Won’t charge you a thing for that.”

“Oh, yes you will. You charge me for a full day’s work at top-scale, consultant level, and not a penny less, you hear?”

“Yes sir.”

“Now I want that brain of yours working on something else. Know anything about the Bible?”

“Not much.”

“Well I don’t either. But something’s come up involving a biblical passage, Mark 2:11. It’s where Jesus cures a crippled man and says to him, ‘Get up, go home.’”

“‘Mein Fuhrer, I can valk,’” said the boy.

“Yeah, something like that,” said Bob, not even close to getting it. “So what hI want you to do is analyze it from any perspective you can think of. Is the number significant, the two-eleven? Is the page on the Bible significant, don’t know what it would be. What do the commentators say about it? What are the different interpretations? Is there some word translated differently from the original language, whatever the hell it was.”

“Aramaic.”

“Yeah, fine. Could it be a code, what are its other citations or usages in history or whatever? Are there paintings or something based on it? All that stuff. You’re smart, you know what I mean.”

“I’ll try.”

“You know the town?”

“Been here my whole life.”

“Okay, maybe there’s some connection between it and this town. I don’t know what, but be creative, think outside the box, make it fun, a puzzle. Who knows what you might come up with.”

“Yes sir.”

He disconnected, and almost before he could put the phone down, it buzzed again. He checked the number and realized it was the private number of Matt MacReady, the young NASCAR racer calling him! Wasn’t tomorrow the big race?

“Yes, Matt?”

“Hello, Gunny. How are you?”

“Only a week older’n last time I saw you, but it feels like a hundred years.”

“Time do race, don’t it? Only thing goes faster than my USMC Charger.”

“Only thing.”

“Anyhow, been thinking and looking and maybe I have something for you.”

“Go ahead, son.”

“Wheel marks, metal close together, part of the NASCAR racing operation? Well there is something. You see it all the time in the pits, it’s everywhere, what’s the word, upbequious?”

“Hmm, don’t know that word.”

“Red says it’s ‘ubiquitous.’ That’s what it is, ubiquitous.”

“Well, damn. Hope I don’t forget it. Ubiquitous. Everywhere.”

“What it is is, it’s the track of our hydraulic jacks.”

“For tire changing?”

“Sir, yes sir. It ain’t all the driver. Part of the art of winning at this game is teamwork on the car. I have a good crew, Red’s got ’em trained up real good. They get me gassed, watered, maybe oiled, and re-tubed in less than fifteen seconds. It’s like choreography, the way they work a car in the pits on Race Day. And the key to the tire change, of course, is the jack. It’s a big heavy dog, solid steel and it’s hydraulic, built of cylinders full of lube. Weighs about fifty pounds. Runs on steel wheels about an inch wide. You have your biggest, strongest stud as your jack man. He gets it over the wall, guides it fast to the wheel well, jacks the car off the ground. Meanwhile, your air-wrench guy de-lugs the tire even as the jack is lifting it high enough to clear. The wrench guy clears out, a guy comes in and grabs the lugs; that’s his job, his only job, to keep track of the lugs. Two other boys, the tire men, pull the burned-out tire off the axle, roll it away, and slam on another one, which two other boys have rolled to them. The wrench-man airblasts the lugs tight, and the jackman lowers the car, and the whole team of them crash hell for leather to the next tire and repeat the same thing. They can get the car re-rubbered in fifteen seconds, and if you look, after a race, win, lose, draw, or crash and burn, their hands and wrists and especially fingers are all cut to hell. But they’re tough boys, they don’t much care.”

“Got it. And they roll that thing through oil and water and it leaves tracks, maybe six to eight inches apart, everywhere on the tarmac, in the pits, everywhere?”

“I’d be willing to bet, sir.”

“So if you saw a tangle of ’em, you’d think, someone’s practicing a wheel change?”

“Well, that’s what I’d think.”

Hmmmm. Swagger tried to press this new information into the pattern he’d assembled. Tire change. Someone was practicing a speed-tire change, after the fashion of NASCAR. Now why the hell would that be? The boys setting this thing up weren’t racers, weren’t running a pit crew. What’d they need a speed-tire change for? What vehicle came with the wrong tires in place and had to be re-rubbered fast? What would be the point of the new tires? Well, only way it makes sense is if the first set of tires is burned out. Now what would burn out a set of tires? Were they going to steal a racing car? Those babies were expensive but he didn’t—

Then he thought, no, no, it’s not burned out. You change the tires in order to change the performance profile of the vehicle. It’s tired-up one way, for one purpose, and now you re-rubber it and you use it for some other, presumably unusual purpose. Maybe that somehow linked with this fit of exploding trucks around the area? Maybe they were deviling up the engine as well for that purpose. But what truck could it be, what new purpose could it have?

“You still there? Does that help?”

“It sure does. Can’t see just how yet, but I’m getting pieces in a row and pretty soon a pattern will be there. Now let me ask you something. This here’s a long shot. Does the biblical passage Mark 2:11 about Jesus curing a crippled man mean anything to you? Would it fit into anything along these lines?”

“We really weren’t people of the book, Gunny. Some drivers are but not us. So no, it doesn’t mean anything to me, and I don’t think it connects to Big Racing in any way.”

“Okay, well, thanks. Really appreciate your taking the time with all you got do do. You’re a good fella, I can tell.”

“My pleasure.”

“All you must have to do and you gave me a hand. That’s marine all the way.”

“Fact is, we don’t do much day before. We’ll run the car this afternoon for a last minute check, I have a signing at my retail trailer in NASCAR Village that’ll be a madhouse but will move a lot of souvenir hats, and other than that it’s just relaxing and trying to keep the mind clear.”

“Well, good luck. I know you’re good enough, I just hope the breaks go your way.”

“Can’t control that, so never worry about it,” said the boy.

Bob sat, ruminated, took notes. Nothing. Then he realized he was hungry, slipped his .38 Super into the Kydex holster, locked on his belt after checking it for the millionth time to be certain it was cocked and locked, and eased out the door. Nothing seemed to be moving in the blazing August heat. A few cars were in the lot, but it was mostly dead space. A couple of stores down the big road was a Denny’s, so Bob headed down to it, completely in Condition Green, giving his world a three-sixty every few minutes on the hunt for anything unusual, looking into shadows, looking for irregularities like the exhaust from a parked car or the same hat showing up on different people, that sort of thing. But it was just a hot day in small-town America.

He ate breakfast, though it was nearing one, and halfway through the meal had an idea of something proactive to do. He would read the entire Book of Mark, and maybe that way he’d get a feel for verse 2:11, see something in it that might have given his daughter some insight that would turn Eddie Ferrol and his associates homicidal.

So he spent the afternoon in his room reading the Bible, enjoying it more as a story—it was a great story, the way Jesus could have run and didn’t want to go up on that cross, reminding him of too many marines who could have run and didn’t and stayed to die—than as anything else. When he was done reading the chapter the second time, he had nothing.

Think. Another thing to do was to look up Eddie Ferrol’s home, then visit it well after dark. Almost certainly Eddie wouldn’t be there, but who knows what clues he might have left behind. Then there was the Carmody and the B.J. Grumley cousins; maybe by now, more information on them had emerged. But he’d have to get that through Nick, as calling Thelma and betraying an unusual interest in that case would not be an intelligent move. But Nick hadn’t called either. Bob called again, and the same thing happened—no answer. And there was no call from the kid in the computer store.

He was tired and felt room-bound and restless at the same time. After a good start, the day was turning out to be worthless. He’d learned nothing, made no progress and—

He knew the sound, the almost liquid sloshing of a heavy airborne engine that could spell only one thing, and that was helicopter. He’d ridden in enough of ’em, and one had saved his life in Vietnam by getting him to the field surgical hospital at Dak To before his life signs slipped away after a Russian sniper had blown a hole in his hip. This one was no Huey, but a larger, more powerful craft and it grew louder and louder, signifying close-by descent.

Bob went to the window, looked out, and saw a large ship settle in the empty parking lot, its rotors a heavy blur that stirred up whirlpools of dust and debris for a hundred yards. It was a Blackhawk no less, much weathered by the winds of wars here and there across the planet but now wearing the starred emblem of law enforcement and the announcement, SHERIFF’S DEPARTMENT JOHNSON COUNTY TENNESSEE across its nose. A handful of grit flew into Bob’s face, and the force of the air beat him back, but he saw the chief Tommy Tactical of them all, Sheriff Reed Wells, drop heavily from the large cargo hatch and head his way.

The sheriff wore a black Nomex jump suit that was hung with belts containing gas grenades, flashbangs, knives, and radio gear. A low slung holster was strapped to his thigh with a tricked-up, cocked and locked .45. His upper body was encased in a stiffly uncomfortable armored vest, with SHERIFF in white letters across the front. Both his knees and his elbows were protected by thick plastic and foam pads. He had a black baseball cap that bore the star emblem of his department, tear-shaped shades, and carried a shorty M4 with a 30-round P-mag, a suppressor and a couple of thousand bucks’ worth of optical sights, flashlights, lasers, and maybe even a can opener bolted onto various rails that ran around the gun’s forearm and receiver top. Lord, the man looked war.

Bob stepped back to let the warrior king clamber in, all rattley and clanky, as if he’d just gotten off his horse sometime in the fifteenth century. But it wasn’t a raid, and the sheriff gestured to Bob to sit, while he himself sat heavily on the bed. Bob saw immediately that the sheriff couldn’t put the M4 down because it was looped to him by a single strand of sling that ran diagonally around his body. But he laid the gun in his lap and took off his hat and glasses. Outside, the noise of the Blackhawk lowered as the pilot shifted to an idling pitch.

“Mr. Swagger, I am beginning to grow annoyed. Your daughter’s case is closed. Thelma closed it last night. We here are very sorry about what happened, but I took it for granted that you’d move on out of here today.”

“Yes sir, don’t mean to overstay my welcome. I’se just going over some loose ends and was going to type ’em up and send ’em off to Thelma. She did damned well, by the way.”

“She saved your life as I recall. Or at least at the time, it certainly seemed she did.”

“Long as I live, I will never forget the sound of that hammer being pulled back and the speed of her draw. The gal is superfast and shoots straight. I was a lucky man and will be forever grateful.”

“Let me ask you about a few loose ends myself. What you went through last night would send most men to the hospital. At the least, they’d be throwing up in the grass for a week. They’d also be changing underpants right away, to be crude but truthful. And that’s just the hostage situation and the trigger pull on the empty chamber. On top of that, you saw a man killed at close range, his brains blown out, and the bullet that took his life passed within six inches of your head. Again, a source of major psychological trauma. When people see people shot, it robs them of sleep for weeks, sometimes months, sometimes years. But from all reports, you hardly noticed and were up and perky in seconds.”

Bob realized he’d misplayed the scene last night. Some macho twist in his mind made him make certain that Thelma and the three FAT officers understood he was as much man as they were and his close call was meaningless to a man who’d had thousands of close calls. Duh! Stupid. Now they were curious about his fortitude. Where did it come from, what did it mean? He should have thrown a weeping jag and pretended to be too distraught to continue. But it hadn’t occurred to him. Another foolish old man’s mistake.

“It was so fast in the happening and so unreal. I still can’t believe it happened. Maybe my rough times are all ahead of me, and that’s when the sleep goes away.”

“I suppose. That would be one explanation. But another occurred to me. You’re not a professional? A gunman, some kind of commando veteran, a former SWAT officer, military with a lot of combat, something like that? That’s how you operated.”

“I told you, I had some military experience years ago.”

“We ran your record. Clean. No indictments, no felonies. I’d pay that ticket you owe the Boise police, though. And I hope you get the drainage issue on your Pima County barn settled. You don’t want trouble with those environmental groups.”

“Yes sir. I have a lawyer working that one now.”

“See, I can’t help notice that you show up and suddenly this little sleepy village becomes Dodge City. Two nights ago, some kid clerk outshoots two hardcore bad guys. I mean really outshoots ’em, absolutely the way a trained professional with a knack for gunwork and a commando’s sense of aggression might have outshot ’em. You’re nowhere connected to that, except that I do have an unverified report of a dark sedan, probably a rental, leaving the grocery store in the immediate aftermath of that shooting. We can’t crack that kid, but I do note you drive a dark green Ford rental sedan. Ain’t that one interesting?”

“Sheriff, I’m just a dad trying to figure out—”

“And yesterday you take down a fleeing armed man. You’re sixty-three years old and walk with a pronounced limp, yet you have no fear of going one-on-one at top speed with an armed drug addict. I have twenty-five-year-old, two-hundred-forty-pound deputies who wouldn’t do that. Then, when he takes you hostage, you don’t even sweat. When he cocks the hammer—”

“I didn’t hardly have time to react to that, sir. It happened, and Thelma fired almost in the same second.”

“And when our officer drills him beneath the eye, you don’t even notice. You’re hardly curious. You don’t breathe hard, you don’t become agitated or nothing. It’s ho-hum. Another day in Mr. Swagger’s life, yawn. Another head-shot, another dollar. Yet your record is curiously, curiously clean, as if some professionals had taken care of you for whatever reason, and there’s no paper or reports of any kind on you. Did you work for CIA or something?”

“I have known an officer of that agency, a very fine lady. Also some assholes. I am friendly with a highly placed FBI agent as well, from events years back. But there’s no paper on me because I’m just a lucky businessman from outside Boise. I was in the marines for a time. There’s no story there. This ain’t some kind of thriller book where everybody’s somebody else and everybody knows how to shoot.”

“I hope you’re telling the truth.”

“Should I get a lawyer sir? Am I a person of interest? Would I be better off with legal representation?”

“I suspect you’ll always be a person of interest, Mr. Swagger. No, you don’t need a lawyer, what you need is a full tank of gas and a good westward destination.”

“Yes sir. I never argue with a man who has a machine gun. But I have paid my night’s rental and it’s now dark, so I have no particular interest in driving the far side of Iron Mountain at this time of night. Suppose I leave tomorrow, bright and early, hoping to beat the Race Day traffic. I’ll finish up the report at my daughter’s and send it to Detective Fielding. Is that acceptable?”

“Somehow I doubt you’re afraid of the dark, sir.”

“It’s not the dark. It’s what’s in the dark.”

“I heard a very capable Green Beret say the same thing. All right, Mr. Swagger. Tomorrow you’re gone or we will meet again at Booking. Over and out?”

“Over and out, Sheriff.”

TWENTY-FOUR

Brother Richard looked so much like Richard Petty you’d have thought he’d get arrested for impersonating a hero. He had that befeathered, straw cowboy hat pulled low over his ears, the tip and tail of its rakishly cantilevered brim cranked beneath eye level, its Indian festival of secretly meaningful charms and amulets flopping insouciantly in the breeze. His eyes were shielded behind glasses that would have looked equally good on the authentic King Richard or Jacqueline Onassis. He had Richard’s scrawny, twisty, muscular body and he wore a NASCAR T-shirt with a pack of Marlboros rolled up in the sleeve. He wore tight jeans and comfortable Luchese boots.

The reason he didn’t get arrested or beaten up or mobbed by teenage white gals was that where he was, every other man looked just the same. It was like a carnival of Richard Petty look-alikes, that being but one category. Others chose the Kurt Bush paradigm, and still others the Dale Jr. Huck Finn, the Tony Stewart, the Juan Montoya, the Mike Martin, the Matt MacReady, and there were even, hard to believe, a few Jeff Gordons, though they had to be from California. This was the crowd at NASCAR Village, that gridwork of cult and retail sites just outside the mighty Bristol speedway, which towered above them all, while providing a steady deafening roar as the weekend’s cars whizzed about it a few last times to run the engines at speed for a final checkout.

It was Friday, the start of racing weekend, under a hot August sky, in a Shenandoah Valley that at this moment was plastered with cars, tents, Rec-Vs, SUVs, everything short of armored personnel carriers. The vehicles rode the gentle hills like a gigantic carpet, as the hundreds of thousands came to worship, live, experience glory and fear vicariously, drink, smoke, shove, fuck, hoot, and have a hell of a good time. Most of them were beyond bliss; there was so much happiness in the meandering beast of the crowd you couldn’t but crack a smile at the heat of the joy. It turned you a little red in fact.

But none of them were as happy as Brother Richard, as he let the crowd push him this way and that through what really amounted to a NASCAR Casbah. The streets weren’t lined with gold, not, that is, if you were buying, though maybe if you were selling. For NASCAR people were spenders. They had to take something of the great Night of Thunder home with them. They bought pendants and T-shirts and cup-holders and beer caddies and hats and thick leather jackets and sweat shirts and polo shirts and pictures and die-cast models and bottled water, beer and bourbon and corporate propaganda. Chevy, Ford, Toyota, and Dodge, the four sanctioned automobile suppliers, had gigantic pavilions, and all four had a pedestal inside. Atop each pedestal was a street shell of the hand-made, custom machine that would, tonight and especially tomorrow night, roar four hundred then five hundred times around the stiffly tilted half-mile where dreams could die in seconds, sometimes in flames, sometimes in the crunch of collapsing metal. The track where guts and grit and luck played against each other at 140 per until one boy was smarter, tougher, braver, and luckier than all the others, and crossed the line first and tasted, however briefly, godhood.

Each of the boss drivers had a long-haul trailer set up in the village, which they’d converted to a dedicated sales outlet. There the hero’s image or number or both had been imprinted on everything, books and videos were added to the swag, hats in a hundred variations were on display—and for sale—and a crew of cashiers lined up to take your bucks. The cash flow must have been amazing; the twenty-dollar bill was the new one-dollar bill, and although the modern cash registers didn’t ka-ching like the old mechanical marvels from Dayton, you could tell yourself that you heard a heavenly choir of ka-chinging, even if it weren’t necessarily true. Brother Richard looked at all that money flowing one way and one way only and briefly considered what might have been but never was, and stifling a choking sound, he took another hard blast on the Bud he carried (like everybody else) in a bright red foam caddie.

You could tell who was hot by the crowds. Both Kyles were doing swell and of course everybody had a thing in their heart for the wonderful Dale Jr., inheritor of the mantle and now driving for the beloved football genius Joe Gibbs; there was little business at Jeff’s, the eternal outsider’s unit, where only malcontents and self-proclaimed mavericks gathered. But the hot one just now was the young redhead, Matt MacReady, just twenty-two, already with a handful of major wins at Sprint venues, in the hunt for the big cup itself still this late in the season.

Somehow, Richard felt himself pulled by torrents of enthusiasm, even love, toward the MacReady locality. In a second he realized why there had been such a current in the crowd. Good Lord, the boy himself was there.

Brother Richard halted and held back. He considered it for a second, then realized that after his surgery and in his currently repackaged King Petty mode, he would stir no old memories, not to the boy, not to Red, not to any of them. So he ambled close, slipping in and out of the whirls and eddies of pilgrims, and by not pushing it too hard, he got pretty close. No, he wouldn’t get in the line, where Matt was dutifully signing posters, hats, T’s, anything, with a Magic Marker, accepting goodwill wishes and even love-horsepowered thumps on the back with grace and ease and charm.

Richard didn’t want to halt, for motion was the law of the crowd. He let it sweep him on by and saw Matt’s calmness—Matt always had that—and his decency—Matt really had that—and it made him realize with surprising bitterness that Matt was really the beneficiary of all the madness of eleven years ago, though nobody could have known it then, for Matt was just a boy from the second, the trophy wife. He was good-natured and unassertive, all eyes and ears to the excellent adventure the fates had decreed would be his life.

“Yes ma’am,” Richard heard Matt say in that soft voice of his. “Be happy to.” And he took a three-year-old upon his lap and smiled for a pic. Then it was time to go and the thousand still in line had to be disappointed. Matt rose and said into a mic, “Folks, I have to get my beauty rest and keep my arm loosey-goosey for all them left-hand turns!” And of course everybody laughed.

Matt waved. Then he and Red left the venue as a golf cart arrived, and Richard saw how thin and muscular the young man was, how lean and graceful. He had the racer’s perfect body, the body that the great ones had, short and slender so there was no crowding in the driver’s seat, with muscular forearms and a longish neck, which gave him eerie pivoting ability for peripheral vision left and right, legs able to reach pedals without cramping, in short, the whole package.

The golf cart speedily vanished behind the cyclone fence that marked off the driver’s compound, that is, the fence that marked off the aristocracy from the peasantry.

Richard watched it go until it disappeared, and he imagined where it took Matt: to a luxury Rec-V customized for travel, a beautiful woman or four or six, a crew of adoring hangers-on, an accountant, maybe rock or movie star pals, the big life as imagined by America at this moment in history.

Again, melancholy came across him, a fleeting image of the eternal What Might Have Been. He’d steeled himself to believe to the contrary that, given certain behavioral dynamics within himself, there was no What Might Have Been, there was only a What Never Could Happen. It wasn’t in the cards; he didn’t have Matt’s go-along-to-get-alongness, his mellow ways, his charm. He was too fucking outlaw, he had to have it his way. He was also too smart, too self-aware. Like all athletic and warrior enterprises, NASCAR tended to reward unconscious genius. If you had irony, had read a book or two, had a taste for surrealism and grotesquerie, if you hated structure and had a natural guerrilla’s heart, it could never be for you. You saw through it too easily. It was like a church, and you were born with a non-believer’s heart. And even if you felt tremendous nostalgia for it, the honest, bitter goddamned truth was that it was never going to be and could never have been for you. For Matt it was maybe just perfect, given his perfect blend of talents and limits. For Richard it was too much, given his blend of talents and limitlessness. No matter what, he would have destroyed his inheritance, crapped in the church, and gone his own outlaw way.

That’s why he was the Sinnerman.

He turned his iPod way, way up until his anthem blasted melancholy from his brain.

Sinnerman, where you gonna run to?

Gonna run to the sea

Sea won’t you hide me?

Run to the sea

Sea won’t you hide me?

But the sea, it was a boilin’

All on that day

Now it was on to business. He looked up at the towering speedway, its circularity gone this far under its shadow, so that it was just a wall of girders and walkways on the underside of the steep auditorium seating. Next to it, silver in the August heat, was the faux-streamline building of the speedway headquarters, which looked to him like a Greyhound station in about 1937. It sat atop a shelf of land, and down here, beneath it, was the grid of lanes of NASCAR Village and all its little retail outlets. A gully, some kind of drainage arrangement full of dirty water, split NASCAR Village in two. But there were two bridges across the channel. He took out a pen and a notepad and carefully drew a map, and on it traced the quickest way from the roadway to the bridge. Oh, that would be the fun part.

He moseyed over to the far side of the gully and found exactly more of the same for another square mile or so, the tents and booths, the walkways, somewhat tackier here, the sense of bizarre for the pilgrims where everything was a holy relic of the faith, all for sale and not cheap. Beyond the village was the hill that lay at the end of a long scut of ridges trending down from the north. He let his gaze fall upon the tip of the hill probably a mile off and six hundred feet up, through mud and inclined forests. He knew that, as in many old fables, paradise lay atop the mountain. I have been to the mountaintop, wasn’t that it? But before you got to the mountaintop you had to cross a river and a plain, bringing fire and destruction along with you. What was this, the Bible?

Ah well, he thought, continuing with his map: Fuck ’em if they can’t take a joke.

TWENTY-FIVE

The caravan left at 4 A.M. to avoid Race Day traffic and observant eyes and to get set up early. It consisted of the Reverend Grumley in the lead car, Brother Richard driving, and two senior Grumleys, a Caleb and a Jordan, both of whom promptly fell asleep, in the back. In the second vehicle, a truck which bore the name PINEY RIDGE BAPTIST PRAYER CAMP carried most of the heavy equipment the long day’s toil would demand. The third, a van also bearing the name of the camp, consisted mostly of man- and firepower. The fourth, a pickup, bore as its loads the tents and over ten thousand bottles of water, as well as ice, coolers, NASCAR hats, T-shirts, King Richard cowboy straw Stetsons, Kyle Busch caps, and other NASCAR trinkets that would justify their presence at the location. The fifth, another van, contained more men, though these were the humbler Grumleys, the tire-change team, and others with various and sundry little tasks, according to the master plan.

The five vehicles moved through a desolate, almost-unlit Mountain City, across Iron Mountain—the spot where Sinnerman had almost taken out Nikki slid by without comment—through Shady Valley, past the last long abutment, Holston Mountain, then full into the Shenandoah for the next eighteen-odd miles to Bristol and its famed speedway.

There was no chatter. Brother Richard drove with his usual deft touch, the car alive in his hands, while the Reverend stared glumly into the darkness.

A cellphone rang to the tune of “Hail, Hail, the Gang’s All Here.”

The Reverend took the phone from his powder blue suit jacket and examined the caller ID.

“His master’s voice,” said Brother Richard. “Who else’d have the number and call at this hour?”

“Yes,” said the Reverend into the cell.

He listened.

“Yes, again.”

He listened some more.

“Absolutely.”

A few more seconds passed.

“I guarantee it. They are well prepared. I myself am here to lead. It will happen exactly as planned. Pray to God our luck is high, but it should be, as the Lord favors the bold. I prayed hard last night and again this morning and so I am confi—”

Brother Richard could tell he was cut off.

Finally he said, “You have my assurances. And I have yours. Then I will see you when we are home free and ready to celebrate.”

He put the phone away. His dark mood was not alleviated.

“That’s the big boss,” said Brother Richard. “That would be the gent that actually thought this up, as it clearly lies beyond the Grumley IQ pool. He’s got his doubts about you, Reverend, I can tell. He wants reassurances, guarantees. A big pair of dice are about to be rolled and, nervous as a cat like the rest of us, he just wants to make certain you have covered all the bases, right?”

The Reverend was silent.

“Sure would like to know who’s on the other end of that phone. Got my ideas. Yes, I do.”

“I ain’t at no liberty to discuss certain business arrangements with a rogue like you, Brother Richard. Don’t think I didn’t notice your head went unbowed during my words with the Master before we left. That is a ticket to damnation, sir.”

“I am already thrice damned,” said Richard. “Which ain’t nothing to you, old man, you are probably thirty-eight times damned or some such, for all your sinning. Here’s what intrigues me. Do you actually believe the Baptist bullshit you sling, or is it just a performance sustained so long it’s become second nature? Are you a con man who’s come to believe in his own con?”

“Hellfire,” said the old preacher man. “Damnation Road. Streaks of fiery lightning. Endtimes. That’s your fate and you will rue it when Satan opens the door with his big smile and welcomes you to the flames of eternal torture.”

“Hoochie mama,” said Richard. “I like it. The sea be aboilin’, the moon be ableedin’, and the Sinnerman don’t got no place to run. I embrace it. That’s why I like myself so much more than I like you, Reverend. I am what I am and I know it. I am not a hypocrite. I took the cards I was dealt, made my decision, played the hand hard to this moment. You hide behind some kind of self-delusionary veil, claiming the Lord’s interest while you’re just a common murderer and thief, and you lead a tribe of neo-pagans to loot the earth, rape, burn, pillage, and move on without a glance back. You’re actually pre-Christian. A PhD could make a career studying the Grumley way and its roots in the Germanic swamps. What was the original, Grummelechtenstein?”

“We be Scots-Irish border-reiver heritage. This talk does us no good.”

“Did he remind you he had video of you and—”

“Shut your mouth,” snapped the Reverend.

“Them boys back there, cousin or brother or both at once, are sleeping the sleep of the purely innocent. Nothing weighs on the conscience-free mind.”

“Nevertheless, shut your mouth.”

“Touchy, touchy. But I did learn something interesting today. Yes, I did. I see now the nature of your relationship with the fellow who runs you.”

“You know nothing.”

“Tell me if I’m wrong. He’s somebody you knew before. He’s somebody close to you. He may even be family. First off, I hear something troubled in your voice, and I hear you let him cut you off, when no one other than me ever cuts you off. So he is familiar to you. An old sponsor? Someone who saved your life? A cellmate? Someone who’s profited off you as you’ve profited off him over long standing? I hear intimacy. Damn, who’d a thought? But that ain’t all.”

“Do tell, Brother. You are so full of yourself. Pride goeth before the fall.”

“Sir, I done already fallen, which is why I consort with your likes. The second reason is, when this is done, there’s got to be a transfer, almost like a dope deal. You will deliver him the swag, he will take his lion’s share, you and the boys will squabble over what’s left. This is a tricky transaction, I know, I’ve driven kingpins to and from enough buys. Usually there are a lot of guns involved for security, paranoia is running hot and feverish, and at any moment for any reason it can all go broken-cuckoo-clocks, the guns come out, and you got yourself a goddamned major firefight. All that cash, just there for the taking. Yet that does not frighten you, does it, Dr. Grumley?”

“When a Grumley give his word, his word is ironclad.”

“Except when it’s not. Oh, there’s the leverage, the pix of the Rev and his boy toy—”

“Richard, I warned you.”

“—but somehow no one is concerned about the exchange. That means it isn’t a problem, everybody, way up front, is okay with it. Damned interesting. Would it be another Grumley? So the leverage ain’t mean-spirited, more like a suggestion than a threat. Everybody’s all cozy with it, especially the gun-crazy, giant gonads sleeping in the van.”

“Richard, I ain’t speaking to you no more. When this is done, I hope never to see you no more never again. You been paid upfront, so my advice is to do your job and disappear.”

“I always do.”

“Pappy,” said Caleb from the back seat, “what’s ‘paranoia’?”

By six, the caravan had decamped and unloaded. The boys worked swiftly, for here was labor hard and simple. With strong arms and backs, they sank the tent pegs and drove the poles deep into the ground. With stout hearts, they unpacked and unfolded the tables. With dead earnestness, they stowed certain boxes containing certain pieces of equipment underneath the tables, arranging and stapling the table cloths so that their skirts covered the items beneath. Then they got the coolers out, packed each with ice, and began to load the bottles into them, each one holding about fifty, so the liquid would be readily cold for pilgrims as the sun rose and pulled the temperature with it. They stacked the remaining cases behind the tables, almost forming a revetment which would keep anyone from noting what they were up to in its dark shadow.

As they worked, of course, they were not alone. All along the Volunteer Parkway this close to the venue, merchants of various stripes were setting up their wares. For this road to and from the speedway would carry, by ten in the morning, a slow-motion parade, as cars crept along its jammed lanes and pedestrians coming from vehicles already parked streamed in the thousands toward the mighty coliseum. Next to the Grumley installation, for example, was PHIL’S FINE NORTH CAROLINA BAR-B-Q, where Phil and his sons had already lit the coals under the broad-bottomed grills that would hold the meat put atop them, allowing the juices of Phil’s secret mix of sauces and herbs to permeate it, so that by noontime, damn, the whole place would smell of hot pig and sweet bubbly brown sugar. On the other side, a tall Mr. Stevens had an elaborate tent that offered a line of extremely fine woven mats, some showing drivers standing before their sleek vehicles, some showing the flag or Elvis or the Iwo Jima memorial or the Twin Towers (NEVER FORGET!) or the flag of the departed Confederacy or F-15s blazing across a sky or horses rearing proudly against a western mesa or Osama in the crosshairs of a sniper’s scope, all made, of course, in China. And on and on it went, down the parkway that linked the speedway and the city of Bristol twelve miles away. The parkway that on Race Day would be a near-frozen river of automobiles moving an inch at a time.

But the Grumleys had gotten the best spot of all, and it took some doing, as the permit for this space had been held for a number of years by another Baptist church, which used to sell souvenirs as well but had been persuaded to turn over its permit in receipt of a large donation. So the Grumleys had set up almost at ground zero of the NASCAR explosion: directly across from NASCAR Village, on the other side of parkway, just a bit down from the driveway that led to the parkway from the speedway headquarters, an admin building in art moderne aluminum. As they labored and the sun rose, they could see across the way the hugeness of the speedway itself, dwarfed only by the mountain beyond NASCAR Village that topped the wall of the racing structure.

They were all done by eight: bottles, hats, T’s, and so forth, all displayed under a large banner that read, PINEY RIDGE BAPTIST PRAYER CAMP WATER $1 HATS $10 T’S $15 and in smaller letters, SEND A STUDENT TO PRAYER CAMP TO LEARN THE WAY OF THE GOSPEL AND THE TRUE MEANING OF WORSHIP.

It was, at long last, Race Day.

PART II

RACE DAY

TWENTY-SIX

Vern knocked on the door. He heard awkward, reluctant shuffling, sensed doubt, perhaps even fear, but finally the door popped open about two inches, held secure by a chain lock, and he and his partner faced a pair of ancient Asian eyes in an ancient Asian face. Mama-san looked to be in her seventies, without much English, and quite insecure.

Vern, with his gift of gab, his easy ways of persuasion, his cheap good looks, was on the case from the start.

“Ma’am,” he said with a smile and warmth radiating from his eyes, “sorry to bother you, but we are official inspectors. We have to inspect, you know? Only take a moment.”

The woman’s face collapsed into confusion. Suddenly a much younger Asian face, possibly no more than fourteen years old and belonging to a very pretty child, leaned beyond the door. Well, hello, hello, Vern thought.

Her skin was fair, her eyes almond, her hair drawn back. She was smooth as a peach and tiny as a fairy princess.

“My grandmother doesn’t understand. What is it?”

“Sweetie,” said Vern, kneeling to the girl, “we are official inspectors. From the Department of Official Inspection. Here, lookie this.”

He showed her an Alabama driver’s license in the name of Horton Van Leer.

“See that star. Means it’s official. Just need to come in a second and we’ll be gone. Have to make a report. You wouldn’t want to get in trouble with the department now, would you?”

The child said, “There’s no such thing as a department of inspections. That’s an Alabama driver’s license, not a badge or an ID. Go away.” Then she shut the door.

Alas, working quickly, Ernie had already knocked the hinge bolts out, and when she slammed it, the door almost toppled in. Catching it, Vern scooted forward, while Ernie held the door, secured at that moment only by the still-attached chain lock. To give his pal some leverage, Vern smilingly unhooked the chain, as if to say to the two terrified women, “See, that’s all there is to it.” He actually managed an expression that suggested he expected some kind of congratulations. Having entered the apartment, Ernie swiftly and expertly remounted the door on its hinges, replaced the bolts, then closed and locked it. The two women stared at the intruders, horrified. Whatever visions of American evil they secretly held, these two men now liberated.

Meanwhile, Vern slipped across the room, peered through the sliding doors that opened, as if onto a balcony, but where there was no balcony since this was the first floor. Instead, they opened onto the parking lot. Across the lot stood another building like this one, an undistinguished, three-story brick structure with four outdoor stairwells, and six units per stairwell. The unit directly across from them was Nikki Swagger’s, which they’d discovered by checking the mailboxes.

“Is it okay, Vern?” called Ernie, who was more or less just intimidating the prisoners with his presence and his baleful, charmless stare.

Vern said, “Yeah, it’s fine. We can see him good, no problem.”

He turned to the two Asian women.

“Sorry, gals,” said Vern, “but what’s got to be’s got to be. Now, no need for nobody to git excited. We are very easygoing, long as you cooperate.”

Without violence but with a force that suggested the possibility of violence, Vern herded the women into the living room.

“Now, little lady, since you’re so damned spunky, and Granny here don’t talk the lingo, looks like you’ll have to answer the questions. No holding back now, little dolly.” He put his hand, friendly-like, on her frail shoulder, feeling it stiffen.

“Are you thieves? We have so little but take it and go away. My grandmother has been ill. A shock could kill her. Look at her, she’s scared to death.”

Vern hugged Grannie.

“There, there, Mama-san, it ain’t nothing. You just relax now, okay. Just sit down on the sofa and relax. Watch a show, do some knitting.”

“She likes Sudoku.”

“Yeah, then do that. Meanwhile—”

He took the smaller girl back into the bedroom. She was one of those scrawny-beautiful scrappers, with eyes that glittered fiercely. Twelve, maybe. No breasts. Short, a T-shirt, some running shoes. The T-shirt said HANNAH MONTANA ’08 TOUR and had a picture of another kid. The child had no sexuality but she was hotter than hell nevertheless, as the smart, feisty ones always are. She’d never back down from nobody.

“Sweetie, please work with me on this. It’s better for everone. How many people live here? Where are they? When they gonna be home? I don’t want no surprises, and if I’m surprised, you ain’t gonna be a happy camper.”

He showed her the grip of his shoulder-holstered Glock.

“In case you don’t get it, that’s a real gun. I am a real bad man and I have to be here for a time. I ain’t gonna hurt you. You ain’t a witness, because my name’s already on a hundred circulars. But I am the real thing, and there ain’t no heroes no more, nobody’s coming to save you, so you do what I say, exactly, or there will be some problems. And I’m the easy one. That guy, Ernie, with me? He is a true bastard. I’m the only thing between your family and him.”

He loved the perfect tenderness of her beautiful little ear: so tiny, so precise, like some kind of exquisite jewelry.

“You’re an ape. Why are you doing this? We have nothing.”

“I am not an ape. Well, maybe a little. Sweetie, we’re here because we’re here and we’ll be gone when we’re gone. What are you, Chinese?”

“Vietnamese. My grandfather’s with the hospital, a researcher. My father’s dead, my mother works. My brother and sister will be home by four, Mom at five. Please don’t hurt us. We don’t have a thing, we haven’t done a thing.”

“There you go, sweetie, talking about hurting. I told you, nobody gets hurt long as I get smooth cooperation. Here’s how it’s gonna be. Grandma’s in here with you. You can watch TV, go to the bathroom, whatever. You can fix food. But that’s it. We’re going to be outside in the living room, looking out the sliding doors at the building across the parking lot. Don’t know for how long. If we’re still here when the other folks start arriving, it’s your job to keep them from going nuts. You tell them what’s what. You cool them down. You have to be a grown-up today. How old are you?”

“None of your business, you ape.”

“Wow, you do have snazzle. I like that. Think somewhere I got a gal your age. Hope she’s got the same snazzle. Anyhows, go ahead, hate me, I’m used to it. I kind of like it, truth is. Maybe that’s why I turned out so rotten. Anyhow, you got responsibilities. You have to please God. I am God. Please me and you’ll come out happy.”

“You’re not God. You’re an ape bastard bully with a gun.”

He saw he was never going to make any headway with this one, which of course made him really like her a lot. Maybe too much. An idea was starting to form. He could get her in the bathroom and she had to do what he said or he’d hurt her family so she’d have to do it. He saw her fear, her little body, the trembling. It excited him.

“I’ll go get Grandma. Oh, and one other thing. What do you want on your pizza?”

TWENTY-SEVEN

For some reason, like an old bear, he needed sleep. So he violated his promise to the sheriff by sleeping through the clock radio, awaking at ten-thirty and thinking first of all, Oh hell, where am I?

That moment of confusion, familiar to men beyond sixty. His eyes flashed around the banal motel room and he had no idea what he was doing there, what time it was, why he was so late, why in his dreams people seemed so disappointed in him. It came back, of course, but not quickly enough, and he needed a good ten minutes for the blood to somehow reach his brain and revive his short-term memories. Quickly he took up the Kimber .38 Super, made a quick recon of the parking lot of the Mountain Empire Motel and was satisfied to see it largely empty, no sheriff’s cars in sight. He started the coffee, took a shower, pulled on his last clean Polo—there had to be a washer and dryer at Nikki’s—and began his calls.

The first, of course, was to his wife.

The news was great.

“Bob, she’s awake. She’s back, our baby is back.”

Bob felt the elation blossom bright, like a flare in the night, signaling that reinforcements were coming in.

“Oh, thank God. Oh, Christ, that is so great. When did it happen, how, what’s her condition?”

Julie tumbled through the story. At about eight-fifteen, Nikki opened her eyes, sat up, shook her head groggily, and said, “Hi, Mom. Where am I?”

Doctors came and went, tests were made, Nikki gradually seemed to focus, and particularly benefited from her little sister’s incredible joy. The two girls sat on the bed and talked for what seemed hours, while all the fuss went on about them. Now she was getting further tests.

“She doesn’t remember anything about the incident, but everything else seemed all right. How’s Dad—oh my God, how much work have I missed—oh, I have to call my editor—when can we leave—I’m hungry.”

“Oh, that’s so great,” said Bob. It doesn’t get much better than the moment you hear your kid has pulled through a tough one. His first impulse was to race to the car and beeline to Knoxville to be with his family at this precious moment.

“The doctor says the signs are good. She’ll get more memory back over the next few days. Our little girl is going to make it.”

Miko came on, delirious, and he talked to the second daughter for a while, in the language of fathers and daughters, both intimate and silly. But at a certain point it came back to him. Yeah, she’s fine, she’s okay, it’s all right, there’s a happy ending…if.

He realized that she’d make it if the boys didn’t come back to take her out again. She was much more dangerous now that she was conscious. Unconscious, there was always the thought that she could pass; now, revived, she was a threat.

“I’d like to come back,” he said. “I wish I could come back.”

“But you can’t,” Julie said. “You have work to do.”

“Yes, I do. I want the security tightened.”

“Bob, I’ve already called Pinkerton. They’re upping the manpower. It’ll cost us a fortune, but I don’t care. What’s happening there, where are you?”

He told her, summing things up, wishing he had a definite next step in mind, or that a solution would somehow soon be at hand. But it remained amorphous. Strange men tried to kill Nikki, tried to kill him for looking into it. The sheriff’s office didn’t have a clue. Nick Memphis hadn’t returned his phone calls.

“I’m going to go to Bristol now, to her apartment. That’s where they’ll know to find me.”

“Bob, be careful.”

“Maybe I can turn a thing on them. If not, I’ll wait a few days until after the race, then I’ll sneak back here and sniff out Eddie Ferrol. If anyone knows anything for sure, it’s him. He and I’ll have a little conversation, and then I’ll be up to speed.”

“Can you find him?”

“I think I can.”

He saw his cell light blinking, informing him another call was coming in.

“You know, I have to go. I’ll get back to you when I’m in Bristol.”

“Love you.”

“Love you.”

He called up Received Calls and recovered Charlie Wingate’s number. He punched Call and the phone was answered in two seconds.

“Charlie?”

“Mr. Swagger, did you hear?”

“No.”

“They found the owner of that gun store dead. Eddie Ferrol, the guy who owned Iron Mountain Armory. Someone shot him. They found the body off the interstate.”

Bob blinked, took a swallow of the coffee.

“Yeah,” he said. “And before he and I could chat.”

“Remember, I gave you the number from your daughter’s laptop hard drive. Did you see him? I don’t—”

Bob suddenly saw how it might have looked to the kid.

“You think I tracked him down? You think I’m some kind of hit man? No, Charlie, it’s not that way. I saw him and asked him some questions about my daughter. He denied ever having seen her, but I learned that was a lie. I was going to see him again, but the next thing I know, I’m the one who’s targeted. Long story. Been more or less laying low ever since. But anyone concerned about me would know that Eddie’s the man I’d have to get back to. If they couldn’t get me, they could get him. Especially since they can’t have had any confidence in his ability to stand up to tough questions. The fastest way out of that jam is a bullet in his head.”

“Yes sir. Um—am I in any danger?”

“Don’t think so. Only way would be if whoever I’m looking for has very sophisticated phone intercept capability. Government quality. No, not these boys. Smokeless powder is about as sophisticated as they get. It ain’t the CIA or even the mafia. It’s some boys who aren’t sure the wheel is going to last. Charlie, I’m about to leave town. You keep working on what I told you, and I’ll check back from Bristol, okay?”

“Yes sir. This is kind of cool.”

After disconnecting, Bob tried Nick again. Agh! Where was he?

He called Terry Hepplewhite, the clerk at Lester’s, about whom he still worried. But he found Terry in fine spirits with nothing to report. He had half a mind to pay for a vacation or something, but saw in an instant that wouldn’t work. Thelma’d be all over it if Terry suddenly vanished. No, Terry had to sit it out, at least until whatever happened happened, his case was processed, and police interest had moved elsewhere. Bob thought, That was another mistake. I shouldn’t have involved that kid, I should have stuck around and taken the heat. Man, am I losing it? I have made a batch of bad decisions on this one, and maybe I am just making things more difficult than they are. But there was nothing left to do but get out of town, so that sheriff didn’t drop down in his Blackhawk again.

He threw his laundry into his duffel, and went to the car. He drove aimlessly, hoping to smoke out anybody following, but his sudden turns and reverses uncovered nobody. For all of it, he was in the free and clear.

The route took him up and down Iron Mountain on 421, across Shady Valley, where he stopped and refueled and got a bite to eat. He then crossed Holston Mountain and, twenty miles out of Bristol, almost immediately hit the Race Day traffic he’d sworn to avoid by leaving early. That plan lost, he settled in for the long haul: the drive across the valley, a backup at the approach to the bridge over Holston Lake, and then into really heavy stuff as he got close to the speedway itself, which was twelve miles outside of Bristol. He hated traffic. He was too old for traffic. Traffic was no fun. The only good thing about traffic was that nothing bad could happen in it, because nobody who did anything bad could get away. There was too much traffic.

He looked at the map, thought maybe he could figure out a way around the mess. It might be longer in miles but it would keep him driving and engaged instead of crawling. That was always his theory in other situations: it’s better to drive at speed even if it takes longer than to endure the frustrations of the slow stop-and-go.

But none of the other routes really offered much in the way of possibility. He had to remember that hundreds of thousands of people were on the march, and that every single route would be slowed down. It was just physics: That many cars on those few roads computed to simple congestion no matter what. You had to accept it, not let it screw you up.

So he just tried to stay relaxed, giving himself up to the radio, running from country western station to country western station, occasionally nesting on the Knoxville 24/7 news station, hoping there might be new information on the two Grumley boys who’d tried to kill him. But there wasn’t. That story was dead, as was the killing of the meth addict Cubby Bartlett. Nothing lasted more than a day in today’s news cycle.

Why didn’t Nick call? With Nick’s help, he could find out in minutes who these Grumleys were, what their involvement foretold, and who, possibly, they were connected to or working for.

But Nick didn’t call.

Finally, around four, he hit the city limits, and forty minutes later crawled past the speedway itself. It was the same, only worse. The huge structure dominated the valley, but it was aswarm with crowds. Traffic just crawled, and people wandered through it en masse. Most of the husky fellows who herded families through the merriment seemed to carry coolers full of beer on their shoulders, and NASCAR ball caps were perched on every head from the youngest to the oldest. The pilgrims were dressed any old way, mainly in cut-off jeans and tank tops, and everybody smoked or had a beer in a caddy. The women wore flip-flops, and a few even seemed to have bras underneath their shirts, but mainly it was down-home as it could be. Not a tie or a jacket anywhere in sight, just thin clothes, heaving flesh, a sense of complete ease. This was the night of nights, the Night of Thunder.

On both sides of the road—he’d turned from 421 to the Volunteer Parkway—even more booths had been set up, so that the strip appeared to be a vast bazaar. There wasn’t hardly anything NASCAR you couldn’t buy, except possibly body parts or DNA samples, and every merchant seemed to be doing land-rush business, all of it cash. Smoke hung in the air from the barbecue grills, and even the tee-totaling Baptists were selling water bottles to raise money for their prayers.

Bob found it hard not to feel the joy these folks felt, and he connected with it. His daughter was all right. She’d come back. She was okay, she was going to be fine. He again felt rich in daughters and possibilities and wished he could just enjoy it a little.

But there was the worm. Someone had tried to kill her, might try again. They’d tried to kill him; they’d kill anyone who got in the way, even if that person didn’t realize they’d gotten in the way. Mark 2:11. “I say, arise from your pallet and go to your house.” Crippled man, arise, you are cured. I give you your life back. That fellow would feel some joy too; the sensation leaking into his legs, the strength burgeoning, the psychological burden of self-loathing, of imperfection, of isolation, all of that gone. Rejoin the world, son. Welcome back to the land of the whole. That’s how he felt when the word came that Nikki was awake—he’d risen from his bed, able to go to his home again.

What could it mean? What could it mean? The thing weighed like an ingot on his brain, so much so that he hardly noticed that the traffic had thinned and—glory be!—that he could accelerate, stoplight to stoplight, because he was now inside the destination. It was the lanes on the other side of the median that were so impossibly jammed up.

He sped through downtown Bristol, found the right cross street, looked for the Kmart that was his tipoff, managed a left, and wound through the little, hidden neighborhood and up a hill into the complex that ultimately yielded her apartment.

He parked next to a red Eldorado—wow, don’t someone have extravagant taste in transporation!—and stopped to look around, see if there was a chance anyone had stayed with him through the endless hours of traffic. Nope. Funny, though, he had a strange feeling of being watched. He had good instincts for such. Kept him alive more than once.

He looked again, saw nothing. A parking lot longer than it was wide, on each side of it low four-story brick buildings, typical American apartments, lots of balconies. Down the way some kids played, but no one new pulled into the lot. He looked for activity in the cars, for any sight of activity on the balconies and no, no, there was nothing.

Gunman’s paranoia. Going a little nuts in my old age. Mankiller’s anxiety. All the boys I put down are coming after me. Happens to the best of them.

Satisfied no sign existed of threat, he climbed the stairs, opened the door to her apartment, and stepped in.

As he did, a man stood up from her sofa.

Hands flew to guns.

The weapons came out, fingers on triggers, slack going out, killing time was here. But then—

“Nick Memphis, for Christ’s sake.”

“Hello, Bob. You sure took your time getting here. Didn’t think you’d ever make it.”

TWENTY-EIGHT

“Vern, dammit, I can’t do this alone, git over here. I might miss something. I have to pee.”

That was Ernie sitting in the dining room chair at the drawn sliding doors, peering at the building across the street through a sliver of open curtain.

But Vern didn’t answer.

Instead, he asked the young Vietnamese girl in the bedroom, “So, what’s your name?” while the grandmother looked on with angry eyes. She clearly did not think his attentions were appropriate, and the way he kept looking over to her and grinning with his big white teeth got on her nerves. But then she had never understood these strange white people anyway. What was wrong with them? They were so stupid about so many things.

“What difference does it make?” asked the girl.

“Well, if it don’t make no difference, might as well tell me as not. I’m guessing Susan. You look like a Susan.”

“I do not. I look like a Hannah. Hannah Ng. Pronounced ‘ning.’”

“Hannah Ng, my name is Vern Pye. This ain’t the way I’d have arranged it, but I sure do think highly of you. You’re about as cute as they come. I’d like to hang out with you.”

“You’re trying to date me? My mother doesn’t even let me date boys my own age. Plus, you smell like a smoker. You must smoke eight packs a day.”

“I ain’t that much older’n you. Only two packs, and I’ll be quitting real soon.”

“About sixty years, it looks like to me. And you smell like eight packs. Ugh.”

“You’re what, fifteen?”

“Fourteen.”

“Well, I am forty-four. That makes me only thirty years older. And I have the constitution of a much younger fellow.”

“You’re really delusional. Really, you’re sick.”

“You are so cute. I like your ears. Your ears are so tiny. You’re like a little doll. Anybody ever tell you how cute you are? We could have some fun together, you bet. You’d git some cool new clothes out of it. We’d go to the mall, git Hannah Ng any damn thing she wanted. New jeans, new T’s, new tank tops, new hoodies, new sneaks. We’ll have a hell of a swell time, sweetie, Vern promises.”

The child shivered.

“This is getting creepy.”

“If you didn’t fight against it, it wouldn’t seem so hard, honey.”

“Vern, goddamnit, get over here,” yelled Ernie.

“Now don’t you worry about a thing. Vern’s got some work to do, then we’ll talk some more.”

Vern left, went to the living room, and pulled a chair up to spell Ernie so he could go pee.

“’Bout time. What you been doing?”

“Just talking to the kid.”

“Vern, we got a damn job. You stay away from her while we work, you hear. The Old Man’d be plenty ticked if he knowed you’se been mooning on that damn kid when you’se supposed to be man hunting.”

“When it comes, it comes. Sometimes you don’t get a second shot. You got to take it. Things is swell here.”

“I’m going to piss.”

Vern sat dreamy-eyed and disconnected at the window. He didn’t see the cars across the parking lot or the building they fronted, or the steps up to the doors. He saw himself and Hannah Ng in the bathroom, he saw his easy way with her, how he’d have his way, how good it would feel. He told himself she’d like it too. The more he thought about it, the better it seemed.

Ernie came back.

“Goddamn, Vern, there he is!”

Vern snapped out of the hot and sleazy place his brain was in, and reentered the known world. There indeed, not twenty-five yards away, was the tall, older man named Swagger who was their quarry. He’d parked, now he got out and peered about carefully, making certain he was unfollowed and unnoticed.

“See, he’s a careful one.”

“Yeah, he is. He ain’t no pushover.”

“But he’ll go down hard, like any man.”

The man then went to the stairwell, climbed past second- and third-floor landings, and on the fourth, took out a key, opened the door to an apartment, and stepped in.

“Now we really got to watch. Vern, you can’t—”

“I know, I know.”

“Better call the Old Man.”

“Yeah, yeah,” said Vern, taking out his cell. He punched in the number.

“What, Vern?” asked the Reverend.

In the background, Vern could hear hubbub, as the boys sold water and Reb hats and T-shirts to pilgrims going to the race. Vern could tell that business was land-rush scale.

“Reverend, he done showed. Just arrived. He’s there.”

“Oh, that’s good, that’s fine, that’s swell.”

“Yes sir. We could go over there right now, kick in the door, be in, out in five seconds, and it’d be done.”

“No, no,” said the Reverend. “You never can tell. Long as he’s in there, he ain’t doing us no harm. You just watch and wait. If he don’t never leave, you wait till we go at eleven or so, then you go. That way, what the hell, the laws have situations at both ends of town with a massive traffic mess in between ’em. They won’t never git it sorted out. That’s when you do ’em. Or, if for some reason, he decides to go somewhere. You see him come out and go to his car. Then we can’t know where he’s going, then you go out and while he’s in that car starting up, you pop his ass good and hard. Drop that hammer. Nail that boy to the wall. Yes sir, bappity-bap-bap and you all done. Then you go. It’s so far off, no laws will figure it has nothing to do with anything else. But that’s my second choice. Best wait till our fun commences before y’all go settle Grumley accounts. Got that, Vern?”

“I do, Pap.”

God,” said Ernie, “this is turning into an Adam Sandler movie. Dopey-stupid and crazy. Someone else just arrived. What’s next, the circus?”

The two boys watched as, indeed, someone went up the four landings and knocked at the old man’s door. After some time the door was answered, and an awkward transaction took place.

“Them guys always come at the wrong time,” said Ernie as the UPS man walked down the steps and returned to his brown van.

TWENTY-NINE

“Well, you look older and dumpier,” said Bob. Nick had indeed thickened some, and let his crewcut grow out a little. The years of service had engraved wary lines in his face, and now he wore glasses, horn-rims. He still wore the uniform, the black suit, white shirt, and red tie, and if you looked you saw his handgun printing high on his right hip. He now replaced it, as Bob replaced his.

“So do you. What’s with the hair? You must have seen a ghost.”

“Reckon so. It just went in two weeks. I had a rough spell in Japan. These folks kept trying to cut me down, so to get their attention, I cut them down. I’d tell you more about it except you’d have to arrest me.”

“Since I haven’t seen any Interpol circulars on them, you seem to have gotten away with it again. By the way, do you have a license to carry that gun?”

“No.”

“Good. Same old Bob. Just checking.”

“How’s that tough little wife of yours? She still want to put me in jail?”

“More like a mental home. Anyhow, Sally’s with the U.S. Attorney’s office in D.C. now.”

“She never liked me much. But then few do, why should she be any different?”

“I never liked you much either, if it matters.”

“Well, what I liked about you was, you’se so far down the totem pole, I could say ‘ain’t’ and ‘it don’t’ without any career harm. And, by the way, what’re you doing standing in the middle of my daughter’s living room?”

“How is she?”

“You know what happened to her?”

“As of two days ago, pretty much everything. I know she’s awake with a groggy memory, which is why there’s no sense talking to her. But I will. And that’s why even as we speak, a team of U.S. marshals has taken over security at her hospital. She’s a valuable federal witness, even if she doesn’t know it.”

“Looks like we’ve got a spell of talking to do. Mind if I get something to drink?”

“You shouldn’t drink and carry. Not a good idea.”

“Don’t mean that kind of drinking. Drink as in fruit juice or a nice Coke, something wet. You want one?”

“No, I’m fine.”

Bob got himself a fruit juice from the refrigerator and when he got back, Nick had sat down on the sofa. He reclined in a chair.

“Okay, old friend. Let’s talk. By the way, I’m really glad you’re here. This thing is very complex, and I ain’t got it half figured out. But why didn’t you call me back?”

“Because I’m looking for a very smart guy. I don’t know his capabilities, but he’s a highly organized criminal with amazing technical skills. He might know about the task force and he might have penetrated it. Just a precaution.”

“The driver, right?”

“Yeah, the driver. The guy who tried to kill your daughter. The car guy.”

“He came damn close.”

“You don’t know how lucky your daughter is. This is a very bad actor. He’s killed nine federal witnesses and six federal officers over the past seven years. He did a family in Cleveland three years back. The father was an accountant who was going to testify against a teamster local, money laundering and extortion. Never happened. The driver hit them and they were gone in a second. Mother, father, three kids. He may even have more kills that we don’t even know about; he also freelances for various mob franchises, even some overseas outfits—we have Interpol circulars on him. But we’re in this because of the federal angle.”

“You have a name?”

“We don’t have a name or even a face. All we have is a modus operandi, and it took years before we were even on to that. What we’ve been able to learn is that he’s some kind of genius with automobiles. Genius driver, genius mechanic, genius car thief, genius on automotive electronics. He can break into any car he wants in about six seconds, drive off in three more. He seems to like Chargers. He’ll steal a car, plates, and so forth. He sets the car up with a heavy-duty suspension, tunes the engine for max power. Then he scopes his quarry out. Waits till they’re on the highway. He understands the physics of the accident, what it takes to knock a car out of equilibrium, where to hit it, which angle to take, that sort of thing. It usually takes only one pass. He hits ’em hard, they overcorrect to keep control, and they lose it. The car flips. It rolls, it bounces, and everyone inside is whiplashed to death in seconds. He’s gone in a flash, the car is never found, there’s no prints, no DNA, nothing. Just paint samples that lead back to a stolen car.”

“You don’t have any idea who he is?”

“There’s stories. Some say he’s a rogue NASCAR guy who killed another driver in a fit of rage and had to make himself scarce. We have seven names like that, all of them accounted for. Some say he pissed off Big Racing by fucking one of the family’s daughters, and they made sure he’d never race a sanctioned event again. Some say he’s just pure psycho, with a gift for automotives. It could be any of those, all of them, none of them. We just know he’s good, very thorough, highly intelligent, the fearless, classic psychotic. But when we heard about Nikki, we set up a task force out of Knoxville. Something’s up, we think.”

“I do too.”

“So what have you got?”

“Well—”

Someone knocked on the door.

The two men exchanged looks.

“Were you followed?”

“Don’t think so.”

“Expecting anyone?”

“No.”

“Let’s be real careful on this one.”

Nick slipped to the right of the door, SIG in hand, tense, ready.

Bob went to the left of the door, drew the Kimber, held it behind him, thumb riding the safety, ready to push it off in a second.

“Yeah?” he demanded loudly.

“UPS,” came the muffled reply.

“Just a sec,” said Bob. He looked through the peep hole.

“He’s in brown. I don’t know, maybe they’re so far into this they have fake UPS uniforms.”

“I don’t know,” said Nick.

“Can you just leave it?”

“Need a signature, sir.”

“Okay,” said Bob.

He opened the door two inches until the chain restrained it, even as he peeled away from it in case somebody fired through it.

But instead a thin cardboard box slipped through the two-inch opening in the doorway. Bob grabbed it, shook it, and tossed it on the floor.

He opened the door, signed his name with a stylus on the computerized notepad, and watched the fellow trundle off, slightly absurd in his short pants and brown socks.

“Those guys always arrive at the wrong time,” said Nick. “They have a gift for it.”

They sat down again, and Bob told the whole story, from start to finish, his arrival in Bristol after his daughter’s accident, his investigation, the sheriff department’s investigation, the opposing conclusions of each, the two critical incidents that left three dead, Bob’s remorse about leaving poor Terry Hepplewhite alone back there as the supposed shooter, the death of Eddie Ferrol, the police politics of Johnson County, the situation as it now was with Nikki awake.

“So let me sum up your findings,” Nick said.

He ticked them off.

The strange economics of methamphetamine in Johnson County.

The Baptist prayer camp, run by an Alton Grumley.

The driver.

The tire-change jack and possible exercises to refine that skill.

The night firing of guns.

The attempts on Bob’s life by Grumleys as he tried to investigate.

“Grumleys are a southern crime family, headquartered near Hot Springs,” Nick explained. “Kind of a family training camp for the criminal skills. Been around for generations. They produce all kinds of mischief, force-based mainly, but also confidence, bunco, extortion, and kidnapping. Very tribal group of bad guys. If they’re involved, I’m suddenly seeing a lot of dough.”

Bob took it in, then continued.

The missing pages in his daughter’s notebook, the crushed car, crushed recording devices.

The trip to the gun store.

And finally, Mark 2:11.

“That’s it,” said Bob. “Now here’s my take. Somehow Nikki picked something up. So she visited the camp but saw through the Reverend. She poked around on her own and she found something. Clearly these Grumleys were involved. But what she found made her think of—I don’t know, here’s where it gets blurry, guns or the Bible or both? She wouldn’t call me to ask about the Bible, that I guarantee you. So maybe it is about guns. She tried to call me but I was out in the horse ring. So she went to the first Baptist minister she heard about, who turned out to be Eddie Ferrol, and asked about Mark 2:11, thinking that fella would know.”

“And the fact that he owns a gun store is coincidental? I don’t buy coincidences that big.”

Bob stopped. “Yeah, this is where it comes apart: the bullet or Bible issue. And she called me first, and I don’t know jerk about Bibles. But the fact that he claims she didn’t go there, and we know that’s a lie…She drives home, and that guy, who’s later killed, somehow gets to the driver, and he’s sent after her. Now he had to be close. So he was clearly at the prayer camp run by old man Grumley. We have his tracks as he raced down 421 to catch up to her.”

“That sounds right. Okay, we don’t have Mark 2:11, but what do we have? Here’s what I’m getting. It seems to me what they’re planning isn’t a conspiracy, a murder, a scheme, a plot. That doesn’t sound Grumley. It’s more of a caper, a one-time thing, some kind of raid or operation. Maybe a robbery. That’s the urgency. That’s why everything has to happen fast, ’cause they’re up against a tight deadline, and what happens happens soon. They have to go at a certain moment, not before, not after. And that information has to be protected. It’s so fragile that even the suspicion of something going on would screw things up. Their plan must depend on total surprise, and even minimum-security upgrades would defeat it. That’s why they go after Nikki. Even if she knows nothing, she might make phone calls or ask questions, and someone else might figure something was up and those upgrades would be made and their plans would be screwed.”

Bob thought, Yeah he’s pretty smart. That’s good for government work.

“Could it be a code, a signal? Let’s Google it again. Maybe we missed something.”

But they came up with nothing except the endless and seemingly fruitless biblical references.

“Let me call this kid Charlie. He’s real smart, maybe he’s come up with something.”

Bob called Charlie; the boy was apologetic, self-doubting and disappointed because he hadn’t come up with anything.

“I even ran it by a guy I know who specializes in codes. He looked at it for numerology, misplaced letters, anagrams, displacements, upside down writing, backwards writing, and he came up zilch.”

“Okay, Charlie. Thanks.”

“Sorry I couldn’t do better for you, Mr. Swagger.”

“Well, you actually cross out a lot of possibilities, son. So that’s of some help. It ain’t a code, it ain’t nothing from the Bible or the numbers or letters in the Bible. That cuts it way down.”

“I won’t charge you.”

“Charlie, how many times do I have to say this: Charge me!”

Bob disconnected.

“Nothing. And if you’re right, if they have some kind of caper going on against a deadline, here we sit with nothing to show for it, no progress made. Could it have to do with the race? The big race?” He looked at his watch. “Hell, eight-thirty. It’s started. Could it be a rob…”

But he let it trail off.

“It doesn’t make any sense,” said Nick. “How could they rob something in the middle of the biggest traffic jam in Tennessee this year? How could they get in, get out? I suppose they could go on foot, but how much could each man carry? I just don’t see any reasonable methodology here. Those roads are going to be like parking lots for hours. Nobody’s going anywhere.”

“I am at the end of the road.”

“Man, I’m about to say, call it a day. Maybe tomorrow I can run it by the analysts back in D.C. and get some genius to look into it and see what we don’t. I do need a drink, a real one. But let’s ask: What do we know the most about?”

“The answer is Nikki. I know Nikki. I know how her mind works and what a stubborn little cuss she can be.”

“So let’s think along with her. Take us through her thoughts on that last night. You know she’s called you.”

“She calls me…but I’m not answering. She gets a burr under her saddle, she’s got to get it out. She calls me, I ain’t there. What does she do? Call someone else? Who else would she call? She’s been to a gun store, she had a Bible she got from the Reverend, she can’t find no satisfaction, she calls me, I’m not there, who else does she call? It’s early evening, most places are closed down. Who does she call? The newspaper? Could she have called the newspaper?”

“But you said she didn’t.”

“That’s right.”

“Maybe she didn’t call anyone. Maybe she just up and left for home and the driver caught her and—”

“No. Gal wouldn’t give up. That’s not how she was taught. She’d want to do something positive, achieve a sense of progress. So somehow she’d continue to search. So, who’s open that late? Who never closes? Who has information on anything on tap even if you’re in the woods in rural Tennessee in the dark?”

They looked at each other.

“She had a laptop, right?” said Nick. “Wireless, right? She went to the Internet. She tried to Google Mark 2:11 and came up with what we came up with—ten thousand explanations of how Jesus cured the cripple and sent him home, and she couldn’t make any sense of it. Who does she call next?”

They looked at nothing and then they looked at each other again.

They looked at the package that Bob had just dumped on the floor. It said AMAZON.

“She buys a book!”

THIRTY

Vern’s cell rang.

“Yes sir.”

“What’s the word, Vern?”

“Ernie, what’s the word?”

“Ain’t no word, goddamnit, Vern, and you’d know that if you done your job. Don’t know how you can take money for tonight, just sittin’ there hammerin’ on that poor little girl and her family.”

Vern sat next to the little girl on the sofa, his big hand draped protectively about her. Gently he’d been caressing her arm for about and hour, whispering softly into her ear.

“Well, sir, Mr. Holy Water, I will do my job, same as you, and earn my money, same as you.”

He went back to the phone.

“Sir, I—”

“Vern, I heard discord. I told y’all I didn’t want no discord. Discord is what makes things fall apart, that I know true and straight.”

“Sir, Ernie and I are fine. We just ran into some unexpected situation is all. As for that old man, he ain’t peeked out a bit. Ernie kept a good watch on him, yes he did. There’s no move or nothing.”

“Okay, we are about to let hell out of the jar here. The race’ll be over in a little bit—they’re up to lap four eighty or so now—and they’ll let the traffic build a bit, and then they go and we jump. Like I said before, that’s when you go up, you bash in the door, you hit him with both barrels, a lot of shooting, it don’t matter, no po-lice getting there for six hours with the mess we making here. Then you git gone but good. I’ll call you later so’s you can pick up your swag.”

“That is a good plan, sir.”

“Boys,” said the Reverend, “I just want you to know, you’re doing Grumley work tonight, but more important, you are serving the Lord.”

“Sir, He has rewarded me. I have met the gal of my dreams here tonight, yes sir!”

THIRTY-ONE

It was The History of Sniping and Sharpshooting by Major John L. Plaster, a sniper expert and former SOG war dog in Vietnam, who Bob actually knew.

“Sniping,” said Nick. “So she was trying to find something about snipers.”

“She couldn’t have found a gun. Nobody loses a gun. She’d found, I don’t know, a piece of equipment, a gillie hat, a range book, or maybe some shell-related thing. The shell itself, the box, a piece of carton, a manifest, a bill of lading, something with a shell designation on it. But it had to be something unusual. The girl is my daughter. She’d been around cartridges her whole life. She knew the difference between a .308 and a .30-06 and between a shell, a cartridge, and a bullet.”

“And it had to be arcane then, if she didn’t know it right away and sought someone with more information—the guy in the gun store, you, finally the book.”

“Let’s try Mark 2:11,” Bob said.

He went to the index. Damn! No Mark 2:11. But he was so close now, he could feel the answer almost as a palpable presence, floating just out of focus in the corner of the room.

“Damn,” said Nick. “I was so sure it—”

“Wait,” said Bob, “I think technically they abbreviate ’em. And we never saw the word ‘Mark’ written in her own hand. Don’t know if it really was a Mark or some kind of abbreviation. I think the military uses ‘M-k period’ as its abbreviation, left over from the old days. But I don’t see—”

“Go back to the index.”

Bob found the designation “Mk.211, 622.”

Bob turned to page 622 and immediately saw a photo of a group of long, big, mean-looking cartridges, missiles really, their sleek brass hulls propped upright as they rested on a rim, while at the top, a bullet like a warhead promised speed, precision, and destruction. The conical, streamlined-to-death-point thing itself was sometimes black, sometimes blue, sometimes red, sometimes tipped in these colors, all a part of the complex system of military enumeration, by which armies on the prowl in far dusty places could keep their logistical requirements coherent.

And there, finally, it was: Mk.211 Model O Raufoss, with green-over-white painted tip.

They read. The Mk.211 Raufoss is a dedicated armor-piercing .50 caliber round, meant to penetrate light steel, of Norwegian manufacture (NAMMO being the name of the firm) and design, in play in specialized roles in the American war effort in the Middle East. It consists of a tungsten core buried in the center of the 650-grain bronze bullet and was designed so that the bullet itself, traveling at over twenty-five hundred feet per second and delivering four thousand foot pounds of energy at impact, would bore through the armor of the vehicle. A nanosecond later a small charge would explode, thus releasing the tungsten rod within, which being heavier and harder, would fly into the crew compartment, shatter and fragmentize, quickly wounding, disabling, or simply slaughtering the human beings and any delicate electronic equipment inside.

“It’s for light armored vehicles,” said Bob. “Not a tank, but an armored personnel carrier, a Humvee, a car, a radar screen, an aerial, a mobile command center. Or maybe a bunker or barricade, a helicopter, a plane on the ground, a wiring junction, a stoplight, a camera or infrared scope, any number of military applications which are classified ‘soft targets,’ anything short of the real, big mechanized stuff. I’m betting they do a lot of damage wherever they’re deployed.”

“The .50 caliber. That’s the big one?” Nick wanted to know.

“They call the original gun the Queen of Battle. Ma Deuce, from the heavy machine gun designation which is M-2. You rule the battlefield with it in certain situations, say on a hill way out in bad-guy land. We used a lot of ’em in ’Nam. We loved ’em. But this here’s the newest wrinkle. It ain’t for a machine gun. See this Mk.211 shit’s for a rifle built by an outfit called Barrett, a big son of a bitch, just barely man-portable. Six feet long, forty pounds or so, off a bipod. Looks like an M16 on hormones for Arnold Schwarzenegger. You couldn’t carry it in a holster to rob a store. But placed with a trained operator, you could use it to snipe at over a mile to take out trucks and lightly armored defensive positions, you could rain havoc and brimstone on your target zone with pinpoint accuracy. You could take down people, low-flying planes, missiles on their launch pads, radio and radar installations, anything. You could use it on the president with that ammo. It ain’t the gun, it’s the ammo. It’s strictly military-only, banned from civilian use, and I don’t think even the NRA cares about that. It’s for blowing up stuff, for multiplying the killing force, for bringing down planes or choppers, That ammo’ll go through anything and cut the shit out of what’s on the other side.”

“So that’s what she found,” said Nick. “Some evidence of a .50 caliber rifle with deadly, military-only ammunition in criminal hands, presumably being readied for some kind of kick-ass caper. And that’s why they wanted to kill her, and when you found out, they had to try and kill you. But what would the caper be? Can you guess? And when is it going down?”

“Could it be a kill?” said Bob. “That’s what you could do with this. The president, I don’t know, the governor, some big guy, he’s in a box watching the race. They’re on the mountaintop which just barely might give you a vantage point on the speedway or somehow they’ve gotten into the speedway itself, though with a gun that big, I don’t know how. Maybe he can zero the big guy’s box, put ten Mk.211s into it, kill everybody in two seconds, I’m guessing. Or it could take out an armored limousine. Turn it to Swiss cheese.”

“The president isn’t there. The governor of Tennessee is, but…the governor of Tennessee? I suppose. I just—” Nick ran out of words. “Somehow, it doesn’t seem Grumley. It’s not their style.”

“No, no, this is good, consider it,” said Bob. “They’re hired by some mob who knows their one value isn’t sophistication but silence. That’s what they’re selling. So maybe the governor is organizing some new anti–organized crime task force, got ’em all scared. They contract the hit to the Grumleys who bring it off with their usual crudeness and violence but also a refusal to snitch ’em out if caught.”

“The tires, Bob. You were the one that discovered the tires. Were you wrong on that? How would that fit in?”

“Ahhh—” Bob thought, clinging to his thesis. “Yeah, yeah, they could count on their being an SUV there in the crowd, but not with off-road tires. Yeah, after the hit, which takes maybe two seconds, they chase a family out of its Bronco, speed-change the tires, and take off cross country, maybe to the top of that hill. A chopper picks ’em up. It sounds pretty good to me, partner.”

“But maybe you have biases. You’re a sniper. Everything to you looks like a sniper job.”

“From ten feet with a .50 Mk.211, it ain’t much like sniping. It’s like blowing stuff up real good.”

“Okay, I think we have to alert this command structure somehow. They’ve got to get people into the area, put a hold on all VIP transit, and maybe—I still don’t like it. It just doesn’t seem Grumley. Does it seem Grumley to you?”

“Until today, I didn’t know a Grumley from a dandelion.”

“Could they shoot up the race? From up above, fire the ten shells into the lead three cars as they move through the pack on a turn? You’d get a massive crash, cars all over the place, the race would be a catastrophe, they’d stop it, cancel it, something.”

Bob saw through that.

“And if someone laid money against the one-in-a-million shot there’d be no winner to the Sharpie 500—well, that person would win a fortune. But he’d get a visit from the Vegas mob enforcer to make sure his win was on the up-and-up, and since it wouldn’t be, he’d get a swim in Lake Tahoe with a pair of cement socks.”

“And it doesn’t seem to need a driver, a speed-tire change, or any of the other stuff. It just doesn’t seem to make any sense,” Nick said.

“And just to make it more ridiculous, the race is almost over. It’s near eleven. They start at eight and do the five hundred laps in about three hours. Man, I am so buffaloed. Come on, Nick, you’re supposed to be smart. Figure it out.”

“I’m tired, I’m old. I feel older than you look.”

“Okay, go back to basics. What do we know, absolutely.”

“We know, absolutely, they have acquired a .50 caliber rifle and a supply of armor-piercing incendiary rounds of a sort the government categorizes as ‘antimatériel.’”

“So,” said Bob, “let’s pursue this particular line. What is matériel?”

“Okay, I’d answer like this: light armor. Limousines, sure. Or, given this environment, power lines, TV trucks, light safes, radio installations, I don’t know, McDonald’s signs, news helicopters, race cars, race car trailers, propane barbecue tanks. It could be any of those. I’m afraid we’re stuck with—”

“Just make the call. You don’t have to designate a target. You just have to flood the zone with law enforcement and security and—”

“What zone?”

“I guess the race zone.”

“Yeah, but, hello, it’s full of three hundred thousand happy campers. Too bad there’s not a nice armored car in the middle of this, chock full of cash. Now that would make some sense. Okay, I’ll make the call and—”

It lay there in the room for a while. Each man considered what Nick had just blurted out. Yes, armored car. Seemingly impregnable, full of cash, stuck in traffic, yet easily taken down by such a tool as an Mk.211.

“What you just said,” said Bob, “now that makes some sense.”

“It does, doesn’t it?” But he had to fight it. “Why would there be an armored car in the middle of all this? It doesn’t track, it’s a bad idea, a red herring, it—”

Nick took out his cell, punched a number. “I’ll call a state police captain I’ve worked with. He might know something,” he said.

When he got through, Bob heard him say, “Hey, Mike. It’s Memphis, sorry for the late call. You’ve been watching the race? Cool, is it over yet? No, I could call back, it’s almost over, but let me just lay something on you. I’m here in Bristol myself. Sorry but it’s important.”

He said to Bob, “Now he’s turning the TV down. Ah, okay, Mike, we have intelligence that some very bad actors are on scene here with a piece of ugly work called an Mk.211 Raufoss antimatériel round. And a .50 caliber rifle to fire the stuff. They could use it to do all sorts of things but the more we think about it, this group seems criminal, not political, and we’re trying to figure out if there’s a target they could unzip with it. I know it sounds ridiculous, but I’m thinking how ideally suited the ordnance would be against some sort of armored car. Is there an armored car in play here that you would know anything—”

He listened as far-off Mike told him all about it.

Then he said, “All right, can you patch through to your command center? I’m going to try to reach them from my end. I’ll try and get a Bureau SWAT team deployed from Knoxville by chopper, and then we’ll move on site fast as we can. Ten-four.”

“Well?” said Bob.

“Come on,” said Nick, “we don’t have time. I’ll explain on the run.”

Bob threw on a light khaki sports coat to cover the gun in Kydex and mags arrayed in clip holders along his backside.

“It’s the concession money,” said Nick. “All of it, cash, small bills, a week’s worth of souvenirs and baseball hats, plus tickets for tonight, hot dog money, beer money, all the money from that NASCAR Village operation. He says it’s a six to eight million take. Now I should say, if you rob a bank and get two million, you’ve really only stolen $200,000 because you’ve got to move it to an overseas cartel, they’ve got to launder it and get it back to the U.S., and they’ll only pay out one on ten. That’s universal—except for this. Eight million small bills—maybe eight hundred to a thousand pounds of deadweight—is eight million. No one for ten. Straight one-for-one. You can start spending immediately, no one can track it.”

“It’s in an armored car?” asked Bob.

“More like a truck. They gather it up during the race and haul it to speedway headquarters. But there’s no vault there. So they bale it up and load it aboard that armored car. When the race is over, that vehicle, with a driver and three or four guards, moves out into the traffic and begins the long crawl to Bristol where it’s vaulted at one of the big downtown banks. The traffic jam, that’s supposedly the security. No one would hit an armored car in a traffic jam, because there’s no way out. But I’m guessing they’ve figured some way—”

It was suddenly clear to Bob.

“I see it. No, they don’t take the swag. They blow open the car, kill or incapacitate the crew. It takes ten seconds with an Mk.211. They set up perimeter security to deal with the cops who will have to fight the tide of panicked fans in the thousands to even get there. This team changes tires fast. Why? Because they ain’t driving down no road. The roads are jammed. They go off-road, they just mounted some kind of powerful off-road, heavy-tread tire. They go off-road, they grind through the most open area, which is that NASCAR Village, they just smash through it, nothing could stand up to the power of that truck. Maybe they’ve amped the engine somehow, to get a lot more power for a few minutes before the engine seizes or catches fire. That’s something the driver could do; he could figure it out.”

“Yeah, but where does that get ’em?”

“It gets ’em to the mountain. The hill, whatever. Up they go, and for that ride they’d need the best driver in the world, someone who’d won hill-climbs and truck demo derbies, the whole nine yards. They crank up that hill five minutes and fifty dead citizens and cops after they first hit the car. Up top, that’s the only safe place for that chopper pickup I came up with earlier. The chopper comes down the mountain range, way out of reach or even sight of any police firepower on scene, it picks them and the dough up, and they’re gone in seconds. They run through the dark low without lights, and nobody will follow them, because a) they can’t see ’em, and b) even if they could, they’re afraid of that .50 caliber, which will easily take a chopper down.”

Nick took up the narrative. “They chopper out of the area, land, split the swag, and they’re gone by dawn. We won’t even find where they’ll land.”

Bob made his choice at that moment. He knew where they’d land. But he had business there too.

“I have to move,” said Nick. “I’m going to try and get a chopper in here and get out there. You don’t have to—”

“Oh, yes I do. You need guns. I’ve got one.”

THIRTY-TWO

The race was over. It was a jim-dandy. Junior won, just beating Carl by shedding him in a pile of the lapped but persistent tail-enders on the last half of number five hundred, when Junior went low, slipped through a gap between Food City and Bass Pro Shop, buzzed dangerously around the blue-green Dewalt reading the apex of the curve—which he knew better than his girlfriend’s inner thighs and which he dreamed of more often—and hit the last straight in FedEx’s wake, slingshotting off the suck, and hitting the checker maybe six feet ahead of Carl’s Office Depot. Carl got caught behind Cheerios—damn him!—then caught a gap and some sling action of his own, but just couldn’t overcome Junior. If it had been a five hundred-lap-plus-thirty-foot race he’d have done it. Okay, so? It’s only one race.

The boys were all cheering, all up and down Volunteer Parkway outside the gigantic speedway structure, where the rug merchants all waited for a last shot at the johns and their families. Less sincerely, the Grumleys lurked, waiting for their big moment.

“Where’d USMC 44 finish?” asked Brother Richard.

“They haven’t read off the order yet—wait, here it is—” and Caleb listened hard to his little radio in the darkness. Then he said, “Fourth, he finished fourth.”

“Cool,” said Brother Richard.

A half-mile off, the speedway was still a source of immense noise, even with the engines finally turned off as the hot and smoky cars were rolled to their garages. It was the roar of the tribe. It was immense, the NASCAR animal in full throat, and above the stadium one could see the illumination not merely of the lights that made night racing possible but the thousands upon thousands of flashbulbs pricking off to record the moment when the young Dale the junior took his trophy.

“Okay, boys,” said the old man, “time to git ’er ready. Say a prayer for fortune if you’re with me, if you are a secret non-believer, that’s okay, ’cause I will say a prayer for you and as I am close to Him, he will look out for you.”

The boys began to prepare. Caleb quietly slipped under the table, pulled two large plastic bins out and withdrew into the dark space made by the tent above and the revetment of water bottles behind. There, in privacy, he removed two large constructions of metal, the upper and the lower of a Barrett .50 caliber M107. Expertly, he fitted the two together, finding the machined parts connected in the perfect joinery of the well-engineered. Pins secured the two units into one solid mechanism. Completed, made whole, it looked like a standard M4 assault rifle after six years in the gym, the familiar lines where they should be, but the whole thing amplified and extended, thickened, lengthened, densified, packed with strength and weight. Another Grumley—he couldn’t see who in the darkness—handed him a heavy magazine with ten Raufoss armor penetrators locked in and held tense under extreme spring tension. He himself slid the heavy thing into the magazine well, heard it click solidly as it found its place. He drew the bolt back, his great strength helping, let it slip forward, moving one of the quarter-pound, 650-grain, tungsten-cored big guys into the chamber, and locked it.

All up and down the line, the Grumley boys were cowboying up. Most wore bulletproof vests, and the guns were a motley of junky but effective Third and Fourth World subguns from various organized crime arsenals around the South, plus some functional American junkers. The inventory included a couple of Swedish K’s; a couple of Egyptian Port Saids (clones of the K), some beat-up Mk-760s from small American manufacturers after the original S&W variant, which was itself a K clone; an Uzi; a kicked-to-shit West Hurley Thompson; a full-auto AK-47. With all the clicking and snapping as mags were locked in, guns were cocked, belts of spare mags were strapped on, body armor was tightened and ratcheted shut, it sounded like chickens eating walnuts on an aluminum floor. But in a few seconds or so, it was done.

“We all set, Pap,” said Caleb, more or less the sergeant.

“Good, you boys stay back there in the dark, the crowd’s coming out now. Lord God Almighty, there’s a vast sea of people.”

And there was. The first of about one hundred fifty thousand people slithered out of the speedway gates, spread when they hit open air, and fanned across the available ground. It was an exodus from the church that was NASCAR, and now these good folks had nowhere to go except back into the dreary real world and no way to get there except to take the slow-motion parade in the opposite direction of the afternoon’s slow-motion parade. A few runners made it to their cars early, began to pick their way out of the densely packed lots. Meanwhile, seeming to materialize from nowhere, the police in their yellow-and-white safety vests with their red-lensed flashlights moved onto the roadway to govern or at least moderate the huge outflow of people and vehicles. Dust hung in the soft summer air, shouts mostly of joy, the clink of bottle on bottle, the pop of cans being sprung to spew brew, the friendly jostle of people of the same values, the hum of insects drawn by the lights, the acrid drift of cigarette and cigar smoke, the occasional boastfulness of the young and dumb, the wail of a too-tired baby, a whole human carnival of happy yet exhausted people.

In just a few minutes gridlock had set in; so many cars, so many folks, so few roads. Honks filled the air, but mostly the crowd had made peace with the ordeal of the egress. In short order, the lanes immediately in front of the Piney Ridge refreshment station were jammed with cars full of citizens, bumper to bumper and door to door in either direction, frozen solid. The people in the cars unaware that a commando force, heavily armed and full of aggression and craziness, lurked just a few feet off in the shadows.

Ain’t you folks gonna git a thrill in just a minute or so, thought Richard.

He was behind the skirmish line, unarmed. No reason for him to be up front and get himself shot up in the early rush. He wouldn’t venture out until the truck was taken down, the guards either surrendered or murdered. He licked his lips, which were dry, and his tongue was also dry. He pulled a bottle of water out, now warm, popped the cap and slugged some down.

“Go easy, Brother Richard. You don’t want to have to pull over for a piss in the middle of all this.”

Everybody laughed.

“Why, Cousin Cletus, if I do, you hold ’em off while I empty the snake, okay?”

More laughter. That Richard. What a joker.

The minutes dragged on, the boys sat patiently, a Marlboro or Lucky firing up in the darkness, the drift of the smoke through the tented space.

“I see her,” said the old man from out front. “Yes sir, here she comes, trying to edge her way in.”

Richard saw it. The vehicle, technically called a “Cash in Transit” truck, was a Ford F-750, probably from Alpine, the biggest of the up-armor specialty firms. It wore a bank emblem on its flat sides and doors, and was a boxy thing, ten feet high and twenty-two long, with the grace of a milk truck from the ’50s blown up to be a parade float. White, it gleamed in the cascade of lights, the rivets in their grid all over the damned thing cast tiny shadows, so unlike the smooth skin and bright primaries of the civilian vehicles, this big, sluggish baby had texture. Its grill was a meshwork of slots that looked like, but weren’t, gun slits, and if the thing was armored to the hilt at the highest upgrade it could withstand anything—except what the Grumleys had prepared for it that night. Squared fenders, a stout body, everything acute-angled off, vault-like, it was made to convey the impression of invincibility, of a moving fortress atop the upgraded shocks and suspension.

Richard could make out the two doomed drivers, blandly sitting behind the three-inch-thick windshield glass, unaware that hell was about to arrive in spades. The two men slouched, like the others having made peace with the ordeal ahead, and the big thing edged its way down the road from speedway headquarters to the merge with Volunteer. As it advanced, waiting in a line to get in another line, it edged ahead ever so damned slowly. People poured around it, sloshed around it, some even clambering on its bumpers as they progressed, the whole thing eerie in the brownish lights of the vapor-mercuries up above. It demanded respect. Twice, vehicles with better position moved aside to permit it entrance, because it was in some sense magical.

But everything was rapidly collapsing into a phenomenon of lights with no one feature predominant, because there were so many sources of illumination, those merc-vapors up top, the lights from the cars in the various lines in the various lanes, the bobbing strobes of the cop monitors, the overhead fast movers that were affixed to various news helicopters and a police ship or two. Beams cut the air this way and that—was it a lightsaber battle from Star Wars VII: Attack of the Baptist Killer Redneck Hell-Raising Natural Born Killers?—and zones of illumination played on the surface of the clouds of dust or smoke that roiled heavily, the whole thing punctuated by sounds of the America of 2008: cars, kids, squeals, shouts, taunts, laughter. In the scene the humans were insubstantial, almost flickering ghosts and shadows.

“Damn,” said Richard to nobody in particular, “is this a great country or what?”

“Hell boys,” said Caleb, “time to git some.”

“Here he comes. Caleb, you ready?”

“Yes sir.”

“Remember, you move with purpose like you’re doing what you’re supposed to be doing. Remember, not through the windows, we need that bulletproof glass on the way up the hill.”

“Yes sir, Pap.”

“I loves you, son. I loves all you boys, you goddamned brave Grumley boys.”

“We love you, Daddy.”

“Brother Richard, I even love you.”

“Reverend, will you take a shower with me after this is over?”

Grumley laughter.

“Such a Sinnerman,” said the old man.

Now it was Caleb’s move. He stepped onto the roadway with the heavy, lengthy weapon—thirty pounds, fifty-eight inches long—and boldly walked across the lanes, dipping in and out, once waiting patiently as an SUV full of kids pulled by, two in the backseat bugeyed at the unbelievable image of a blond hulk in a heavy metal T-shirt, a Razorbacks baseball hat, plugs in his ears, body armor clinging to his upper torso and six feet of the gunliest gun ever made in his hands. But no one could really put it together. He seemed calm because he was calm. He got right up close to the sluggishly moving F-750, at almost-point-blank range, the muzzle three feet from the steel door, the guards looking lazily not around but up the road at the jammed-up lanes of cars and their blinking, on-again, off-again brake lights that yawned before them, and then Caleb fired.

THIRTY-THREE

Vern removed the girl from the bedroom with an insincere smile to her cowed family and took her into the bathroom. He sat down on the toilet, his arm draped across her shoulders. The door was closed.

“Now, sweetie.”

“I don’t like this,” she said, her eyes looking nervously around.

“Now, sweetie, you just calm down. Does Vern look like a man who could hurt a cute little thing like Hannah Ng?”

“Please don’t hurt me.”

“Sweetie, I would never hurt you. In fact, to relax, I want you to think about ice cream. What’s your favorite flavor?”

“I don’t know. I can’t think.”

“Strawberry. Mine too. Now what do you do with a nice big pink strawberry ice cream.”

The girl had shut her eyes. He held her by the arm.

“You lick it. Isn’t that what you do?”

He forced her to her knees.

“You lick it, nice and hard. Ummm, good. Now, Hannah, let’s pretend we got us a nice ice cream right here right now—”

“Let’s go,” called Ernie from the living room.

Damn!

Vern leaned down and gave the little Asian girl a kiss on the cheek.

“I’ll be back for you. We got some fun ahead.”

He raced through the apartment, out the open sliding doors, crossed the lawn, and caught up with his cousin just as Ernie hit the parking lot. They slipped between cars, and Vern saw ahead of him two men coming down the building steps on the other side of the parking lot, lit in the glow of the stairwell. Who the hell was the other guy? Too bad for him, he’s dead too. He indexed his finger above the trigger guard of his Glock for fast application, and he and Ernie described a straight line on the interception of the two targets who, heading on the oblique, were obviously going to a car somewhere farther down in the lot.

Didn’t matter. Was easy. Them boys didn’t know a thing, didn’t have a prayer or a hope. Bang bang, it’d be over. He watched them, as everything seemed to accelerate in time, noting one was the lanky, gray-headed older guy, a Mr. Swagger Pap said, who had been their quarry so many times before and who Pap said killed Carmody and B.J. The other, a beefier guy, police beef in a suit with a thatch of hair, who was talking into a phone.

The Grumleys had their guns out, but the rule was, get close as you can, then get closer, get close enough to touch, get close enough so missing isn’t on the table, shoot ’em fast in the guts, shoot ’em down, then lean over ’em for the head shot, blow their brains out, shoot your gun empty, then get the hell out of town.

It was happening now, it was happening fast, his gun came up, his finger flew to trigger, it was so easy, they picked up their speed on the unsuspecting marks, almost running now.

“Look out,” came a cry from behind, “they’re killers, look out!”

It was a young girl’s voice.

As they raced down the stairwell, Nick held a slight lead and Bob could hear him talking urgently into his cell.

“Officer, this is Special Agent Nick Memphis, FBI, Fed ID 12-054. Lancer, you’ve got to patch me through to the speedway command center, whoever’s in charge. We believe there’s going to be a robbery assault at your location. No, no, I’ve got SWAT operators inbound from Knoxville, but it’ll be a time before they’re on scene. This is a heavy ten-fifty-two by an armed team, maybe with automatic weapons, all units should be alert and ready to move on the sound of the gunfire, somewhere in the speedway vicinity. Please patch me through to your command center, and I will need airborne transportation to the site and need a rendezvous point and—”

They cleared the building, slid through the darkness to Nick’s car, though Bob didn’t know which one it was, and seemed almost to be on the run when Bob heard a voice from across the way screaming, “Look out, they’re killers, look out.” In that same second he saw two hunched men rushing at him, guns out, guns upfront. A gun flashed, there was no noise, but the brightness of the muzzle flash displayed the urgent mug of a handsome-ugly guy and Bob knew Nick was hit. Stricken, he muttered an animal noise, lost a step and all rhythm, and was struggling for his own gun.

It happened fast, faster by far than the speed of coherent thought, faster almost than the pulse rate that was in any event suspended by blood chemicals, and each of the four at close range in the dark devolved into creatures of instinct and training, and the victory would go to the one with the best instinct and the most training. The determining factor was distance; up close, skill counted for nothing, but at ten feet out in the dark, it wasn’t just who shot fast, but who shot best, who had the knack to hit movers in bad light on the fly.

Bob’s hand flew at a speed which could never be known or measured, so fast that he himself had no sense of it happening, he just knew that the Kimber .38 Super was locked in his fist, his elbow locked against his side, his wrist stiff, the weird, maybe autistic brainfreak in his head solving the complexities of target identification, acquisition, alignment that had been the gift of the Swagger generations since the beginning, his muscles tight, all except the trigger finger, which—you get this about ten thousand repetitions into your shooting program—flew torqueless and true as it jacked back, slipped forward to reset then jacked back again, four times, all without disturbing the set of the gun in his hand. Brass bubbles flew through the air, as spent shells pitched by the Mach 2 speed of the flying slide as it cycled, all four within an inch or three of the others, and Bob put four .38 Super CorBons into the center-mass of the fellow closest to him, who immediately changed his mind about killing.

Nick fired. Bob’s opponent fired finally, but into the ground. The man on Nick fired twice more from a smallish silver handgun, though crazily, and Bob vectored in on him and fired three more times in that superfast zone that seems to defy all rational laws of physics. The night was rent by flash. From afar it must have looked like a photo opportunity as a beautiful star entered a nightclub, the air filling with incandescence, the smell of something burned, and the noise lost in the hugeness of all outdoors. But it was just the world’s true oldest profession, which is killers killing.

It was over in less than two seconds.

Bob dumped his not-quite-empty mag, slammed a new fresh one in and blinked to clear his eyes of strobe, then looked for targets. The guy he hit second was down flat, arms and legs akimbo, his silver revolver three or four feet away, weirdly gleaming in the dark from a random beam of light. The other fellow, hit first, was not down but he had dropped his gun. He walked aimlessly about, holding his stomach and screaming, “Daddy, I am so sorry!”

Bob watched as he went to a big car and settled next to it, his face resting on the bumper. The lack of rigidity in the body posture told the story.

Bob knelt to Nick.

“Hit bad, partner?”

“Ah, Christ,” said Nick, “can you believe this?”

“No, but it sure happened. I’m looking, I don’t see no blood on your chest.”

“He hit me in the leg, stupid fucker. Oh Christ, what a mess.”

By this time, people had come to their balconies and looked down upon the fallen men.

“Call an ambulance, please. This officer is hit. We are police!” yelled Bob.

But in seconds another man had arrived, a smallish Indian with a medical bag.

“I am Dr. Gupta,” he said, “the ambulance has been called. Can I help?”

“He’s hit in the leg. I don’t think it’s life threatening. Not a spurting artery.”

The doctor bent over, quickly ripped the seam of Nick’s suit pants with scissors, and revealed a single wound about an inch inboard on his right thigh, maybe off-center enough to have missed bone. The wound did not bleed profusely, but persistently. It was an ugly, mangled hole, muscles puckered and torn, bad news for weeks or months but maybe not years.

“Tie,” said the doctor.

Bob quickly unlooped Nick’s tie and handed it to the doctor, who wrapped it into a tourniquet above the wound, knotted it off, then pulled out and cracked open a box, removed a TraumaDEX squeeze applicator and squirted a dusting of the clotting agent on the wound to stop the blood flow.

“Don’t know when the ambulance will arrive in all this traffic. Can you give him something for pain?”

“No, no,” said Nick, “I am all right. Where’s that damned phone. Oh, shit, we can’t get a chopper in here. Oh, Christ, I need to—”

“You ain’t going nowhere,” said Bob, “except the ER.”

“Oh, Christ,” said Nick. “I hope they got my message.” But even as he said it, he knew it was hopeless, as did Bob. The shooters would bring their weapons to bear, the cops were strung out, the situation was a mess, nobody would know a thing, it was—

“I’ll get there,” said Bob.

“How, you can’t—”

“My daughter’s bike. It’s over there. I can ramrod through the traffic. I’ve got some firepower. I know where they’re going. I can intercept them at the hill, put some lead on them, maybe stop them from that chopper pick-up.”

“Swagger, you can’t—” but then he stopped.

“Okay,” said Bob. “Who, then? You see anybody else around? You want these lowlife fucks to get away with this thing, and the contempt it shows for all law enforcement, for civilians, for anything that gets in the way? You see anyone else here?”

But there wasn’t anybody else around. Funny, there never was.

“Here,” Nick finally said, “maybe this’ll stop the cops from shooting you.” He reached into his shirt and pulled out a badge on a chain around his neck. “This makes you officially FBI and there goes my career. Good luck. Oh, Jesus, you don’t have to do this.”

“Sure, why not,” said Bob. “I got nothing better to do. It’ll be my kind of fun.” Bob threw the chain around his neck so that the badge hung in the center of his chest, signifying, for the first time since 1975, his official righteousness.

He rose, walked through the gathered crowd. He walked across the parking lot to his car, but next to it, came across the curious scene of a Vietnamese family standing in a semicircle around the gunman who had fallen against the bumper of his red Cadillac. One of them was a pretty young girl in a Hannah Montana T-shirt.

“You yelled the warning?” he asked.

“Yes. They were in our apartment all day, scaring my family to death. Horrible men. Monsters,”

“Can on co em. Co that gan da va su can dam cua co da cuu sinh mang chung toi,” he said.

She smiled.

He walked to his car, popped the trunk. He withdrew the DPMS 6.8 rifle, and inserted a magazine with twenty-eight rounds. He looped its sling, held by a single cinch, diagonally across his body so that the gun was down across his front with enough play to allow him to get it either to shoulder or a prone position. He looked at the monitor atop it, that EOtech thing that looked like a ’50s space-cadet toy, figured out which of several buttons turned it on, so that if he had to do it in the dark, he’d know which one to use.

He threw on the vest Julie had provided, in which he’d inserted, in dedicated mag pouches, the other nine magazines, all full with ammo.

Slamming the trunk, he walked back to the stairwell where Nikki’s bike rested under a tarp. He ripped the canvas free and climbed aboard the Kawasaki 350. Shit, the pain in his hip from Kondo Isami’s last cut flared hard and red, but he tried not to notice it. He turned the key to electrify the bike. It took three or four kicks to gin the thing to life, but he saw that he had plenty of fuel. He heeled up the stand, lurched ahead, kicked it into gear, pulled into the lot, evaded the gawkers, and took off into the night, running hard, disappearing quickly.

Nick, his leg throbbing but feeling no pain, watched him go.

Lone gunman, he thought, remembering Lawrence’s words defining the American spirit: “hard, stoic, isolate, and a killer.” But on the Night of Thunder, so necessary.

THIRTY-FOUR

The muzzle flash of the Barrett 107 was extraordinary, a ball of fire that bleached the details from the night, so bright that it set bulbs popping in eyes for minutes. Caleb, who was holding it under his shoulder like a gangster’s tommy gun, felt the heavy surge of the recoil as the weapon rocked massively against his muscle, almost knocking him from his feet, while at the same moment fierce blowback from the point of impact lashed against his face. Without glasses, he’d have burned out his eyes. The muzzle blast, expanding radially at light speed, ripped up a cyclone of dust from the earth beneath; it seemed a tornado had briefly touched down, filling the air with substance.

The 650-grain bullet hit the steel door two inches below the window frame, blowing a half-inch-size gaper and leaving a smear of burnt steel peeling away from the actual crater. It took both driver and assistant driver down, spewing a foam of blood on the far window inside the cab, after the tungsten core, liberated from the center of the bullet by the secondary detonation, flew onward at several thousand miles per hour and ripped them apart.

“Jesus Christ,” said Caleb, himself awestruck and even a little nonplused by the carnage he had unleashed.

“The rear, the rear,” screamed the old man.

Caleb lumbered around behind the truck with the heavy weapon in his hands, locked under his shoulder, as the Grumleys fanned out to surround the vehicle, while at the same time gesturing with their submachine guns to frozen passengers in the jammed cars to abandon ship and run like hell.

“G’wan, git the hell out of here, git them kids out of here, there’s going to be a lot of goddamned shooting.”

Caleb closed his eyes, fired one more time, point blank, into the rear of the truck from dead six o’clock. He even remembered to crouch and hoist the weight to orient the gun at a slight upward angle so that the tungsten rod it flung wouldn’t continue forward, exit the end of the armored box, shred the dash, and end up chewing the bejesus out of the engine. That would have been a mess.

Again, the fireball blinded any who happened to observe the discharge from within a hundred yards, though most civilians had abandoned their cars and were running en masse in the opposite direction. Again, the muzzle blast unleashed a cyclone of atmospheric disturbance. Again, the recoil was formidable, even if slightly dissipated by the give in Caleb’s arms and body as he elasticized backward from the blow. This time, for some reason, the noise was present in force and Caleb, even with ear plugs in, felt his eardrums cave under pressure of the blast.

A crater ruptured the upper half of the rear door.

A Grumley leaned close and yelled into the hole, almost as if there were a chance in hell anyone inside could hear, “You boys best open up or he’ll fire six more in there.”

There was a moment, then the door unlatched. Two uniformed men, with darkened faces from the blast, their own blood streaming from ear and nose, someone else’s splattered randomly about them, eyes unseeing for the brightness, staggered out, fightless and dazed. Instantly the Grumleys were on them, disarmed them, and shoved them to one side of the road, where they collapsed and crawled to a gully to try and forget the horror of what they had just seen—the third member of their crew, who’d evidently taken a full injection of flying tungsten frontally, vaporizing the upper half of his body. His legs and lower torso lay on the floor, like the remains of a scarecrow blown down and scattered by a strong wind; the plastic bags of baled cash stacked on racks now wore a bright dappling of his viscera.

“Damn thang means business,” a Grumley said.

“Go, go, boys, git going, no goddamned lollygagging,” shouted the old man, a kind of cheerleader, amazingly animated and liberated by the violence. “Watch for them coppers.”

A Grumley took up a position at each of the four compass points around the truck. The idea was to try and locate approaching police through the lines of cars, and engage them far away, because with their handguns the cops couldn’t bring effective fire from that range. Meanwhile, other Grumleys set about their business. One dragged the second half of poor Officer Unlucky out of the truck, and dumped him. Another flew to the bags and began to pull out the ones containing change, which he dragged out and dumped. No need for extra weight on the upcoming hill.

Now it was Richard’s turn.

“Tire guys, go, go, get it done,” he shouted, and as they had so often practiced, a Grumley team of three hit the rear axle of the vehicle, got the heavy power-jack underneath, and with swift, focused strength jerked the thing atilt. Meanwhile, from roadside, two heavy tires with off-road treads meant to bite and tear at the earth in maximum, tractor-pull traction, trundled out, driven by Grumley power to the site of the armored truck, and the changing commenced.

Richard raced to the engine with his trick bag, not looking at the cab, not wanting to see what remained of the crew; he’d let Grumley minions clear that mess out. A Grumley struggled against the locked hood, then fired a blast of tracer into it. The bullets tore and bounced and in seconds had reduced the metal to tatters so that the hood could be lifted and hoisted high.

Richard set to work, as flashlights beamed onto the chugging complexities of the engine. He waited till a Grumley turned it off, and it went still. It was exactly as he expected, a Cat 7-stroke diesel, producing around 250 horsepower, which is why the big truck would always move sluggishly, underpowered for the extra weight of the armor. Quickly, he plunged into the nest of wires, found the MAP sensor, disconnected it, and reconnected the Xzillaraider wire harness. Plug and play was the principle. As the Grumleys held the flashlights, his fingers flew to the right wires, cut them, and quickly and expertly clipped in the new wires. He grounded the assembly, this time taking the time to unscrew the negative terminal, carefully wrap the grounding wire against the plug, then rescrew the cable terminal, making sure everything was nice, tidy, and tight. He paid no attention to what was going on around him, and so maximized was his concentration that he missed the crash of a helicopter brought down by Caleb. Then he leapt back to the rear of the engine compartment, pulled a knife, and cut through the rubber grommet and stuffed the wire harness through into the cab.

Ugh. Now the unpleasantness. When he got to the F-750’s cab, however, the bodies were gone and some Grumley with a thoughtful touch had thrown a wad of NASCAR T-shirts on the blood and flesh matter that the Mk.211 had blown loose from the drivers. It wasn’t so bad; no hearts or lungs or heads lay about, it only looked like several gallons of raspberry sorbet had melted.

He got to work, linking the harness of wires to the Xzillaraider module. He quickly wired the unit to the fuse box, then slid behind the wheel, paying no attention to the three gunshots that ricocheted weirdly off the three-inch glass, leaving a smear, nor to the fact that the whole scene appeared to be lit by an orange glow, as the crashed helicopter blazed brightly in the middle of NASCAR Village. Under normal circumstances, who would not stare at an aviation disaster such as that one? But these weren’t normal circumstances, and Richard was much more fascinated by the blink sequence on the module. Yep, as he turned the key, the lights went through their positions and ended up in the red of high power.

He turned to see the Reverend, a Peacemaker in his hand and a cowboy hat on his head, and Brother Richard said, “When the tires are finished, old man, we are good to go.”

While Richard worked, the old man had been commanding Grumley defenses. His gunners peered three-sixty, looking for targets, and when a poor police officer approached on foot, illuminated by his traffic safety jacket, a Grumley put a burst of 9mm tracer into him. The tracers were a wonderful idea: they made manifest the strength and invincibility of the Pap Grumley firepower.

Pap watched as a sleek streak of 9-mils raced down the corridor between abandoned cars, struck the poor officer, who had not even drawn his pistol, and flattened him. Those that missed their targets spanged off the cars on either side, pitched skyward into the night air. Hootchie mama, it was the Fourth of July! It was Jubilee! It was hell come to earth, fire, brimstone, the whole goddamned Armageddon thing.

“Good shooting,” he yelled, “that’ll keep their damned heads down.”

Then someone poked him in the ribs and he looked down and saw a black hole in the lapel of his powder blue Wah Ming Chow custom suit. Fortunately the armored vest underneath stopped the bullet, but it meant some cop had fired from nearby up on the hill to the right.

“Over there,” he commanded, and two Grumleys put out a blaze of noon light in the form of a half-mag apiece. If they got the cop or not, nobody could say, but the bullets sure chewed the hell out of an SUV in line to get out of a parking lot. Fortunately for all concerned, it had been long abandoned and so if anyone died, it would only have been a copper.

The sound of shots rang out everywhere as Grumleys on the perimeter either saw or thought they saw policemen slithering closer, and answered with long, probing bursts of tracer. Now and then something caught fire, including the rear of a Winnebago, a souvenir stand whose supply of T’s and ball caps went up in flames, a propane heater for a barbecue stand. These small disasters added yet more hellish illumination to flicker across the already incredible scene, part monster movie (the citizens flee the beast), part war movie (the noise, the tracers, the screams of the wounded), and part NASCAR documentary (the tire crew operates at top speed, well choreographed and rehearsed) as the Grumley tire team, having gotten one of the off-road tires rigged, switched sides of the F-750, and went hard to work on the other.

But then a new source of illumination shocked all the Grumleys with its relentless quality. It was a harsh beam of light from a state police helicopter thirty feet up and fifty yards out, catching everything in high, remorseless relief.

“Drop your firearms,” came the amplified order, “you are covered, drop your firearms and—”

“Caleb, take ’er down,” yelled the old man.

“Pap, you sure?”

“It’s copper, boy, they about to fire.”

“Got it.”

Caleb set up the Barrett on the hood of an abandoned car next to the F-750. He shouldered the weapon for the first time, drew it tight to him, and put his eye to the scope—he had no idea, but it happened to be a superb Schmidt & Bender 4x16 Tactical model—and in a second, as he adjusted his eye to the focal length, saw the black shape of the helicopter behind the blazing radiance of the light which was quadrisected by the cross hairs of the scope. He fired. The gun kicked so hard it broke his nose.

“Ow, fuck,” he screamed, thinking, Wouldn’t want to do that again, goddammit.

He put a 650-grain Mk.211 into the helicopter, right through the engine nacelle, and the bird climbed upward abruptly as the pilot realized he was under heavy fire. But then all his linkages went, and from aircraft the thing alchemized into sheer weight, beyond the influence of anything except gravity, and it simply fell from the air, straight down into NASCAR Village, nose forward. There it hit, its rotors chawing up a circle of dust from every bite. It seemed to die like an animal for a few seconds, still and broken, and then it exploded, an incredibly bright, oily, napalmesque four-thousand-degree burn. It lit the scene like day, exposing the fleeing masses, the fallen and trampled, the occasional crouching police officer popping away ineffectively with a handgun from two hundred yards out. Then the glare dulled and subsided, and all detail was lost.

“That’ll keep them boys far away,” yelled the old man.

“I’d like to git me another, Pap,” said Caleb.

“You just wait on it, son, goddamn, them other birds is far away.” And it was true, for a mile out, a number of choppers had settled into orbit.

“Tires done,” yelled a Grumley.

“Richard, we are set to rock out of here.”

“Okay,” yelled Richard from the cab. “Git the boys aboard, all that want to come.”

“Time to go, fellas.”

With that, the Grumleys descended upon the F-750. That is, the armed Grumleys. The tire boys had been well prepped and knew there wasn’t enough room aboard for all of them. Instead, they moseyed to the edge of the cone of light, and there, in darkness, peeled off armored vests, put on new baseball hats, and melted off into the trees. There were a few Grumley cars hidden in outlying spots to which they’d have no trouble proceeding, and would rendezvous later for their split of the swag. But now it was left to Richard and the shooters to get the load out of there.

Richard, in neutral, rode the pedal as his gunmen jumped aboard. Pap climbed into the other seat.

“Four minutes,” he said, looking at his watch. “By God, we are ahead of schedule, don’t think we’ve taken a wound, much less a kill, and nothing left to do but to drive on out of here, Richard. Let them boys shoot at us all they want, ain’t going do no damage.”

Richard shifted from neutral, gunned ahead, battered the car in front away until he had maneuver room. He turned the truck, found an angle between two abandoned cars pinning him on his right, and smashed between them. They fought the strength of his vehicle. The clang of vibrations loosened everyone’s dentures, the metal screamed, but the cars yielded to the pumped-up CIT vehicle. Freed, he turned left, rode the shoulder for fifty feet, then turned right down an access road toward the speedway. This road took him to a bridge over a gully, and he pulled across it. Before him, pristine but not quite deserted, lay the heart of the kingdom, the confluence of courage for sale, engineering genius, soap opera, family feud, grudge, redemption, and failure, along with hats and shirts and signed portraits, the trailers turned to shops, the industrial pavilions, the souvenir and bric-a-brac outlets, the beer joints, and the cash machines that were NASCAR Village. It was the only thing between them and the mountain a mile away.

THIRTY-FIVE

Swagger had no trouble at first, and raced through the streets of Bristol, skewing and fishtailing around curves, zipping in and out of the traffic, as most people were off the streets or, if in their cars, intent on the racing news that had turned into robbery news. But the traffic began to thicken as he got through downtown and headed out the Volunteer Parkway toward the speedway and the civic disaster that engulfed it.

Signs of the disaster were everywhere as he buzzed at eighty down the road; it seemed that signal lights pulsed from every direction, and the traffic soon began to coalesce into something dense and motionless. He diverted to the shoulder but found that congested with fleeing citizens. He veered back onto the roadway and found the lane between jammed cars also impenetrable because of the panicked crowd.

He pulled up, looking for an alternate route from the mess of fleeing civilians and abandoned cars that solidified the parkway before him, when a cop on foot materialized from nowhere and started screaming, “Buddy, get that goddamn thing out of here, do you know what’s—”

But then Bob offered him the magic talisman of the FBI badge, and the man’s eyes slid quickly to the assault rifle Bob wore crosswise down the front of his body, and his eyes bugged.

“You got an update?” Bob said.

“Well, it’s a real bad ten-fifty-two, lots of shots fired, officers down all over the place. They got some kind of cannon or—”

“Can you get through to command on that thing?” He indicated the radio unit pinned to the man’s lapel.

“It’s a mess, I can try.”

“Okay, tell them FBI recommends they get their SWAT units to the mountain overlooking the speedway. They’re going to try to take that truck up there and go out by helicopter.”

“What truck?”

“It’s an armored-car job. They want to take all the baled cash to Mexico or wherever and anybody who gets in their way gets shot up. Now make the call.”

“Sir, we can’t move nobody in there now. It’s a mess, with thousands of civilians in the immediate and we can’t get through ’em.”

“Are there secondary routes to the mountain?”

“Not really. Lots of little streets, but nothing straight that ain’t jammed with cars.”

“Okay, advise SWAT to get as close as possible then move out on foot. It’s the only way. Now someone has to intercept them and I don’t see anybody around so it looks like it’s me. You tell me my next move.”

“You’re it? You’re the whole FBI? A guy on a bike?”

“Better yet, an old guy on a bike. We have people incoming by chopper, I’m advised. Look, we’re wasting time. How do I get to that mountain? Up ahead’s no good.”

“Okay, sir, I’d fight my way down Volunteer best as possible. Too bad you don’t have a siren on that thing.”

“I liberated it from a civilian.”

“You go down and about a mile before the speedway, you’ll hit Groverdale Road. You left-turn on that, follow it to something called Cedarwood Circle. You can cut through somebody’s yard there and you want to find Shady Brooks Drive, it’s not much, but it curls around behind some houses that have probably given their yards up to parking, and that’ll take you alongside the hill before it heads back to the parkway. You may want to leave the road when you’re next to the mountain, as I’m thinking there’s nothing up there except fields and stuff and maybe you can move faster. I’m guessing that’s the only clear way.”

“Got it.”

“You want my body armor?”

“Thanks, officer, I don’t have time.”

“When this is over, I’ll have to cite you for no helmet and driving off roadways.”

“You do that. Mr. Hoover’ll pay the fine.”

“Who?”

“Never mind, son. You get on that squawk box and try and get SWAT where I told you.”

“Yes sir. Good hunting, Special Agent.”

“Thanks.”

With that Bob spurted ahead, trying to ease his way between fleeing citizens, at last finding a fairly clear path between cars on the wrong side of the road. He never got into third gear. Up ahead the disaster played out; it seemed all the squad cars in the world were on the perimeter while the sky above was filled with the lights of orbiting choppers. He became aware of glare against the darkness which could only signify something burning hot, eating up aviation fuel, and that stench seemed in the air as well. He could hear no shots because of the sound of the engine, and now and then a hard-moving foot patrolman would try to wave him down and get him out of there, but the FBI badge made these phantoms depart.

At last he hit Groverdale, which took him down a road lined with modest houses, where each homeowner had turned his land over to parking use. The rate, he saw from the remaining signs, was a hundred dollars a night. Most people had been glad to pay it, and now most of them were in cars, caught in a thermal stew of light, dust, exhaust, cigarette smoke, and body odor, the cars locked bumper-to-bumper. But Bob made pretty good progress just along the edge of the shoulder where the road dissolved into grass and the walkers had moved up a bit, giving him room.

He found himself in a bright cul-de-sac, where the illumination blocked out all sense of what lay beyond. He had a sense, possibly from a new, dead quality to the echoes, possibly from the imposition of a kind of dampness on the sultry air, of a mountain, a huge, green obstacle, close at hand. Between the houses he could see glimpses of NASCAR Village, jiggles of flame, and everywhere, it seemed, emergency service vehicles trying to penetrate the gridlock of wreckage, but hopelessly behind the curve, unaware of what was happening to whom. He thought it was better he had no radio contact with any of this, for the network would have been a crazed blur of garbled facts, glaring misinterpretations, wrong advice, command ego, reluctance. It was like radio traffic during a big attack in that far off fairyland called Vietnam, all but forgotten these days but still the crucible that burned in Bob and made him the man he was.

He cut between two houses, almost put-putting along, riding the throttle grip and clutch grip and the gears between first and second, really defying the bike’s true nature, which was to rush ahead, faster and faster. He skidded, found himself in a backyard where folks clustered around a radio and looked at him fearfully. A shotgun or two seemed to come his direction.

“FBI!” he yelled, holding up the badge. “Which way to the fight?”

A fellow in Bermudas with a beer in one hand and a Remington 870 in the other gestured onward, the direction he was headed.

“You go get ’em,” he screamed. “Let me finish this beer and I’ll be right behind.”

“You’d best sit this one out, sir. You need to protect wife and family and in-laws.”

“Yes sir,” said the guy, settling into a lawn chair. “FBI with a machine gun on a Kawasaki in my back yard. Goddamn, ain’t I seen everything now.”

Bob lurched ahead, through a line of bushes, into another back yard, the bike grinding and chawing through a garden. Threading between houses, he found himself on a still-narrower road—this had to be Shady Brooks Drive, which was really only wide enough for one car, and which was jammed with them, all going the way Bob wasn’t.

But there was room on the shoulder, and he got all the way up into third for a while, at last running free of cars. Then he saw why. The road wound back to the right, toward the parkway, toward NASCAR Village itself, and that small metropolis now blazed like London in the blitz. Something had ramrodded through it, strewing wreckage and ruin everywhere.

But Bob saw clearly that proceeding in this direction would prove nothing, for it would take him only where his enemies had been.

He looked to the left, saw trees in pale illumination and saw that it had to be the base of the mountain. His thought now was to run the edge of the incline and see if he could cut trail, and where the boys had gone up, follow them.

It seemed to take for-goddamned-ever. He couldn’t run full out—the way was tough, and he had to wiggle this way and that off-road and around natural obstacles. He couldn’t see far enough ahead to make any speed at all, and though the land looked flat, it yielded up a bumpiness concealed in the height of the grass.

He came at last to some sort of installation in the lee of the mountain, a complex of corrugated tin buildings sealed off by cyclone fence, its approach from some other angle. He prowled around the perimeter and came upon a gate that had been smashed in. No lawman had made it this far. He pulled open the gate, found himself at last on level roadway, and followed the tracks of a heavy vehicle with born-to-raise-hell treads on the tires that had churned its way back beyond the buildings. At last he found an archway in the trees where a much-disturbed dirt road and dust in the air signified the recent passing of a major vehicle. The road had to lead up.

Bob circled, backtracked a hundred or so yards, then gunned his engine and jumped gears. He hit the road in a fishtail of spewed mud, slithered around a boulder, penetrated heavy woods, and began the stark upward climb, his bike fighting the mud below and the gravity that pulled it backward.

THIRTY-SIX

Brother Richard paused for a second, feeling the thrill of the moment, feeling the low hum of vibration running from the amped diesel to his foot on the pedal, feeling his fingers in barest contact with the truck through the wheel, feeling all the million little tingles of tremor and jiggle and bounce that signified a vehicle with a load, a lot of fuel, and a wide open road.

“Richard, boy, goddamn, time’s a wasting,” said the Reverend.

“No, no, just look for a second. Look at it now to fix it in your mind.”

“What you talkin’ about, boy? All this here don’t matter a frog’s fart, just get us to the mountain!”

“It matters to me, old man.” He smiled, turned and looked at the old man, and the Reverend saw for the first time how insane Richard was. He swallowed. The driver was one twisted visitor from beyond Pluto with his superiority, his mechanical and driving genius, and now this, his weird and furious insistence of enjoying the ride as if it were sex.

Richard winked.

“Remember Slim Pickens in Strangelove?”

What the hell the boy talking about? The Reverend thought this was crazyman talk.

“Remember ‘Yee-haw,’ the ride down to Armageddon, the sheer joy of it all? Well, old man, it’s yee-haw time!”

Richard punched it. With a lurch even its toughened-up shocks couldn’t soften, the heavy cash truck surged forward. First up was some sort of Jack Daniels tent, the center of which was a huge construct of whiskey bottles and cases. Richard aimed and hit dead zero. He felt the flimsy canvas yield without a whisper, devoured by the roaring bull of the truck, and the whiskey bottles shattered in a spew of brownish chaos, asparkle with the light, blown this way and that by the big vehicle’s velocity. It was a whiskey explosion. He emerged from the mess with a truck bathed in eighty-proof Jack, good for curing colds, relieving virgins of their burden, burying grudges or exposing them, as well as causing the ruin of many good men of high birth and low, and being a boon companion on a long flight through lightning.

“Richard, goddamn boy, you just git us to the hill. Don’t you be smashing things.”

But Richard had another agenda, and the Reverend now saw that this thing here, this glory-run through the civilization that was NASCAR, this was the point.

“See them feathers fly?” Richard shouted, eyes lit by the glare of superego blitzed on brain chemicals. “Well, they shouldn’ta run!”

He was truly insane, particularly to the narrow mind of Alton Grumley, who didn’t realize Richard was channeling Bo Hopkins from the first shoot-out in The Wild Bunch, nor that he had morphed into both Holden and Borgnine.

“Let’s go,” he said. Then he answered himself, “Why not?” and let a little sliver of psycho’s giggle escape, just as Borgnine’s Dutch had in that movie all those years ago.

“Richard, Richard, we don’t have the time.”

Richard then hit the pedestal on which an orange Toyota Camry, Daytona subvariant, was mounted twenty feet above all as part of Toyota’s very polished pavilion. He didn’t hit it straight on; it was more of a glancer, the point being to knock the car to the ground. In this humble desire, he succeeded, and the sleek vehicle pitched nose first into the mud, then toppled like a flipped turtle onto its back. Richard continued his war on the Japanese by clipping the corner of the Toyota structure, a piece of airport-like architecture meant to suggest the future, and his blow was so well considered that half of the roof went down, shattering glass and burying display cars in rubble inside.

He accelerated, took out this or that little place, the details were unimportant to him, saw people flee before him in both terror and glee and—oh, boy, fun, fun, fun till Daddy took the T-Bird away—found himself lined up perfect dead-on zero angle for the concourse of driver retail outlets, those trailer-truck souvenir shops where each of the big guys had heroic portraiture, replica clothing, ball caps, leathers, books, and related vanities on sale.

Richard revved the truck, enjoying himself. It was here he noted with amusement a certain base human truth. It was not he alone who looked upon the organization of commerce, the standardization of currency, the capitalist system, and had a violent impulse to destroy it all. He liked to crush things, sure, but so did lots of Americans. Yep, and it seemed that there were hundreds, maybe thousands, watching him. The moms and the kids and the old guys had fled. Not the young ones, the key NASCAR demographic of fourteen to thirty-six, southern, male, employed, tattooed (at least three), smoker, drinker, carouser, fighter. These guys, in the thousands, had somehow sensed that a show was about to begin.

“Can you hear it, old man?” Richard asked.

The Reverend could. It was soft, a murmur at first, but it picked up, the chant, “Go, Go, Go,” until it became “Go, Go, Go!” and Richard was nothing if he wasn’t the fellow who knew how to play to a crowd.

He punched. The roar rose, the windshield blurred with speed, then jolted with impact after impact, pitching this way, then that, tossing stuff through the air either whole or in many pieces. He fishtailed and jackrabbited his way in a perfect, high-test zigzag of destruction, hitting and smashing the truck trailers, which yielded by tipping or jumping or simply collapsing in shame. In thirty loud seconds Driver’s Row looked like Battleship Row after the first wave of Japanese dive bombers. For good measure, samurai Richard-san pounded the snot out of a cash machine at the end of the formation, and dollars flew everywhere.

Richard heard the cheer of the crowd. He looked in his side mirror and was saddened to see that he had started no fires, though he’d knocked down some electric wires and they bled sparks in a few places, dangerous and beautiful and spectacular at once. Then suddenly one of them ignited something and the fire rose and leaped, at least on one half of Driver’s Row, and soon enough flames consumed a great many of the battered retail installations.

Damn, that was good! Do it git better?

“Richard, my poor Grumleys in the back. They ain’t got no seatbelt.”

“Their heads are too hard for injury. You can’t hurt a Grumley by hitting him in the skull. But okay, let’s go.”

He came next to a little bridge across a gully, initially cut off by traffic blocks set in the earth. But a less important Grumley job had been to wander down there during the race itself and pull them out. Richard rumbled across the bridge, pulled up an incline, and came again to flatness and temptation. Now the speedway was half a mile behind him, the mountain half a mile before him, and the structures on this side of the gully less substantial.

“Go, Richard,” shouted the old man.

This wouldn’t be as fun. It was all ticky-tack, tents and ramshackle lean-tos, all of it held together by aluminum and canvas and tape and twine, representing the lower end of the NASCAR money pyramid. Not corporate power but scavenging entrepreneurial nomadism.

“Ho hum,” said Richard. “Don’t think nothing’ll burn or electrify, sorry to say.”

“Richard, you don’t got to narrate everthing. This ain’t a damn movie.”

“Oh, it is, old man. You’re Tommy Lee Jones, avuncular and charming, but now old and weary. I’m the mean Kevin Costner, not the sensitive Kevin, Caleb is Marky Mark, and maybe somewhere there’s a hero who’ll bring us down, but Clint retired and nobody took his place, so I don’t think so.”

After these important comments, Richard finally consented to do his job, and roared through the lesser precincts of NASCAR with much less pizzaz, as if he’d grown bored, having the attention span of a gnat. It was just snap, crackle, and pop, as the flimsy structures were eaten alive by the power of the Cash in Transit truck, and no pile of hats or Chinese Confederate flags or funnel cakes or barbecued ribs and sausages could stand against the onrush. Beer exploded, tables of goods were splattered, tents billowed as their ropes were cut, signs fell, but it lacked the FX grandeur of the previous few minutes’ work. As spectacle, it had fallen. His esthetic sense somewhat blunted, he glumly soldiered on.

But as tactical enterprise, the genius of the plan soon became evident. There simply was no way any four-wheeled vehicle could have followed them, because Richard left behind him so much more damage than had been there before, and whether or not planned, the dynamic of the crowd, ebbing this way and that, opening before him, then solidifying behind him, precluded penetration. Then too, of the few roads around NASCAR Village, all were impenetrable, because all were jammed with civilians headed out, not in. Many of those people had abandoned their cars upon seeing the panicked crowd and hearing stories of machine guns, armed guerrillas, terrorists, Klansmen, militia. So in the vast mess, only the armored truck had any maneuverability, purely on the strength of its ruthlessness. It could and would drive through anything, it could and had driven down anybody, it was without conscience, a Moby Dick on land, or a Godzilla or a Beast from Twenty Thousand Fathoms that regarded humanity as insects to be crushed. It was just diesel nihilism on four tires, driven by venality and psychopathology and the fury of sons who’d disappointed their fathers, and it was unstoppable.

Richard drove on, he flattened, folks danced in delight, some throwing beer bottles at him, not so much to stop him but to participate in the wanton pleasure of the evening. Now and then a police bullet sounded a pitiful ping as it bounced off the heavy armor but failed to penetrate. At the far end, the anticlimax arrived with a whimper. Richard found a dirt road that led to a gated installation in the lee of the mountain, built up some nice speed and fragmented the cyclone gate with his Ford cyclone, and roared along the edge of the mountain, which presented itself to him as an incline swaddled in trees.

“There ’tis,” shouted the old man, and indeed, up ahead, an archway in the trees revealed a dark portal, behind which lay the serpentine of a switchbacked track to the top, glistening with perpetual mud from a dozen mountain springs, its existence all but forgotten, a relic left over from logging days. “Here’s where you earn all that goddamn money we done paid you!”

“Think there’s a man in America who could get a rig this heavy up a road this steep and sharp? Well there ain’t but one, and he took the Pike’s Peak hill climb three times running and some other uphills as well, and has done the trick on bikes and go-carts and destructo jalopies and tractors and big-daddy trucks and hell, even a kiddie cart or two.”

“You’d best have it, boy.”

“Hang on, Grandpappy. The elevator is reading Up.”

He plunged ahead.

A lesser man would have wept. Not Caleb. His shattered nose blossomed blood, and he felt like a piece of popped corn in a corn popper, floating this way and that, a hard trick with a thirty-pound rifle in his hands.

“Goddamn him, that sumbitch, gonna whip his ass!” screamed another flying Grumley, immediately before hitting the goddamned wall or sharp shelf or any of the dozens of hard surfaces inside the box.

“The fucking little prick, he doin’ this ’cause he thinks he’s special, it’s his little trick on us poor dumb Grumleys.”

“He thinks we ain’t human!”

It was, in other words, no fun in the box. The five boys each were made clumsy by submachine guns, their body armor, their spare magazines, the darkness, the claustrophobia. It was like a submarine undergoing a depth-charge raid by the Japanese. They were tossed this way, then that, without visibility. On top of that, shrapnel, in the form of thirty-pound bales of bills in tamper-evident plastic bags flew around the interior like really heavy pillows. They fucking hurt when they hit you, and they could hit you at any time from any angle. Then there was a lunch box or two, maybe a few cans of Diet Coke, and who knew what else afly in the dark atmosphere of the steel box and though the shocks supporting it were thick and strong, they did little to protect against the vicissitudes of crumple and crunch that Richard produced as he wreaked vengeance on NASCAR for the crime of being NASCAR. Back here, a hero was needed, a man of strength.

But these were Grumleys, greed-driven and sensation hungry, the brains scientifically bred out of them, so they had no hero. No calm voice took over and soothed, not even Caleb’s, as that unhappy warrior simply sat as still as possible, clutching the huge Barrett .50, trying to breathe through blood, while dreaming of driving the Barrett’s butt into Richard’s strange, disguised head and watching it shatter. The rest got through the ordeal of the ride on the strength of their considerable sheer meanness, their similar hunger to pulp Richard when the day was done, and dreams of swag and whores and drugs and other cool Grumley things.

It was dialogue. It was not oration, still less a lecture, and least of all some kind of pontification. No, it was chat, conversation, attention to nuance, cooperation, and teamwork. This is how you climb a hill that doesn’t want to be climbed in a big vehicle that doesn’t want to climb it. Richard listened and talked with the components of the adventure. He felt the traction in each tire, not a chorus, but the voice of each as the expression of a personality; he felt the play between torque and transmission even in the crude containment of the automatic gear shift as these two dynamisms bartered their way through the complex transaction. He felt the tremble of vibes from the shocks, the subtler orchestration of announcements from the enhanced diesel as the Xzillaraider had blown out the parameters of the performance package, and the diesel fuel burned hot and long and fierce, turning its own chambers a molten red, threatening to go volcanic at any second. On top of that, through the imperfect vision cones of the illuminating headlights, Richard read the curves, finding the ideal line in each, read the texture of the mud in the road, divining where its gelid smoothness contained strength and where only watery treachery. He sensed which logs could be crushed, which knocked aside and which, still strong, had to be avoided. It was a complex negotiation, and he was right that few men in the world could have done it, and few would have wanted to.

It seemed to take forever, and Richard at a certain point felt his muscles locked against the wheel as if the wheel was the enemy and the addition of his human strength could make a difference. He cued himself to relax, and felt the iron melt from his neck. Though bathed in sweat, he felt at last a kind of relaxation, because it occurred to him that that which he feared most—a sucking pool of mud that would engulf him to above the hubcaps—would not befoul him.

“Jesus Christ,” said the old man, “I think you done it, boy. I think we going to make it.”

The truck broke from gnarled, mythic wood into a kind of grassy meadow and it suddenly occurred to Richard that there was no more hill to climb.

He brought the truck to a stop. He opened the door and almost fell out, limp with exhaustion, spent and wasted and hungry for vacation. He sucked coolish air, felt coolish air against his brow. He looked, saw stars, pinwheels of ancient energy, dancing light years off. Jesus, what a fucking thing.

“We here, boy, we done it,” sang the old guy. From behind came an outpouring of Grumleys as the boys liberated themselves and had a moment of pure bliss. They were on top of the world. Ma, we’re on top of the world. From hating Richard, they flew to loving him. Richard had never been so admired in his life. He felt like a rock star as hard Grumley hands pounded him on the back.

“Okay, boys, you git that dough on the roof,” yelled the old man, and then turned to speak on the cell, “Tom, get that bird in and get us the hell out of here. Time to go home.”

As behind him, the Grumleys set about to move the money bales to the roof of the truck so that they could be tossed into the hovering chopper, Richard moseyed off a few yards and came to a vantage on what he had done.

He looked down from a thousand feet on the vast structure of the speedway and the NASCAR civilization that had spread forth and put roots down upon the plains.

He saw wreckage. He saw fire. He saw a thousand emergency service vehicles spitting out goobers of red light. He saw smoke, drifting this way and that in the wind, he saw the crushed, the broken, the smashed, the atomized. He saw pain, disbelief, destruction, disaster. He saw the beast wounded. He felt in himself an insane pride in the ruination. Sure you could have detonated a bomb like some A-rab boy-fucker, or opened up with a Glock like a sad, sick Korean kid, or any of another dozen methods of high-octane take-down, but to drive through it, to smash and grind and pulp and express the ultimate contempt in traction and horsepower—say, that was pretty fucking cool. It was so Sinnerman. He felt a sense of profound fulfillment.

Fuck ’em if they can’t take a joke.

But then he heard it. They all heard it. The sound of a motorcycle as it churned up the same hill they’d just mounted.

“It’s the goddamned Lone Ranger,” somebody said.

THIRTY-SEVEN

Bob hit the hill hard on his Kawasaki. The bike slid upward, attacking, sliding right and left, inclining on the sudden hairpins, spitting mud, churning dirt, sliding this way and that as it fought for traction. Up he went, feeling between his legs the throb of the pistons beating as he rode the line between second and third, foot alive to the quickness of the necessary shifting. He smelled gas as it was eaten in 350-cc gulps.

But he knew it was time to dump the bike when the tracers came floating his way. Whoever these boys were, they weren’t well schooled. They fired too early, counting on the display of neon death floating parabola-like through the trees (and rupturing wood where it struck) to drive him back. He might have been a different fellow, but Bob had taken tracer before, even fired batches of it, so panic was not what he felt, even as random bullets began to kick up stingers and puffs of mud near him.

He cranked hard, put the bike over, feeling it bite against the mud as it plowed furrows. Before it was even still, he’d scrambled off, found cover in the trees, and begun his assault. He had no targets yet, but still his finger flew to the EOTech gizmo atop his DPMS rifle, and pressed the button that was protected against accidental tripping by a plastic sheet across it. He nudged it, felt it give, brought the gun to his shoulder and saw, to his surprise, a bright orange circle on the 2x2 screen. You didn’t need training, so simple was the concept; you put the circle on what it was you wanted, you pushed the trigger, and you ventilated. He slithered upward, safety off, finger indexed along the top of the guard, and forty yards out saw two men hunched over weapons on a crestline, peering hard for target.

“I think we put him down, Pap,” came a cry. Bob put the orange circle on the center of mass, and fired three times. This damn gun was no poodle-shooter; it bucked, more by far than a .223, but not so much that it was beyond control. With superb trigger control and a stout shooting position, Bob knew he scored all three and he watched the unfortunate recipient jerk when struck, then fall to the left. Bob came over, wasn’t quite fast enough on the pivot, and by the time he got around, the second guy was down under cover. Gunflashes gave away his position, and so did the tracer burst which vectored like splashes of liquid weight toward Bob, bending as it arched toward him and tore into trees and ground. And suddenly other boys were on the line and the hill was alive with the sound of death. The guns buzzsawed hellaciously and ripped, and the world turned all nasty and full of frags and flying debris and the spritz of near-supersonic wood chips. Bob squirmed back, aware that they were shooting toward sound rather than actually acquiring a target.

He waited a bit, moved a little more but delicately, put his rifle up and waited patiently. Soon enough a scout popped up to see if he could see a thing, and just as quickly Bob put one into him, center mass again, the gun beating into his shoulder with its upward torque, the muzzle flash bleaching detail from his night vision, illuminating a spent 6.8 shell as it flew to the right. Another one down, but another cycle of mega-blasting came abanging as the rest of the boys dumped their mags at him.

He waited them out. Would they have the guts to flank? Would they put people off on his right and his left, triangulate and take him out? He bet not. They weren’t trying to hold the hill for but a few more minutes, and nobody wanted to miss the big bus out.

And indeed, here came the bus; it floated out of blackness, its rotor kicking up a cyclone, huge and messy, blowing clouds of dust everywhere. He couldn’t get a good shot at it, however, and when it had settled in, it was hidden behind the angle of the incline and he could only hear it, see its column of rising disturbance. Then another posse of tracer came his way, lighting up his world and almost hitting him. One came closer than any round since fifteen years earlier, and he had a moment of fear. Even he, the great Bob the Nailer, victor in a hundred gunfights against impossible odds, felt the terror of the near miss, and he slunk back, happy just to be alive.

The phone rang.

Odd time for a phone call. But it rang, some chipper computery tune calculated to alert and annoy, the sound fortunately buried from his antagonists by the roar of the chopper. Astounded that he would do such an amazingly stupid thing, he obeyed the human rule that no matter what, phone calls take precedence over all reality. Maybe it was FBI, or maybe Nick had given the number to local authority.

“Swagger,” he said into it after plucking it from inside his vest and slipping it open.

“Mr. Swagger, it’s Charlie Wingate,” said the voice.

“Charlie? Well—”

“I think I figured Mark 2:11 out. It took a thousand hits on the Net but it’s actually ‘Mark,’ as in military or industrial model designation, capital M, small k, period, then just two-eleven, no colon, and it refers to a .50 caliber armor-piercing munition that—”

At that moment the tree trunk behind which Bob had slithered exploded. It atomized as something weighing 650 grains with a secondary explosive and a tungsten core, traveling at twenty-five hundred feet per second, hit it at zero angle, detonated, and sent a shockwave through it that all but liquefied the wood structure itself. It toppled, but could not find room among the other trees to actually hit ground, and lay suspended at an angle.

“Thanks, Charlie,” said Bob, “I’ll get back to you.” He flipped the phone away, slithered even farther down the hill. Good old Charlie. Better late than never.

Two more .50 Raufosses arrived, but the gunner had no target. This time, not hitting wood, he did not get his secondary detonation, but only plowed into the dirt, kicking up a huge, dusty geyser of earth and leaves, each blast a bit farther from Bob, the thrust of the recoil taking him away from his target with each shot. Bob rolled to the side, came up in a good kneeling position, put the red circle on his target and, guessing that he was body-armored, shot him in the head.

Now, he thought, get to the top, get some rounds into that bird, cripple it, then fall back and live happily ever after. Let the real FBI take over.

Each thirty-pound, twenty-by twenty-four-inch, plastic tamper-evident bag contained approximately twelve thousand bills, as baled carefully in the counting room at Bristol Speedway headquarters. The distribution of bills was predictable, even immutable: 10 per cent of them were ones, 15 per cent fives, 25 per cent of them tens, 40 per cent of them twenties, 5 per cent of them fifties and 5 per cent of them one hundreds. Each bag contained about $226,000 and all thirty-five of them—roughly $8 million in small, unrecorded bills—weighed a thousand fifty pounds.

The Reverend needed men. So he sent only two gunners to the crestline to search for the ranger on the motorcycle, figuring the two could handle it easily enough. That left three to unload and hoist, and one on the roof to stack the bales in a neat pile for easy tossing into the wide-open chopper door. If that goddamned Richard were here, it would help, but the boy had disappeared.

The Grumley inside tossed the bags out to a Grumley beside the truck’s open rear door, and he in turn—husky Caleb, bloody nose and all—heaved it up to the Grumley atop the truck. When all the bags were out, all the Grumleys would climb up top and toss the bags into the chopper hovering above. It seemed to be going pretty well, given that the rotors of the helicopter were tossing up hell and gone, when someone wandered up groggily, holding his ear.

“Pap,” he yelled, “he goddamn hit me three times and the last one bounced off the vest and tore off my ear.”

“Oh, Lord,” said Pap.

“Pap, I’se hurt bad. Git me out of here. That boy can shoot a lick.”

The Reverend made a decision.

“Caleb, you no nevermind that, you git over there, you boys too, you put this fella down.”

So the whole goddamned team quit their loading and ran to the edge of the hill.

Pap waited as the guns blazed, the helicopter hovered, and nothing seemed to be happening except time was passing. What was taking so long?

“I’m getting worried hanging here,” said the helicopter pilot through the phone. “They git heavy guns up here, they can bring this thing down in a second. You said wouldn’t be no shooting.”

“Some damn hero trying to win a medal,” Pap said. “Hold her just a second.”

He looked about. Richard would sure have been a help around now. But no Richard.

Suddenly the boys was back. They’d dumped their mags, filled the woods with slugs, tore shit out of it no human man could live through, and left Caleb to hold the fort.

So it was Pap himself who climbed up top the truck from the hood, and started lifting and tossing the bales into the chopper. Hard to believe, each chunk of weight was about a quarter mil in swag, untraceable, immediately spendable, investable, hell, a feller could have himself a great weekend in Vegas with just one of ’em. And goddamn, he was getting two, the boys one each and—

He found superhuman strength in the power of his greed and tossed them aboard. The pilot helped by walking the chopper down the length of the truck so the distance wasn’t far, and the thirty-five bags went aboard fast. Then each scrambled in, all helping to get the wounded man aboard.

“Where’s Caleb?”

“Sir, he ain’t coming, don’t believe. We seen him go down just a second ago. We ought to—”

But the old man didn’t need to be told. He twisted from the news, looked through the entryway from cargo hatch to cockpit where a pilot looked back at him, and gave the thumbs up.

Too bad for Caleb, but that were the Grumley way, and even though the bird was no rocket, they all felt some kind of low g-force as she zoomed skyward, straight up into the black, with four Grumleys and eight mill small unrecorded aboard.

Whooooeeeee, Pap felt himself gush as the bird climbed and began its outbound jaunt, running low, hard and without lights.

Nothing could stop them now.

Bob hadn’t even made it out of the trees as the bird—it was a Blackhawk, no less—took off for the moon or other parts ethereal. It climbed high until it was damned near invisible, and it was out of range in seconds. He didn’t have a shot.

Shit, he thought.

Then he cursed himself for chucking away the phone as he now saw he might have been able to get a call through, somehow have gotten word to somebody that…but he saw that was impossible. Nah. The airwaves were still a mess, nobody knew anything, no—

Mark 2:11. “Arise from your pallet and go to your house.”

Mk.211, Model O, Raufoss armor-penetrating incendiary.

It was time to let Jesus speak for himself.

Swagger ran to the fallen man, who lay in a fetal position, his head bent and crushed by a 6.8 Remington. But that wasn’t the point. The point was cradled in dead hands. Bob picked up the goddamned Barrett rifle, all thirty pounds of it, and ran back with it to the armored truck. He set up over the hood, after performing a quick check with the bolt to make certain a shell lay in the chamber and seeing that it did, he found a good supported position, the heavy thing on its bipod legs. He drew it to his shoulder, aware from Japan that he’d find speed in no speed, he’d find attainment in no attainment, he’d find it all in smooth, and in smooth he ticked them off: spotweld, check, trigger finger, check, breathing discipline, check, bones locked, check, mind numbed to stillness, going, going, going on toward nothing.

The last time he’d fired through a scope was months ago, and what was this scope, what was its zero, who set it up? Well, the bad boys didn’t set it up, because they used it close in, and the shooting they’d done was from the hip, at distances of twenty feet or less, as witness the beefy guy who’d tried to hipshoot him. They’d left it alone, most likely, fearing it a little. What was the origin of the gun? Was it a privately owned weapon, used by some rich gun guy for hitting targets a mile out? No way, too beat up for that, not well enough cared for. Had to be from the same source as the restricted Raufoss ammo, that is, from some Justice Department/Defense Department equipment program, meaning it was a military gun, maybe refurbed by Barrett after use in the sand, declared surplus and turned over to law enforcement cheap for use in the war against drugs and somehow coming all the way to Mountain City. Bob tried to feel its last real shooter and came up with a man like himself, a marine NCO, hard and salty and given to the mastery of the technology, his imagination enflamed by the possibility of doing bad guys a mile away and saving the lives of young marines who’d otherwise have to close and do it at muzzle-blast range.

He’s a mile out, he thought, and whoever set this up, he fired at a mile, that was his pride, his power. He knew with certainty: The scope is zeroed at a mile.

Bob settled behind the reticle, indexed on his approximation of the angle at which the bird had headed, and there it was, illuminated in the light of the speedway its occupants had just looted, the bird in blur, three-quarter profile, bisected in the milliradian-designated crosshairs, and it all came together in the kind of stroke only someone who’d done the deed under pressure a thousand or a million times on training fields and in bad places where they shot back could make happen—smooth and beyond attainment or speed or ambition.

He didn’t even feel the recoil in the nanosecond the bird crossed the crosshairs of the scope, though it may have been ferocious, even as he gave with it, rolled backward, and let the gun resettle for a second shot. He didn’t see the blinding muzzle flash as the huge missile with its tungsten core flew onward at well past the speed of sound, he didn’t feel the noise, which was immense, he didn’t sense the disturbance all those hot, roiling gases unleashed.

He looked again when the show was complete, but he couldn’t find the bird. Where had it gone, what was it—

He saw it sliding out of the sky. He watched through the magnification of the scope and caught the thing in its downward gyre. It wasn’t smoking or burning, but its internal rhythms were psychotic and the fuselage rotated wildly, whipping ever faster, until it was just barely flying, and at the last the pilot, whoever he was, got some control, and the thing hit with a smash against the empty seating of the speedway, its tail boom shearing off and going for a tumble, smoke rising now from a dozen different areas. Then Bob saw men spilling crazily out of it, even one, from this distance, in blue.

Then a glare spotlighted him.

He looked up to see another bird just a few feet up. He felt himself pinned, silhouetted in the harsh light. He raised his hands, holding Nick’s badge up for all to see.

The bird got even lower, and in its own light he now saw KFOXTV written on its boom.

He climbed up to the roof of the truck and the chopper came even lower. He got a foot on the runner, launched forward, and eager hands pulled him in.

He was aboard next to a guy with a fancy haircut and a guy with a camera, both so excited they looked about to pee. But he wedged past them, knowing all too well the interior of the Huey, and leaned into the cockpit.

The pilot handed him a set of earphones, which he slipped on, finding a throat mic at the ready.

“I’m with the FBI,” he said, gesturing with the badge.

“Yes sir.”

“Listen, can you run this baby south to 421, then follow 421 all the way over Iron Mountain out to Mountain City?”

“Sure can.”

“When we get there, I’ll talk you in the rest of the way. You drop me where I say, and then you make tracks.”

“Read you, Special Agent.”

“Then let’s rock and roll the fuck out of here.”

THIRTY-EIGHT

The boss waited. Radio reports were incoherent, inclusive, communicating only chaos and conflicting intelligence. Choppers down, but Caleb had to bring a chopper down. How many? One? Two, three? Hard to say. In the end, it was pointless to listen, and so the boss turned off the unit.

The boss checked the time. After midnight. Here, so far away, the night was calm, the sky full of radiance, the temperature at last bearable, and a sliver of gibbous moon let low gleam smear the southern hemisphere. When the hell would it be here? Why wouldn’t the hands on the watch move more quickly? Why was breath so hard, neck so stiff, mouth so dry?

Suddenly, there it was. The boss felt immense relief. It felt so good. They were here. It was done.

The black bird, running low over the mountain crest, finding this unlit field behind the prayer camp without a problem. He was such a good pilot and now he could be taken care of too.

The boss lit a flare, the only signal necessary.

It’s done. They said it couldn’t be done. But I did it. Now I’m free and clear and rich and untouchable. I’m a legend. They’ll wonder for a hundred years what became of me, what I did with all that money. They’ll tell of the boss who beat the game.

The helicopter set down, pitching up a whirl of wind and dust and leaves, blowing and bending the grass away from its roar. But Grumleys didn’t jump out. That old man in his blue suit didn’t leap out, dancing as was his way when gleeful, and there were no Grumleys shouting and pounding and strutting as was expected, everybody hungry for their share of the swag, neatly pre-cut into bales of cash, one for each boy, two for the old man, and the rest for the boss, as planned. Then the boss would jump aboard the chopper, and it would continue its run in the dark, low and unfollowable, another hundred miles to an obscure rural field where an SUV waited along with some phony passports. They’d be in Mexico in a day.

But no, none of that happened.

No Grumleys got off.

Just one old man: Bob Lee Swagger.

“Howdy, Detective Thelma,” Bob said. “Nice to see you.”

“Swagger,” she said. “Goddamn you.”

“I do annoy people.”

She saw the badge.

“You were FBI undercover all the time?”

“No, ma’am. I am Nikki Swagger’s father, pure and simple. But I have a great friend in the Bureau and we linked up. Now I’m working for him. But I’m still working for Nikki.”

“It wasn’t personal.”

“It never is.”

The two faced each other in the flicker of the flare as the helicopter skipped away into a high orbit.

“No way that hayseed gun store gets hold of imported Norwegian Raufoss armor-piercing rounds without someone running a request on police stationery through Justice under the sheriff’s signature, the sort of thing someone running an anti–meth lab program might have, right, Thelma? But who runs the department? That matinee-idol sheriff? He’s so dumb he doesn’t know how many feet he’s got. They’ll figure that out down there soon enough. I already did.”

“Swagger, don’t make me do this. I see I have to run hard now, and I can’t waste time here with you.”

“There ain’t no rush, Detective Thelma. I don’t think you’re going nowhere. Hmm, let’s see, what else? Oh, yeah, sure, I’m betting the superlab is in the coal yard next to the sheriff’s office, under the stink of all that coal where nobody can sniff it out, most of all that sheriff. Boy, you made some monkey out of him. But that’s why you got to go, isn’t it, Thelma? OSHA’s closing down the yard and y’all are moving the department. You can’t run the lab if they’re closing down the whole zone. You’ve run meth in Johnson for three years now. You fed the sheriff the intel, let the sheriff take out the competition, and you manufactured the stuff by the bagful right under his nose, slipstreamed behind him, kept the cost of meth the same. That network of snitches you’re so proud of; those are your dealers. That poor boy Cubby Bartlett you shot was a dealer and he was so cranked he didn’t have any idea what was going on. You grabbed the gun because when you showed up at his place that afternoon and pumped him full of ice, you found his piece, unloaded it. So you had to grab it to justify your prints all over it. The upshot is, you used the profit to set up this operation, to turn an awkward million you shouldn’t have had into eight unmarked free and clear. Hell, the pieces were already in place for you; the helicopter, its pilot being your banged-up gone-to-hell brother. And I know you got him the job. The Barrett rifle already in the inventory, the inside dope on the cash movement, the inside dope on how tied in knots law enforcement was. All you had to do was get the sheriff to sign off on the Raufoss. Then off you go, laughing all the way. What you got on old Alton to leverage him like that? Something pretty, I imagine.”

“Damn you, Swagger, how’d you get so smart? He likes boys. He come chickenhawking up here, and I heard and set up a sting and got video on him. In his circles, that’s ruination. So he does this job, and we’re quits.”

“You are a bad girl, Thelma. But we ain’t quite at the end. You knew Grumley before. You got some strange connection to Grumley. Grumley don’t trust no outsiders. They’d just roll over you. What is it, Thelma. Who are you?”

“Born Grumley. Maybe Pap’s, maybe someone else’s. Grumley blood. They got rid of me. Too smart. Raised in an orphanage. But I backtracked and found ’em. Pap could never bring himself to shed Grumley blood. End of talk. Time to go. Swagger, you are way overmatched. You have seen me draw. You know how fast I am, and how I don’t never miss. I have to leave now. If you try to stop me I will kill you. Who do you think you are?”

“Who do I think I am? You never got it, did you? Y’all thought I was some old coot from out West, no match for Grumley killers and armed robbers and crooked-as-hell detectives. I am Bob Lee Swagger, Gunnery Sergeant, USMC, eighty-seven kills, third-ranking marine sniper in Vietnam. I have shot it out with Salvadorian hunter-killer units and Marisol Cubano hitmen and a Russian sniper sent halfway around the world. I even won a sword fight or two in my time. They all had one thing in common. They thought they were hunting me, and I was hunting them. Faced many, all are sucking grass from the bitter, root end. Here’re your choices: You can come easy or you can come dead.”

Thelma drew.

She was way fast, she was so smooth, her hand flew in a blur to the Para-Ord in the speed holster, it came up like a sword stroke, invisible in its raw speed.

Bob hit her twice in the chest before she even got the safety off.

She spun, hurt so bad, and the heavy gun fell from her hand, the two CorBon .38 Supers enabling the ritual of drainage that would take her life from her as they opened up like sharp steel roses. She gasped for air, finding little, and turned to look at the old man with the pistol in his hand, just as the flare died.

“By the way,” he said, “I was also Area 7 USPSA champ five years running. Nobody ever called me slow.”

PART III

LAST LAP

THIRTY-NINE

It took some sorting out, and the politics were enormously complicated. But the final law enforcement debriefing on the incident of August 23, 2009, Bristol, Tennessee, managed to get through its business in less than six hours. All participants—the FBI, the Tri-cities Law Enforcement Task Force representing the municipalities of Sullivan County, the Tennessee Highway Patrol, and the appropriate federal, state, city, and county prosecutor’s offices—remained cordial and tempers were more or less controlled throughout.

It helped that though the Grumley mob had fired over 750 rounds of ammunition—this was the number of cartridge casings picked up by the FBI Evidence Recovery Team on site at the Bristol Speedway the day after the incident—no civilians were killed, though eleven were wounded, one critically. It helped that Bristol police officers caught the main perpetrators—actually had them signed, sealed, and delivered when the hijacked Johnson County Sheriff’s Department’s helicopter crashed conveniently into the speedway itself—without difficulty. It helped that law enforcement casualties were quite low too: a Bristol traffic officer was seriously wounded by 9mm fire as he approached the site of the takedown, a state police helicopter pilot was badly burned when his aircraft was shot down by Caleb Grumley early in the firefight, and his copilot broke an ankle pulling him out of the downed machine in the seconds before the fire erupted. The real tragedy was the three employees of Cash Transit Service of Tennessee killed outright. It seemed to bother no one that three perpetrators—Caleb, another Grumley gunman on the hilltop, and a corrupt Johnson County law enforcement officer—were killed by FBI agents. Two other Grumley gunmen were killed earlier in the evening by another FBI team.

If anyone could be said to have won the engagement and emerged in extremely positive light, it was the Bureau, with its intrepid penetration of the conspiracy, its rapid response and deployment, and its heroic SWAT actions during the incident itself. Task force director Nicholas Memphis, wounded in the first shooting relating to the events of that evening, was singled out for special praise and would almost certainly win another decoration. The undercover agent he supervised was never identified to law enforcement personnel—the Bureau is notoriously reluctant to share operational details, even with other agencies—though many believed the tall, anonymous older gentleman who accompanied the Bureau contingent to the meeting might have been that fellow himself.

Some oddities and disappointments became clear. Though in fact FBI initiative closed the attempt down, it was clear from even the most preliminary study that the real failure factor in the criminal enterprise was the odd route the driver of the hijacked Cash in Transit truck took to the helicopter pickup point. Had he not diverted to cause maximum damage to NASCAR Village, the felons would have made their escape easily. Running low and without lights by helicopter, they would have been impossible to locate. They could have split the $8 million cash take, and dispersed almost instantly. That’s how close the bad guys came to getting away with it. That led, in turn, to the one disappointment: the failure to apprehend that particular fellow, the mysterious driver who had somehow slithered away in all the craziness.

As for the Grumleys themselves, they were as they had always been: tough, silent men who did their crime and were willing to do their time, even if, as in the case of Alton Grumley, he would certainly perish in prison before that time was over. They named no names, snitched out no others. Besides Alton, three shooters were taken alive and would not name the other Grumleys who had helped in the vehicle takedown and then melted away, remaining unapprehended. The pilot, former major Thomas Fielding, United States Army, would have sold anybody out, but he knew nothing. He was a wounded combat veteran who had been shot down three times in two wars. His last tour of duty had been very rough, leading to a history of drinking and other personal problems. He quickly turned state’s evidence, though he had little to offer except to point out to any and all that he should never have listened to his little sister.

Finally, it was over, though adjudication remained, the inevitable process by which things get processed in the justice system. It would involve many of the cops, further investigation, much sworn testimony and court time, generally inconveniencing everybody and using up millions of dollars. But all that was in the future, and the heroic Nick Memphis, sure now to become an assistant director, left with his party, including the quiet older agent who said nothing but watched all.

The two of them walked to Nick’s car and they were a sight. Bob still limped and would always limp from the deep cut across his hip and down to his steel replacement joint. Nick was on crutches and hobbled along as best he could.

“If we had a drummer, we’d look like Yankee Doodle Dandy,” Bob joked at one point. They got across the parking lot of the Bristol Police Department, where the meeting had taken place. It was another sultry day in the South, with a low, gray sky and a threat of rain in the air. Nick turned to Bob.

“I have to say, partner, you are some kind of cowboy. We don’t have a guy who could come close to you, and we’ve got some damn good guys. What’s the secret, Bob? What explains you? No one knows you better than me, and I don’t know a thing.”

“My old man was the real hero. I’m just his kid, trying to live up to him, that’s all. That plus good old USMC training, some kind of natural skill, and what can only be called Gunfighter’s Luck. Wyatt had it, so did Frank Hammer, Mel Purvis, Jelly Bryce, D.A. Parker, all those old boys. I seem to have just a touch myself.”

“You have what they have for sure, and it isn’t luck. It’s something else. Arkansas boy like you ought to know the term for it. ‘True Grit’ ring a bell? If not, try Japanese: ‘Samurai.’ Sound familiar? You were there. Marine Corps. ‘The Old Breed.’ Bet you heard that one. Or go back to the ancient Greeks: ‘Spartan.’ Any of it mean a thing?”

“Don’t know, Nick. Maybe it’s just stupid luck. And maybe it’s just who I am, that’s all.”

“Okay, go home, rest, enjoy. You’ve earned it. Get fat. Have more kids. Die in bed in forty years.”

“I intend to. First though, I’m heading back to Knoxville, to pick up my wife and daughters. Boy, am I sick of that damned drive down and back. After I git quit of this part of the country, ain’t never driving that I-81 spur again. Sorry you didn’t get your bad boy, that driver. That one must sting.”

“We’ll get him. If he was expecting a cut of the cash, he came up short, which means he’ll have to work again soon. We know what to listen for this time.”

“Bet you do get him, too.”

“If Nikki remembers—you know, anything, but a face would be best. You have my number. This time I’ll answer.”

“You don’t think—”

“He’s long gone. Believe me, this guy is not hanging around when there’s all this law enforcement buzz.”

The two said goodbye with a little hug—the sort masculine men not given to emotion but feeling it nonetheless are given to perform—and then Nick climbed awkwardly into the seat, and his driver took him away. Bob watched his closest—maybe his only—friend go, then turned, and headed to his own car, now much-loathed, the little green, rental Ford that had hauled him so many places. He had half a mind to buy a really nice Dodge Charger, blood red, the big V8 engine, spoilers, the works, to celebrate surviving another one of his things.

Feeling the omnipresent pain in his hip, he negotiated his way to the little vehicle to see, astonishingly, that someone had pulled up in a brand new Dodge Charger, his dream vehicle, though this one was death black and gleamy. The door opened, and a familiar figure stepped out. It was that young Matt MacReady, who’d taken USMC 44 to a fourth in Bristol.

“Howdy, Gunny. Heard about this meet, thought I might find you here.”

“Well, Matt, how are you? Congratulations on your run.”

“Sir, it wasn’t nothing compared to your run, what I’m hearing. I just drive in circles and nobody’s shooting.”

“Well, most of what I did was crawl in circles, hoping not to get shot.”

“Sergeant Swagger—”

“Bob, I told you, son.”

“Bob, Big Racing won’t ever say a thing, but I came by to thank you just the same. If that thing had come off, it would be a stain. You stopped it. A cop told me you stopped it alone. So, no stain. No ugliness. No memories of bad things. In fact, in some perverted way, I think everybody who didn’t die or lose their business kind of enjoyed it. But the race is still the thing.”

“Thank you, Matt. Everybody seems to think I was an FBI agent and now even the FBI’s pretending to that one, so it looks like it’ll clear up okay for me and I can get back to my front porch.”

“I doubt anything’ll keep you on a front porch. But there’s one more thing.”

“What’s that?”

“This guy, the driver?”

“Yep.”

“Think I know who he is.”

This got Bob’s full attention.

“All right. That puts you ahead of everyone else in this game.”

“He’s the man who murdered my father. On the track, twenty years ago. Ran him hard into an abutment, killed him, everybody knew it was murder, but there was no investigation because Big Racing didn’t want an investigation and a scandal. They just ran him out of the game and made sure he never got on another track again.”

“So he was a racer?”

“The best. Would have been a god. Trained by the hardest taskmaster, made hard and cruel by a hard and cruel mentor, trained to show no mercy, to intimidate, to win or die trying. A monster, or maybe a genius, or maybe the best racing mind and reflexes ever put in one body. Who knows what he might have been? I grew up hearing rumors about him—anytime there was some strange guy winning an unsanctioned event like a coast-to-coast or a mountain climb or some slick driving in a bank robbery getaway, I always thought it was Johnny.”

“You sound like you know him.”

“I do. I once loved him. I guess I still do, no matter what. He’s my brother.”

FORTY

“So let me get this straight, Dad,” Nikki said. “In my own newspaper it reports, ‘An FBI unit pursued the robbers to the top of the hill, killing two and bringing down the fleeing helicopter.’”

“That’s what it says, so it must be true,” he answered. “They don’t put it in the paper if it ain’t true, as I understand it.” He was pushing her in a wheelchair down the hallway from the release office at the Knoxville hospital. She wore blue jeans, a polo shirt, an FBI baseball cap that he had brought her, and a pair of flip-flops.

“But that FBI unit—that was one guy, and he wasn’t even in the FBI. That was you?”

“I have no comment for the press.”

“And this,” she added, reading more from the paper, “‘Other federal units converged on Piney Mountain Baptist Prayer Camp, where they encountered Johnson County Sheriff’s Department Detective Thelma Fielding with evidence that she planned the robbery, Tennessee’s most violent since the 1930s. Fielding resisted arrest and was shot dead.’ That was you too.”

“I don’t honestly remember.”

“Aren’t you a little old for all that cowboy stuff?”

He laughed. It was so good to have her back. His chest swelled. Who said snipers have not hearts or that mankillers are isolate and stark? Through her, he was connected to it all. She was all: civilization, democracy, honor, civility, loyalty, the radiance of sheer life itself. He felt so damned good!

She looked wonderful, her eyes bright with the furious Nikki-intelligence that had always marked her presence on earth. Her face had color in it, her blonde hair was pulled back in a pony tail, and she had that cut-to-the-chase directness he’d always loved so much. She was quite a kid and he thought anew how lucky he was to end up rich, most of all, in daughters.

“Once cowboy, always cowboy, I guess. Didn’t know I could move so fast, nor be so lucky still. I suppose I’m supposed to feel bad about putting those people down, in the modern fashion, but then I remember they targeted my daughter, so I can’t work up no tears.”

“Any tears.”

“Any tears.”

“What boy who loves me can ever compete with you?”

“Nah. You’ll meet him and forget clean about the old goat. That’s the way it’s supposed to be, and just getting you back into the world to meet him and have a great life and contribute wherever you go, that’s enough for me. Now let’s go, Mommy’s waiting in the van. We have to get you back to Bristol.”

He pushed her to the elevator, then the lobby. People waved at Nikki and she waved back, and then he took her outside, into sunlight and southern heat. The clouds had broken, the sun shone, and the trees flashed green as their leaves played in breeze.

“It’s so stupid,” she said. “I can walk perfectly fine.”

“These hospitals have rules. You don’t go home on your own two feet, honey.”

They waited, and then Julie pulled up in a rented red Ford passenger van. The door popped open, and Miko hopped out and threw herself at Nikki. The two daughters embraced.

“Your daddy,” said Nikki, “your daddy is still a tough old bird, sweetie. I fear for the boys you start bringing home in a few years.”

“I don’t like boys,” says Miko. “I like my daddy.”

“She’ll sing a different tune pretty damn soon,” said Bob.

Gingerly, Julie and Bob got Nikki, still a little fragile despite her protestations, into the backseat of the van. Julie got in next to her, got her seat belt on, and Miko got into the front seat. Bob climbed into the driver’s seat, engaged the engine, and pulled out for the long, last trek up I-81 from Knoxville to Bristol.

Brother Richard watched them, listening to his iPod.

Sinnerman, where you gonna run to?

Run to the sea, but the sea it’s aboilin’,

Run to the moon, but the moon it’s ableedin’,

Sinnerman, where you gonna to run to,

All on that day?

He was parked two blocks back in a recently stolen Dodge Charger, 6.7 liter Hemi V8, the car idling smoothly, giving no evidence of the 425-horsepower beast under its hood. He’d been on the Swaggers for three days now, knowing that sooner or later Nikki would leave the hospital. He knew they’d rent a van, and he ID’d the handsome woman who was the mother of the girl he had to kill.

Now he watched the little scene at the hospital doors, so sweet, the theme of family wholeness after an ordeal, the subthemes, the heroism of the father, the faith of the mother, the weird special talent of the daughter, the innocence of the younger child. But he wasn’t thinking about the family or themes; he was thinking tactically, of details involved in the action ahead. He knew that no matter how well the van was driven by this extremely competent man, it was too tall, too slow, too stiff, had too high a tipping point, to stand up to the assault of his Charger.

He knew so much. He knew which route they’d have to take to the I-81 ramp, and he knew exactly where he’d take them, right after Exit 66 and its outlet mall, where the traffic would be thinner, the road straight, the embankment low, and the precipice steep, and the jolt would force the van over and down it would go, bouncing, bouncing, snapping the spines of all inside.

I never meant to do a family, he thought, but I am the Sinnerman, and that girl has seen my new face and when she remembers, I am done. That’s what the Sinnerman does. He does what is necessary.

Bob drove through traffic idly, looking neither left nor right, paying no particular attention to anything. He turned a corner, then had a sudden inspiration.

“I could use a nice chocolate Softee,” he said.

“Daddy, you’ll get fat.”

“I’ll get a Diet Softee then,” he said, laughing.

He pulled into the immediate left, a convenience store parking lot.

Julie said, “Okay, everybody out.”

“Mommy, I—”

“No, no, just out, out, fast.”

There was something new and hard in her voice.

She shepherded the two girls, but not into the store for the treat, but instead into another rental, a car, where she directed them to lie low.

“Mommy, I—”

“Do it, honey. Just do it now.”

She turned back into the cab of the van, where Bob had cinched his seatbelt tight.

She made eye contact with him, and spoke not with love but with the mission-centered earnestness of officer to sergeant.

“This time, get him!”

All of a sudden, they turned right, just as he was himself caught in an unexpected snarl of traffic. Agh! They’re getting away. Brother Richard felt a spurt of anger. He could control so much, but not traffic. But just as swiftly it cleared up, and he darted ahead, took the right-hand turn and saw that they’d pulled into a convenience store, probably for a Coke or something, and were now pulling out, back on the road. He idled by the side of the road, let the van put some distance between them, then cut back into traffic and began his leisurely stalk.

He stayed far behind, occasionally even losing visual contact. But he reacquired the van as it pulled up the ramp to I-81 North. Again without haste, he let some distance build, took the ramp, and slipped into traffic. There it was, maybe half a mile ahead, the red van, completely unaware of his presence. He accelerated through the gears, the Charger growled, shivered at the chance to show off its muscularity and all 425 of its horses, and Brother Richard felt that octane-driven bounce as the car flew ahead, pressing him into the seat.

The miles sped by, the van always in the slow lane, holding steady at fifty-five, Richard a mile back, forcing himself to keep his power-burner at the same rate. He’d lose the target on hills or turns, but it was always just there, ahead of him, easily recoverable. The exits ticked by, until at last, almost an hour later, Exit 66, with its much-ballyhooed promise of consumer paradise at cut rate, took the majority of the northbound cars.

We are here, he told himself. We are where we have to be. We are Sinnerman.

He had them. The road was clear, no Smokies had been seen in some time, the odd trailer truck or SUV dawdled in the slow lane, now and then a fast-mover passed too aggressively in the left-hand, speeder’s alley, but not with any regularity.

He turned up the music on his iPod, that continual loop of the old spiritual, with its image of Armageddon, its sense of the endings of things, its image of the Sinnerman in all his glory, finally facing his ultimate fate, the one this Sinnerman was now about to make impossible by destroying the one living witness to his deeds and face.

He hit the pedal. The car jacked ahead. Clear sailing, only the red van stumping along across the ridge lines of the bland North Tennessee landscape with its anonymous farms and low hills. The car sang as it ate up the distance, alive under his touch as all cars always had been. He closed fast; they had no idea the Sinnerman was on them.

It was just like all the others: the blind-side approach, the perfect angle, the perfect hit just beyond the left rear quarter panel, the satisfaction of the thump as metal hit metal at speed, possibly a flash of horror as the doomed driver looked back, even as, predictably, he overcorrected as he felt control vanish and the side of the road beckon, not realizing that the overcorrection was the killer. Then the weirdness visible in the rearview mirror as the car twisted and lost traction, always seemingly in slow motion, and began to float as it separated from the surface of the planet. Once it floated, it pirouetted, almost lovely for a thing so full of death. Then it hit, as gravity reasserted its command, and bounced, jerked, spun, disintegrated, throwing up heaps of dust. Possibly it disappeared, going off a precipice or down an incline, but it didn’t really matter, for the velocity-interruption of the strike of car to ground produced more torque than any human body could withstand, and spines, like toothpicks or straws, snapped instantly. If the car hit a tree, hit a rock, hit an abutment, burned, shattered, splintered, erupted, it didn’t matter. Its cargo was corpses by the time the ultimate worked itself out.

He had them he had them he had them. He was in the blind spot, he found the angle, he veered for the fatal smash—

Where you gonna run to, all on that day?

A curiosity. Unprecedentedly, before he struck, the van disappeared. No, it didn’t disappear, it braked hard but well, instantly jettisoning its speed, and in a nanosecond was out of the kill zone as he oversped. But as it disappeared, it also revealed. That revelation was another vehicle, just ahead, so close to the first that it had been hidden by the height of the van. In another nanosecond Brother Richard discovered that it was a Dodge Charger like his own, only glistening black, the V8 6.7 liter Hemi, 425 horses raring to go.

In that second, too, he recognized the profile of its driver. It was his brother, Matt, the NASCAR hero, whom he’d always adored but whom he also hated, for Matt had the life that he, Johnny, so wanted.

Matt nodded.

The Sinnerman knew what would happen next.

Matt slid inside him, came left hard, hit him just beyond the rear quarter panel, and he felt the traction going as the car floated left. Before he could stop himself, he overcorrected, and the car launched at 140 miles per.

Where you gonna run to, all on that day?

You’re not going to run anywhere. There was no place to run.

He was floating, his tires lost contact with the surface of the earth, the moon was bleeding, the sea was boiling, the car was rolling, all on this day.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This one began the second I saw the Speedway at night, loaded with fans, frenzy, and happiness. I thought: What they need is a good gunfight! I recommend a trip to Bristol whether it’s a racing weekend or not, for that view of the hugeness of the structure in the greenness of the valley is shocking and somehow awesome. It stands for man’s monumental imagination and his ability to impose his will on nature. On the other hand, if those aren’t your values, you’d better stay away. Anyhow, I was down there visiting my daughter, Amy, who, like Nikki, is a reporter for the Bristol Herald Courier, and she’s just as gallant and intrepid as Nikki, even if I’m a far cry from Bob Lee Swagger. Without giving it a thought, I had bumbled into the most fantastic American spectacle I’d ever seen and knew I had to do something with it.

The confluence of daughter and setting suggested a plot, though it took a while to get it all straightened out. In the early going, the story was going to revolve around an attempt to fix a race and would have required penetrating NASCAR culture to a far greater extent. Ten minutes into a race convinced me that “fixing” was impossible, so I diverted to something more gun-centric and fireworks-intensive. Had a hell of a good time doing it, too.

Thanks to the usual suspects and some newcomers as well. Thanks to Amy for inspiring it, thanks to NASCAR for being so much fun to write about, thanks to the millions who attend NASCAR events, for their good humor, enthusiasm, charisma, and consumption of beer in epic quantities. Thanks to Gary Goldberg, who became a sort of majordomo of the book, and figured out, among so many things, how much $8 million in small bills would weigh. Thanks to John Bainbridge for proofreading, to Lenne Miller, Jay Carr, Frank Starr, Mike Hill, and Jeff Weber for good counsel and morale. Thanks to Jean, as usual, for going along on my mad flights with a good spirit. Thanks to Folk Village, and XM-15 for playing “Sinnerman” at the precise moment I was trying to get a handle on the driver. Thanks to Ylan Q. Mui at The Washington Post for her help with Bob’s Vietnamese. Thanks to the professionals: my agent, Esther Newberg, my publisher, David Rosenthal, and my editor, Colin Fox.

Thanks to Kimber, DPMS, and Black Hills for inspiring all the hardware. Thanks to Dodge for the Charger, a piece of work and a half. Most of all, thanks to you for entertaining my efforts.

I, SNIPER

ALSO BY STEPHEN HUNTER

Night of Thunder

The 47th Samurai

American Gunfight (with John Bainbridge, Jr.)

Now Playing at the Valencia: Pulitzer Prize Essays on the Movies

Havana

Pale Horse Coming

Hot Springs

Time to Hunt

Black Light

Dirty White Boys

Point of Impact

Violent Screen: A Critic’s 13 Years on the Front Lines of Movie Mayhem

Target

The Day Before Midnight

The Spanish Gambit (Tapestry of Spain)

The Second Saladin

The Master Sniper

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Hunter, Stephen.

I, sniper : a Bob Lee Swagger novel / Stephen Hunter.

p. cm.

1. Swagger, Bob Lee (Fictitious character)—Fiction. 2. Vietnam War,

1961–1975—Veterans—Fiction. 3. Murder—Investigation—Fiction.

4. Marines—Fiction. 5. Snipers—Fiction. I. Title.

PS3558.U494I3 2009

813'.54—dc22

ISBN: 978-1-4165-6515-4

eISBN: 978-1-4165-6616-8

This book is dedicated to the American writers who have provided me with so much education, illumination, insight, enjoyment, and delight over the past twenty-five very good years, with apologies to the many I’ve left out:

Michael Bane, Massad Ayoob, Jan C. Libourel, Rick Hacker,

David M. Fortier, Chuck Taylor, Peter G. Kokalis, Wiley Clapp,

Don Cates, Sam Fadala, Patrick Sweeney, Craig Boddington,

Barrett Tillman, Duane Thomas, Layne Simpson, Garry James,

Walt Rausch, John Feamster, John L. Plaster, Frank James,

Roy Huntington, Charles Cutshaw, Gary Paul Johnston,

Mike Venturino, John Barsness, LeRoy Thompson, Dan Shea,

Frank Iannamico, Jacob Gottfried, Dave Anderson, John Taffin,

Holt Bodinson, Gene Gangarosa, Rick Jamison, Wayne Van Zoll,

Terry Wieland, Clint Smith,

and

the late Chuck Karwan and the late Robert T. Shimek.

Why, they couldn’t hit an elephant at this distance!

MAJOR GENERAL JOHN SEDGWICK,

COMMANDER, UNION VI CORPS, MOMENTS

BEFORE HIS DEATH BY RIFLE FIRE FROM

CONFEDERATE SHARPSHOOTERS,

SPOTSYLVANIA, VIRGINIA, MAY 9, 1864

1

The time has long passed in America when one can say of a sixty-eight-year-old woman that she is “still” beautiful, the snarky little modifier, all buzzy with irony, signifying some kind of miracle that one so elderly could be so attractive. Thus everyone agreed, without modification, that Joan Flanders was beautiful in the absolute—fully beautiful, extremely beautiful, totally beautiful, but never “still” beautiful. Botox? Possibly. Other work? Only Joan and her doctors knew. The best in dental work, an aggressive workout regimen, the most gifted cosmeticians and hairdressers available to the select? That much certainly was true.

But even without the high-end maintenance, she would have been beautiful, with pale smooth skin, a lioness’s mane of thick reddish blond hair, piercing blue eyes set behind prominent cheekbones, a slender stalk of neck and a mere slip of body, unfettered by excess ounces, much less pounds. She was dressed in tweeds and white cashmere, expertly tailored, and wore immense sunglasses that looked as if flying saucers of prescription glass had landed on the planet of her face. She took tea with a great deal of grace and wit, with her Hollywood agent, a famous name but with a dull generic quality to him no one would recognize, and her gay personal assistant. The group sat on the patio of the Lemon Tree in downtown East Hampton, New York, on a bright fall day with just a brush of chill in the air as well as salt tang from the nearby Atlantic. There were two other stars on the patio, of the young, overmoussed generation, one female, one indeterminate, as well as a couple of agents with their best-selling writers, the wives of a couple of Fortune 500 CEOs, and least three mistresses of other Fortune 500 CEOs, as well as the odd tourist couple and discreet celeb watchers, enjoying an unusually rich harvest of faces.

Joan and Phil were discussing—the market recovery? Paramount’s new vice president of production? The lousy scripts that were being sent her after the failure of her comeback picture Sally Tells All? Ex-hubby Tom’s strange new obsession with the kiddie shoot-’em-ups of his past? It doesn’t matter. What matters is only that Joan was twice royalty: her father, Jack, had been one of the major stars bridging the pre- and postwar era and she had gotten his piercing eyes and bed-knob cheekbones. She was pure Hollywood blueblood, second generation. But as well, her second husband had been a prominent antiwar leader in the raging if far-off sixties, and her picture, aboard the gunner’s chair on a North Vietnamese anti-aircraft battery, had made her instantly beloved and loathed by equal portions of her generation. That made her political royalty, a part of the hallowed crusade to end a futile war; or it made her a commie bitch traitor, but still royalty. The rest was detail, albeit interesting. She had won an Oscar. She had been married to the billionaire mogul T. T. Constable, in one of the most documented relationships in history. She had made one of her several fortunes as an exercise guru and still worked out three hours a day and was as fit as any thirty-five-year-old. All who saw her that day felt her charisma, her history, her beauty, her royal presence, including the tourists, the other stars, the wives and mistresses, and her executioner.

He spared her and America the disturbing phenomenon of a head shot. Instead, he fired from about 340 yards out and sent a 168-grain Sierra hollow point boat tail MatchKing on a slight downward angle at 2,300 feet per second to pierce her between her fourth and fifth ribs on the left-hand side, just outside the armpit; the missile flew unerringly through viscera without the slightest deviation and had only lost a few dozen pounds of energy when it hit her in the absolute center of the heart, exactly where all four chambers came together in a nexus of muscle. That organ was pulped in a fraction of a second. Death was instantaneous, a kind of mercy, one supposes, as Ms. Flanders quite literally could not have noticed her own extinction.

As in all cases of public violence, a moment of disbelief occurred when she toppled forward, accidentally broke her fall on the table for a second, but then torqued to the right and her body lost purchase and completed its journey with a graceless thud to the brick of the patio. Nearly everyone thought “She’s fainted,” because the rifle report was so far away and suppressed that no identifier with the information “gun” was associated with the star’s fall to earth. It took a second more for the exit wound to begin copious blood outflow, and that product spread in a dark sheen from her body, at which point the human fear of blood—quite natural, after all—asserted itself and screams and panic and running around and jumping up and down and diving for cover commenced.

It wasn’t long before the police arrived and set up crime scene operations, and not long at all after that when the first of what would become more than three hundred reporters and photographers arrived on scene and the whole two blocks of downtown East Hampton took on an aspect that resembled none of Joan Flanders’s twenty-eight films but vividly recalled those made by an Italian gentleman named Federico Fellini. In all that, no one noticed a blue Ford van pulling out of an alley 340 yards away to begin a trip to another destination and another date with history.

The shooter did not spare his audience the theatrics of gore for his next two victims. He went for the head, hit it perfectly, and blew each one all over the insides of the Volvo in which they were just beginning their daily commute. The range this time was shorter, 230 yards, but the ordnance was identical and the accuracy just as superb. He hit the first target one inch below the crown of the skull, dead center. There had been no deviation through the rear window glass of the heavy Swedish car. Unlike in the Flanders hit, there was no immediate hubbub. Jack Strong merely slumped forward until his shattered skull hit the steering wheel and rested. His wife, Mitzi Reilly, pivoted her head at the ruckus, had a second’s worth of abject horror—police found urine in her panties, a fact not publicized, thankfully—before the second bullet hit her above and a little forward of the left ear. In both cases the hollow point target bullet blossomed in its puncture of skull bone and spun sideways, whimsically, as it plowed through brain matter, then exited in a horrendous gusher of blood, gray stuff, and bone frags, above an eye in one case, below the other eye in the other, cracking the face bone like a pie plate.

The car, which was in gear and running, then eased forward under the pressure of Jack’s dead foot and hit the wall of the garage, where its progress halted. No one heard the gunshots, and indeed, the sound of gunshots in that part of Chicago was not remarkable to begin with. Jack and Mitzi lay like that for over an hour until a FedEx truck came down the alley seeking a shortcut through Hyde Park. The driver had trouble getting by, noticed the exhaust tendrils still curling from the pipe, and got out to inquire of the drivers what was going on. He discovered the carnage, called 911, and within minutes the Fellini movie starring Chicago police, FBI, and media had commenced on this site too.

It would be said that Jack and Mitzi went out together as they had lived, fought, and loved together. They were famous, not as much as Joan Flanders, but in their own world stars as well. Both tracked their pedigrees back to the decade of madness against which Joan Flanders had stood out. But it had been so long ago.

Jack, high-born (né Golden) of Jewish factory owners, well educated, passionate, handsome, had grown up in the radical tradition in Hyde Park, taken his act to Harvard, then Columbia, had been a founder of Students for Social Reform, and for a good six years was the face of the movement. At a certain point he despaired of peaceful demonstration as a means of affecting policy, much less lowering body count, and in 1971 went underground, with guns and bombs.

It was there that he met the already famous Mitzi Reilly, working-class Boston Irish, fiery of temperament and demeanor, intellectually brilliant, who had already been photographed on the sites of several bombings and two bank robberies. Redheaded with green eyes and pale, freckly skin, she was the fey Irish lass turned radical underground guerrilla woman-warrior, beloved by media and loathed by blue-collar Americans. She reveled in her status, and when Jack came aboard—it was a matter of minutes before they were in the sack together, and the fireworks there were legendary!—the team really took off, both in fame and in importance. They quickly became the number one most wanted desperadoes on J. Edgar’s famous list, and somehow, through sympathetic journalists, continued to give interviews, stand still for pictures—both had great hair, thick, luxuriant, and strong, artistic faces; they burned holes in film—and operate.

Their biggest hit was the bombing of the Pentagon. Actually, it was a three-pound bag of black powder going boom off a primitive clock fuse in a waste can that created more smoke than damage, but it was symbolic, worth more than a thousand bombs detonated at lesser targets. It closed down a concourse for a couple of hours, more because of the insane press coverage than for any actual threat to people or operations, but it made them stars of an even bigger magnitude.

Their career began to turn when they were building a bigger bomb for a bigger target, but this time the boom came in the bedroom, not the Capitol, and both fled, leaving behind a good sister who’d managed to blow herself up. They were hunted and running low on money, and a violent bank robbery may or may not have followed—the FBI said yes, it was them; the Nyackett, Massachusetts, police were split—that left two security guards dead, shot down from behind by a tail gunner. It was a bad career move, whoever did it, because the dead men had children and were nothing but working stiffs, not pigs or oppressors or goons, just two guys, one Irish, one Polish, trying to get by, with large families depending on their three jobs, and the hypocrisy of a movement dedicated to the people that shot down two of the people was not lost on the public. Jack and Mitzi were never formally tied to this event, because the bank surveillance film, recovered by the police, was stolen from a processing lab and never recovered. Otherwise, it was said, they’d be up on capital murder charges and have a one-way to the big chair with all the wires attached, as Massachusetts dispatched its bad ones in those days.

A few years passed; times changed; the war ended, or at least the American part of it. Jack and Mitzi hired a wired lawyer who brokered a deal, and then it came out that in its efforts to apprehend them, the police and federal agencies had broken nearly as many laws as the famous couple had. In the end, rather than expose their own excesses to the public, the various authorities agreed to let it all slip. They were “guilty as hell, free as a bird,” as Jack had proclaimed on the event, and able to rejoin society.

The academy beckoned. Each, with a solid academic background, found employment and ultimately tenure in Chicago higher ed. Jack taught education and achieved a professorship at the University of Illinois Chicago Circle campus; Mitzi, who’d graduated from the University of Michigan law school, came to rest at Northwestern’s law school. The two bought a house in Hyde Park and spent the next years preaching rather than practicing radicalism. It seemed an extraordinary American saga, yet it ended, just like Dillinger’s, in a Chi-town alley in pools of blood.

“Someone,” said Mitch Greene, holding up a copy of that day’s Plain Dealer with its blaring head police, feds hunt clues in protest slayings, “please tell Mark Felt I don’t wanna play anymore.” He got some laughter from the few before him who knew that Mark Felt had been the FBI’s black bag guy long before he became Woodward’s Deep Throat, during the wild years when Mitch Greene was running hard and starring in his own one-man show, “Mitch Greene v. America: the Comedy.” Among its brighter ideas: a wishathon by which America’s kids would will the planes full of soldiers to return to California. And the bit where he petitioned the Disney Company to open a “Vietnamland,” where you could chuck phosphorous grenades into tunnels and animatronic screaming yellow flamers would pop out and perish in the foliage? Wonderful stuff. Alas, more of his audience remained mute, these being the slack-faced, mouth-breathing tattoo and pin exhibits called “the kids” who now made up his crowds in larger and larger percentages. Forget Felt; did they even know who Mitch was? Doubtful. They just knew he wrote Uncle Mitch Explains, a series of lighthearted history essays that preached Mitch’s crazed lefto-tilt version of American history with a great deal of the ex-rad’s charm and wit and had become, astonishingly, consistent best sellers.

So here he was, another town, another gig. The town was Cleveland, the gig was The Gilded Age: Peasants for Dinner Again, Amanda? Rockefeller, Carnegie, Gould, those guys, the usual suspects, the data mined quickly for outrageous anecdotes, the dates at least right courtesy of a long-suffering research assistant (“Mitch, you can’t really say that.” “Oh yeah, watch me.”) Another mild best seller, though it annoyed him the Times BR no longer listed his books in the adult section but only in its monthly kid section.

“Mr. Felt,” he ad-libbed, “please don’t have me killed. I ain’t a-marching anymore.”

Again, the laughter was limited to those few who saw the allusion to the famous Phil Ochs anthem of the sixties protest generation. Still, it was a pretty good crowd for a weeknight in Cleveland, in a nice Borders out in the burbs. He saw faces and books and the blackness of the sheet glass window, and he had a nice hotel room, who knows, maybe he could get laid, judging by the number of women with undyed gray hair knotted into ponytails above their muumuus and their Birkenstocks, and his plane to Houston wasn’t at a brain-dead early morning hour.

But then someone hollered, “Mark Felt is dead.”

Mitch replied, “Tell this guy!” holding up the front page even higher.

That got a good laugh—even most of the kids caught it. He was quick, when he was on the road, to adapt the latest developments into his shtick. His real gift was for stand-up and he’d even tried it for a few years in the eighties, though with not much success. A typically lighthearted op-ed piece in the Daily News had attracted an editor at one of the big, classy midtown houses, and the next thing you know, he was a success again, in his second career, after the first, which consisted of overthrowing the government and stopping the war in Vietnam. The only problem with the writing, he often remarked, not originally, was the paperwork.

Was Mitch Greene funny because he looked funny, or did he look funny because he was funny? Good question, no answer, not even after all these years. He had one of those big faces—big eyes, big nose, big jaw, big bones all the way around, big ears, big Adam’s apple—all of it set off by a big frizz of reddish-gold-turning-to-gray hair, a kind of Chia Pet gone berserk. When he smiled, he had big teeth and a big tongue.

“Anyhow, boys and girls,” he said, “and that includes all you grandpas and grandmas, because if you haven’t checked lately, you still are divided into boys and girls, not that it matters at our—oops, I mean, your age—this psycho thing we have going on now, with some berserk redneck dressed in camouflage and a ‘Bring Back Bush’ bumper sticker on his pickup, is a reminder of one thing: you may want to ignore history, but unfortunately history will not ignore you. Who said that originally? Ten points and I’ll only charge you ten bucks for an autograph.”

“Trotsky,” came the call.

“Give the man a joint,” said Mitch. “Anyhow, to be serious for just a second, we have a nutcase killer playing sniper wannabe shooting down some of my cohorts who gave it up to stop the war in Vietnam all those years ago. You little peasants weren’t even born then, that’s how long ago it was. Anyhow, these folks really gave it up for peace and to bring our boys—your dads—home in one piece. Since you’re all here, you can see it worked. Now some guy is playing get even with the commies, because that’s the way his mind works. No good deed goes unpunished, just like the man says. But history, guys and gals, it could kill you. And until it does, you may as well have a laugh or two at history’s expense, which is why I worked for at least seven, no, maybe as many as eleven days on the book, which gives you a sense of where it started: with the wretched excesses of capital, of men with so much money they couldn’t spend it, and after the fifth mansion, housing lost its charm, so they—”

The bullet hit him in the mouth. It actually flew between his two big sets of choppers and plowed through the rear of the throat to the spine, which it all but vaporized into thin pink mist on the exit. His head did not explode like Jack’s and Mitzi’s, as the cranio-ocular vault had not been compromised with an injection of velocity, energy, and hydraulic pressure. The bullet flew on through and hit a wall. But with the bisection of Mitch’s spine, animal death was instantaneous, though Mitch’s knees hadn’t got the message and they fought to keep him upright, even fought through the collapse of all that weight, so instead of tumbling he sat down and happened to find his chair with a thud, almost as if he’d finally gotten sick of hearing his own voice. No one got it. Attention was also claimed by an oddity of sound—the nearly unspellable sound of something shearing through glass, a kind of grindy, high-pitched scronk that announced that a gossamer of fracture, like a spider’s delicate web, had suddenly been flung across the large front window a hundred feet beyond Mitch at his lectern, and that at its asymmetrical center a small, round, actual hole had been drilled in the glass, which, though grievously damaged, held. As no loud report was registered, no thought of “gun” or “bullet” occurred to anyone for at least three full seconds, just the weird confluence of the bizarre: Mitch sitting down, shutting up, the window going all smeary. Hmm, what could this mean? But then Mitch’s head, still intact, lolled forward and his mouth and nose began to issue blood vomitus in nauseating amounts.

That’s when the jumping, screaming, shouting, hopping, and cell phone photoing began, and soon enough the police-FBI Fellini movie would begin its new run in Cleveland.

2

Politics, everything’s politics. Even murder. There would be a tussle with Chicago PD upcoming; they’d want the glory, and in any case, under normal circumstances, murder was for a local jurisdiction and the FBI held no sway over it. But the FBI would win out as lead agency on the investigation, because of a statute holding that murder for hire when initiated over state lines was in the federal bailiwick. The utter professionalism of the shooting made the murder-for-hire inference inescapable, and thus the Bureau got the prize.

Nick Memphis was still the hot boy in the Bureau because of his triumph a year earlier in an ambitious, violent bank robbery in Bristol, Tennessee, which he’d tracked, penetrated, and taken apart with minimal loss to civilians. He was hovering on the edge of an assistant directorship. So though others lobbied intensively, it did no good and Nick got the agent-in-charge gig for “Task Force Sniper,” once it was declared a major case, Bureau code for “Everybody is watching this one.” Given the high publicity value of the investigation, the hugeness and brightness of the limelight, the grounds for endless speculation and fascination, it might get him the assistant directorship if he wrapped it up fast. He tried not to think of that. That had never been the point. The point had always been to use his talents, his work ethic, his intelligence, his courage to do some good in the world, make it a better place. So he tried to deny how fucking much he wanted that assistant directorship.

His first morning after getting the assignment—it happened the day Jack and Mitzi were taken down and the “pattern” emerged—he spent establishing liaison first with field offices in Chicago and New York (who of course resented suddenly having to report to a DC big shot, even if he was well-known and liked by reputation) and through them with the responding police departments. Since East Hampton’s was small, the Long Islanders were happy to turn administrative control over to the feds, whom they despised less than the New York State Police; that was no problem. Chicago was bitter, but in a little time—Nick’s diplomatic rep was well-known and amply justified—he’d gotten Chicago aboard and set up a working HQ in the Chicago Police Department (as opposed to the FBI’s field office, which ticked off the field office AIC, but that couldn’t be helped) and got down to the bolts and nuts. Evidence recovery teams were dispatched immediately to both localities, some of the Bureau’s best forensic people taken off less urgent cases and reassigned here, firearms specialists invited over from BATF just to contribute what they could to the FBI’s efforts, special agents moved in to monitor the local performance and offer gentle evaluations of what could be done better, what needed to be done over, and what was superb work. By 4 p.m., the feds had all but usurped the Chicagoans in the investigation.

But Nick had a first move to make before he even went to Chicago to take command. Just from press reports, he understood, as a onetime sniper himself, that the shooting was of very high quality, something rarely found in criminal cases. Neither his people in East Hampton nor those in Chicago could confirm exactly where the shots had come from, but the lack of rifle reports noted at each scene suggested they had come from a long way off or that the shooter had used some kind of suppressive device, and that conclusion buttressed the operating assumption: a pro. A bullet recovered from the elbow of Joan Flanders’s personal assistant—it had passed through Joan, hit her PA in the fleshy part of the shoulder and struck bone, though without energy to break bone, and literally bounced off the hard stuff and rolled down the outer part of his arm, doing surprisingly little damage—proved to be, if mangled so that it appeared to resemble an especially lovely mushroom, the famous 168-grain boat tail hollow point unanimously used in its Federal or Black Hills loading by most SWAT sniper teams as well as nearly all Army, Marine Corps, Air Force, and Navy dedicated marksmen, combat or otherwise. It was the magic bean that terminated the lives of three Somali pirates in April ’09 in one well-coordinated moment. So Nick had his own DC investigators and through them via e-mail their reps in all fifty states begin the hardest, dullest part of the hunt: the canvass.

All military units with sniper deployment had to be reached; the same was true of all law enforcement units with precision shooters as part of the team. Then there were all cadres and students, recent and otherwise, of the many sniper schools, not merely professional, such as the Marine Sniper School at Quantico, but also the literally dozens of private schools, because as of late sniping had taken on a kind of glamorous aura and many citizens wanted training in the art. But beyond sniper culture lay the broader shooting culture itself, and this generally involved the many dedicated high-power shooting teams affiliated with gun clubs and administered at some level by the NRA, which ran the national matches at Camp Perry, Ohio, every late summer. There were firearms schools that taught hunting techniques too, and there was a niche in the hunting community built around men who became proficient at taking out game animals at long range. There were varmint hunters, who also shot at long range and were truly superb shots, capable of, after much refining of their instruments and much investment in range and loading bench time, hitting twelve-inch-tall prairie dogs at ranges of over a thousand yards with regularity. There was a bench rest culture, in which men, again with highly customized rigs, shot for group size at over a thousand yards (the current thousand-yard champ had been able to put ten rounds into 4.5 inches from that distance). All had to be surveyed and the same questions answered.

Is someone messed up? Is someone bitter, irrational, nearly out of control? Is someone angry? Does someone talk a lot about how the lefties lost the war in Vietnam? Has someone’s health declined suddenly? Is someone on drugs? Did a marriage break up, a child die, a job disappear? Has someone vanished? Is someone pissed off about something that happened in Iraq? Was there a flutter, a tremble, a twitch, a glitch, an anomaly in the community? The task was huge; there were a lot of people who could shoot well at long range in America, and it seemed for a while as if the investigators would have to shake out all of them.

Meanwhile, in the media, the immediate suspicion fell on him, as in the Great American Gun Nut.

That was the narrative, from the start. You know the guy; we all do. Something a little “weird” about him, no? Makes his office buddies a little uneasy, the women especially, with his dullness on all subjects save firearms, about which he lights up like a Christmas tree. Can be seen hunched at the keyboard not with secret Japanese teen nudes but with rifles on his screen. Goes a little nuts when the Second Amendment comes up, and in time people learn to stay away from the topic when he’s around. Maybe he’s got a house full of heads or a shelf full of trophies with small gold men holding weapons atop them. Ew, creepy. Maybe he knows the difference between .30-06 and .308 or that a “thirty caliber” can be a .30-06, a .308, a .300 Win Mag, a .300 Remington Ultra Mag, a .307, a 7.62X39, X51, X54, and so on. Maybe he spends time in the basement with his little mechanical devices and like some dark alchemist of medieval times is capable of fabricating his own cartridges. Maybe he’s an amateur gunsmith who’s got an eerie engagement with the clever mechanics that underlie the mesh of pins, levers, springs, valves, and tubes that constitute the interior of all firearms. All these things suddenly became suspect, and at a certain point, the reporters even started going through the Internet and calling gun stores for hints on recent bizarre behavior by otherwise nondescript customers.

It was the third death, poor Mitch Greene in midsentence, that narrowed the field. Anyone could have killed Joan Flanders, for she was hated as much as she was loved; hatred of her was too broad-based to be of any help at all. And anyone could have killed Jack Strong and Mitzi Reilly, for they were hated, perhaps even more passionately, by just as many, for their smugness, moral superiority, fancy education, contempt for authority, unconvincing contrition, reentry into society, low-watt fame, and so forth and so on. The fact that both Joan and the Jack-Mitzi crimes could be connected to the Vietnam War and the rages of the sixties was tantalizing but of itself not revelatory, not yet anyway.

But nobody really hated Mitch Greene, then or now. He was a clown, a comedian, a cornball; he made people laugh. He probably had never met the other three, for he was really several tiers below them in radical chic circles. He had more or less gone mainstream; he was the one-man answer to the question “Which one of these doesn’t belong?”

He only belonged, if barely, by virtue of the Vietnam connection. Like the other three, he was famous in those years and got a lot of TV time. But was he a real radical, like the others, or was he just a guy riding history’s currents as a way to a gig, getting laid, and doing a little self-expression at the same time? In fact, he’d never really done much for the movement except exploit it for his own ends. There were others, many others, who’d done a lot more, who could be held accountable for a lot more, if those were your politics and “punishment” or “vengeance” were your motive.

“He’s a lightweight,” said Ron Fields, Nick’s number two, an institutionally famous Tommy Tactical type who’d won five gunfights but was known not for brains so much as loyalty and guts. “The only reason for whacking him would be unsophisticated. To a certain type of person upset with the Movement, he would be one of them, maybe even a face, although in reality he was never one of the key apparatchiks. He needed too much attention to do the hard work of revolution.”

“Is that anything?” Nick asked. “Does it tell us anything? Are we learning anything?” He looked around the table, his staff of three or four stars like Ron who’d hitched themselves to him, hoping he’d rise, a New York State Police detective, repping the Hampton sector of the investigation, two smart guys each from Chicago and Shaker Heights, except one of the smart guys in each team was a smart girl. The group was clustered in a large, dreary room in the upper reaches of the Shaker Heights Police Station on the day after Mitch’s death, sitting at a Formica table littered with dead cups of joe, half-eaten doughnuts, sugar grains everywhere, all of it rotting under the nurtureless light of an overhead fluorescent.

One of the women now said, “Here’s what I’m getting: He’s gifted technically but politically naive; he hasn’t done his homework, he’s just gone after the simplest, most obvious symbols of the Movement forty years ago, as he would know it or as he remembered it.”

“So he’s an old guy?” Nick asked.

“I think he has to be.”

“I don’t know,” Nick said. “Shooting at that level is a young guy’s game. Muscle, stamina, discipline, all young guy stuff. Then there’s the moving around. He’s probably not flying, not with the rifle, and all the localities are within driving distance of the time differential. Lots of driving, lots of movement—again, that’s all young guy stuff.”

“Maybe he’s a real good old guy,” someone said. “I mean really good.”

“Anybody know a really good old guy?”

Silence.

“Well, I do. The best. ’Nam sniper, operator, gunman. He’d be the logical candidate.”

“Do you want us on it, Nick?”

“I already called him. First day, by landline, in Idaho, verifying for my own ears he was not in play but out on his ranch caring for his horses. He was. There was a one-in-a-jillion chance he snapped. It happens. He knew why I was calling. He was pissed. But I wanted a clear head to run this show, and that’s what I got. So does anybody know of any other really good old guys?”

“We don’t,” Ron said, “but tomorrow a.m. I’ll have people looking at Vietnam medal-winners, guys who killed a lot. Snipers, maybe aces, specialists.”

“That’s good,” said Nick. “That’ll give us a place to start winnowing. All right, what I’m seeing is someone paying ‘them’ back for their treason. To feel that all these years later, he had to be there all those years before. Kids today don’t care much about Vietnam; most of them don’t even know what it was. But whoever he is has borne a grudge for a long time. And now, maybe realizing that he himself has limited time left, he’s decided to get the rifle out of mothballs, put on his camos, and go off into the boonies on one last stalk and kill.”

“Makes sense,” said one of the others and politely no one bothered to point out that this interpretation violated the premise by which the Bureau would run the investigation. That was because all of them were now attached to it, and all of them would prosper if it prospered.

“All right,” said Nick, “then as Ron says, let’s find our best people and jump-start this thing by testing the theory. Let’s eliminate the large category of possibles for what we think is a smaller category of probables. I’m thinking former Vietnam snipers. Marines, Army, maybe CIA; they had a lot of paramilitary operators over there. I think it was called SOG, their little commando unit. Did the Air Force have snipers?”

“They would have had air policemen sniper-trained for perimeter security. Also, the Navy always has a designated marksman shipboard for mine disposal. Guy hits ’em at long range, makes ’em go boom. Those are two off-the-wall possibilities. I don’t think the SEALS had a sniper program that early. They were more Delta cowboy gunfighters than precision takedown specialists.” That was Ron, always good on sniper stuff and hoping to become head of Precision Marksmanship, the FBI sniper training unit, at Quantico.

“I’m sure by noon tomorrow everyone on this investigation will be an expert on the arcana of military sniping, circa 1965 to ’75. Get ’em going. Stay with ’em. I’ll be going to the autopsy tomorrow and I’m waiting to hear from forensics on the Greene bullet. I’m sure it’ll be another 168.”

Thus it was that the FBI, very early in the investigation, became aware of Carl Hitchcock.

Carl’s name actually arose almost simultaneously from two sources. The first was the sergeant in charge of training and special operations for the North Carolina State Police, their SWAT guy, in other words. He’d been reached at home by a young special agent in the major case working room of Task Force Sniper in the headquarters building in Washington. She was making inquiries on the subject of good law enforcement shots who’d recently displayed instability. The sergeant abjured knowledge of such, and the phone call was brusque, abrupt, and professional, and almost short. But—

“I hate to do this, young lady, but there is one name that comes up.”

“Yes sir,” said the agent.

“Carl Hitchcock.”

The young woman had no idea who that would be. She had no response.

“The name familiar?”

“No sir, can’t say it is.”

“How old are you?”

“Twenty-four.”

“Okay, then. For a time, Carl Hitchcock was the most famous sniper in America. Someone wrote a book about him on account of all the kills he got in Vietnam. Marine sniper, you know, in the boonies, hunting bad guys one at a time.”

“Yes sir,” said the investigator, writing the name down.

“He was known as the leading sniper with something like ninety-three or -four kills. He had magazine articles written about him, he had a book published, and for years he went around to gun shows and sold autographs, just like an old baseball player. There was talk of a movie, and a lot of smaller products, you know, an authorized poster, a special brand of ammo, some rifles that bore his name. Carl got a little action off each one.”

“He’s now in your area?”

“He retired down here in Jacksonville, like a lot of old marines do. It’s right outside Lejeune. He had a little house here. He liked to garden. His wife died a year or two back. But his health hasn’t been too good lately.”

“How do you know him?”

“He had a consulting business where he’d drop by and do some informal training days for police departments on their shooting programs. He helped our boys and was an exceptional coach. He made everyone shoot better and, more important, think better. He’d put a lot into snipercraft. He even had a license plate that read SNIPR-1.”

He spelled it out for the young woman.

“And something’s going on with him?”

“Well, it gets dicey here. This is why I’m reluctant to share. But yeah, something. Something. Don’t know what. Carl’s not the sort of man who talks a lot about how he feels. He prides himself on not feeling a thing. But I could tell. His voice was dead on the phone. He canceled his visits. Just something and it depressed the hell out of him. Classical. Maybe just old age, the realization there were a lot more leaves on the ground than on the tree. It hits different people different ways. I don’t know.”

“So when was the last time you saw Carl Hitchcock?”

“A month ago. I’m just talking a feeling. Seemed lonely, I suppose.”

“Was he infirm?”

“He wasn’t able to play basketball, no, but for a gent close to seventy, he was spry enough. Walked with a limp, had pain from some burns, that sort of thing, but he got around all right.”

“Do you have an address?”

“Well, let me look it up for you. Would you want me to—”

“No sir,” said the young woman, who knew that a local gumshoe suddenly asking questions might be just what the doctor didn’t order. “I’m going to run this by my superiors and we will be back in touch soonest.”

“Ma’am, I hear that all the time when I work with feds, and ‘soonest’ is shorthand for ‘neverest.’ ”

“I apologize for that, sir, but I do mean ‘soonest’ this time.”

The young woman, excited, raced in to see the legendary Nick, who waved her into a chair while he finished a call.

And the young woman heard him say, “You spell that H-I-T-C-H-C-O-C-K, just like the director?”

Source number two was the police department of Hendrix, Arizona, whose chief Nick had just been on the phone with. The chief had said the following:

“This old gal sat in our lobby for six hours and I will say she got the runaround. But finally a detective came by to take her complaint and it turned out that her sister was a former beauty queen named Mavis O’Neill Hitchcock, of Jacksonville, North Carolina, which is a town just outside the big marine base at Camp Lejeune. Mavis died, but her husband was a combat-injured retiree named Carl Hitchcock, who had been famous for a while as the marines’ number one sniper in Vietnam. It was a good marriage. Both were old dogs, both had been around the block, and Mavis’s first husband, Howard, had also been a marine sergeant, and he and Carl had been friends. Anyhow, for a long time Carl was a kind of a god to the marines and to lots of law-enforcement officers and the like. It was a life he liked very much and he enjoyed talking to the young snipers and so forth. But about the time Mavis took sick, something went sour. Belly-up. Don’t know what. Now, the sister went out to Jacksonville as Mavis’s condition worsened, and she could tell that something wasn’t right with Carl. ‘Carl, what’s wrong?’ Carl wouldn’t say a word. Wasn’t a talking type; all the lonely time he spent in Vietnam probably cured him of a need to talk. He tells her he was the champion. But now it turns out he wasn’t the champion. There was another fellow, a few years earlier, killed more bad guys. ‘Why would you let a thing like that upset you?’ ‘I feel like I’ve been living a lie,’ Carl said. Anyhow, Mavis dies, Carl is all broken up, and the sister has to go back to Hendrix and her own life, but she tries to keep in touch. Several times she calls, he’s too drunk to talk. Sometimes he himself calls, drunk. One day he breaks a hip and that takes a hell of a lot out of him. Then he just stopped answering the phone. Now this, and she wonders, could Carl . . . It’s not like Carl . . . Carl was such a good, brave man, such a wonderful marine . . . but could Carl?”

“All right,” Nick told them at the meeting he convened in about thirty seconds, “I don’t want to commit to Carl Hitchcock, but we have to get more. I’ve been on the phone with the federal attorney for North Carolina and he’s putting together a search warrant. I want our best team on this. Ron Fields will run the show, and Ron, you know what I expect. This is a tough situation, you don’t want to brown off the locals with overzealous supervision, the marines are going to be very interested because he’s very much a symbol of their branch, one of their heroes, but I’ve also got Joan Flanders’s ex-husband T. T. Constable calling the director and demanding action, sometimes twice a day. Ron, you’re up for this?”

“I am.”

“Take the young woman here with you. She did good. What was your name, young lady?”

“Jean Chandler.”

“Take Special Agent Chandler, Ron. Run her hard, treat her unfairly, call her by her last name, overwork her, don’t let her call her husband—”

“No husband,” Chandler said, blankly.

“—boyfriend, who’s probably a linebacker for the Redskins, and see if she comes up smiling. Maybe she’s a keeper, maybe not. We’ll see.”

Chandler smiled; Nick was famous for his needling, joshing style with the younger people.

Nick said, “You make sure—I know you know this, but they pay me to point out the obvious—you make sure the legal paperwork is perfect before you move; you don’t ransack; you show utmost respect to this old duffer if he’s around; you document everything, okay? Is this understood?”

“Yes, Nick.”

“And you understand this one other thing: if, God forbid, he’s the boy and if it gets dicey, you back off quick and look contrite. I know you’re a gunfighter yourself, but you cannot engage Carl Hitchcock. Under no circumstances are you to engage Carl Hitchcock. If you want to see a lot of people dead in a hurry, you corner a former marine sniper with a rifle and a bagful of ammo with no way out, and I guarantee you, you’ll have body bags all the way out to the trees and back in the first two minutes. And the survivors will never get a promotion.”

They laughed, nervously.

“And you keep me in the loop and everybody else out of the loop. Everything goes through me, because I get paid to be the asshole. You let me be the asshole. If you do that, I’ll fight to death for you. If you don’t, I’ll dump you and hang a do-not-promote-this-fool toe tag on your career. I will not be asked questions by the press I don’t know the answer to. Okay, go, go, go. What, you’re not out of here yet?”

3

The house was a one-story brick job under palms and pines in a leafy neighborhood full mostly of young marine noncom families. Jacksonville, it turned out, was one of those parasite towns that grew up on the outskirts of a large military installation, this time Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, the home of and training site for II Marine Expeditionary Force, the Second Marine Division, the 22nd, 23rd, and 24th Marine Expeditionary Units as well as the USMC infantry and engineering schools. The town was full of small retail for young marines—dry cleaners, tailors, shoe repair places, fast food—and of course a seamier array of afterduty amusements, mostly beer and strippers, as well as a bus station, a train station, and a surprisingly well developed taxi system, which ferried the boys and girls to and from duty and recreation if they were not advanced enough in their careers to afford autos.

Ron Fields and Jean Chandler met early that afternoon with the federal prosecutor for Shelby County, a USMC JAG staff rep, the local police chief, and a captain in the North Carolina State Police. Fields had a lot of explaining to do.

“I’m really a nice guy,” Ron said, “and people love me. But I’m going to big-foot it now to save time and let you decide how wonderful I am six months from now. Sorry if I come on like a jerk, but that’s the way it has to be. Jack,” he said to the prosecutor, sliding into first-name familiarity, “I’m going to fax your office’s legal work to DC for vetting by guys who went to Harvard. I don’t think they’re smarter, I just have to be sure.”

“Of course,” said Jack, “I only went to UNC, what do I know?”

“We have forensics and evidence recovery teams and SWAT people on standby. But we cannot approach this by kicking in doors. We go gentle. Slow and gentle. I want you, Major Connough,”—the Marine Corps JAG rep—“to witness and sign off on all my decisions, and you tell me any time I act with disrespect; I don’t want the Marine Corps mad at me.”

“The Marine Corps is already mad. This guy is an institution. He’s a god, a hero. If it turns out—well, it won’t. Everyone who knows Carl Hitchcock says it won’t.”

Ron didn’t like the sound of that. It was already out. That’s the thing with these service cultures, he thought. They’re hardwired for commo and something can’t happen here without everyone knowing it in five seconds.

“I hope he’s clean too. Makes my job easier. Okay, no police presence up front. I want it gathered at the school two blocks away; your SWAT people, your traffic control, your medical standby, your press liaison, whatever. How fast can you assemble?”

“We can have people in place by four p.m.”

“Good, I’m hoping to get a yes from DC and that you can get to a nice friendly judge by then, all right?”

“We can work that time frame. The warrant’s already at Judge O’Brian’s. He’ll sign. He always has before.”

“Good move, Chief, that saves some time. Now at three, Chief, I want your people to begin a discreet evac of the neighborhood. Friendly cop style, ma’am, we’re making a potentially dangerous arrest, and we’d like you to quietly gather your kids up and head over to the school, that kind of thing. These are marine people, they’ll follow orders.”

“Is that necessary?” asked the marine JAG rep. “Carl’s nearly seventy. He’s not going to go to guns.”

“I’m sure you’re right, Major Connough. But I can’t take the risk. We cannot have civilian casualties. Furthermore, every public safety professional who has the potential of going in line of sight to the house will wear, I say again, will wear body armor.”

“Won’t stop a .308,” said the marine.

“No, but it could deflect and we’ve found that the armor increases efficiency and confidence as well as survivability in critical incidents.”

“We do have some critical incident experience in the Marine Corps,” said the major. “Ever hear of Iwo Jima?”

“Yes sir, I meant no disrespect, I’m just covering all the bases in my dull, straight-ahead fashion. In the meantime, I’m going to take a cab ride over and just pass by the house a couple of times.”

So next, while the various authorities moved their teams into place, Ron and Jean Chandler glided along Peacock Lane for the third time, with a Jacksonville cop in civies over body armor behind the wheel. The feds played elementary security games, maybe overkill, but coming from a second-guess culture bar none, they took no chances: first time they were in coat and tie and a formal blouse, the second in polo shirts and glasses under ball caps, and this time they had switched sunglasses and ball caps.

Each time, they’d seen nothing, though as they worked it, only one of them, in the off side, actually observed the house. The closer agent sat still, eyes dead ahead, utterly uninterested; it was his partner, leaning back just a bit, head cocked just a bit, who scanned for intelligence.

“Give me your read,” said Ron.

“Nothing,” she said. “It looks empty. The grass is trim, though it’s been a while since the last cutting. The garden has been weeded, the lawn watered, nothing is lying around. It just looks dead. No sign of habitation, nothing out of the ordinary, nothing spontaneous or unexplainable, just the house of a neat older retiree who lives alone but is still spry enough to do his gardening. He’s been gone a week, maybe two, but there’s no sign of decay or instability. It’ll run down in time, but not yet. It’s still neat as a button. The car looks dusty but the dust covers a clean vehicle. It’s been washed but not driven and it’s sat for a week.” That was Carl’s Chrysler 300 with the North Carolina rear plate SNIPR-1.

Chandler’s assessment did not deviate from Ron’s; in fact, it confirmed Ron’s in every detail.

Finally, at 4:09 p.m., Ron got the call he had been waiting for from Nick.

“All right, Ron, Justice has signed off on the legal and the judge down there has okayed the warrant. You can go. You get back to me soonest.”

“Roger,” he said, and turned to the gathering of officers. “It’s a go. Agent Chandler and I will approach. I will have my mike open. Any sounds of shots or scuffles, you guys get there fast.”

Nods all around.

“Okay, cowboy up.”

The SWAT people climbed into their armored vehicles and turned the engines on. Ron and Jean put on body armor, then their coats. They hung their IDs on their chests by a chain necklace. A last quick checkoff with the district attorney, the federal attorney, the police executives, the medical people, and so on made it clear that the moment was indeed here.

The two agents got into the black sedan, drove two blocks, and pulled into Carl Hitchcock’s driveway.

Discreetly, the SWAT teams, locked and loaded, moved to holding points just out of line of sight of the house. All earphones were open to the same channel.

Ron and Jean exited the vehicle, took a look around, then Ron led the way to the front door. Both agents had unsnapped the safety strap on the holsters of their Glock .40s, which they now carried hot. Ron knocked, waited, knocked again, to no answer.

They edged their way around to each door, knocking. They peered through windows and saw nothing. Finally, circumnavigating the house and narrating their progress over the radio, they again reached the front door. Ron pushed it; it popped open, unlocked.

“Sergeant Hitchcock,” he yelled. “My name is Ronald C. Fields, Special Agent, Federal Bureau of Investigation. I am here to serve a search warrant and to take you in for questioning. I have a marine JAG officer nearby if you wish to talk to him first. Please come out with hands raised. This is not an arrest; it’s an interview and search. You will have ample time to acquire legal representation if necessary.”

There was silence.

Finally Ron said, “Okay, we’re going in.” He withdrew his Glock. “Muzzle down. You do not fire unless you absolutely positively see a weapon or are physically assaulted, do you understand, Chandler?”

“Got it,” said Chandler.

“You do not shoot Special Agent Fields in the ass, no matter how big a jerk he is, all right?”

“Ten-four that,” said Chandler.

They entered, stepping into a living room.

It took a second to adjust to the darkness.

“Sergeant Hitchcock, FBI, please identify yourself.”

Silence.

The living room was dominated by a wall of glory narrating a marine career, pictures from Lejeune and Pendleton and half the ships at sea, Rome, Paris, the war in Vietnam, a batch of magazine covers and a book cover all rendered into picture frames, medals in an oak display case, trophies boasting little golden shooters, all of it neat, all of it framed, all of it speaking of a man proud of his accomplishments and in control of his faculties.

They moved onward, Ron advancing, Jean covering, down the hall through a laundry room to a small but neat kitchen. Beyond was a bedroom, bed made, sheet tight as per barracks style (you could bounce a dime off the covers), nothing flung or discarded.

Finally there was only a last bedroom, closed.

In fact, locked from the outside, with a padlock screwed between door and frame.

“Kick it in,” said Ron. “We’ll pay for it later.”

Jean Chandler gave it a kick and her foot bounced off.

“More time in the gym for Agent Jeannie,” said Fields, with a snort.

“I can do it,” Jean said, this time setting herself more correctly, aiming higher to bring more stress on the joinery of the screws to the wood of door and frame. She kicked, the door flew open, and they stepped in.

“Jesus Christ,” said Ron.

4

A few hours later, in the press briefing auditorium of the FBI headquarters building in Washington DC, Nick stepped to the podium, almost blinded by the lights. He could sense the seething crowd in the darkness. He went to the lectern, cleared his voice, tested the microphone. Then he stood by to be introduced by Phil Price, the Bureau’s public affairs officer, as “Nick Memphis, Special Agent in Charge of Task Force Sniper, with, as we said, important new information.”

Nick leaned to the microphone.

“Thank you all for coming. Are we ready? Jimmy, hand out the circulars and the release; make sure everyone gets one. All right, as Phil said, I have information. I am here to announce that we have just obtained an arrest warrant in the deaths of Joan Flanders, Mitch Greene, Jack Strong, and Mitzi Reilly.”

A wave of excitement radiated from the gathered reporters, as all squirmed forward on their seats.

“The warrant names Carl R. Hitchcock, sixty-seven, of Jacksonville, North Carolina, as prime suspect in the felonies. I should add that Hitchcock, a highly trained, experienced, and decorated marine sniper with a lot of combat experience, is to be approached with extreme caution, and I say this to law enforcement too. He is an exceedingly dangerous man, possibly the most dangerous man the Bureau has sought since Baby Face Nelson in 1934. He was credited with ninety-three kills in Vietnam in a 1969–1970 tour of duty and was one of the most accomplished of the marine snipers in that war. Here’s his picture.”

Nick stepped aside, and behind him, where the seal of the FBI had been projected, the image of a man swam into focus. It was a hard, lean face, dominated by hawklike eyes furious in their concentration, completely Scots-Irish, Appalachian-bred, from a hardscrabble farm or vertical plantation. In older days, the cruel word “hillbilly” would have applied to such concentration knitting the brow, the bricklike chin, the eyes so close together. Nowadays, the snarky of the world would apply the word “redneck” or even “trailer trash.” The planes of the face were all vertical slashes; the eyebrows thick, the nose meaty, the mouth a grim cipher. He wore the dress uniform of the United States Marine Corps with the saucer cap squared away atop his white sidewall, the brow low to his dark eyes. The tunic was immaculate, the chest festooned with medals and awards.

“This was taken in 1974, the week he retired as a master sergeant. He’d served the Corps for twenty-three years, did three tours in Vietnam, the last as a sniper and platoon sergeant with Scout/Sniper Company, Second Battalion, Third Marines near Huu Toc, just off the DMZ. He was in combat nearly every day for thirteen months. He was shot at a lot. In his other tours he was a military policeman and the platoon sergeant of a line infantry company. He has three Purple Hearts as well as the Silver Star, which was awarded him for removing men from a burning tracked vehicle at considerable risk and in considerable pain, as he had sustained forty percent first-degree burns. You can see that his service record is impeccable, the stuff of heroism and sacrifice at its highest level. That is why no one here is anything but saddened by this development.”

A new face appeared. It was clearly the same, though the discipline had eased, the eyes were merry, there was more flesh. From the angle it was clear he’d been snuggling with someone, a wife probably, and the old warrior was happy.

“This is our most recent picture of Sergeant Hitchcock. It was taken three years ago before the death of his wife, Mavis. We’ve cropped her out of the picture. But this is the man we’re hunting today.”

“Can you outline the case?” came a call from the darkness.

“Briefly. Based on intelligence derived from a canvass of sniper and SWAT and other long-range shooting communities, we quickly obtained information that Sergeant Hitchcock had been depressed of late and hadn’t been seen in two weeks. We obtained a search warrant, and at four this afternoon, a Bureau team with the help of local and state law enforcement agencies in Jacksonville, North Carolina, served it in his domicile. We found a room with photos on the wall of several of the victims as well as others in the antiwar movement of forty years ago. We found the number ninety-seven drawn on walls, pads of paper, on the photos themselves, all over the room. We found computer records suggesting a great deal of research into the lives and whereabouts of various antiwar movement figures, particularly Joan Flanders, but also Strong and Reilly. There was less on Mitch Greene, but he was included. We found gun oil, cleaning rods, ammunition cases, and a case of .308 Federal Match 168-grain hollow point boat tail cartridges, of the sort our forensics people have ID’d as used in the four shootings. Four boxes, eighty rounds, were missing. We found the paperwork for a Treasury Department stamp tax of two hundred dollars for a class III device, approved by ATF, called a suppressor, which you would call a silencer. We found packaging for that device from its manufacturer, SureFire Inc., as well as an invoice for the costs to thread the muzzle of a new Krieger barrel, by which method the suppressor could be effectively mated to the rifle, all dated from 2005. We found maps with routes marked out charting a trip that went from the Hamptons on Long Island to Chicago to Minneapolis. We believe he diverted from Minneapolis, where an ex-radical named Ivan Thorson is a controversial law professor, to Cleveland, where Mitch Greene was scheduled to appear at a book signing. We have determined that the time frame of the three shootings sustains the interpretation that he had sufficient allowance to drive to and away from each site. We have tracked his credit card records and have determined that he rented motel rooms in each locality the night before the shooting.”

“Where is he now?”

“On the road.”

“Do you—”

“No, but I assure you, all possibilities are being exhaustively examined at this point in time. We have a federal alert code blue, the highest category, and all police agencies in the continental U.S. were notified immediately prior to this press conference.”

“What’s the motive? Is he crazy? Did he flip? Some kind of combat stress disorder?”

“Combat stress disorder, almost certainly. His own declining health, yes, as records indicate a slow recovery from a broken hip some years ago, problems with alcoholism, two DWI arrests in the past six months, and other factors generally pointing to depression and disappointment. Loneliness, isolation, depression in the aftermath of the death of his wife. But there was something else.

“For close to thirty years, Carl Hitchcock had been known publicly as the United States Marine Corps’ number one sniper in Vietnam. He had ninety-three kills, as I’ve said. A book was written about him, magazine articles and so forth. He was in a small world a king, a center of attraction and attention. I leave it to you all to discover the joys he took in that identity, as well as the benefits he reaped from it. He attended many gun shows, he sold autographs, he was kind of like an old ballplayer trading on his celebrity by attending public meets. He enjoyed small royalties from several products he endorsed, such as a rifle manufactured by Springfield, a lithograph that showed him in full combat regalia, a line of premium ammunition. I think this speaks to the point: he had a license plate that read SNIPR-1.

“But about two years ago, an article was published in Soldier of Fortune magazine mentioning offhandedly another marine sniper with ninety-six kills. It caused a storm in that small world. A researcher used the Freedom of Information Act to access Marine records and determined that, indeed, a Chuck McKenzie, a former lance corporal from Modoc, Oregon, had served for thirteen months in Vietnam in 1966 and achieved an officially credited ninety-six kills. It never occurred to him that he’d done anything remarkable, and he went on to a career in the United States Forestry Service, never mentioning his Vietnam service to anybody but other vets. As I understand it, he was never decorated, his kids didn’t even know what their dad had done in the war, and he took no part in what might be called ‘tactical culture,’ a kind of celebration of various aggressive, firearms-centric methodologies that seems to enjoy some currency now and is supported by various magazines and Web sites and blogs. He never knew there was a Carl Hitchcock cult, so to speak, and that products and endorsements and magazines and the book had been written about Carl and his ninety-three kills. He only found out about it when Soldier of Fortune contacted him a few years ago. He had no comment then; I doubt he has any comment now. He’s never done a thing to capitalize on his ‘fame,’ such as it was.

“But we now see that Carl was extremely upset. A taciturn man, he wouldn’t have sought psychological help or counseling. He simply withdrew from the world, a process speeded up by the death of his wife at about the same time. Clearly he brooded on it; I’ll let the psychologists tell you by what process he arrived at his conclusion, but from our reading of the materials in his house, it seems clear that he saw this week’s shootings as a continuation of his Vietnam tour of duty. It was a last mission, and he identified as ‘enemies’ not Vietcong or North Vietnamese regulars but protesters who in his interpretation had helped the enemy. So he set out to eliminate them and, in some fashion, reclaim the title of the number one Vietnam sniper. Thus we find the number ninety-seven scrawled all over the headquarters room he’d dedicated in his house; it seems clear that he will go on hunting the supposed traitors until we stop him or he comes to his senses and turns himself in.”

“What is the state of the manhunt at this time?”

“Well, even as we speak, this information is going to all law enforcement entities within the continental United States. We continue to receive information from hundreds of sources. Our last sighting places him in an Econo Lodge Motel on the outskirts of Shaker Heights, Ohio, two nights ago. We are concentrating our efforts in an area within two days’ drive of that locality. Meanwhile, our forensic people, our evidence recovery teams, and their local equivalents examine the evidence for further information. We have established state police roadblocks on interstates in Michigan, Illinois, Pennsylvania, and New York State. If Carl Hitchcock is listening, we urge him to give himself up and end this madness. But I have to say again, he is armed and dangerous, highly trained, a superb shot, a combat veteran, a close-quarters combat expert, and he is capable of wreaking extreme havoc in a very little time. So he must be approached with caution.”

“Do you have any opinion, Special Agent, on the use of ‘trained killers’ in the military and the risks such men pose for society when they return to the civilian world? I mean, this seems to dovetail neatly with the report released by the Homeland Security Agency some months ago that—”

“You must be from the New York Times.”

“Yes sir,” the young man said.

Then Nick saw movement, and his eyes flashed to it. In the back of the room Jack Hefner, assistant director and Nick’s immediate supervisor, was winding the index finger of one hand around, helicopter rotor style, meaning “Wind it up, we have news.”

“Okay, ladies and gentlemen, sorry I don’t have time for more questions, but we’ve got to get back to the manhunt.”

Trying to appear casual, Nick gathered up his papers, conferred briefly with the Bureau’s public information officer, then slid out the door to the rear, avoiding the reporters who’d now clustered forward, wanting more, more, more.

Nick got into the off-limits sector of the floor and watched as Jack came toward him on the fly.

“We got him,” he said.

“Where?”

“His credit card was just used to check into a hotel in Grand Rapids, Michigan. He’s there now, in a room. Michigan State Police can have SWAT teams there in a few minutes. It’s your call, Nick.”

“No assault. Tell them to set up discreet surveillance. I don’t want this guy opening up. One sniper team. I guess if he goes, we’ll have to drop him. God, I’d hate to do that. But one sniper team in a truck across from the hotel. I’m leaving with my team now.”

“Nick, I’d advise that you send the word to take him down now. If it goes bad, Michigan will have to answer for it.”

“Jack, if I’m incident commander, my best judgment is soft surveillance. I’m on my way, can be there in three hours.” He looked at his watch. It was 9:35 p.m., 10:35 in the Midwest. “We’ll let him fall asleep. We’ll take him down at dawn.”

5

Through the night-vision binoculars, the Econo Lodge just off 83 in Grand Rapids, Michigan, looked calm enough. It dozed under a clear if cold night sky. A few lights blazed greenly in the amped fields of vision, slightly pixelated in distortion, as if painted by a mad Dutchman who’d just cut off his ear. It was the kind of detail that shouldn’t have come to Nick but did anyway, and he exiled it from his mind, just kept the lenses screwed on the first-floor window, sixth down from the office, which was dark.

“Any sign of movement?” Fields asked.

“Nothing. Captain, how are they coming?”

“I’m sure they’re almost done, Special Agent,” said the Michigan State Police SWAT commander, a burly guy in combat gear from head to toe, like some kind of medieval knight. He wore an MP5 submachine gun in a cinch sling tight to his body armor and a black watch cap.

He was referring to the slow evacuation of the Econo Lodge by state policemen. They were moving stealthily, almost creeping, knocking softly and emptying the motel, herding tired travelers to a nearby high school for safekeeping. Meanwhile several observation posts had been set up, one in a truck across the way in a Dunkin’ Donuts parking lot, one in a civilian household behind the motel, and two others farther out with good angles to the motel. Three heavily armed and armored SWAT operators had taken over the room next to Carl Hitchcock’s, inserted an optic tube through the duct system, and got a good look-see into his room, where they saw—nothing. Nick again checked the image as it was broadcast to a vid monitor in the command vehicle. He too, and all the men about him, saw nothing, just what appeared to be the shapes consistent with a generic motel room, low-end: a bed, a bureau, a TV on a TV stand, a small bathroom. No sound of breathing was picked up by the microphones.

“He either sleeps still or he’s dead,” said the SWAT captain.

“These guys are trained in stillness,” said Nick. “He can control his breathing, hold it down to nothingness almost. We can’t assume he’s out.”

A call came.

The captain took it, muttered into the phone.

“Okay,” he said, “that’s the last of ’em. The motel is empty, all the houses on the street beyond are evacked too. Just him and us.”

“Okay,” said Nick.

“You know, my people can blow the wall between the rooms and be on him in one second, behind a flashbang,” said the captain. “Might be the safest, surest way.”

Nick didn’t like it. He knew the SWAT mentality. He knew the most aggressive officers applied, the ones who liked to shoot and had a little hero fantasy at play behind their eyes at all times. Dress ’em up like Delta commandos and give ’em fancy weapons and tools, and you all but tickled their trigger fingers. For some reason he couldn’t understand, Nick wanted desperately to take Carl Hitchcock alive. The old guy deserved their best efforts.

“Negative, but thanks and noted. No, my team will apprehend. It’s a small room, I don’t want a lot of people in there rushing and crowding. Three’s enough. Body armor, helmet, backup shotguns but primary personnel—that is, myself and Agents Fields and Chandler—will go in with handguns behind flashbangs. Okay? My call, that’s how I’m calling it.”

He went ahead with further tactical details: all SWAT teams cocked and locked at the holding point, the helicopters in orbit a mile out, roadblocks in place, medical teams on standby—everything was checked off until there was nothing more to do except the thing itself.

“Let’s go,” he said.

They scampered through the darkness, hit the hotel office, where a squad of cops waited breathlessly. They nodded, did a last checkoff, and slid down the hallway, passing cop sentries every few feet. The approach to Carl’s room, however, was clear, and they slid to it.

Nick looked at his watch, saw that it was 5 a.m.

He nodded to his two colleagues. Ron Fields slipped by him. He had a Mossberg entry gun, a short-barreled pump-action shotgun with a breaching round in the chamber. Next to him young Chandler, her Glock holstered gunfighter style in a low rig strapped to her thigh under her body armor, had a flashbang in each fist. With the thumb of each hand, she pulled the pins, holding the levers down. Fields squirmed to the doorknob, braced the muzzle of the short-barrel against it, made a visual check with each teammate, pushed the safety off, and made a last visual check with Nick.

Nick nodded.

Fields took a deep breath and fired.

The breaching round detonated in the narrow space of the hallway, splintering the door at the knob. Fields gave it a kick, and it flew open brokenly, and then he stood aside as Chandler tossed in each distraction grenade. In three seconds, the two detonated with a stunning double thunderclap, filling the universe with painful vibration and a flash of illumination so powerful it cut like a knife, disorienting anyone looking into it instead of, like the raiders, away from it.

Nick went through the door hard, his Glock in a steady two-hand grip, trigger finger indexed above the trigger guard, a SureFire light mounted on rails beneath the barrel burning a hole in the smoky turmoil conjured by the flashbangs. His beam showed nothing, and he advanced quickly, screaming, “FBI, hands up, FBI, hands up, FBI, hands up!”

But there was nobody there with hands to raise. Penetrated by Nick’s, then Fields’s, then Chandler’s beams, the darkness yielded no image of a man struggling to come awake and grope for a gun. The room was empty, the bed unmessed, nothing strewn about to signify human occupation, just the sterile neatness of an undisturbed motel room. The three rotated quickly to the bathroom, kicking the ajar door fully open and again revealing nothing. The shower curtain wasn’t even drawn, so there was no concealment behind it. Other cops arrived, forming up in the hallway; outside, shadows moved, where SWAT teamers from stations beyond the motel got close and laid their muzzles on a window to prevent any escape. But no target emerged.

The lights came on, revealing what was now nothing more than a room of overexcited policemen with guns drawn.

One last door remained. It was to the closet, just this side of the bathroom, and a cluster of guns zeroed it. Someone dipped in, pulled it open.

The many weapons-mounted lights captured the still Carl. He was in his underwear, a plaid pair of shorts and an OD T-shirt. His legs were stretched out, pale and glowing, the dark hair on them standing up bristling in the merciless lights. He held his rifle, which Nick numbly noted was the inevitable Remington 700 with a heavy barrel; his hand lay relaxed upon his thigh, where it had fallen from its awkward stretch to reach the trigger. In fact, because of the extra length of the barrel with the eight inches of steel suppressor affixed, he’d had to push the trigger with a straightened-out hanger. The hanger had fallen to the floor. The weapon ran up the length of his body to his mouth, almost as if cradled, a loving thing till the end, but at the mouth, the muzzle of its suppressor had nested, though in recoil it appeared to have knocked a few teeth out. He’d fired his last shot through the roof of his mouth in the closed closet, and the bullet had tunneled upward through his brain, plowed through the roof of the closet and perhaps lodged itself in the motel structure, where it could be recovered. Carl’s eyes were closed and his brains and blood painted the upper third of the closet, more abstract art for the clinically inclined. In all the circling light beams, the blood itself, red-orange, seemed to dance or pulsate, as if it still welled from the crater that had been the top of the man’s skull.

“He must have done it right away,” said Chandler. “There’s rigor in the limbs, so he’s been gone a long time. Maybe right after he checked in.”

“He knew it was all over,” said Ron. “He had no place to run. Besides, he completed his mission, he got to ninety-seven. He’s the champ again.”

6

As in Vietnam, the rains came. It was the season. They fell almost horizontally, sopping everything, turning the earth to gruel, squeezing mud up and over shoes. It was a penetrating rain, and nobody got away from it or didn’t feel its chill.

Swagger stood apart from the others and watched the box that contained what remained of Carl Hitchcock go into the ground. He hadn’t known Carl, as Carl had finished his sniper’s tour before Bob started his; afterwards, in the melancholy aftermath of a lost war, things turned and stayed strange for the longest time, and the two never came upon each other, though they cut trail often enough.

Then, the odd thing: in slow, steady increments, Carl got big. Being number one, at anything, still mattered in this country, and a book came along, some articles, and soon enough Carl was adding to his pension by standing still for autographs at gun shows and being beloved as the avuncular “Gunny,” a pop-cult stereotype with a background in real bloodletting that made certain no one ever laughed in his face and, stamping him a member of the killer elite or a knight of a round table, depending on your politics, would only permit other snipers or shooters in his presence; those who had not shot for blood felt quietly driven out and shunned.

Then, another thing, wholly unpredictable: what might be called “tactical culture.” Because of Carl or in spite of him or completely apart from him—who knew? but for some reason—a fascination with the designated life takers, the sanctioned force appliers, took root. The new man was the sniper, the commando, the CQB professional, the pistol jockey, the long-range hitter. Magazines like Soldier of Fortune and SWAT and Combat Handguns came alive, and serious men consumed reams and reams of paper debating such issues as “9mm v. .45 ACP” or “Instinct Shooting: Lifesaver or Fool’s Folly?” The fascination took hold of a certain demographic, some professional, some dreamers, but all obsessed with a kind of ideal warrior in an ideal gunfight. The core of the culture was equipment fetish, and soon enough boutique providers were turning out dedicated sniper rifles, pouches, straps, gizmos of all shapes and purposes, whole lines of tactical clothing, headgear, watches (always black), boots, vests, holsters with elaborately engineered snaps for security on the one hand and quickness of draw on the other. Carl was somehow the professor emeritus of this world, its guru, its revered elder. And it fed him, as he rode sniper chic to a nice enough income with his seminars for law enforcement marksmen, which he put on all over the country. He became at the same time a kind of sniper social worker and spent more than one night talking to someone who’d blown a shot or frozen at the ultimate moment. He counted again. He loved it. Who could blame him? Human nature being what it was, it was more fun to spend a retirement beloved than ignored.

But it had come to this: a civilian graveyard on the outskirts of Jacksonville, North Carolina, a wet fall day, a few disconsolate loners standing about in what appeared to be a crowd but was not, really, as no one pressed close; it was just a group of individuals standing in an almost-crowd. Some generic holy fellow read from the book but added nothing other than God’s pro forma respect for the dead. No one from the United States Marine Corps attended.

How could they? Carl was deranged marine sniper, Carl was combat-shocked vet, Carl was crazed gunman, Carl was disappointed, depressed soldier, in the words of a prominent newspaper in New York that thought it was all right to call marines soldiers. So the Corps sent no one officially, despite all that Carl had given the Corps. That seemed wrong to Bob, but what did he know of such things and the way they turned out.

Again, like a Faulknerian blood curse, an original sin of violence and oppression, the hideous adventure that was this country’s misguided path in Vietnam in the late 1960s reaches out to claim yet more lives. Let it be written, that the tragic marine sniper Carl Hitchcock, once a hero and now an alleged murderer, is the last casualty of that war and that it can kill no more. Let us hope we are at last safe from it.

But let the Vietnam War stand also as a warning to further enticements in far-off lands; there have been a few since. The temptation to solve with violence that which cannot be solved with diplomacy is powerful, yet always wrong. Victory or defeat make little difference in the end. War turns heroes into Carl Hitchcocks with kills 94, 95, 96 and 97 the civilians who were only trying to save him. They are victims, but Carl Hitchcock was the tragedy, constructed by a culture that seeks its answers in high-velocity bullets.

That was the New York Times editorial page.

Bob hadn’t read any others online; he didn’t have the heart to, and it was another of his resentments that Carl had somehow become the platform for the eastern asshole press, and he doubted there was a man in an eastern press editorial room who’d been in Vietnam at all, much less as a marine, and yet somehow they were the ones who felt entitled to sound the words and play the bugle.

He tried to shake it off.

Getting old, all beat and cut to hell.

He still walked with a limp from a bad cut picked up a few years back. His hair was gray, his face bleak, his body old and achy. He’d been shot at a lot, hit a few times, and one of his hips was cold steel, five degrees icier than the weather every single day, always a reminder of how things can go wrong. But all that said, it was true too that he had it made.

He was sort of rich. He owned seven lay-up barns throughout the West and drew a good percentage from each with not a lot of overhead; his wife ran them beautifully. He had pensions from the marines as well as disability pay, so there’d always be enough money. He lived in a beautiful house outside Boise that looked across meadows to mountains. He had a few good horses, a few good rifles, a few good handguns, and a damned comfortable rocking chair on the porch. He had an all-terrain vehicle and a Ford F-150 and a Kawasaki 350. But he was richest in daughters: his oldest had just moved up in her chosen profession to a big newspaper, which made him happy; his other daughter had just won the girls’ Idaho twelve-and-under pony slalom crown at the junior NCAA rodeo in Casper and was only seven. The kid was a true samurai on horseback. That was a day of happiness so pure he thought he’d die of it, but then this terrible week happened that left four people dead and Carl with his brains blown out and everybody and his brother saying terrible things about marine snipers.

In time, the reverend Mr. Minister was done and backed off. One by one, the men filed by, just to see the box close up, perhaps reflect on the boxes he had put men into or the boxes they had put men into or the boxes they had almost gone into themselves. No one said a word. It wasn’t a crowd that would throw a drunken wake and end up in the hoosegow with black eyes, broken teeth, and memories of a great bar fight. In many ways, they were all Carls and all Swaggers: scrawny men with lots of fast-twitch muscles, hair crew cut yet thick, thousand-yard stares, the dignity of the professional military or police, no sense of emotional excess anywhere, no moans or tears. They weren’t quite buying into the crazed marine narrative and felt an urge to pay solemn last respects to a guy who’d done his duty always to the end.

When it was finished, the minister came to Bob.

“Was that what you had in mind, Mr. Swagger?”

“It was fine, Reverend. What do I owe you?”

“Sir, I hate to put a figure on such a melancholy occasion. Whatever’s in your heart.”

It wasn’t in Swagger’s heart; it was in Swagger’s hand, a crumple of hundreds, three of them, and he discreetly passed them to the minister.

“I’ll go to the office now and pay the cemetery people,” he said.

“You’re a Christian soul, sir.”

“Not really,” said Swagger.

“You knew him . . . before.”

“Knew of him. Not in his league. Sorry it came to this.”

“We all are.”

Bob said his good-bye to the man and walked to the road, where the few cars were parked. He drove the rental quickly to the cemetery headquarters, went inside, and took care of business. It was a matter of $4,000, and he wrote the check quickly, without thinking about it.

“Very good, Mr. Swagger. I must say, decent of you. I don’t know what would have happened to the body otherwise. No survivors. The estate will be tied up for weeks, maybe months. It’s so sad. He deserved so much better. I just don’t know what—”

Swagger didn’t want to hear it. The mortuary director was unctuous, as they tend to be, and trying to say the right things, but Swagger tuned him out, smiled, and when he heard a break in the man’s patter, slipped away.

He was walking to the car, thinking, Get to the airport by six, be back to Boise by ten, get to the house by midnight. Glad it didn’t run long. It’ll be—

“Say, wouldn’t you be the famed paid killer Bob Lee Swagger?”

The voice took him unawares because he’d been so deep into his own internals, he’d lost contact with the real world, always a bad mistake. Now what the hell was this? Some asshole?

He turned, faced another soaked man about his own age, swaddled in rain gear and melted boonie cap but with fewer lines and deeper tan, and something mischievous in his eyes, cluing Bob to the fact that the comment, in a tone of jest and needling, hadn’t been meant in hostility but as evidence of membership in the brotherhood of life takers.

“Who would you be?” Bob asked.

“Gunny, my name’s Chuck McKenzie. Lance corporal, retired. I was in the same line of work for a year plus a month.”

Swagger felt something pulse in his cold, dead heart and realized he was still a little alive.

“Chuck! Damn! Sure, Chuck. You’re the big Mr. Ninety-six, right?”

“That’s what they say. Myself, I never counted. Just figured if it had an AK-47, it was worth shooting.”

“Chuck, I’ll shake your hand gladly. You and me, brother, that’s us out there looking for AKs with targets attached. Glad you made it through your thirteen, glad you made it here.”

“You paid for this, right?”

“I guess so. Somebody had to, and I have a few bucks scraped up. That’s all.”

“Gunny, can we talk? Can I buy you a cup of coffee, a drink?”

Bob thought: there goes the flight plan.

“Sure,” he said. “Let’s find a place. Coffee’s fine. I have a drinking problem just barely beat, and if I take a slug of bourbon, you won’t see me until the next monsoon.”

Chuck turned out to be something rare: the funny sniper. They sat in some imitation Starbucks in a suburb of a suburb, a nondescript warren full of interchangeable boys and girls, two old guys laughing and cackling, like the dry drunks they were, over topics so arcane no man but a sniper could have stayed with them or found it funny.

“It wasn’t the killing I minded,” Chuck said, “it was the paperwork. All them after-action reports. My trigger finger got cramps. I said, ‘Sir, you want me out shootin’, you gotta cut digit number one some slack, that old boy’s gittin’ all tuckered.’ I thought he’s going to say, ‘Corporal, put it on ice, like a pitcher. It’s too valuable to treat lightly. You, go on KP, but that finger, it’s got to be taken care of.’ Really, we wasn’t men, we’s trigger fingers that was unfortunately connected to men.

“What I liked,” he continued, “was the way some officers looked at you like you were Murder Inc. Mankiller, psycho nutcase, piece of dog turd on the shoe. That is, until they’s pinned down by a little guy in the bushes with a ninety-year-old Russian bolt gun, a three-buck scope, and a hunger to kill something big and white, with bars on its collars. Then you’re the man’s best friend! ‘Brother Chuck, so damn glad to see you. Chuck, Chuck, Chuckity-chuck, my closest compadre! Where you been, how’s the wife ’n’ kids, how’d you like a nice promotion, say, do you mind dusting that little feller in the bushes trying to put a squirt of lead up my ass?”

Bob laughed. It was pretty funny and oh so true.

“Ran into that a dozen times,” he said. “What was it? ‘Killer elite,’ something like that. We were more like dip-sucking redneck boneheads too dumb to know we were on the bull’s-eye ourselves, doing what they told us to do. Turned out they didn’t mean ‘Kill all those little bastards.’ What they meant was ‘Kill all those little bastards but don’t tell us about it, because we don’t want to have to think about it.’ ”

“Exactly.” Chuck laughed. “Gunny, that’s it. They didn’t want to think about it, but they didn’t care if we thought about it. Like the man said about whores, it ain’t the sex you’re paying them for, it’s the leaving after the sex. It wasn’t the killing they’s paying us for, it’s the remembering, so that they didn’t have to and could go home and enjoy Christmas with the kids and feel all clean and moral and heroic.”

“Well,” said Bob, “we made a lot of them feel heroic then. Still, with all the shit, we lived lives few men could imagine.”

“Amen, Gunny. Look at all them poodles: they don’t have clue one about the real world, and we lived and fought and died in a world so real they couldn’t imagine it.”

“Here’s to the United States Marine Corps, which gave us three hots, a cot, a rifle, and a target-rich environment.”

“I’ll drink to the target-rich environment, even if the hots wasn’t hot that often and the cot not that comfortable that often. Sure was good shooting, though. Never saw anything like it, and I wish I could feel ashamed like I’m supposed to, but I figure every little yellow guy I sent to Buddha-R-Us didn’t put a 7.62 through PFC Jones, and he got to go home to Passel O’Toads, Tennessee, and go to work in the paint factory.”

“Damn straight,” said Bob, “here’s to all them paint factory personnel departments we helped meet the quota!”

Too bad it was overpriced coffee they were drinking instead of some hard slop-chute poison that would have mellowed them out and made them feel no pain. But it was just caffeine, and in a while, Chuck got around to the real reason he’d struck up chatter with Swagger, as Swagger knew he would.

“Gunny—”

“It’s Bob. All that Gunny shit’s long gone.”

“Bob. I have to tell you, this whole thing doesn’t sit right.”

“No, it don’t.”

“Did you know Carl?”

“Never met him. Knew many who knew him; all said he was the bravest, the straightest, the best marine. I never had any reason to doubt that. You meet him?”

“Well, yes and no. All this stuff about number one and number two? It wasn’t a thing I gave a goddamn about, but when it come out, it did gnaw on me some. Suddenly I have newspaper assholes wanting ‘feature stories’ and I just know who they wanted me to play and I didn’t want to play that guy. I just wanted to be with my family. My daughter’s in the honors program at University of Oregon and my son just signed a minor league contract with the Mariners organization. I put in twenty-five years in the forestry service, had a nice pension, and I wanted to have some good time with my kids and watch them develop. There’s also a great many smallmouths out there signed up to go on my hook and I don’t want to disappoint ’em. Nothing more than that. All this ‘You’re number one’ crap didn’t mean a thing to me. It don’t put fish on the hook. But it got me worrying that it might have meant something to Carl. It just seemed wrong and I worried he’d be upset. If he was. I mean, who knew, really? The numbers was made-up to begin with. The official tags was only seen and confirmed by line squad members or officers and reported. There were hundreds more probables, and you know as well as I do, if you can call your shots, you know that there wasn’t nothing probable about most probables.”

Bob knew. The kills were a lot more than the official tally. A lot more.

“So anyway, I thought the right thing to do after the news came out was try to reach Carl. I wanted him to know that nothing of this had anything to do with me. I wasn’t behind any of it. I’m just minding my business, takin’ care of my kids and wife, that’s all. Someone else thought it was a big deal, not me. Of course I didn’t know how to reach him, so I sent him a letter care of Ballantine Books, which had printed Marine Sniper, that biography of him that fellow wrote. Didn’t think there’s a chance in hell it’d reach him. I suppose I did it for myself. Anyhow, I just said, ‘Hey, look, Sarge, just so you know, it wasn’t me behind ‘Who’s number one’ that everybody’s talking about, it means nothing to me, I haven’t thought about it in thirty years. You were a great marine sniper, the greatest. I just got a little luckier because a few more assholes saw me pull the trigger, that’s all.’ I felt a little better after sending the letter.”

“You got a response?”

“Well, yeah. It took a while. It took close to two years, but goddamn if I didn’t get a letter just a couple of days before all this craziness started. That’s why all this is so strange.”

Bob knew he’d be offered a chance to read the letter. He also knew he shouldn’t.

It was over, it was finished, it was gone. Put it behind you. Walk away from it. It means nothing. It’s the dead past. You have a life, a family, kids, the world. You have everything. No man has more than you, plus you got to be a marine sniper and you saw a lifetime of stuff no other man ever saw, much less survived, and you’ve got the scars and steel bones to prove how close the calls were over the years.

Chuck got the letter out, unfolded it.

“It just don’t make no sense to me. Here, read it.”

Bob took the letter, and read.

Of course. How could he not? He had to read. He owed it to Chuck, he owed it to Carl, he owed it to all the boys under the ground. You can’t walk away from certain obligations.

“Dear Chuck McKenzie,” the letter read, in Carl Hitchcock’s big, looping penmanship, not the slick handwriting of a man who wrote a lot.

Thanks so much for your letter and I’d heard you were no part of this deal, so it’s no problem for me at all. Don’t you worry about it. You were a hell of a marine and it’s a shame you didn’t get the medals and the rank you deserved, but then that was the way the thinking went in those days. But like me and all the other snipers I know, I figure you realize your true reward is all the boys walking around today who wouldn’t be if you hadn’t done your duty. I suppose I had a rough time for a while, because I’m as dumb a bastard as there is. And the “number one” thing put beer in the fridge and bait on the hook. I thought that might be over. Funny thing is, ever since the news came, I been busier than ever. I thought it would go away and instead it got louder. In fact, I have more bookings at more shows this year than any of the past five. And I told the promoters I’d have to up my fee because the cost of gas was so high, and that turned out to be fine with them. So as I sit here, damned if it don’t seem to be working out. It’s really the attention, more than the actual meaning. Being number two makes me somehow more interesting than being number one and I don’t know why. Civilians! But I do know a good thing when I see it and I will run with it all the way to the bank, or at least the bait shop.

Semper Fi, marine, and best to you and yours,

Carl Hitchcock

“Hmm,” Bob said, a sound he made involuntarily which seemed to have the meaning, That’s interesting but I will have to think harder about it.

Then he said, “He sounded pretty healthy.”

“That’s it, Gunny. He doesn’t sound like a depressed fellow about to go off on some kind of killing rampage, obsessed with getting his number one ranking back.”

Bob looked at the date. It was dated two weeks before the killing of the movie actress in Long Island.

It teased him.

“You show this to anybody?”

“No. The FBI asked questions about me, I hear, but no one ever contacted me directly and I never had a sit-down face-to-face, so I didn’t have a chance to bring it up.”

“Yeah, they asked questions about me too,” said Bob, remembering a call from Nick before it was clear what all this was about.

“Now,” said Chuck, “I’m not sure what to do. Should I call the FBI? I’m hoping to get some advice. Is this anything? I just don’t see how Carl could write this and just a few weeks later blow a hole in Hanoi Joan’s rib cage. It doesn’t add up.”

“No,” said Bob. “It don’t.”

“Yet the FBI, they say categorically, over and over, it’s been in all the papers, that yep, Carl did it, all the proof is in, they going to release a final report with all the evidence, case closed, and that’s it, that’s what the history books’ll say.”

“Yeah,” said Bob. “They’ve clearly committed to that interpretation and it’ll take something to get them off it. I know a little about how this stuff works. Once the big guys make up their mind, you can’t change it. Just like a sniper program. Took years for the brass to see the value and sanction a school, and meantime every unit on the line put one together ad hoc, because it was so obvious and necessary.”

“Should I contact the FBI?”

Bob honestly didn’t know. He had no policy.

Then Chuck said, “Here’s why I’m really here. A guy hears things, you know. And one of the things I hear is that you never really left the life. You’re a sniper still, through and through. You’ve done stuff, survived stuff; lots of people say you’re way at the top of the pyramid in terms of getting certain kinds of work done. I remember years ago you were wanted for the murder of that archbishop. Then that all went away, magically, so something not too many people know about was going on.”

“I’ve had some crazy stuff happen,” said Bob. “But I’m retired now.”

“But it’s said you have a gift. I mean, more than the shooting, but understanding the shooting. You can look at circumstances and you have some kind of feel for what happened. You can infer in ways other people can’t. You’re Sherlock Holmes, you’re CSI, Gunfight, that sort of thing.”

“Chuck, you’re way overstating it.”

“I’m just saying what I’ve heard.”

“It’s true that men of my family are natural-born people of the gun. Don’t know why. But I had it, my daddy had it in spades, and his dad—who I hear was otherwise a monster—his dad was quite the gun man as well. It goes back, off and on, through generations, since somehow a mysterious fellow called Swagger appeared in the territory that would become Arkansas in 1783, from God knows where. His son had the gift and it’s why so many of us died in wars or other violence. We’re drawn to it, fatally, our character, our fate, one side of the law or the other, I don’t know why.”

“Well, I had a favor to ask.”

“Ask it, brother Chuck.”

“It’s this. Maybe Carl did go all nuts like they say, and maybe he did all that killing, and maybe, somehow, I’m a little part responsible. If that’s the case, then I’ll just have to learn to live with it, and it’s okay, it’s what happens in the world. But suppose it’s not. Suppose it didn’t happen the way they said it did. Suppose, suppose, I don’t know what, just suppose. Anyhow, what I’d like is for someone who is sympathetic to the marine side of the story and not under pressure to issue a report to make the newspapers happy to go and look hard at it. Go to the sites, reconstruct it in your mind, see what you see without prejudice. Look at it fair and square. If all the facts point to Carl, then that’s where we are, that’s it. At least there’s no worry in it, nothing to keep you up nights.”

“Chuck, I—”

“Now, I have a check here for five thousand dollars. That’s not a payment. But you shouldn’t have to gin up the expense money on your own. I’d like you to take it for travel, for hotels, for this and that, anything that might come up. Just take a week and satisfy yourself that everything’s on the up and up.”

“Chuck, save your money. I’m sixty-three, a little old to be tramping around strange cities with a range finder, hoping to find something the most sophisticated ballistic forensics techs in the world missed. It’s just not going to happen. I’m too old, they’re too good. It’s not for me and it’s a waste.”

“Gunny, I—”

“I just can’t do it. I don’t want you mad at me and I’m sorry for Carl, but I can’t go off again. I’m old. It’ll kill me, I know.”

“Okay, Gunny,” said Chuck. “I get it. No problem. Hey, I had to give it a try.”

“You’re a good man, Chuck.”

“Look, just do me the favor of saying you’ll keep a mind open to it. No pressure, but if you change your thinking, the check is still there. And if you need help of any sort, here’s my card, I’ll be there in a second. I’m still a lance corporal at heart.”

Swagger still made his plane, but just barely. He flew across America charged with melancholy at the way it had worked out. But he put it out of mind for a while, tried to get to sleep. Finally, after all the connections, he made it to Boise and went to his car in the lot. Another hour or so and then the day would be finished, at least.

He thought to call his wife to tell her he’d be home in a bit but was astonished to see his message light blinking.

Couldn’t hardly work the damned thing, but managed to figure out how to call up the “missed call” menu after a bit, and was stunned to see a Washington area code on the caller. Who in that town gave a damn about him? But then he realized there was one person, and he recognized the number from last year: it was Nick Memphis’s.

7

When the Seventh Floor calls, you have to go. It was J. Edgar’s rule, back when the floor was the fifth and the building was across and down Pennsylvania, but it still held. Nick was glad he’d worn a tie that day. He dipped into the washroom and gave his face a scrub, but the lines driven into his flesh by a week of twenty-hour days and a lot of flight and airport time weren’t helpful. He ran some water through his hair, toweled off, went out and found his jacket, and took the elevator up to seven for the director’s office.

He was waved through by the Big Guy’s secretary and two uniformed Joes who formed a security perimeter even this deep in the heart of the federal beast. He’d been in this office before, with its altar of flags, its glory wall summing up the director’s—this director’s—career, its shelves of unread books, its mementos and naval flourishes (the brass telescope!) and so forth. And he’d seen this view, which looked to the southeast over Pennsylvania and the Archives’ Grecian pretensions toward the dome of the Capitol, giving the room an absurd fake-movie quality, on the presumption that all offices in Washington had views of the Capitol, with its red-white-blue bunting flopping in wind jets.

But the director sat with two men, by dint of haberdashery alone—well-fitted blue suits with subtle striping; dark, shiny mahogany loafers affixed with the je-ne-sais-quoi languor of tassels; fresh, un-dry-cleaned red power ties—of a higher professional political ranking. Each face was smooth and ruddy (Botox? only a coroner would know for sure), each head of hair lush and vibrant, each profile taut, each body toned (hours per diem in the gym). It took a while, but Nick recognized the heartier of the men as a congressman from out west somewhere; the other guy had lawyer or prominent lobbyist written in his flesh.

“Nick, sorry to interrupt,” said the director, “but I wanted to get these two interested parties a little shot of face time with our lead guy on Sniper.”

“Nick,” said the congressman, rising, hand out, “Jack Ridings, Wyoming, thanks so much for giving us a few,” and the other quickly fell into line, IDing himself behind the well-turned-out presentation as Bill Fedders, no affiliation but by implication powerful affiliation.

“Nick’s one of our heroes,” the director said. “He still limps a little because he was wounded in a gunfight while busting up that armored car robbery in Bristol, Tennessee, last year. How’s the leg, Nick?”

“Well, my basketball days are over, but I can still jog and ride a bike, so it’s a fair trade. I never could hit a jumper anyway.”

“Nick, can you catch the guys up? Jack’s the representative for T. T. Constable’s western holdings and Bill’s T. T.’s private attorney, and Mr. Constable—”

“ ‘Tom’ is what we all call him,” said the slicker of the two, with a conspiratorial warmth, as if he were letting them in on some inside skinny. “He just came up with the ‘T. T.’ for publicity purposes. The man is insatiable.”

“Tom, then,” said the director. “Tom is very concerned with the progress in his ex-wife’s death.”

“Sure,” said Nick. “No problem. Most of it’s been in the papers.”

So, this was a private confab with the forces of Constable? Constable, wealthy beyond measure, the famous star’s equally famous hubby for eight years, fingers in all the pies there were—Constable was big-footing it. He needed private assurances that this thing was getting full attention from the Bureau—as if something this insanely high-profile wouldn’t of its own accord—and insisting on a little inside dope. That was fine, that was okay, that was the way the town worked, and if you were going to have a career in the town, you had to play by its rules.

The rules were: Information is power. But power is also power. Power must be not so much obeyed as acquiesced to, massaged, assured. The key to all transactions was the congressman, who got his big donors and supporters private audiences with linchpin feds. It had always been that way, it would always be that way. Now Tom Constable—T. T. in the papers, Tom only to friends and intimates—wanted to be in the loop. In a way, Nick was surprised it had taken so long. Constable had a yen for attention himself, which may be why he married Joan in the first place, and he’d been front and center on all the Sunday talkers about the tragedy of his second wife, how much she’d given, what a crime it was that this tragedy took her, how it was as if she hadn’t survived the war she had tried so hard to stop. Of course Jack and Mitzi and the poor funnyman Mitch more or less disappeared during this orgy of calamity, but again, that was the way of the big foot. Nobody ever said it was fair. It wasn’t supposed to be fair. The process, in fact, in the language of engineers, was operating as designed.

Nick quickly ran through the actions his investigation had taken and tried not to overplay his hand. The director supplied that ingredient.

“See how fast Nick cut to the heart of it. He knew exactly where to go to smoke this guy out and it took, what, Nick, less than three days?”

“We didn’t begin to look at the pattern until after the second incident,” said Nick, “and we became lead agency. But we had the name one day after the third incident, went public with it the second day, and had our man early in the morning on the third, though for all of us involved, there was no breakdown by days. Nobody went home, we worked straight. It was great staff work. My people really did it. I just tried to stay out of the way.”

“I’m sure Nick is being modest,” said the congressman.

“I think I speak for Tom when I say the Bureau’s actions have been extraordinary,” said Bill. “Really fine work. Now what

happens?”

“Well,” said Nick, “as the defendant is dead, obviously there won’t be any trial. What we do, we assemble the case just as if he’d survived, and we’ll issue a report. When we do that, we’ll officially declare the case closed. Chicago, New York, and Ohio will then declare their cases closed. And then—well, that’s it.”

“What happens if someone comes along,” asked the congressman, “and says, ‘Hey, you got it wrong, it was actually Freemasons from the Vatican and the Uzbeki mafia that did it?’ That could happen. And then it’s all dragged out again. I think Tom’s a little worried about Joan’s life becoming some kind of cash cow for cranks.”

“You know,” added the smoother Bill, “unlike, say, ’sixty-three, we have the Internet, we have bloggers, we have anybody with or without a thought in his head having instant worldwide contact with billions of others of questionable competence. The result, I’m sure you’re aware, is a kind of festival of the bizarre, of the mendacious and the frankly exploitative. Good God, some are saying that Tom killed Joan because she was going to tell the world Tom dresses up in women’s clothes! Or he never forgave her for not having his child. Or she cheated on him with a key grip on the set of Justine’s Revenge. Others are saying Mitch Greene was a Russian agent and was about to turn himself in and reveal Tom as a spymaster. I mean, can you imagine? I can’t even repeat some of the viler stuff.”

“Well, there’s a kind of systemic guard against that,” said Nick. He was smart enough to lean a little forward, as if he were divulging some real inside dope, when what he was about to say was clearly known by everyone above the precinct level. “See, once law enforcement closes the case, it goes into the records as ‘case closed.’ That’s a percentage, and every department, especially big-city departments or state police agencies and the political bureaucracies behind them, want their percentage as high as possible every year. I don’t think the director will fire me if I tell you we do too. So the reality is that nobody wants to reopen a closed case that’s on the good side of the ledger. Practically speaking, that means when the guy with the psycho best seller idea comes to us, we just say case closed and refer him to our document. Which, of course, he’s already seen on the Internet. When that final doc comes out, it really does, in our experience, pull down a curtain that never comes up.”

“Nick, may I call you Nick?” asked Bill.

“Sure, everybody does.”

“Nick, is there a time frame here you could share?”

“Well, this one is unique, given the celebrity of the victims and the killer, the media attention and so forth, so of course we don’t want to rush anything or make any mistakes that can later be attacked or reinterpreted. So I’m thinking another week at the least.”

“Ah.” If Bill was disappointed, no hint of it showed on his pampered, sleek, confident face, but in time he did make a further comment.

“I’m wondering,” he said, “if we can’t hasten it just a bit. Tom is extremely disturbed by Joan’s death, and it’s unnerving the way it’s just hanging there in the open right now. This is painful for everyone, and Tom is also speaking for the heirs and families of the other survivors as well, and that poor, crazed sergeant. So I’m wondering if we can’t speed the process somewhat. Get it out, get it done with, get it put to bed and closed, and we can return to our lives and begin the healing.”

“I understand that,” said Nick, “and we are working extremely hard. But, sir, it is a complex investigation, given the disparity of the four victims and the geographical spread, and my fear is that if we do somehow misstate or miss something, that’ll just be fodder for these goblins. Look at the Kennedy thing, how that went on for years and ultimately compromised a generation’s belief in the United States government.”

“I see, I see,” said Bill. “Then possibly here’s a way we could go. Could we leak something to, say, NBC News or the Times? I happen to know a young guy at the Times who could be very helpful. And that paper almost speaks with the authority of the state, and an early peek at the findings of the investigation would do a lot to calm this grotesque speculation.”

“Well,” said Nick, knowing it to be a bad idea. You couldn’t trust those guys anymore, and some hotshot egoist reporter with a desperate need to advance his own career could completely mess things up.

“I appreciate Tom’s interest,” said the director, “but I don’t think we’ve got anything comprehensive to leak yet. I’d be very happy to keep you gentleman, and Mr. Constable, in the loop, and when we have something near an end product, we’ll get back in touch and then maybe we can work something out. In the meantime, Nick, consider yourself officially interfered with by the Seventh Floor and pressurized to bring it to a boil faster, because there are so many interested parties. It’s wrong, it’s unfair, it sucks, but it’s Washington.”

Everybody laughed at the director’s skillful jest, which nevertheless carried the weight of authority behind the humor.

“Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to walk Nick back to the task force real estate; it was good of you to drop by and express your concerns.”

Everybody rose, shook, palavered inconsequentially for a bit, and then the director herded Nick back to the hallway and shoved him down it toward the elevators.

“Sorry, but Constable has juice with the administration, and when he leans, I have to pretend to give a little.”

“Yes sir,” said Nick.

“For some reason, they want this thing moved ahead. I know you’re working your ass off, but it’s so much better for all of us if you can release sooner rather than later and if you can slip something to the Times.”

“As soon as I can, sir, believe me, I’ll—”

“Just let me ask you, what’s the hang-up? Do you need more people? Is it a manpower issue or a technology thing? Whatever support you need, I’ll give it to you one hundred fifty percent. I want this thing over too.”

“Yes sir. No, it’s not really manpower, it’s—”

He paused.

“ ‘Memo to Special Agents: Never pause thoughtfully in the presence of the director. Thoughtful doesn’t get you to the Seventh Floor, only results do.’ ”

“Yes sir. It’s this, then. I’ll lay it out. Not a major issue, I think, but it is something I’ve—we’ve—never encountered before. It’s weird; it’s got us somewhat baffled.”

“An anomaly?”

“A huge anomaly. I’ve never seen an anomaly this big.”

“What is it?”

“Here’s the anomaly: there are no anomalies.”

The director grunted.

“This is real life,” Nick said, “there’s always an anomaly, some little random fact that doesn’t make sense or seems stuck in there and is connected to nothing. Someone gets somewhere too fast or not out of breath; someone’s looking out a window and sees something and misinterprets it; a fingerprint from seven years ago turns up on a scene and screws up everybody. That’s the universe we work in: squalid, messy, human, full of the unexplained or the untidy. The unusual is to be expected; it’s even banal. But in this case, nothing. It all fits. There’s nothing left over, nothing unexplained. Everything is perfect, from the ballistics to the forensics to the arterial spray patterns to the fiber samples to the fingerprints to the paper trail to the witness accounts to the time line to the coroner’s report to the DNA testing. It’s not messy enough. It’s too neat and it makes me very nervous.”

“But you can’t put your finger on any one thing, is that it?”

“Exactly. We go over it and over it and we’re stymied. Every day we get something new and it always fits just right, like a puzzle.”

“Well, let me just caution you that you don’t want to get too overwhelmed by what is, after all, well and truly nothing. I mean the prime craziness of the conspiracy gooney birds is the notion that the less the evidence, the more proof the authorities saw of conspiracy. Less was never less, it was always more. The absence of evidence was seen as more significant than evidence itself.”

“Good point,” Nick conceded. “Still, there’s a thing I want to do. Let me run it by you.”

“Go ahead.”

“A wild card.”

“Hmm,” said the director.

“Meaning somebody from outside our culture, not in our boxes, with our prejudices, who would look at it with a fresh eye.”

“A neutral observer.”

“Actually, someone inclined to disbelieve our explanation. Someone who’d fight us. Someone with an instinct for our weaknesses. Someone who’s very good on guns, particularly the dynamics of shooting, because he’s won a batch of fights with big iron. Someone whose life experience inclines him to revere the marine sniper and who would never make an axiomatic assumption about a marine sniper’s guilt. His mind doesn’t work that way. Then, he was himself a marine sni—”

“Swagger.”

“Yes.”

“Christ, Nick, no doubt he’s quite the operator, but can he be controlled? I mean, we spun his adventures in Bristol to our advantage, no doubt about it, but he was just that far from being out of control. Nick, suppose that fifty he fired at that helicopter had missed and hit a busful of orphan piano prodigies on their way to prayer camp.”

“I’d be a crossing guard in Mississippi,” said Nick.

“And I’d be your supervisor, making twenty-five cents more an hour. Nick—”

“He’s smart,” Nick said. “Almost nobody knows more about this stuff than he does. And he’s honest. He’ll call it as he reads it, no bullshit, no PC, no spin. He’s straight nineteenth-century lawman in that regard.”

“Matt Dillon!” said the director. “Here we go again. You ride him hard, you control him heavy, you have three more days. We need that report sooner, if not faster than sooner.”

8

He beheld the thing itself. It was Carl’s “teaching rifle,” a patiently constructed replica of the Remington M40A1 .308 USMC sniper rifle of the nineties. Carl, of course, had done his great shooting in Vietnam with one of the old marine special services target rifles, a heavy-barreled Model 70 in .30-06, and a two-foot-long Unertl 8x scope. But that system was hopelessly outmoded, and as a “teacher” at sniper schools and an adviser to police SWAT teams and a gun show celeb, he’d had to acquire something more up-to-date, and thus in 1997 had purchased 5965321.

It seemed that 5965321 was Swagger’s fate, no matter how he tried to avoid it. Nick had pushed all the right buttons: responsibility to the Corps, responsibility to the sniper program and to sniper culture, the one-in-a-million shot this was a game some assholes were running that only he, Swagger, could see into, the old cowboy thing about setting things right in the world. Against such arguments, “I’m old, I’m tired, I’m used up, I need a nap, my leg hurts” didn’t cut much. So here he was with Carl’s rifle, in the city he hated above all others, surrounded by people of whom he trusted only one.

The rifle: Carl had gotten 5965321 through the PX system at Camp Lejeune, a system which as a retiree he was still allowed to use, writing a check (also recovered) for $345.89, as opposed to a civilian retail of about $700, a very good deal. The agents had found the bill of sale in his papers, and Bob looked at it now: a Remington police rifle, in the model PPS, with a heavy 24-inch barrel and a tuned action. Carl bought it, Carl used it, Carl knew it, Carl loved it, no doubt about that.

Carl also, as sophisticated shooters will, improved it. He’d bought a McMillan Hunter stock, in the sand-and-spinach camo pattern that was state of the art in the nineties, before all this desert digital came in. Either he or a marine armorer buddy had bedded the action to the stock and hung a 1903 leather Springfield sling on it. He bought a Leupold 3.5–10x tactical scope with mil-dots in the reticle for ranging, a good alternative to the Marine Unertl 10xs not commonly available on the open market. He mounted the scope in Badger Ordnance tactical rings on a Badger Picatinny rail bolted and red Loctited to the action. He’d changed out the Remington trigger for a Jewell that gave 5965321 a five-ounce pull without creep or overtravel. He’d fired nothing but match 168-grainers in it and had shot out the original barrel and replaced it with two Hart barrels, keeping a detailed log of each shot fired. A few years ago, realizing that his clients would mostly be law enforcement and that many would be shooting suppressed systems, he’d gone through the ATF/Treasury Department rigamarole to legally purchase an otherwise illegal Class III device, i.e., a suppressor from SureFire, the tac light, laser, and suppressor giant, and had paid the SureFire armorers to machine threads to his new Krieger barrel on which to screw the noise-dampening steel tube. When the trigger was pulled, the gun didn’t go bang, it went ulch or groff or something like that, a lot less loud but more importantly dissipated to other points on the horizon and thus a lot less identifiable as a firearm report. The SureFire armorers were so good that they could mount the can, as suppressors are called, without affecting the accuracy of the weapon, and FBI shooters had already proved the efficacy of the construction: they’d gotten consistent minute-of-angle groups, averaging .675 at a hundred yards, 1.866 at two hundred, and 2.84 at three hundred yards, the scope well zeroed at the hundred-yard marker.

It was a formidable piece of weaponry, easily capable of killing each of the targets that had been fired at during Carl’s last mad week, and given his expertise in the art, the kills were clearly within his capabilities; moreover, the suppressor disguised the origin of the shots and guaranteed his getaway. Ballistics matched, casings matched, fingerprints matched; all the shots were makeable by a man with Carl’s extensive training and field experience, and all the movements seemed within his capacity even as a sixty-eight-year-old man.

The rifle, slightly out of balance because of the eight-inch suppressor, lay on a long table set up in the Major Case working room on the third floor of the J. Edgar Hoover Building in Washington DC. It was part of the melancholy accretion of data by which the agents and technicians had proved that Carl and Carl alone had been responsible for the four murders in the seven-day time line of his killing spree. Their arguments and their evidence were contained in the draft known as “the report,” meant to be issued through PIO as soon as possible, in tandem with the case being officially closed by the Bureau, and the police agencies involved would certainly, even eagerly, follow suit. And that would be that. Swagger had read the report many times, and even though rough and unfinished, it was an extremely convincing document.

In Carl’s home, address given, agents had located a “mission room” in which detailed accounts of the lives of nine “famous” antiwar activists from the late sixties and early seventies, among them “Hanoi Joan” Flanders, Jack Strong and Mitzi Reilly, and, a much lesser presence admittedly, Mitch Greene. Moreover, the number ninety-seven, representing the number of kills it would take for Carl to take over as “number one marine sniper” from the war, was scrawled in thirty-nine separate localities in the room, on scraps of paper, on the wall, though again admittedly, it was difficult to get a convincing handwriting interpretation based only on two numerals.

That number spoke to motive, perhaps seemingly irrational to many but certainly arguable in the context of advancing physical decline, signs of dementia or depression, alcohol problems, loneliness, and isolation.

The means were equally convincing. A paper trail documented the former marine’s travels in his last week, from his purchase of the blue Ford van for $16,900 from Woody’s Fords on the outskirts of Jacksonville to Bank of America Visa card records for fill-ups, which traced an odyssey that ran from Jacksonville to Long Island to Chicago to Cleveland to finally near Ann Arbor. Motel bills told the same story.

There was the van itself, smeared with Carl’s fingerprints and DNA traces, as well as dirt samples essentially linkable to two of the three shooting sites, clearly brought into the cab by Carl’s boots. Witnesses corroborated it all, more or less. Yeah, that’s the guy, yeah, old guy, kind of thorny, looked like that guy. The witnesses were the least impressive, of course, because they were people in the hospitality industry who saw hundreds of faces a day, but they basically agreed that yes, that’s the guy.

He was there. He’d done it. Face it, Bob said to himself.

The motive? Well, who knew about that? It seemed to make sense in the way killers’ motives made sense in the movies. Yeah, sure, he learned he wasn’t number one no more and the freakin’ redneck hillbilly cracked and went wacko/psycho. It didn’t sound like any marine NCO Bob had ever known, because those gentlemen—himself included—tended to be the kind that stuffed it way inside and let it sit there. Even at the worst of times, with lead flying in and hitting everywhere, everything, everybody, tossing up stinging clouds of jet-spray debris, their faces remained, on long discipline, phlegmatic and almost uninterested. It wasn’t that they were fearless, it’s that they were responsible, and they had boys under them on the verge of panic and flight, and that dull, unimpressed face was their greatest weapon. It was cultivated, a sergeant mug—flat, smooth, unworried, kind of irritated maybe, but hardly really noticing all the shit in the air.

Would a man with a face like that crack the way this theory held, and then—here was the strange part—fragment into two beings, one still stoic and capable of intelligence gathering and analysis, complex escape planning, and execution in the form of great shooting followed by fallback through an unfamiliar area, without a single slipup, and the other clear-out crazy as a burning duck in a tornado? It didn’t sit with any theory of human behavior Bob had ever seen or heard of, and he’d been around a bit. He’d heard of great warriors who suddenly were torn down by black dogs of depression—hell, he’d been one of those, in another lifetime, a solitary, furious loser off in the woods by himself, with nothing but mean for any and all—but those guys usually just ate the .45 one night. They had too much respect for what guns can do to go serial killer on anybody. They might end up lonely, bitter drunks, wife beaters, terrible fathers, serial adulterers, bar fighters, but it wasn’t in the mind to go out and kill. Still, evidently some docs somewhere said it was possible. It was a symptom of post-combat stress syndrome, or whatever they were calling it these days. These guys in white coats were much smarter than him, so maybe they knew something. They said that it worked as a motive, and so the reality was, it worked as a motive. That would not go away. Carl got what little glory RVN bestowed, rode it hard, saw it turn to nothing, and he cracked. So be it.

So Bob set aside motive and turned at last to his most dreaded and melancholy task, feeling no progress had been made and none was on the horizon.

This was the actual product of the killer’s enterprise: four corpses. Bob had seen corpses his whole life and had donated more than could be counted to the cause of universal extinction for meaningless reasons. He knew what bullets did to flesh and bone. He himself had been hit at least seven times and had in his hip a stainless steel ball joint to keep his old thighbone functional where a .30 caliber had torn through and shredded everything it hit. He knew what grotesqueness the collision of supersonic bits of copper-covered lead and human matter was likely to produce, and there’d been little grotesqueness of that sort he hadn’t seen.

Nevertheless he was pleased to ease into his virtual trip to the morgue via the first of the victims, the movie star, who alone had been shot in the body. The crime scene photos were of little use; they simply displayed a woman handsomely dressed, petite, lithe, lying facedown on the bricks in a sleepy, relaxed, yet dignified position: her knees were together, and nothing untoward could be glimpsed (and police photographers were notoriously inclined to denude the body of any vestige of dignity by going for the looker-upper to panty). A pool of blood lay beneath her, and one expensive shoe had dislodged itself from her foot. She had pretty painted toenails, and nothing that he could see suggested that she was older than he was by a few years: taut legs, thin wrists, a thin neck. She looked a toned thirty-five. A little sherbet stain marked the entrance wound, but most of the gore was from another angle, and when he turned to that photo, he saw nothing but a delta of black liquid soaking her clothes. A hand at the end of a splayed arm hung limp; blood ran down it, inside her sleeve, and it slid down her curled fingers and deposited itself in little splotches on the bricks beneath.

The morgue shots showed even less, really. A neat puncture of an entrance wound, an exit wound (now cleaned) about the size of a fist, traversing her from left front to opposite rear right, that is to say, breast to shoulder blade. Alas, between them had lain her heart, and it had been neatly exploded by the velocity; a separate photo showed the shredded organ, and he shuddered, thinking of the millions who’d loved and hated this woman, who’d been moved by her art or sickened by her politics, who’d worked out with her on her exercise tapes or loved her famous father and brother, who’d followed her in the gossips or on the tube. What would they say of this pulverized piece of meat that stood for her soul?

He put down the case of Joan Flanders and turned to the far more devastating photos and diagrams of Jack Strong and Mitzi Reilly. He tried to be professional, objective, distanced, but couldn’t quite bring that off, as indeed what he saw was an atrocity.

The integrity of the head, after all, is the surest of biological assumptions. The head is a vault, a treasure chest, a reliquary, the container of all our sacraments, of all that makes us human. When you blow it up, the sight disturbs anyone.

It disturbed Bob. Jack Strong’s face was gone. It simply wasn’t there. The bullet had tilted sideways—its entry was small enough, a little bitty thirty-caliber hole hard to find under Jack’s thick hair—as it coursed through and churned up stuff and had built up enormous energy in just nanoseconds so that like a typhoon of brain matter, it literally exploded, tearing out everything that had been the upper left quarter of his face. What remained was an immense crater of red curd, squashed bean, broken potato chip, and vomited banana, sustained in a bowl of shattered skull; stared at long enough, the image fuzzed and became a volcano photo-reconned from above.

If anything, Mitzi’s photos were even worse. Because she was thin-boned and thin-skulled, the bullet had actually broken her face into three plates as it exited her head sideways and bent. The three plates had been propelled by hot gas and hydraulic pressure to expand, almost as if inflated, and when the trauma of that moment passed, they reassembled themselves on her skull, though not quite precisely. The result was a terrible sense of the broken: each part of the face was recognizably Mitzi Reilly, famed guerrilla warrior of the sixties turned law school professor, but each was askew from the other, and the fissures that separated them deeply were evident. The face so diverged from assumption that it had a truly nightmarish reality. Even Bob, no stranger to the horrors of war, couldn’t stomach it for long, and turned away to the autopsy diagram stapled to the report, which displayed nothing but a nude, generic body upon which the doctor had Xed the entrance and exit wounds in the frontal and rear skull and concluded that they were “consistent with death by high-velocity bullet trauma.” No shit, Sherlock. The trauma was also located cartographically, by centimeter. “The epicenter of the entrance wound is located longitudinally 133 centimeters beneath the highest point of the crown and 133 centimeters from the lowest point of the jaw. It is located latitudinally 62 centimeters from the left and right occipital bones.”

It was here that it first hit him. A strangeness, a premonition, his subconscious telling him to pay attention. He didn’t like it. He didn’t want to make a discovery, see a clue, a trace of some other hand. It made his own and everybody else’s life so complicated. He wasn’t sure he could face it.

But still, that feeling would not go away: what am I missing? He could feel he was missing something. Something was not right. It was so obvious that no one had seen it; he could feel it, sense it, almost touch it in the empty space of the Major Case working room. It was in the Xs. Each diagram of each body bore an X to designate an entry wound and an exit, four Xs doubled for a total of eight Xs, carrying the inadvertent meaning of pornography, but something else too, X the unknown, X the mystery. He stared at the Xs, advancing even to Mitch’s, and looked for a pattern in all eight . . . but then it

was gone.

Feeling frustrated, he turned to poor Mitch Greene, least important of the four comrades in arms. Mitch would have called them “comrades in holes, see?” Always the joker, Mitch, even in death; from the first photo, he looked like he’d passed out and puked, sort of lolling on the chair behind the podium of the Cleveland-area Borders, with a spew of blackness from his slack jaw. You could look at it and almost laugh, calling up the memory of the man and his antics.

The back view, dead-on, told the truth, however. The lower part of his skull, directly behind the mouth, had been blown out, including, perfectly, the joinery between spine and brain. His head looked like a cantaloupe, with a broad scoop where the seeds and pulp had been dug free. Another great shot—didn’t disturb teeth or tongue but simply plowed through the back of the mouth into the lower cranial vault.

Bob shook his head and turned quickly to the remaining morgue photos and the autopsy report, finding nothing particularly illuminating about them. They showed the crater, scrubbed, and the doctor had colored in a little patch on the generic diagram to document the missing skull and brain matter, at the center of which, of course, was the X signifying exit. In that case too, the bullet had been recovered, this time from beyond the wall behind Mitch, where it had bored through into the Borders’ staff break room, touching no one and extinguishing its flight in the padding of an old sofa. Slightly deformed by its journey, it had turned out to be yet another Sierra 168-grain boat tail match hollow point, like the others, straight out of the Federal casing found in Carl’s van in the motel parking lot. Four shots, four kills, just like the book said. It was sniper warfare at its best.

Bob sat back. Pain in his head, pain in his hip, pain everywhere. Lord, he needed a drink; too bad that wasn’t in the cards. He’d essentially finished and he had nothing, not a goddamn thing. It was all as the experts from the Bureau said it was, tight as a drum. Carl had—

He hated it, but there it was. Carl had—

Well, Carl certainly hadn’t forgotten how to shoot. As pure warcraft, you had to say, great shooting.

He sat back in his chair even further, wishing to be far away. He ought to run through it again and again, just to make sure he hadn’t missed a thing. He didn’t think he had, but sometimes you do, and he wasn’t as sharp as he’d once been.

He snatched a sheet of paper from the yellow legal pad on which he’d been writing notes—there weren’t many, the only interesting one being “No beveling in Strong-Reilly; why BTHP bullets go through glass without beveling? Did shooter move gun? Why?”—which had led nowhere. He crumpled it, thought he’d go to the hotel early this evening, maybe take in a movie, have a nice booze-free meal, something like that. He pivoted in the chair and spotted a wastebasket fifteen feet away, and like nine out of ten American men would, he immediately brought the crumpled puff up in two hands, riding the line up the lapel of his jacket while he fumbled for the right touch, found it, and as his arms flowed upward, he arrived at the point of release, so he launched toward the basket, which had become an orange hoop ten feet above an arena’s wooden floor as the last shot had come to Bob Lee Swagger, shooting guard, with but a second left on the clock as the Razorbacks, down two (91–89) in the NCAA final against, who, oh yeah, Duke, they’re always good—

The gods of small, airborne, crumpled paper balls were kind. The thing rode a perfect parabola, floated on nurturing air currents and eddies, and at the apex began its descent. He swished it. Perfect. Three. The buzzer sounded, the crowd cheered, Arkansas wins. Dead center, didn’t even rustle the net.

His little guy drama come to an end, Bob turned back to—

Say now. Perfect shot. Couldn’t do that again in a million years. Or could he?

He quickly crumpled another paper ball, turned, and went through the same ritual. Arkansas still won, 92–91, and guard Bob Lee Swagger was still the nation’s hero, but this time on the descent the paper ball caught on the rim of the basket before falling in. He shot three more times, made two of them, but came nowhere near the freak dead-center perfection of the first shot.

What does that tell you? What does that tell you?

9

They were adults and professionals, so it was ridiculous that on those very few occasions when the director, jacket off, sleeves rolled up, tie askew, entered a room, everyone tensed. Yet it happened, always.

So when the great man strode into the Major Case working room, instant silence fell upon the workaday chatter, where Chandler—now called “Starling” after the Jodie Foster character in Silence of the Lambs because she was young, blond, and extremely attractive—sat with Ron Fields and a couple of other senior special agents assigned to Task Force Sniper, grousing good-naturedly about the “situation.”

The “situation” was that nothing much was happening except re-checks, double checks, and then triple checks. It was Starling’s responsibility to maintain the time line, to chronicle the input of the investigation, to make certain every piece of evidence was logged, its source, chain of custody, and disposition kept pristine, all lab reports properly annotated and summarized, all physical evidence cataloged. She had written the first, rough draft of the report that, polished and expanded, would announce the end of Task Force Sniper and the closing of its case.

But of late, even the hyperbusy Starling was not overworked; she’d even taken a full half hour for lunch, not the usual twelve minutes, and got home to her fiancé, a star photo analyst at a notable but unnameable government entity located in Langley, Virginia, before ten.

“It’s eerie,” she was saying. “I keep checking and checking—”

“Now, Starling,” said Fields, “this is the rhythm of a major investigation. It goes and goes and goes and then, poof, it goes away. You just have to get used to it. And you have to understand that one of the things the Bureau pays you for is to wait until a genius consultant speaks his piece.”

“Say, who is this guy anyway?” asked Bob Martin, assigned to the case as the best investigator from the Shaker Heights Police Department.

“He’s supposedly some big gun guy. Not just in theory but in operational terms too. It’s whispered by I-don’t-know-who that Nick may have put him undercover in Bristol and that’s how he brought down the Grumley crew.”

“He looks like Buddy Ebsen as that old detective,” said Bob. “What was it, MacGyver?”

“No, that was the young guy. Barney Fife?”

“No,” said Starling, who’d watched every law and order show ever broadcast, as she was from a total police-culture family, with a father in command of and two brothers supervisors in the Arizona Highway Patrol, “Barnaby Jones.”

“Score one for Jodie,” said Martin.

“Come on, Bob, you can’t call her that. It’s Starling.”

“You guys,” she said, and then she went silent as His Eminence walked by.

The director knocked on the door of Nick’s office and opened when he got the “Yo,” from inside. He left the door open, presumably so the troops could hear and get the word before Nick himself put it out. He was known to be a guy very clever in managerial skills.

“Nick, hey, don’t get up.”

Nick, half rising, sat back down.

“Yes sir. Can I have someone get some coffee?”

“I heard your coffee down here sucked. I much prefer Organized Crime’s coffee. Now that’s coffee.”

“Yes, Mr. Director.”

“Nick, talk to me.” He hadn’t bothered to sit, which indicated in bureaucratic language that this was a quick chat type visit, a buck-up-the-troops initiative, rather than a serious policy discussion.

“I’m just passing by, I don’t want to be one of those asshole micromanagers, you know the type, but do we have an arrival time yet on your consultant?”

“Sir, I’ve told him over and over that time is not on our side. But he’s a cautious, deliberate guy. That’s how he’s stayed alive all these years.”

“I’m getting all kinds of crap on this one. I think the New York Times is working for Tom Constable, as well as his lobbyist and that congressman. I’m hearing from Chicago and New York, and I know Cleveland will be on me soon. They all want action and we’ve got people literally living downstairs in Public Information.”

“I see ’em every morning.”

“Okay, what I’m thinking, is there some kind of interim report we could put out? Something we haven’t given out before. Maybe it could be confirmed that we’ve matched Hitchcock’s movements to the shootings? We have, haven’t we?”

“That part’s real solid.”

“It doesn’t commit us, but it makes us look good. Leak it to the Times. Got anyone here who could make a creditable leaker?”

Nick stood, looked beyond the director’s shoulder.

“Starling, come here, will you?”

The young woman got up instantly, came in.

“Sorry. I shouldn’t have called you that, Agent Chandler. Have you met the director? Sir, this is Special Agent Jean Chandler, whom I’ve appointed our case monitor. She’s very good, works like a dog.”

“Starling, eh? I get it. Well, I hope you’re as good as Starling, Starling.”

“So do I, sir,” said Starling, for whom the original Starling was a complete goddess and the primary reason she’d decided on the Bureau for a career.

“I think I know your dad. Arizona? Great cop.”

“He’s the best.”

“Starling, I’m sorry, Agent Chandler.”

“I’m used to it, Mr. Director.”

“Anyhow, any experience with the press?”

“My father and brothers were not disposed to share things with the press.”

“Well, that’s sound principle, most of the time. But sometimes it buys us some time if we can feed the dogs a little something so they fight among themselves and leave us alone for a bit. Hmm, I’m wondering if—”

The phone rang.

“Go ahead, Nick, answer it, this can wait.”

“Yes sir.”

Nick snatched the phone up, glad for the interruption. He knew that having a thing with the press was tricky; you could never outsmart them, and Starling, even if she was working under the director’s guidance, could get tagged as a snitch, never trusted, and it might hurt her career. He didn’t wish that on anybody so young, so bright, so hardworking.

“Memphis.”

“Swagger. I think I’ve got a little something. Should I come over? I don’t know how you want to play it.”

“My idea is, I’d bring the upper management of the investigative team over, plus some of the forensic and ATF loaners. Is that okay? You can talk to the group.”

“Sure, in for a penny, in for a pound.”

“And since he’s here, I might bring the director along.”

“Why not?” said Bob.

“Tell me you have good news.”

“I have news,” Bob said, “and it’s up to you whether it’s good or bad.”

“That doesn’t sound promising.”

“Your people did a great job. Amazing, really, in the time. They only got one little thing wrong.”

“And that is?”

“They got the wrong guy.”

10

He stood at the head of a table with his notes written on a yellow legal pad. Immediately to his right, some very pretty young woman had her own pad, presumably to take what he said down. The others in the room were the executive special agents of the Task Force Sniper investigation, two loaners from ATF, a Bureau ballistics lab guy, one or two junior analysts, an Ohio detective, a Chicago detective, a New York State Police detective, also loaners to represent local interests, Nick as the task force commander, and the director, who had allegedly “been in the area” and wandered in. All basked in the dead institutional light of the overhead fluorescent, which turned them a kind of pale gray-green.

They knew. It was a sullen crew, hostile, not furious but disappointed and ready to fight. No smiles, no eye contact, nothing but sluggish body language, whispers with attitude launching them too loudly into colleagues’ ears, a whole “We’re not impressed” vibration throbbing in the room.

“Folks,” said Nick when the shifting and shuffling and whispering had settled down, “as I’ve told all of you, I wanted to get an outsider’s opinion on our findings, and I asked Mr. Swagger here because he’s a former marine sniper himself. I’m sure he’ll admit that he began with the honest bias to come to a different finding, to exonerate a fellow marine, but I knew that if we convinced him, we were doing pretty good. I guess we haven’t. But I also know that he is the most experienced shooter I’ve ever met, an authentically honorable and dependable man, and I believe he has a certain kind of, uh, ‘gift’ for seeing into shooting dynamics. Not that he’s a court-approved firearms expert, but he’s just got some extra gene for seeing things that other people don’t see. So let’s listen to what he has to say. Bob, why don’t you get started?”

“I should add,” said the director, “and excuse me Nick, I don’t mean to take over your task force, but last year as a consultant to Nick in Tennessee, Mr. Swagger performed with heroic distinction in an undercover capacity. He’s earned the right to muss a few feathers around here, so I expect complete professional respect from everybody. I will be very disappointed if this turns into a yelling match.”

“I won’t do no yelling, I promise,” said Bob. “I can tell there’s disappointment here. I’m not here to criticize or to suggest somebody missed something. I don’t want nobody’s career hurt. I don’t want nothing but the truth. You can also tell from the way I mix them verbs and subjects up, I’m not particularly well educated, and I apologize for that also. If I try to sound like I am, I will just sound even dumber, so generally I won’t make no attempt to speak ‘smart,’ like you’d expect. If I lapse into it and my verbs and subjects start agreeing, give me a kick in the butt.”

That brought a laugh, a respite, however brief, in the hostility.

“But it don’t matter how I talk. I’m here to bring experience none of you has, which is as a sniper, a man who’s taken lives in the field and who’s spent too much time thinking about this sort of thing. So let me thank you in advance for your attention, and let me sum up and put cards on the table. Yeah, I’m here to tell you you’re wrong and that Carl Hitchcock didn’t do nothing. He spent the last week of his life, I’m guessing, in a drug-induced coma, and right away you say, ‘How come there’s no drugs in his bloodstream?’ and the reason is, the drug they used was bourbon. There was plenty of that in there. He was an alcoholic and he was pickled forcefully via an arm drip—okay, I don’t know the medicine, maybe it was just pure alcohol—after he was kidnapped. By who? I can’t give you no name. But when I’m done you’ll have a pretty good picture of who the guy is, where he is, and what it’ll take to catch him. So shall we start?”

A few mumbles seemed to acknowledge reluctant assent.

“I begin with the shooting. You noted the shooter was a fellow of some experience. This boy knew what he was doing. Twice he made brain shots through heavy back window auto glass from what looks to be two-hundred-plus yards out. He drilled the actress between the ribs and into her heart. He shot Mitch Greene through the open mouth from a hundred yards out through glass. Carl Hitchcock clearly had the capacity to make those shots. So did his rifle. So did his ammunition. With that rifle and that ammunition and that skill, y’all are thinking, as I did at first, it’s a piece of cake. Cold-bore kill shot. Yes, you could have made the cold-bore kill shot, Nick could have made the kill shot, I could have made the kill shot. But these shots weren’t no cold-bore kill shots. These weren’t bull’s-eyes. These weren’t center-target hits. These, all four of them, were abnormally perfect shots.”

He let that sink in.

“He didn’t hit the target. He didn’t hit the bull’s-eye. He didn’t hit the center of the bull’s-eye. He didn’t hit the X at the center of the bull’s-eye. Four times running, he hit exactly the spot where the two slashes cross to form the X in the center of the bull’s-eye. He hit the exact mathematical center of the target, and you can verify that by checking the locations as figured by the coroners who measured. All four shots are centered right on the goddamned button by measurement.”

Instantly, a hand shot up.

“I’m sorry to interrupt,” said the New York State Police detective, “but that isn’t what I see at all. What I see is a hole in the ribs to the left of the left breast, a hole in the center of the back of the skull, a hole in the left side of the head two inches above and a little ahead of the left ear, and a hole in the back of the mouth. I give you, maybe, the hole in the center of the back of the head and the mouth shot, possibly, but the other two are way off-center. They’re not bull’s-eyes at all.”

“Good point. However, you’re thinking of the targets as if they’s lying still. You’re thinking of them as two dimensions on a mount and looking for equal measurements top and bottom, right and left. But these was human and they’s in motion. They are dead center, dead bang Fourth of July center, to the body at the angle it was at the time of the shooting. It’s easiest to see on Reilly. Her husband got blasted, right next to her. She turns her head to look at it, pivoting to the left. As she turns longitudinally, her head gets longer. The shooter shoots exactly for the center of the head and at that angle, with the head cranked around forty-five or so degrees to the left, the exact mathematical center is four inches up and one inch in front of the left ear.”

He looked at his notes.

“At a forty-five-degree angle, her head would have been 425 millimeters wide. I called a fellow to run it through the computer. Our asshole put the bullet exactly at 212 millimeters from the extreme furthest point of the skull and 132 millimeters from the crown and 132 millimeters from the jawline. Do you need the figures on Flanders? It’s the same. Dead center side to side and top to bottom, given the angle of the bullet to the target. If he were shooting groups, he would have put those four bullets from varying distances in varying conditions into one hole of about .312 inches. Moreover, the group size, measured from center to center of the four bullet holes, would have been less than one-tenth of an inch. Ain’t no man alive can shoot like that. Only God could.”

He tried to let it sink in but in most cases saw confusion.

“How did he do it?”

He waited for an answer.

“Here’s the funny thing. If you asked him, he wouldn’t know. He wasn’t trying to do it. It was a mistake. If he’d figured it out in advance, he’d have shot less well, just for kills, not for the center of the center. He actually did it by mistake. How?”

No answer.

“The answer is the scope. Don’t you see? Carl had—and the rifle was found with—a Leupold 2.5–10x Mark 4 mil-dot sight, state of the art to the year he had his rifle built, which was 2005. It could hit head, heart, mouth, sure, but it would put its bullets in a random pattern across a couple of inches over three hundred yards. The group is maybe an inch per hundred, two inches for two hundred, three for three, called ‘minute of angle.’ It ain’t refined enough, no way is it refined enough to make shots that accurate into a group less than a quarter of an inch. The killer did it because that’s what the scope let him do.”

“He used a target scope?” somebody asked.

“No sir. The wars have pushed the technology of scopes hard since 2005. There’s military money in it now, because we’re fighting in sniper campaigns, we have to tag people way out there before they can tag us. Our shooter had access to this stuff. Our guy used some new generation software-driven piece of equipment that allows amazing cold-bore first shot accuracy. The manufacturers are Horus, Holland through Leupold, Tubb through Schmidt & Bender, Nightforce, the BORS system from Barrett, and an outfit calling itself iSniper. Whoever did this job took Carl’s scope off, mounted one of these babies, did the shooting, then replaced the Leupold Mark 4. He sat there in the dark in that truck, he figured the distance, the temperature, the wind, all went into an equation, which he then ran through the software program preinstalled and precalibrated to bullet weight, powder amount, primer influence, and his little baby computer give him a solution. It said something like seven down, four-three to the right. He looked in the scope, and instead of one crosshair like you think you know, it has a kind of Christmas tree of points of aim—reticles, in the trade—descending from the scope center, and he found the one that was seven down and four point three to the right and pressed the trigger. Instant super bull’s-eye. Okay, let me tell you, first thing, Carl was an old guy, and there was no way that technology meant a goddamned thing to him. He couldn’t have begun to have used that thing to make those shots. I doubt he used a cell. I called seven folks who knew him to verify that.”

Of course, silence. He was beyond them. Then Nick said, “But maybe he just made those shots out of luck. I mean there’s no physical reason he couldn’t have had a very good day. Four times in a row. It happens. Nothing evidentiary sustains your presumption. In other words, there’s just no proof except your reading of the bull’s-eyes, your subjective interpretation.”

“No,” said Ron Fields, ever the bull in the porcelain museum, “I have to agree with him. I shot designated marksman on the St. Louis SWAT team for six years. I got very, very good, but I could never ever shoot like that. I could hit anybody, bring ’em down dead in a second, and thank God I never had to, but my shots were all in what he called minute of angle. This guy is shooting second of angle. Tenth of second of angle.”

“Mr. Director?” asked Nick.

“Nick, I’m just listening. Go on, Mr. Swagger, do you have anything else?”

“Well, let’s think about who’d use a sight like this. There’s basically two sniping communities, military and police, with some interchange. But for a fact, most police teams never shoot beyond a hundred yards.”

“That’s right,” said someone. “Our Quantico people put out a report last year that found the average police marksman shot takes place at seventy-seven yards.”

“It’s only the military that needs to take people out way beyond a hundred yards. That’s what they’re doing in the sandbox right now with calibers like .338 Lapua Mag, .300 Winchester Magnum, .408 CheyTac, .416 Barrett, and of course the .50 BMG. They’re dumping bad actors out to a mile, maybe even farther.”

“So he’s military. Carl was military. That seems to prove our point, not yours,” Ron said.

“No sir. Carl started military, Carl was great military, one of the best marines that ever lived, but in the last twenty years, Carl has been putting on seminars for police all over the country.”

“That’s how Chandler found him,” said Nick.

Chandler seemed to be the young woman taking notes; she smiled but didn’t look up.

“So Carl had to learn the ins and outs of your kind of shooting as well as his own. That’s why he didn’t have no .408 CheyTac, ’cause he wasn’t working with young snipers headed out to the sand to pop ragheads at fifteen hundred long ones, he was working with police sergeants who might have to take down a crazy husband who has a knife to his baby’s head. That’s why he stayed with the .308. Y’all go through his logbook and see that he’s been working almost entirely in a police environment for about ten years now. That’s another reason why he wouldn’t know and couldn’t have learned fast enough to master that high-tech, software-driven thing. But there’s another thing. You, sir, you were a police marksman. You were called out, I’m guessing, even if you never pulled down on anyone. You recall lying there in the dark, worrying. What were you worrying about? What was your biggest problem?”

“Well,” Ron started, his eyes going troublesomely vague as he looked back through hazy memory, “as I recall it was . . . well, glass.”

“That’s it,” said Bob. “What’s the situation of a man with a knife at a baby’s throat? What’s the situation of a bank robber with hostages? What’s the situation of a gangbanger who won’t come out? What’s the situation of a kidnapper with a gun to his victim’s head after a car chase? The answer ain’t ‘indoors.’ The answer is ‘behind glass.’ ”

Again, the pause.

“That’s something Carl had to know if he was going to help law enforcement boys with their rifle shooting. That’s something that military snipers pay no attention to. They’re almost always dropping people outdoors. They never have hostage situations. They scan, they locate, they calculate, they drop, and if it’s in town, most of the windows have been blown out, if they was there at all. The guy with the AK or the RPG. The guy with the cell phone, whatever. Glass ain’t in their plans. Sir, how do you shoot through glass?”

Ron nodded. It was as if he was conceding a clever checkmate that he hadn’t seen coming.

“Yeah,” he said, “I get it. To shoot through glass, every police marksman knows, you don’t shoot that Federal 168-grain match hollow point. You shoot a hunting round, a 165-grain Federal Trophy Bear Claw, it’s called. It’s a much stronger bullet structurally, which means it won’t break, shatter, or deviate on glass, particularly the heavy glass in an automobile. But this guy didn’t know that.”

“Carl would have. But this guy didn’t,” said Bob. “But he wasn’t no dummy. He had an uninformed idea on glass and his solution was improvised, as a military sniper would impro out in bad-guy land. His solution was to minimize the angle of deflection by actually moving the gun in the Reilly shooting. He was, what, over two-hundred-odd yards out, the next block over, and he knew that he didn’t want to try and go through the back window of that Volvo at an angle, because there’s no predicting how the bullet would deviate. It might not even penetrate, it might skid off. So he—he had to have help, I’m guessing—he just pushed his sandbags or shooting pedestal eighteen inches to the right so his angle to the glass would be zero degrees. That’s why there was no beveling on the second shot. Both were straight-throughs.”

The room was quiet.

Bob finally said, “A sophisticated team set this up. They watched Carl, they knew Carl’s weaknesses, his strengths, his tendencies. One night, when they had their intelligence set up, they took Carl down, injected him with something strong; he probably never came awake again, as they kept him stewed under a fast alcohol drip for the next week. They had someone who resembled him in some vague way take over his identity, buy the van, rent the rooms, establish his bona fides, drive to the shooting site. Their shooter did the killing, while some people rigged that room in his house. When the ID was made, they hauled poor Carl to that room and blew his brains out. Then they vanished. It was set up so you couldn’t help but think it was Carl. They’s running a game on you and they almost got away with it. Only thing is, their sniper didn’t think rigorously about the hits he was making. Too bad for him.”

“So who are we looking for?” Nick asked.

“Lots of military experience, no civilian experience. Superb technician. He’s got to be a grad of some service sniper school, lots of kills in the war. Thinks he’s pretty damn good.”

“What do you recommend we do now, Mr. Swagger?”

“Just one thing: you want to catch a sniper, there’s only one way. Get another sniper.”

11

In the town of Cold Water, there lived an outlaw by the name of Texas Red. He kicked open the swinging slatted door to the Spotted Dog saloon and slid through as it rode its hinges back and forth. The piano man stopped his tinkling, and cowboys cleared away from the bar. He stood, tense, as the crowd cleared, leaving but three, who seemed not in the least perturbed.

They were the Mendoza brothers, Mexicans. They had greasy mustaches, bandoliers crossed on their chest, guns worn low, gunfighter style.

Red appraised them. He was thin and wiry with a straw mustache. He had hard black eyes. He wore a tall, round-topped Stetson, pale gray, a lot of hat. He wore a faded red placket shirt, a pair of suspenders to sustain the weight of his tight wheat-colored jeans, a pair of well-beaten boots with silver, jingly spurs. Across his waist, in a Mexican flap holster, engraved beautifully in a floral motif by the folks in El Paso after the artist-gunman Bob Meldrum, he wore a first-generation Colt Peacemaker in .44-40 with yellowed, ancient ivory grips. It contained five cartridges because he had carefully loaded by pattern so that the hammer of the old revolver, with its fierce prong of firing pin, now rested on an empty cylinder. It was a safety measure. You wouldn’t think at nut-cutting time with the Mendozas a fella would think about gun safety. But Red had.

“Bastards,” said Red under his breath.

The Mendozas said nothing, not because they were tongue-tied but because they were black metal plates.

He heard the buzz of a timer, signifying go!

Texas Red drew, and he was smooth and that meant he was fast, and he cocked as the gun came up, fired from instinct honed on practice, and sent a wad of lead to bang hard off and knock down José Mendoza’s black-plate chest, another to gut the black-plate belly of Frank Mendoza, and—dammit—a third which just missed Jimmy Mendoza in the black plate. Then Texas Red thumbed back the hammer fast—this had taken months to learn—and in the same motion tried to ride the gun up to his eyes and fired a fourth time, hitting Jimmy in the center of the black plate. The black plate fell. Cottony swirls of old-time black powder smoke rolled in the air.

“Goddamn,” he said. “Goddamn, goddamn.”

“I think Jimmy might have toasted you, Mr. Constable,” said Clell Rush, the legendary Hollywood gun coach. “I saw you go to sights on the fourth shot. Because you missed the third shot. And the reason you missed the third shot was the gun didn’t set up in your hand correctly on the recoil after the second shot. And the reason that happened is that after each shot, the gun was a little higher in your hand. The first two shots were good, though. But if you go to sights, you’re thinking, and all the time you’re thinking, that black plate is shooting back.”

Texas Red turned.

“I can’t seem to get to three,” he said. “I’m fine through two, I can do two, but I get tangled up and it makes me cautious on the third.”

“Are you drawing each night like I said?”

“I do my homework, Clell, you know that.”

“Well then, you’re momentarily plateaued out. Same thing happened to Bob Mitchum on El Dorado. He got good and then he stopped developing. I didn’t think he’d ever get it. But he was a pro, like you, Mr. Constable, he did the work, and when he had the saloon scene, he was smooth as butter. Sometimes you get a natural—Dino was a natural, he just took to it with super hand speed and coordination—but if you didn’t get the gene for gunwork, you have to practice.”

“I guess I’ll just have to work harder,” said Texas Red–Tom Constable. “The real Cold Water is next month and I do mean to win.”

Tom Constable was fond of winning, and pretty good at it too. He’d won a fortune in his twenties by pushing his inherited advertising agency (it specialized in roadway signage) into other forms of media, and he got into cable early, rode it hard, and made his first billion. Then the sailing bug caught him and he put two years into that and won an America’s Cup. Then sports, then news, buying or creating teams and networks. Then he married a movie star, decided to become a rancher, bought more land than anybody in America, reinvented buffalo herds, started a restaurant chain, and now he was into a new obsession called cowboy action shooting.

It was an interesting diversion. It played with his old Wild West fantasies, which had first been cultivated in front of the TV in the golden decade of the fifties, when Paladin, Marshal Dillon, Chris Colt, Cheyenne, and the boys from Laramie and Bonanza had dominated the American popular imagination. The way it worked: you got yourself all dressed up like one of the old boys, you called yourself by a nickname, you packed four guns—two handguns, a rifle, a shotgun, all of them of a design preceding 1898—and you shot real bullets and buckshot (black powder loaded) in low-key fun house scenarios adapted from the TV shows of yore.

Most folks did it because it was a nice baby boom wallow; it was relaxed and social and all men met as equals. But Tom, as always, wanted to win; it was a part of his unmalleable personality, the least pleasant thing about him, the way he got fixed on something and all life ceased to exist except that issue. That’s why he’d had so many wives, was so estranged from his children, drove so hard in business, and could not stand to be bested in anything. Who’d have guessed such a handsome man had such fiery pathologies hidden beneath?

And in Texas Red, he’d stumbled upon a creation that pleased him immensely. In the sport you could cook up your own character, and for some reason Constable had instantly conjured Red, twenty-four, of South Texas, a kind of Billy the Kid knockoff, young, fast, loose, dangerous. Red was the dysfunctional deviant boy that Tom’s well-disciplined business life and public image could never acknowledge, but who lived somewhere inside him, hiding under layers of polish, tailoring, grooming, and flossing. He was all id, he was a killer, he was a fast-draw piece of work, and when he saw wrong or threat by his own standards, not society’s, he faced it and gunned it down. One and nineteen men had tried to take him in his fantasy, and one and nineteen were dead. The next man who faced him, whoever he was, wherever he was, soon would be dead.

Meanwhile, on the dreary planet called reality, he’d immediately commissioned a famed Peacemaker gunsmith to build him the most refined and accurate six-gun possible, ditto the rifle and shotgun, and he paid the legendary Clell Rush an outrageous fee for private coaching. He’d gotten good too. Tom worked every damn day on it, shooting privately reloaded .44-40s by the bucketful on his vast western ranch. There too he’d had the scenarios from last year’s Cold Water Cowboy Action Shoot in Cold Water, Colorado, recreated. He wanted desperately to place well in the upcoming matches, because like so many other things, a victory wouldn’t be from who he was but from what he’d done.

He reloaded the Colt, sliding the big cartridges through the loading gate, just as generations of cowboys had in this land two centuries ago. Around him, the mountains of southwest Montana towered, glistening peaks lit by snow at their higher altitudes, under a sky so blue it made your teeth ache and wads of cirrocumulus clouds piled high. Of course, he noticed none of that.

“I don’t know why I can’t get it to set right on that third shot,” he said. “Maybe that one had a little extra powder in it and it kicked a little harder.”

“Could be. Most likely you held it too tight and didn’t give with the recoil, and it acted up on its own. You can’t be fast fast. You can only be fast slow.”

“You know, Clell, you tell me that every damn time, and one of these weeks I’m actually going to understand what you mean.”

“Well, sir, what it means is, you can’t fight it. You can’t conquer the gun. You can’t beat it down, make it do what it don’t want to. You got to do it with love. You got to meet it gentle, let it have its way, and in that way you get your way. It’s like a horse. Or a woman.”

“It isn’t like any of the women I was married to, I’ll tell you,” Tom said with a laugh. “They like to broke me, the bitches. Anyhow, I will—”

“Mr. Constable?”

It was his secretary, Susan Jantz, standing next to him in her pantsuit, an extremely plain but unbelievably capable woman.

“Susan?”

“A call from DC. Mr. Fedders. He says it’s urgent.”

Tom made a little comic face for the benefit of Clell, took the phone, and stepped away.

“Yes, Bill.”

“Tom, I’ve got some news. Not good, I’m afraid. I’ve heard through a source that the FBI’s going to postpone releasing its report for a little bit.”

“I thought you—”

“Tom, Jack Ridings and I went and had a one-on-one with the director himself. We met the head guy on the investigatory team. It looked to be in the bag. It seems there’s a new direction they want to pursue.”

“Lord, I don’t want this dragging on all year. I don’t want books, I don’t want TV specials, I don’t want any who-killed-Joan bullshit selling product and little weasels getting rich off Joan’s death.”

“Yes, Tom, I understand. It’s the chief of the task force. He’s somehow reluctant to sign off on the narrative they’ve established, so there’s some dicking around, I’m not sure exactly what and I’m not sure how long it will take. He seemed like a guy who was reading the wind, and I just don’t know what’s happening with him now.”

“Bill, I’m paying you a great deal of dough. If this FBI guy is suddenly getting cute, then find some way to get him out of the picture. Have him shipped to Toledo, dig up something about him and plant it in the papers, just get him the hell out of there.”

“Tom, of course, I just wanted you in the loop. I actually know a young Times reporter who can be very helpful to us in this case.”

“Please handle it, Bill.”

12

You’re a little ahead of us,” said Nick. “We don’t even know where to begin.”

“Someone here knows where to begin. That fellow, there,” said Bob, pointing to a man.

“I wondered when you’d remember,” said a mild-looking older man, hair gone thin but still combable, sitting at the far end of the table. He looked like the professor at the frat party, among all the young go-getters.

“How are you, Mr. Jacobs? Are you the lab boss yet?”

“I’m fine, Mr. Swagger, and yes, actually, I am the lab director. I remember how I tried to send you away; it was like this, all the evidence pointed to you. But you’d figured it out and pulled the rug out from under me.”

Years ago, in a different lifetime, Walter Jacobs, then a young technician from the lab, had testified for the government in a case in which Swagger had been accused of the murder of a prominent man by long-range rifle fire. It was a complicated thing, and it almost got him killed, but it also got him out of the bitter woods, lifted the anger that had weighed like a yoke across his shoulders, got him married to a fine woman, and got him two of the best daughters a man could dream of.

“That old lawyer was spectacular, Mr. Swagger. I’ve never forgotten it. But before I answer your question, do you mind if I ask you a question?”

“Was waiting for it when I saw you.”

“I’m aware that once again, or so it appears, someone extremely knowledgeable has apparently manipulated ballistic evidence to frame a Marine Corps sniper. Though in the first case the sniper survived—you—and in this one he died—Hitchcock. But you’re playing the same role, aren’t you? You’re still the man who sees through it and on his own goes into the wilderness and puts a conspiracy under the ground, so that justice, in some form, pays out. But it also seems you could be reinventing your biggest triumph. Maybe subconsciously you’re trying to recreate that episode in your life, like Captain Queeg and his strawberries aboard the Caine. Maybe it’s all a delusionary structure that the much older and perhaps less rational Bob Lee Swagger is subconsciously forcing on all of us. Are you Swagger or Queeg?”

“Has anyone here read Mr. Herman Wouk’s The Caine Mutiny?” Bob asked. No hands went up.

“See, Mr. Jacobs, I have, so I’m with you. And I’ll let you decide. But before you decide, let me ask you my question. And I bet when you hear it, you withdraw yours.”

“Well, isn’t this interesting,” said the director. “Nick, you do give a good meeting, very dramatic, even if your coffee sucks. Go ahead, Mr. Swagger.”

“All right,” Bob said. “Yeah, maybe I am a foolish old coot who’s playing tricks on myself and on you to have a taste of old triumphs. But let’s just examine the technical stuff a little. I’m betting that when that rifle came to your lab, you went over it at a microscopic level. It ain’t got no secrets, not even among the atoms, you don’t know about, is that right?”

“That is right, Mr. Swagger. Even to the point of measuring the firing pin to make certain that it was up to spec, even to the last two or three thousandths of an inch, so that nobody could have cut it and soldered it back so that it wouldn’t fire. We learned that one the hard way.”

“Yes sir. Now, is it not true that any object in the world picks up microscopic debris of some sort? A record at the smallest level possible of where it’s been, what it’s done.”

“Yes sir, just like on the CSI shows.”

“Never seen one. Figured it out on my own. Now, a sniper rifle would be particularly rich in such a micro record, wouldn’t it? I mean, mostly it’s kept cased or in a safe, so it’s not picking up a lot of random crap. It’s rarely used, and when it’s used, it’s used in some dramatic enterprise. So the stuff aboard ought to tell a straightforward story, yes?”

“True again.”

“And a rifle is a particular kind of vacuum then, right? I mean, it’s always slightly lubricated, and lubrication has an attraction factor on its own. It’s like glue. Lot of tiny fragments and stuff sticks. Some can be identified, some can’t.”

“That’s right.”

“If it were paint or carpet fibers, you’d have a huge database to compare anything you found against. You could do it by computer in a few seconds. Right?”

“Right.”

“But if I’m reading correctly, you came up with an amount of ‘unknown baked paint debris.’ ”

“That’s what it says. That’s what I wrote.”

“And it’s unknown because you ain’t got no ‘baked paint debris’ database, nothing to compare it to.”

“Right again.”

“Now,” said Swagger, “here’s where I am. That baked paint debris—my thought is that it’s some kind of peelings, fragments, dust, motes, whatever you call it—”

“We call it ‘microscopic shit,’ Mr. Swagger,” Jacobs said, and everyone laughed, even Bob. Good one for Mr. Jacobs, and the laugh let a little tension out of the room.

“My read is that some of it came from the scopes. In other words, whenever you tighten the rings on a scope to mate it to the rifle, you leave microscopic trace amounts, ‘shit’ ”—another laugh—“off the finish of the scope. You do it a lot, you have a lot of shit. You do it rarely, you don’t have much. But it’s always there, right? However, since rifles with scopes are so seldom used in crimes, no one’s bothered to accumulate a database, when of course paint samples from cars and carpet fibers are always found at crime scenes.”

“Yes.”

“Okay,” said Swagger. “Here I am. Here’s what the old man is driving at. This kind of scope I described—as I said, there’s only six makers in the world. Well, in America. They are Horus; the Tubb DTAC, which is made by Schmidt & Bender; Nightforce, an American outfit actually manufactured in Australia; Holland, which has a contract through both Leupold and Schmidt & Bender to manufacture a scope with a ranging reticle and a series of aiming points; the BORS from Barrett, which fits on and adjusts the scope itself; and finally a company out west called iSniper, which makes a top-dollar variant called the iSniper911, said to be the best of the bunch. One of those brands of scopes this joker used. Therefore, you have to go to a big firearms wholesaler who has all these scopes in stock, you have to obtain one of each and test them. And one of them will yield baked paint debris identical to the microscopic baked paint debris you found on Carl’s rifle. And that’s the kind of scope this sniper used, while Carl was all alcohol-stupored up. Then his old scope was remounted and zeroed. So my question is, if you find it and make that match, would you withdraw your question about this thing being a Swagger fantasy? In other words, ain’t that your, whatchyoucallit, objective evidence?”

“Once again, Mr. Swagger, you’re the smartest boy in the class.”

Nick said, “We can track the sales records of the scope. Someone on that list—and I’m guessing there can’t be many because it’s new and it costs a lot of money—someone who’s bought one of these things, he’d be our person of interest.”

“So why again do we need to send an undercover, Mr. Swagger?” asked Ron Fields.

“This is why,” said Swagger. “The flaw in this system is that it’s tricky. That’s why an old guy like Carl never could have mastered it, and that’s why these things will always be primarily for the government, because they demand basically a professional, highly trained shooter to get them to do what you’re paying all that money for them to do, which is head-shoot Taliban field commanders at sixteen hundred meters cold-bore. You got to be good with numbers, good with small machinery, confident with higher logarithms and minicomputers, familiar with software, all that tech-weenie stuff, plus be able to use it all in the dark or the cold or the jungle or after three days of sitting in a hole in the ground under a net on a mountain slope in someplace that ends in ‘stan.’ It’s a highly refined skill. So most of these companies run schools to teach potential shooters—mostly special ops people, or high-contact military like Rangers or some government SWAT outfits, highly trained contract operators like Blackwater or Graywolf, people who need to know, your elite professionals—to teach them how to run the stuff under pressure and in field conditions. Our man will have gone through that training.”

“We get the records—”

“You have to subpoena the records. The records can be diddled or destroyed. You don’t know who or what is behind this, what the point is, where the trail leads. You need to send a man who can play in that league to the shooting school to see what he can come up with. You need to do it fast. I have a recommendation.”

He couldn’t believe he was about to say this, but there it was. In for a penny, in for a pound. Last mission of a long-dead war. And as in all wars, who else was there to send?

“I recommend me. Let me hunt this bastard.”

13

He didn’t introduce himself. He simply strode to the front of the small group of shooters assembled in the bleachers next to the benches under the bright Wyoming sun and said, “Your insert was at 2200, you got to the target zone at 0500 in the dark after a long uphill, over-rock belly crawl, so you’ve no time to range the target area by light. You’re in a hole. You’re bleeding everywhere. The scorpions are crawling over your backside, looking for the breakfast you yourself ain’t had. It’s cold. There are Taliban all over the place. The light comes up, and that’s when you see the Cherokee. It putters along and finally stops at a hut in the valley, and out pops the tall fellow for his dialysis. You’ve maybe two to three seconds clear shooting when he stops to talk to a kid. You’d also like to go home afterwards and have tea with the boyos, right? Oh, you fellows would have a Bud and a steak, but you take my point. How do you do it?”

He stood in front of them, burly, with a bristle of dark hair and a taut NCO’s face from any army in the world, his seemingly an Irish one. He was muscular, powerful, built for war or football, little else. His small eyes burned darkly and it was clear he was high clergy in the church of the sniper. He wore the uniform of the trade—the tac pants, a military-cut shirt and jacket, assault boots—and his eyes ran from man to man. His cadre stood to the right at parade rest, same uniforms, same burly men, or at least two were, the third being scrawny and dark and feral, all fast-twitch muscle.

“You, Blondie? How do you make that shot?”

Blondie was actually redheaded, about thirty, with his own set of sniper’s hard eyes. He was one-seventh of this quarter’s iSniper five-day tutorial, out here in the wastes to learn how to run the tech. Like his six colleagues, and like the speaker, and like the three other silent members of the teaching cadre, he was sunburned, tattooed, thick-armed, and he knew the drill as to kit, appearing in the de rigueurs of the tactical trade, complete to assault boots from Danner, khaki cargo pants from 5.11, polos from Blackhawk, scrunched boonie hats or weatherbeaten LaRue Tactical dusky green baseball caps, and a whole sales rack of tear-shaped, mucho-dinero sunglasses including Wiley Xs, Gargoyles, and Maui Jims.

The site was a thousand-yard rifle range twenty miles outside Casper, Wyoming, a featureless blank of land that could have been the backdrop for a play by Beckett, just nothingness under a bright sky, with a lean-to sun shade on a cattle ranch hunted for prairie dogs and mule deer in other months but in the cool fall fallow. Six of the students came from unnameable military units. If they told you which one, they had to kill you, but they’d do it fast so it wouldn’t hurt so much, and they’d smile so you wouldn’t feel disliked. The seventh looked like a gentleman cowboy.

“I’d pass,” said Blondie. “Without the range, there’s no shot. How the hell am I going to range, then go to Kestral for temp, altitude, wind, and humidity numbers, then figure in the ballistics, then run the algorithms on my Palm Pilot, then go clickety-clickety-click dialing the scope this way and that, hoping I get ’em right? In three seconds? No way. By the time I’m done, he’s inside. Meanwhile, there’re more and more people around till the area’s thick with ’em. So when he leaves, even if I’m suppressed when I take the shot, they can gauge where I am and put a lot of shit in that area, and that makes me bacon. If I got a big kill out of it, maybe I’d pay that price. But I’d have to think on it, and all the time I’m thinking, he’s getting smaller, and by the time I’ve got it all thought out, he’s gone. Mama didn’t raise me to be no dead hero. Ain’t no virgins waiting for me where I’m headed.”

“Exactly,” said the lecturer. “Now, possibly Mr. Swagger here,”—he pointed to the gentleman cowboy—“possibly Mr. Swagger could make that shot cold-bore. But he’s not human, he’s mythical. I’m simply human, so I couldn’t make it. Could you make that shot, Mr. Swagger, as I’ve described it? You made so many others.”

“Doubtful,” said Bob. “Not now, at any rate, I’ve lost too much. When I was as young as these fellows, there’s a possibility. I never worried about humidity because where I was it was consistent, and there wasn’t much wind, except during monsoon. I don’t know, though. Some men have a knack for distance. I never did.”

“But you had a knack for knowing the hold. Genius possibly more than ‘knack.’ A feel for it, something subconscious. All of you Vietnamers who scored in the nineties or better had to have that subliminal gift.”

“Well, maybe we did. I never talked with any of the others about it, because both Chuck and poor Carl were long gone before I started my third tour, and I never ran into ’em here neither. So, if the question is, would I take that shot, the answer is probably no. Turns out I ain’t so mythical after all.”

Bob was a crash attendee at the tutorial under his own name because there was no time to put a legend together, and unless you immerse yourself in the details of your fictional narrative, you’ll make a mistake sooner or later. So he was here, publicly, as Bob Lee Swagger, of Boise, Idaho, Gny. Sgt. USMC (Ret.), on government contract as a consultant for the Department of Energy security sector. It was all Nick could come up with quickly, once the forensics people had determined that the baked paint debris had come from an iSniper911 unit and nothing else, and quickness was important, for the iSniper911 was produced in such small numbers that the tutorial that taught it ran but once every two or three months, depending. So Nick called in a favor at Energy; Energy ran the paperwork top speed and got the special exception to iSniper’s usual procedures on the basis of Swagger’s well-known name in the community. The premise was Energy’s security teams, known as very well trained operators in charge of guarding vulnerable, volatile Energy Department sites the nation over, were going to upgrade their sniper capabilities to make shooting out to military ranges possible in the new age of terrorism and were looking for an optics system to handle the task. They’d hired the ex-sniper Swagger to run an R and D on what was available and to make a recommendation; the story would stand up to any kind of vigorous examination, unless Bob let it slip he’d never seen a Department of Energy installation and wasn’t too sure what the Department of Energy did, anyway.

“Anyhow,” Bob allowed, “if you want I could bore all these young guys with stories about how different it was for us, how much more primitive the equipment was, how the landscape favored snipers in a way high desert don’t, but it would be just an old man’s gas. I’m here like them to see if you can do this stuff way out there without a head for numbers.”

Some laughter, even from the Irishman.

“Grand, fellows,” he said, “I’m here to teach you how to make that shot, and any others that may come your way. The name’s Grogan, but you can call me ‘Anto,’ as we of the Irish tribe shorten ‘Anthony.’ I’ve done this work too, with a well-known British unit, and then I saw the way to endless riches by jumping to Graywolf Security, where it was my pleasure to handle caravan and bodyguard gigs in many other sandy places. Now I teach for iSniper, and enough with intros, shall we turn to the toy?”

More laughter. The black Irishman Grogan had a wit to him.

“Fellows, here’s the why as to your presence here. The scope which don’t need no wizard work to get on target. Why, if a sod like Anto Grogan can do it, you smarter fellows will have no trouble. But you question, can it possibly be worth the seven thousand dollars the bosses are charging for it now, plus five days when you could be with loved ones instead of cooking out here in the cowboy sun?”

He opened the rifle case before him, removing a British L96A1, the Accuracy International job, tricked up all very SAS, dun-colored, bi-pod mounted, barrel an inch thick, with what looked like an oar for a stock with a hole in it where your hand set to reach trigger and bolt, all of it crazily adjustable, and then up top two pounds of optical magic secured in Badger Ordnance tactical rings, thick as a giant’s wedding band. Turrets, nodules, knobs, tabs, dials, even a small TV set, a cube with screen above the eyepiece and decorated up top with a keyboard of buttons, the whole damned kitchen sink crunched into one piece.

“It looks hard. It ain’t. That’s its point. As Sergeant Blondie has said, and since I’ve seen the records, I know you all know and have done this work, but to shoot well far out in the field, you must have three instruments besides a rifle and a scope. You must have a range finder to lase the distance to target, a Kestral 4000 wind indicator to read wind and other atmospheric conditions, and a small computer or Palm Pilot or whatever to feed the distance and weather data into where you’ve already stored your ballistics data so that you can drive it all through an algorithmic equation and come up with your solution, which you must then hand-transfer to the scope itself. If any of those all-tricky and confused things goes wrong, it’s a miss. You give up your hide. You probably buy it. All that training gone to waste. Some camel bunger with a red and white tea cozy wrapped around his noggin has inherited your expensive whiz-bang rifle. No, that ain’t why we’re over there, now is it?”

He paused, waiting for the little eddy of giggles to die down.

“Not with iSniper911. With iSniper911, you prang the tall fellow in his heart and he’s dead before his tongue is in the loam. Everyone jumps around and goes jibberty-jabby. They start shooting wildly. Then they realize it’s they themselves on the target black and off they go, not ready for the virgins yet. You wait till dark, crawl back up the damned hill, and wait for extract. Twenty minutes and a loud helo ride later, you’re in base camp with your mates. ‘Shoulda seen the look on Osama’s face,’ you say, and the colonel opens you another can.”

He let this satisfying scenario play in their minds for a few seconds.

“Rather thought you’d like that one. All right, then, here’s the genius of iSniper911. It combines all the functions of ranging, weather analysis, algorithmic computation, ballistic prediction, and scope correction into but one instrument. There’s little devils inside move all them knobs, smart little leprechauns who can do the calc in their cute little heads in supertime. You simply lase the target and wait for the answer in the TV set up top, and in less than a second you’re on target. I mean completely and wholly on target. Here’s how.”

He turned and threw a cover off a portable blackboard next to him, to show a chart that diagramed the 911 reticle design. Busy, busy, one might say, and all the young snipers involuntarily groaned at the density of it, all the knowing and learning that it demanded and the stress of doing all that while possibly being shot at. The iSniper reticle wasn’t just the old standby crosshair, not even the crosshair with its mil-dot ranging diodes on the hairs; it displayed indeed the central crosshair, its nexus a kind of anchor point. From that spot, a veil of lighter netting seemed to descend, in the shape of a Christmas tree, a sort of delta of interfering imagery. Upon closer inspection by all it became evident that the netting itself consisted of rows and rows of smaller crosses. It looked like a cemetery on a hillside.

“See all them markers?” said Grogan. “Sure, they’re the tombstones of men who’ve stood against iSniper. In a manner of speaking. They’re all points of aim.

“You press the lase button to initiate the targeting sequence. In one tenth of a second, you have distance, while at the same time this little unit”—he tapped a collection of dials mounted behind the bell of the scope—“reads temp, wind, atmospheric density, and humidity and automatically inputs to the minicomputer, where some kind of mysterioso chip runs it through the mathematical universe, also taking into consideration the ballistic template of the weight, speed, design, and trajectory of your chosen round, and when it’s all done, a little voice pipes out, ‘Honey, let’s fuck.’ ”

Laughter, of course, as the boys were used to the metaphorically imagined sexual dynamics of sniping and had heard and issued the cry “Get some,” which had once meant “Get some pussy” and now, in the War Against Global Terror, meant “Get some kills.”

“It does not, of course; even the head university boys at iSniper aren’t that clever. No, instead what happens is that once the solution is produced, automatically again and again in supertime, that data is crunched as target coordinates are impulsed up here on the screen of the monitor, so you get a readout. ‘D thirteen, seven R,’ it’ll say, something like that. You go back to the scope, count thirteen hashmarks down, seven tiny cross-hashes to the right, and that’s your aiming point. You put that little cross, that reticle, that pip, on Johnny Taliban and use your good shooter’s discipline, enjoying all the fundamentals you’ve worked so hard to master, and when you shoot, the thing you shoot dies. Not usually. Not sometimes. Not if luck is with you or God is your copilot and the wind be mild, but always.”

A hand came up, from a thick-necked young man who looked like a linebacker. But then, they all looked like linebackers.

“Yes, mate?”

“Sir, I—”

“Mate, I’m just a sergeant rating, like all you boys are, and ‘sir’ makes me hair stand up. You could call me Colour Sergeant if you can get your tongue around something so Waterloo-sounding, but I’ll settle for Anto.”

“Anto, like all of us here, I ain’t no Bob the Nailer, but I know enough to know that there’s nothing made that don’t get beat to hell in combat in three days or less. I look at that little thing and it looks like an iPod or something. I just get worried that after that long crawl, I turn it on and I get ‘does not compute’ or some such and there ain’t no IT to call and bitch at where I’m hunkered down.”

“Excellent, chum. Most excellent. I imagine you’re all worried, no? Mr. Swagger, yourself same, sir?”

“It’s a concern,” said Bob, trying to wear his designated celebrity status gracefully and not come across to these young men as a pompous asshole. “Busted more than my share of glass in the boonies and they didn’t have no batteries in ’em.”

Anto Grogan smiled at the fellas, all confident and pleased, then at his cadre of three other boys, and then he hoisted the rifle and threw it hard upon the ground.

An involuntary groan arose from the little audience, for all were shooters and knew to cherish the weapon as long habit, and if rough stuff happened to it, you hoped it stayed true, but under no account did you abuse it yourself.

“Let’s give it a right and proper licking,” Anto said, picking it up, turning it wrong side out in his strong hands so that he gripped it like a batsman by the barrel, and whacking its stock three times hard against the beam that supported the roof over the shooting benches, the collisions sending a buzz of vibration through the ramshackle structure.

Then he held it up and began to spin the windage and elevation knobs randomly in one direction, then the other.

“Gentlemen, if you could see your own faces now you’d be laughing yourselves. Ever see a man treat a fine rifle so poorly? No, and I don’t recommend it neither, but let’s see what we’ve done. I’ll take two volunteers please, that would be you and you. Jimmy, get the boys the ATV.”

Jimmy detatched himself from the line of cadre and went to a parked ATV, keyed it to life, and brought the three-wheel rough-ground bike up to the bleachers. In its cargo tray behind the second seat, everyone could see three bright round objects, red, yellow, and blue, beachballs actually.

“Now here’s the drill. You two boys are going to go on a little drive out into the field, and whenever the spirit moves you, though I hope it’s beyond five hundred yards, you’ll kick a beachball out, with the last one way far out there. Maybe the wind will come along and move ’em even further about. I, meanwhile, will sit here and continue to talk to the other lads, with the somewhat odd situation being that I’ve been tightly blindfolded”—he pulled a red bandana out of his back pocket—“by Mr. Swagger; that is, after Mr. Swagger has checked the bandana to make certain it’s up and fine. The point is, I can have no idea at what ranges the beach balls have been placed. When all is done, I will turn, Mr. Swagger will pop off my blindfold, and using iSniper, I’ll shoot cold-bore offhand and bang all three in under five seconds. I’ll range, compute, acquire, and fire on three unknown-range targets and hit ’em dead-on. Sure, I’ve practiced some, and sure, I’m deft with the thing, but not at a level any man here willing to work and follow instructions can’t himself achieve over the next five days. And when you see that, imagine your same selves in that hole, only it ain’t beachballs, it’s boys with RPGs moving against your site, and enjoy watching me pop them. And mind, this is after all the abuse you’ve just seen.”

“Anto?”

“I am.”

“Anto, seems like you’re taking the sport out of it,” someone said.

“True, I am, but for sport I butt heads in Irish football and chase a chesty whore now and then, or curl up for a nice read with a book by Agatha Christie. For shooting infidels, by that I mean ‘non-Irish,’ I want no sport at all, just piles of dead Johnny Muhammads feeding flies and scorpions fast as possible. Gentlemen, shall we?”

There was no point in “examining” the bandana; it was just a bandana, and Bob folded it in thirds, looped it about the Irishman’s eyes, and tied it tightly, Grogan going, “Say, that fella’s going to squish me head; easy, old man,” to much laughter, while two of the young operators took their ride on the ATV, this also ginning up laughter because like all young men with too much IQ and too much testosterone all stirred up in a lethal mix and driving them forward, the man piloting the bike took it to the limits, while his bud hung off it, waiting till he was way out there, and then gave each beachball a wicked toss until it came to rest at the farthest reaches of the range. Then they sped back, just barely in control, and came up short in a slithering, too-much-damn-brake powerslide that kicked dust and grass a hundred feet.

“Did anyone die?” asked Anto from behind his blindfold.

“Colour Sergeant, all will live to fight again,” said Jimmy.

“Excellent. We lose a man now and then that way. If someone will guide me to the rifle, please.”

Bob and an operator brought Grogan to his rifle. Bob lifted it and handed it to the man.

“Mr. Swagger, the ammunition, if you please.”

Bob went to a red box of fresh Black Hills .308 match loaded with the 168-grain Sierra boat tail hollow point, that sniper’s preferred number one, slid three out, and said, “Want me to load it?”

“No sir,” said Grogan, “and the loading can count in the five seconds.”

Everyone watched.

“Gentlemen, ears on, glasses on. Me too, Jimmy,” and Grogan’s boy slipped earmuffs over his head. All the muffs, of course, were miked up to allow normal conversation, yet were engineered to close down instantly when the decibel count spiked upon a shot.

“Now, Mr. Swagger, pull off the bandana, and you other fellows count to five in your head and see where you are.”

Bob put his hands on the bandana and—

“Oh, wait,” said Grogan.

He paused, milking the theater of the moment.

“Won’t it be more fun with some stress? Let’s do a game. Since Mr. Swagger is a champion, let’s let him shoot against me. Blondie, you’re his spotter. You go ahead now, work your range finder, tinker the Kestral, run the numbers and the proper ballistics through the Palm Pilot, get coordinates and click ’em into Mr. Swagger’s scope. Then when the bell goes up, Anto goes up against Bob the Nailer, not man on man—no doubt who’s the better man—but system on system, so we may learn which is the better system.”

“It ain’t necessary,” said Bob.

“Mr. Swagger, sir, them smart boys who run iSniper have instructed me to do all I can to sell 911 to the Energy teams, and this is part of my initiative, begging the gentleman’s pardon. I’m after showing the toy in game against the best.”

“Well, that ain’t me now, if it ever was. And outshooting an old goat like me ain’t going to get you much in this world,” Bob said, “but if it’s what you want.” He turned to Blondie.

“Okay by you, son?”

“Be an honor, Mr. Swagger.”

“You good on the numbers?”

“I can run ’em fast as anyone and have done a fair amount of it under incoming.”

“Then you’re the hero here. You run the brainy stuff and diddle the scope and I’ll just pull the trigger.”

Bob took a seat, wedged himself close to the bench, as Blondie placed his own M40A1, by which Bob knew him to be a fellow marine, and watched as the young man swiftly loaded and locked three 168s. Bob squinched behind the rifle, and it was all familiar. He settled in, feeling the tension in the trigger, finding his stockweld, sliding to the eyepiece, and seeing the world through the mil-dot-rich reticle of the Unertl 10X Marine Corps–issue scope, a unit overbuilt so powerfully you could use it to break down doors. He diddled with the focus ring, waiting for it to declare the world pristine and hard-edged at five to eight hundred yards, and when it did, he nodded to Blondie.

“I’m gittin’ bored, me just standing here like a fella on a pier, watching ships,” said Anto, drawing laughter.

“Almost ready, Sergeant Anto,” said Blondie, and then went all serious pro on them, first laser-ranging the three distant brightly colored dots in the thousand yards of green beyond them with his small Leica unit, then pulling out his Kestral 4000 weather station and noting the wind, humidity, and temperature. Then he ran the data through his Palm Pilot and came up with three solutions. He dialed the first into the scope of the rifle, clicking mostly elevation but some windage, for there was a drift of light wind that rustled undulations in the grass.

He whispered to Bob, “Okay, you’re set up on the first target, which is 492 yards out, in a quarter value left to right wind. When you take that shot, I’m quickly turning you eighteen clicks up for the next one, which is at 622 yards, and then up fifteen for the last one, at 814 with a wind correction of five clicks. Are you ready?”

“Good work, son,” said Bob. He was firing off a bench on sandbags while Grogan stood to do his offhand.

“Sure you don’t care to sit, Colour Sergeant Anto?”

“Nah, I’m fine this way. Some other fellow come up and pull the bandana when you’re ready.”

Bob realized that Anto would pass the first target because he

himself was already set up to that range and Anto would have no advantage. Instead he’d lase and shoot the second, then the third, while Blondie worked the clicks up for Bob’s second. He had a rogue impulse toward anarchistic victory: he’d shoot the second one first, taking away Anto’s advantage, then shoot the farthest, them come down to pick up the closest. That would be the way

to win.

But what would that prove? That he was smarter at a stupid game? That he was an asshole? That he couldn’t go with the agenda out of some petty vanity?

Don’t do it, he told himself. Don’t be an asshole.

“Someone start us off,” said Anto.

Someone did.

“Pull on one, ready now, three, two, o—”

Bob was alone in the world of the scope. He was home, really; it was all familiar, the feel of the rifle, the smell of the cleaning fluid, the touch of hand to comb, cheek to fiberglass, finger to trigger, the rifle firm, the breathing stopped, the body nothing but steel except for the littlest tip of the trigger finger, and he saw the bright, tiny dot nesting at the confluence of the crosshairs and, as usual, some inner voice commanded his finger’s twitch and so deep was his concentration that he neither heard the shot nor felt the recoil, just watched the tiny blot of color leap.

With his practiced hand, he got the bolt thrown and felt the vibrations of clickage as, hunched close, the young man called Blondie rocketed through his eighteen clicks. Bob put the hairs on the even smaller dot just in time to see it scoot into the air as Anto nailed it dead solid perfect.

No need to cock then, but some impulse came to him from a trick bag of shooter’s savvy that just seemed to be there when you needed it, and he waved off Blondie and went for the shot on intuition, his gift for hold, knowing that Blondie couldn’t click fast enough. His mind was a blur of numbers. He reasoned that at 800 yards, each mil-dot below the crosshair represented an increment of 35 yards off the last zero at 622, which meant that the 92 yards further out to the third target represented about 2.7 mil-dots, and at a speed that has no place in time, he found the segment of line between second and third mil-dots that represented the 2.7 hold and involuntarily fired, just as did Grogan.

The ball leaped up, then jagged hard right.

“Whoa!”

“Jesus Christ!”

“Damn!”

Grogan’s shot, dead-on, had knocked the ball upwards as it deflated, but Bob’s, arriving a nanosecond later and off-center, had banged it hard to the right, and it squirted off and bled its atmosphere out in the grass, signifying death.

“Well shot, Bob the Nailer,” cried Grogan. “Damn, sir, that’s shooting!”

Applause arose, and Bob was shamed at the vanity of his wanting to win, but at the same time pleased he’d done all right and impressed all the young guys who’d done it for real much more recently than he had, and would be Out There again soon, beyond the point of the spear.

Grogan was all lit up.

“Lord God, many’s the time I’ve done my little trick, yes sir, and no one has ever come even half so close. You was what, a hundredth of a second behind me, and here I am with all the techno gizmos and you just shot on pure instinct. What a shot, what a bloody damned shot.”

For just a second there, it seemed like the point of the whole exercise was to congratulate the old lion on his near-win in a game that proved nothing. But Anto was the leader in this development; he led the celebration.

“Tell me, Mr. Nailer, how you done it. I never could, not in a thousand years, no matter the rifle.”

“He waved me off,” Blondie was saying to anyone who would listen, not that anyone was. “Jesus Christ, can you believe that?”

“When the Marine Corps went to mil-dots in the late seventies with the Unertl, it was something I had to know. Don’t know why. So I learned mil-dots, just beat it all into my head. It’s no good as a system, really, too much dependent on figuring, and so you’ve got to be a mathematician as much as a shooter and a stalker. I just learned it by rote memorization and practice, don’t know why. It kept me off the booze a whole year, I suppose, and maybe the mil-dots saved me from my own black dogs. Anyhow, when Blondie told me the range of the targets, I figured the difference between the two and realized what the subtend value was for the dots at that range. So I was able to come to the point of aim faster using the dots cold off the middle-range zero than I could have with Blondie adjusting the elevation knob. It was 2.7 mil-dots down from the 622-yard zero, so that’s where I held and shot.”

“There’s a professional for all you younger fellows, and I hope in the land of the scorpions you’ve got as much sense.”

“But I was shooting known distance, where you wasn’t. So it don’t really come to much ’cept my vanity. Seems like we lost the point here: the point is, that goddamn thing works like a charm, and I am a believer. Now I will sit back and just watch while you teach these young guys how to use it. They will need that, where they’re going. They will send many bad boys to wherever them kind of people go when they’re sent, and on account of that a lot of good boys will be coming home. If iSniper can up the count on homecomings, then by God, I am a true believer in iSniper and its, whatever you call it, that 911 thing.”

14

Sally was working on some big case with a team from Treasury involving fraud in the financial meltdown, so she wasn’t around much, which meant that Nick found himself with more spare time to kill than he ever expected. Task Force Sniper was nowhere, just going over more leads, tracking down some of the wilder ideas, all of it more or less make-work, waiting for Nick’s decision to release the report and release the task force’s assets, and he was holding out to see if Swagger came up with something truly interesting. Meanwhile, the reps from the three local departments had all been sent home with nothing to do.

Nick decided, late that night, to have a nice dinner, since he hadn’t eaten real food since this thing had begun. He left the ominous Hoover Building, stepping around the line of cement revetments arranged to keep the mad terrorist car bombers at bay, and dawdled aimlessly around Southeast DC, looking for a spot to eat.

It was getting glamorous around here. In the nineties and early in the following decade, Southeast had been a dump, a crappy zone of once-prosperous retail and apartment buildings gone shabby with neglect, a little too far from the federal triangle to attract the lunchtimers who drove more central city food culture, unserviced by movie houses, bookstores, boutiques, that sort of thing. Then it changed when the Verizon Center opened, a new big cathedral to the religions known as NBA and NHL; with it, restaurants opened, a big multiplex of theaters, a busy and hustling main street of sorts, Seventh Street, and all kinds of snazzy little places. It seemed to fill up overnight with that disturbing tribe of unrecognizable barbarians called “the young,” and as Nick moseyed through the streets, he was astounded by their numbers, their energy, their clothes, their heat, their hubbub, their urge to fill the world with their own centrality. It gave him a headache. Ugh, how’d he get so old, over forty, with a big house in Fairfax he hardly ever saw and a wife who had turned out to be such a hotshot he hardly ever saw her either.

He drew his overcoat a little tighter, as deep fall, threatening winter, had come to the East. He took his ID card on its chain off and stuffed it in his pocket, as he didn’t want to be ID’d as a bureaucratic geek out on a late-night prowl. He felt the Glock .40 against his hip, well back in a Safariland holster, and the counterweight of two mags with twelve apiece on his other hip; he bought his coats a little big so that the gun wouldn’t print, even if it meant he had to have the sleeves taken up.

Fish. He decided it would be a fish night, because he was a long way from a reputable steak joint, the nearest, Morton’s, being over on Connecticut at K. It was a cab ride away. Nearby there was a place called Oceanaire he’d always heard good things about; he’d hit that, have a nice dinner, walk back to the Hoover underground, and be home in Fairfax by midnight.

He got to Oceanaire, which was on L, and liked what he saw: it seemed to have a kind of forties look to it, and it made him think of movies about G-men, where everyone wore a tough fedora with a tilt to the brim and a trench coat and carried a Colt Dick Special. Oh, and smoked, they all smoked, and he remembered the movie that had set him off on this path in life, which he’d seen on television in the seventies lying on his belly at fourteen in his parents’ split-level, gray in the light of the tube; it was called The Street with No Name and told the story of a heroic G-man named Gene Cordell who had infiltrated some mob in the tacky slumtown of “Center City,” and it ended in a blazing shootout, with tommy guns spitting flashes and spurts of spent gas and long columns of tumbling brass into the night air, while slugs chewed the shit out of a guy named Shivvy, sparing Cordell’s life at the last moment. Cordell was played by—what was that guy’s name? Some guy who never made it big, but boy, he’d seemed big in that movie. Steve Jackson? Jack Smith? Bill Stevenson, some name like that, some—Mark Stevens, that was it, and for that movie at least, no matter what happened before or after, Mark Stevens was so cool, so smart, so tough, so brave, so everything a kid could want to be, that’s when Nick knew he had to be a G-man or his life would come to nothing.

Nostalgic for the good old days of G-manning he’d only experienced in the movies, no matter twenty-odd years of service as a special agent, Nick slipped in, saw the place was half full, caught the maître d’s attention, and was taken to a nice out-of-the-way table. He sat, turned down a drink, listened to the specials, chose grilled rockfish with mashed potatoes after a salad, oil and vinegar, and began to work on a little plate of on-the-house munchies in sour cream the waiter had brought before he’d taken the order.

Meanwhile big-band music filled the air, and Nick waited for the announcement that the Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor, but it never came. Instead, a bottle of champagne did.

“I didn’t order that,” he said to Chad, the waiter.

“I know, sir, but a fellow at that table sent it over. It’s the very best. Not cheap.”

Nick looked across the room and saw that man Bill Fedders, waving pleasantly at him.

Nick smiled back, then turned to the waiter.

“Take this back, thank Mr. Fedders for me, if you don’t mind, but tell him I’m on duty. I’m an FBI special agent and I’m carrying a firearm, so it’s against regulations for me to drink tonight. He’ll understand.”

“Yes sir,” said the waiter, and sped off. But if Nick thought that would be the end of it, he was sadly mistaken. He had the salad, the rock, nicely done, and was enjoying a cup of decaf when a shadow crossed the table, and he knew who it was.

“Nick, hi. Bill Fedders—”

“Sure, Bill, I remember, in the director’s office a couple of weeks ago. You’re working for Constable, right?”

“I am indeed. Doing the boss’s dirty work, as usual. Sorry you couldn’t take the champagne. It’s a really light one, very good with fish. But I understand. Something happens, you have to pop a bad guy, and the fizz-juice comes up and it’s a lot of trouble.”

“Even I admit the chances of me popping a bad guy tonight are pretty remote, but if you get into a way of living, it’s tough to get out of it. Thanks for the offer. I’m not a prude. It just wouldn’t have been a good idea.”

“Got it. Nick, do you mind if I join you for a sec?” Fedders had a smooth way of ingratiating himself, that professional Washington player’s sense of entitlement to attention everywhere, welcome assumed. He was a radiantly handsome man, wearing the power attorney’s immaculately fitted blue pinstripe, with a glisten in his gray-black hair and the fresh look of just having stepped out of the barber’s chair.

“Mr. Fedders—”

“Bill.”

“Bill, it’s probably not a good idea. I do official business at the office, in the open, where everybody can see and hear. If you want to schedule an appointment, we’ll certainly do our best to accommodate you. Or if—”

“It’s not really official, Nick. Not really.”

“Well, sure then, but bear in mind I have a walk back to my car and a long drive back to Fairfax tonight. And I want to be in early tomorrow. I always try to be the first guy in the office. It goes with all that big money they pay me.”

Fedders smiled, eyes sparkling, as he eased into the empty chair. He put a half-full glass of scotch down before him.

“Nick, it’s my job, you know. I have to ask around, I have to find things out, I have to know how things work. That’s what Tom pays me for. I guess I’m sort of his ‘special agent.’ ”

“Sure.”

“So I hear things. I hear, for example, the investigation has suddenly gone off on another route.”

“We’re trying to be diligent, that’s all.”

“Sure, sure. I hear that too. I hear from people, ‘That Nick Memphis, sure to be an assistant director before the year’s out, just gone from triumph to triumph.’ I understand that thing in Bristol was hairy.”

“I caught a piece of lead, but I’m okay except for the funny walk.”

“Well, a hero. Very good guy. And that’s what I hear, that’s the summary judgment on Nick Memphis, FBI. ‘Very good guy.’ ‘The best.’ ‘One of the incorruptibles,’ ‘really a comer,’ ‘going places.’ ”

“Bill, going places isn’t the point. I’ve had a wonderful career and I’m happy at the small contributions I’ve made. That’s enough. If I make it to the next floor, won’t that be swell. If I don’t, that’s the way the cards fall. My ambition doesn’t include myself. I want to make sure we get it right; that’s my ambition.”

“Well said. You’re a noble man in a town full of assholes, professional and amateur. Okay, Nick, but let me just be square with you. This guy Tom Constable is your classic big foot and he’s not afraid to hurt people who get in his way. I try to get him to exercise some constraint, but these made-it-themselves celebrity billionaires are tough cookies when it comes to getting their own way. I’m just here to say, if there’s no point in antagonizing him, don’t do it. He can and will bring hurt, and I’ve seen it. Nick, I’d hate to see a guy good as you get buried under the big guy’s big foot over nothing. He wants the investigation closed; he wants his ex-wife’s name out of the papers; he wants the whole thing to go away. I’m only telling you this out of respect for your accomplishments.”

“Oh, I see,” said Nick. “You’re doing me a favor. See, I thought you were threatening an FBI agent.”

“Nick—”

“Mr. Fedders, I’d like this conversation to end now, before you get in trouble. Yeah, you have to serve the big man, and yeah, I have to tread softly around the big man, we both know how it works in this bad old town. Okay, you’ve made your point. Power talks, bullshit walks, welcome to the City on the Hill.”

“Nick, be pissed if you want, but think of it from another angle. This guy could really help you. I mean why do the assholes like me make it big and the good boys like you never quite do? It’s because us assholes aren’t afraid to suck up to a big foot, flatter him endlessly, do his dirty little jobs, and get the big payoff. You could say that’s the life I chose, and I’m not going to pretend otherwise. But a good guy like you, if you do this one little favor for the big man, you have no idea how it can help a career. It could get a good guy like you to the Seventh Floor, and think of the good you could do there, and the pride you’d take in it. You’d be ahead of your wife too, and I know that’s got to play into it”—so Fedders had actually looked into Sally’s thriving career at Justice and knew that she was fast-track to the upper floors—“and think how good that would feel. Nick, that’s all I have, thanks for listening, you have my card, and if you ever, and I mean ever, need a favor in this town, call me.”

He smiled warmly and without a trace of shame, then got up and gracefully left.

Nick watched him go, thinking, Oh Christ, where is this going?

15

It turned out to be almost too much fun. Bob had to watch himself; he could be seduced by the pleasure of the three days into forgetting why he was here, which was to recon iSniper and see if he could get some kind of look at the student log and learn who had purchased and been taught to use the thing. But he almost had to force himself into that: most of the time was spent on the range among guns and gunners, men like himself, who’d been and done, except they’d be and do again. So he more or less slipped aside and watched as Anto and his boys helped the younger Americans master the toy.

It was almost as advertised. It could put you on target without a doubt in the world faster than anything going, and in the sand it would be a major boon to American sniper teams, if it held up. There were some ergonomic issues, and the iSniper cadre, led by the irrepressible Anto Grogan, took careful notes to feed back to the iSniper geniuses for the next generation. For one thing, the ranging button atop the monitor to the left of the nodule was difficult to access quickly, unless you were well used to it and had done it ten thousand times and had burned it into muscle memory. It was the key to initiating the target sequence; it was also the same size and height as the enter button and the reset button, and the young snipers sometimes groped for it or hit something else. A slightly roughened surface to distinguish it from the other buttons would help. Then there was a problem with the battery housing, which worked well enough in the day on the range with access to tools but might be a bitch in some frozen third world bog with bad actors on the prowl all over the joint, even if the batteries were said to last for a thousand hours. The housing latch was too small for men with big, blunt fingers and no

fingernails; it had to be redesigned more generously for the big-size boys marine and special forces snipers tended to be.

But the real issue was the necessity of taking the info off the readout screen; it meant you had to come out of your hold, out of your cheek weld, out of your proper eye relief, out of your focus, out of, in short, your shooting world, read a set of numbers, then mentally retain the figures and work them out in the delta of aiming points under the crosshairs. It worked well enough, though when you came up, you always lost your scope vision, your pupils dilated, and it cost you seconds when you came back to the eyepiece to reach max efficiency.

“Aye, it could be better on that score,” admitted Anto. “It’s not perfect, not quite, maybe in the next generation. We told ’em it would be something if you just pushed the ranging button, the leprechauns inside did the heavy lifting, and then instead of presenting a number for you to look at on a screen, the proper aiming point just lit up, you never having to leave the scope. You put it on Johnny, and bingo-bango, time to paint a new swastika on your fuselage. Maybe they’ll get there some time.”

“It’s still the best,” Bob lied, as if he were familiar with the other items from anything other than a Google experience. “Horus is too much time off the scope, though I like its reticle design. DTAC has too busy a reticle with all those other graphs there, and the same with the Holland. Y’all had any luck with Horus out there?”

“Yes sir,” said Blondie, “it gets you on target, but like you say, it’s too slow, too much Palm Pilot and Kestral stuff. I like this here too; it cuts the time way down from figuring to shooting, not quite perfect but perfect enough.”

“Have we made that sale yet, Mr. Swagger?” Anto asked.

“You’re damned close,” Bob said. “I just want to see how the things hold up over the extensive shooting you put them through these five days.”

“We’ll beat ’em to hell and gone and they’ll keep on ticking, you’ll see, sir. I’m here to serve, oh great and mighty and shining one.”

“Anto, I’m just another—”

“Anything I can do I will, which is why they’re paying me the big buckeroos.”

But that all went away at nights, off the range, where the snipers took over a bar called the Mustang across from the Red Rooster where iSniper had booked all. Then it was just men of the gun, lots of beer, war stories, a sense of the smallest, most exclusive community in the world, men who’d shot for blood and lived to tell about it. Bob went too, under the pretext that he might learn something off Anto in a moment of weakness, but Anto never had any, and anyway the love that came to Bob was something he was unprepared for and had never encountered before.

“Mr. Swagger—”

“Please call me Bob, young guy.”

“Bob, I’m not supposed to let this out, but me and Chip are Delta snipers, headed now to Afghanistan for my third, his second, tour with Fifth Special Forces.”

“My hat’s off to you fellows. You’re doing a hell of a job out there.”

“Nothing like you, sir. We’ve heard the An Loc story; it’s a legend. You stopped an NVA battalion, a fucking battalion, that was headed into an A-camp under siege. I just wanted to say, it’s a fine moment for us to be here with you.”

“Y’all make me out to be more than I am. I didn’t stop no battalion. I slowed ’em down, that’s all. Took some of their officers. The rain helped, but what helped most of all was the young man with me, who I am so sad to say didn’t make it home. Anyhow, it was the Phantoms that did most of the killing. They got there with the dawn just as the weather broke, and I have to say those were brave men in those planes; they got so low to the deck to put the burning jelly where it hurt the most, I’m betting most came back with grass in their scoops. I just watched it.”

“He’s a modest man, our Bob,” said Anto, leaning in, “but the story as I heard it has him racing through Indian territory by his lonesome and squeezing down on that battalion for two solid days. Officially it was eighty-seven, was it not, and I’m betting it was eighty-seven that day alone, with no officer there to check. That’s a soldier of the king, I’m telling you, and it shows the power of the fella with the rifle.”

“It was so long ago I can hardly remember,” said Bob, “and I won’t talk no more about myself because you’re doing it better and harder than I ever did, no matter what this drunken IRA bastard says, but I will raise a drink, even if it’s a Diet Coke, to the fella with the rifle.”

When he got back on the second night, the message light on his cell was blinking. He called, knowing it would be Nick, but instead it was the young special agent Chandler and she asked him first off how it was going.

“Going fine. Having a hoot. Ain’t found out much, though. I see Anto’s got some kind of book with him, and he’s a well organized man, so I’m betting he’s got notes taken on all the tutorials he’s run. I’d like to get a look-see at that and let you know if it’s worth subpoenaing.”

“You have to be careful. If you peek and it comes out you’re working for us and we used any information you obtained, a defense attorney can use it against us in court, along the lines of a highly problematic warrantless search, and no matter what, the whole thing could go away. You’re much better off just looking and learning what’s in the open, taking careful notes, and we’ll see where we go from there.”

He sighed. It was clear she had no feel or imagination for undercover work. Her tendency was to push him toward the strictly legal, can’t-get-in-trouble line. But he knew that sometimes you had to push it, just a little, poke it, dance around it. Either that or walk away.

“Yes ma’am. Did you get the info I requested on this fellow Anto Grogan?”

“Yes, we did. He seems straightforward, nothing to indicate tendencies.”

“That’s good to know. Seems like a nice fellow.”

“Here’s the dope. Born Killarney, Ireland, 1964, down there in the south far away from all the crap in Belfast. His dad and his dad’s dad were British Army in their time, and he was drawn to it from the start. Highly decorated service record, lots of deployments in famous actions and not-so-famous actions. He was one of their best guys.”

“Royal Commando?”

“No. He’s Twenty-two all the way.”

“What’s that?”

“That’s Twenty-second Regiment SAS, kind of their Delta Force. He was a colour sergeant, I guess that’s staff sergeant, in Blue Troop, which is what they designate their sniper element. He was a longtime Sabre Squadron guy, which is what they call their operators as opposed to their staff people, as I understand it. He was in what they called the Counter Revolutionary Warfare wing. He deployed in ninety-one to the Gulf with SAS, had a long stay in Afghanistan in oh-two to oh-three, where I’m told he racked up quite a score. He then spent some time back in Credenhill, where SAS is headquartered, where he bugged so many people he got himself sent to Basra in oh-five, where he ran sniper elements again. He seems to have had some trouble there. You would know more about this than I would, Mr. Swagger, but our military liaison picked this up from his contact with the British military liaison; apparently Anto Grogan was rather too enthusiastic in getting his kills. He evidently got a lot of them in Basra, ran his own intelligence-gathering operation, took a lot of people down, and the British Army was a little, um, embarrassed, I guess. That’s why he left and went to work for Graywolf, where he also ran intelligence, organized security on caravans and dignitary visits. Did you know that Graywolf owns iSniper? So he’s still working for them.”

“Hmm,” said Bob. “You better fill me in on Graywolf.”

“Oh, you know. Famous, big security firm, put together by some ex-SEALs. Teaches shooting and survival skills, manufactures products and clothes for the security sector, puts people in the field on contract. There were some problems in Baghdad when these contractor guys got a little trigger-happy and blew away anything that moved; you might remember the fuss in the papers.”

“Now I do. Give a guy an M4 and a pair of cool sunglasses and a ball cap, and he’s Mr. Murder Inc. in no time.”

“He’s a very experienced man, sir. A great soldier, a great sniper, now working for a big international contractor’s firm that is mixed up in a lot of shaky stuff.”

Bob felt a little indecent having requested the dope on Anto. The problem was, he liked Anto Grogan, as did all the boys, and surely Graywolf realized how personable he was, which is why it took him out of the field and made him the public face of the iSniper division. Now Bob had to use him to get a list of names of the men he’d trained, so each could be vetted by the Bureau and checked against any connection to the four sniper killings.

“How’s Nick holding up?” he asked.

“Oh, it seems the pressure is building on us to issue that report. He gets called into the director’s office three times a day and yelled at by Tom Constable’s people. He ran into one of Constable’s brownnosers last night at dinner and was even offered a little friendly career advice. Mr. Swagger, can I talk frankly with you?”

“Sure.”

“He’s way out on a limb, and what’s got him out there is his belief in you. Sir, if you don’t get anything, pull the plug fast. A lot of us around here don’t want to see the great Nick cut off at the knees by this monster Constable because he wouldn’t play ball for believing in you and you didn’t turn anything up.”

He realized: the girl is in love with Nick.

“I hear you. It’d be a crime if Nick got his career wrecked for old goat Swagger, and it turned out old goat Swagger was just blowing smoke on some dream business. Okay, point taken.”

“This can be a tough town.”

“I get you and I will hurry this thing along, so Nick isn’t out there much longer. But do you mind if I say one thing?”

“Go ahead.”

“I ain’t telling you your business, but to me one of the things you investigators ought to be doing is checking to see if there’s any contact between Graywolf and Tom Constable. Are they players in this thing? Or are they just like everyone else, guys who got sucked up by the sniper killings?”

“I’ll run it by Nick.”

“You do that. Out here.”

“What?”

“Out here.”

“What does that mean?”

“Oh, sorry, that’s the way we talk in the field. Sounds all gung ho movie bullshit to you, I guess. Maybe it is. ‘Out here’ means I’m out of stuff to say, good-bye, and so long.”

“Ah. Sorry to be so dumb. It’s a girl thing, I guess. Good luck, Mr. Swagger.”

The problem was, there wasn’t a place to penetrate or break into. There was no school, not really. The iSniper tutorial was simply the four-man cadre—Anto, Jimmy, and two other fellows, Ginger and Raymond, who seemed decent enough; they had their teaching props, their charts, their own weapons, crates of ammo, and a world’s worth of know-how, but that was it. There was no there there, like an administrative center, just the four iSniper Irishmen, Bob, and the six young elite-corps snipers whose units had purchased the gizmo and thereby qualified them to attend the week’s schooling. Maybe back at Graywolf corporate headquarters in North Carolina, at the big training center, there was an administrative center, and maybe that’s where you’d have to go to get the dope on iSniper’s schoolees, but that was no one-man job; rather the Justice Department would have to descend, full-strength, on Graywolf, and Graywolf wouldn’t like that, since a lot of its work was classified, as was its client list, and it clearly had big connections in Defense and wouldn’t be prone to giving up its secrets without a fight.

So it came down to one little absurd thing: Anto’s book.

How am I going to get ahold of Anto’s book?

There was no answer. He went to bed depressed.

The next day at the range, as usual Bob stood aside and let Anto and his cadre work mostly with the young snipers, who’d learned the mechanics of the thing really quickly, being both motivated and highly intelligent, as well as highly dextrous. They could spot an object at unknown distance and take it down very fast, letting the microchip inside 911’s housing do the brainwork, themselves just making sure to master the method of taking the readout info and applying it to the scopeful of aiming points.

Swagger, though, shot enough with it to see its superiority, and a part of him wished he’d had the thing in ’Nam all those years ago. He, Carl, and Chuck McKenzie with iSniper911 on their rifles, what a unit that would have been; we would have won the goddamn thing instead of . . .

The last night, late, a knock sounded.

“Who is it?”

“Mr. Swagger, sir, me, Anto, here. Can I come in?”

Bob opened up.

“Hope you don’t mind if I’m after bending your ear a bit, do you? Wish you’d let me buy you a drink.”

“Anto, you know I can’t drink. If I do, I’m waking up in Kathmandu on Tuesday with a new wife, four new kids, and some very odd tattoos.” It was an old joke he’d told many times before.

“How about this: if it’s not to be whiskey, let Anto buy you an ice cream. Can’t be thinking of no better place for mankillers of our ranking to have a chat than that ice cream shop across the pathway. They mix a high and mighty bowl of flavor. I always overeat when I come to the teaching, I do.”

So Bob and Anto walked across the highway—more dangerous than anything Swagger had done since Bristol—where indeed the ice cream shop was still open, and the two snipers went in, waited among sluggish teenagers with needles in their noses and fathers with squawking babies and a lone truck driver, all travelers consumed with late-night ice cream blue munchies, and got themselves a cone each. Who wouldn’t have cracked a smile if they’d known that these two were professional dealers in death, and now they sat like old fools nibbling at mint chocolate and raspberry and chocolate-chip cones?

“Bob, may I call you Bob?”

“Wish you would, Colour Sergeant.”

“And I’d be Anto. So let’s proceed on to business. Am I asking too much to ask where we stand? The toy, I mean.”

“My report to Energy security will be very positive. I’m extremely impressed by iSniper; the mechanism is first-class; the training is superb. The guys you run through here go to their units five times more effective. That translates to more boys on the planes home, and I like that a lot.”

“Is there anything—”

“Not in my report.”

“But you know we’re owned by Graywolf, and Graywolf isn’t as beloved under this president as it was under the last one, and we’ve got a lot of pressies peeved at us.”

“I know. I can’t account for which way the winds blow in Washington. You may field the best piece of equipment and still lose out, just because that’s the way it is in that town. I’m not a Washington guy.”

“You are not. You’ve nothing of the headquarters rat to you. Them I hated. Always sniffing about HQ on the lookout for the next appointment.”

“You and I share more than a skill set. I hate them mealy climbers too. Not many in the Corps, but a few. I hate the stink of headquarters. Always corrupt, that’s the rule.”

“It is. Well now, here’s where I am. I know we have the best stuff, because I’ve tested the other rigs too, like you. I know we can save lives; it’s not just a matter of business. So I’ve thought long and hard: what can I do, me, just Anto, what can Anto do to help Mr. Swagger make the right decision? And I’ve come up with something.” He licked his ice cream cone.

“Sure.”

“I’ll give you our records. Every man or team we’ve sold a unit too, his record in the tutorial—and we keep very close records even if it appears we don’t—his subsequent actions, how successfully he’s used 911 or before it iSniper 411, his most recent address and number. With the full expectation that you’ll contact some or all of these folks, and you’ll get a view of 911 in the sand or the mountains or wherever, of what it does, of how it stood up, of whether they stayed with it or went to something else. All of that, I will give you. You use it as you see fit, no strings attached, except that I trust you, sniper to sniper, to burn-bag or shred when you’re finished. That’s how much I believe in 911, sir. It’s quite an offer.”

It was. How could anyone refuse it?

16

I don’t know how he did it,” Nick said, “but somehow he talked the head boy at iSniper into turning over their entire distribution and disposition record on a disk.”

The director said, “Tell me you ran this by Justice.”

“I did. Their ruling is that since Swagger didn’t ask for or put pressure on the iSniper rep for the disk, and the iSniper rep specifically enjoined Swagger to use at his own discretion, without consequence, any info on the disk is legally ours to use.”

“But he did turn it over under subterfuge. He thought Bob repped the Energy security people.”

“True. But Swagger did rep the Energy security people, we have the paperwork to prove it, and I had Swagger dictate a report which was duly forwarded to them. What their security people do with it—probably nothing—isn’t the point; the point is that it was all done by the book. Moreover, Bob was given total freedom to dispose of it as he saw fit.”

“Okay,” said the director, leaning back in his chair. “Maybe it’ll come up, maybe it won’t. It’s always best to dot the t’s and cross the i’s before you move on.”

“I agree, sir.”

Outside, in late-fall Washington, a pewter sky encased a pewter Capitol dome; a view like that was what the Seventh Floor got you, plus terrible anxieties that you could be taken down at any time. But today the director seemed in a good mood, well pleased that the Swagger ploy had brought some new energy to Task Force Sniper and that he’d have something to tell the people who were on him.

“So what’s the haul, where does it lead us, what’s the time frame, what are we doing now? Oh, and what’s Swagger’s final read on the iSniper device?”

Nick checked his notes.

“It turns out 346 people had gone through the iSniper tutorial, and another 78 had purchased units without attending the tutorial, some private citizens with big bucks, hunters, wealthy gun people, that sort of thing. It’s not a Class III weapon, after all, just a scope with a computer chip. But mostly it’s government or military people, snipers or members of the professional sniper community. Of that total, 424, we had already vetted 209 by other means, encountering them in the initial canvass of, you know, shooting schools, high-power rifle competitors, firearms manufacturers or reps, custom rifle shops that specialize in tactical work, that sort of thing. I have two people rechecking them, of course, to see if anything was missed the first time.”

“So that gives you—”

“One hundred fifteen new guys. Many are military, and we were quickly able to eliminate twenty-three of them as having been out of the country and in deployment during the event. So that leaves—”

“Are you going to quiz me on my arithmetic?”

“No, sir, I took the liberty of using a calculator. That leaves us with ninety-two new players. That is, ninety-two men with access to and training on iSniper, unexamined in our first canvass of the field. I’ve got teams working them hard now, and we’re going at it twenty-four/seven to see if we can come up with anything. Oh, and put in the four iSniper cadre guys, Anthony ‘Anto’ Grogan, and three guys named Jimmy South, Roger ‘Ginger’ Speed, and Raymond Richardson-Brown, British nationals, who may have been in-country at the time. And then I’ve also got a team probing iSniper and its ownership, Graywolf Global Security, but I will tell you, those guys are barricaded behind some powerful legal talent.”

“What’s Swagger say?”

“He says Hitchcock’s rifle with Hitchcock’s ammo and an iSniper was indeed capable of making those four shots, and that’s all. Other than that, he’s not saying a thing.”

“Where is he?”

“In a motel room in Arlington. I wanted to get your idea on what to do.”

“Send our two best assassins,”—he waited for the shock to register on Nick’s face—“no, no, Nick, a joke! No, I think it’s best to pay him his money and thank him for his brilliance and make him happy and send him home. He has rogue tendencies, and you don’t want him mucking things up, especially since we’re under so much time pressure.”

“He wants to stay with it, I’d bet.”

“He did a hell of a job, I have to say. Pointing our lab to the baked paint debris from the iSniper on the Hitchcock rifle. That’s genius-level stuff. You said he was smart and you were right. But he’s too hard to control. He did his sniper versus sniper undercover op and it worked brilliantly. We’ll get him a bonus and a commendation. But that’s it. He’s got to be farmed out now.”

“Yes sir.”

“Meanwhile, back in the real world, do you need more investigators? Is that where this is going?”

“I’m afraid so. We lost our loaner investigators from Chicago and the other towns, and getting dumped with ninety-two—ninety-six with the Irishmen—new persons of interest is taxing. The more experienced bodies I have, the faster we’ll get through this, the faster we’ll come to a conclusion, and the sooner we can all start keeping regular hours again.”

“Okay, you’ve got ’em. Don’t know where I’m getting them from, but I’m going to give ’em to you somehow. Nick, get me something I can go to the papers on, will you? We are getting chewed to pieces on the old ‘inaction’ meme. Sluggish bureaucracy, gutless lifers, daily naptimes when we’re not screwing our secretaries. They think we’re up here twiddling our thumbs. I’ve got Chicago and Cleveland PDs beefing that we haven’t called it yet, and they’re being leaned on by their politicos because everybody wants the highest crime solution rate possible by end of year.”

“Yes sir. Constable, is he still on you?”

“His fine, dead hand may be involved in this, yes, wouldn’t surprise me a bit. Run into your new buddy Bill Fedders recently?”

“No sir, but if he shows up in the men’s room, I won’t be surprised.”

“Okay, Nick, good job, tough case, now bust it for me or put it to sleep, okay?”

“My best, sir.”

“Oh, and Nick, I’m told you owe Phil Price in PIO a callback.”

“Just been busy, sir.”

“Well, make an old fool like me happy and call him, will you?”

17

Now what?

Now nothing.

Now the rest of your life.

You did everything for Carl Hitchcock, for the United States Marine Corps and its medieval notions of honor and duty, despite what you said to Chuck McKenzie. If you owed him and that ever-smaller membership of the generation of men who’d put scopes on things and killed them in the Land of Bad Things, you’ve paid that debt. You turned up significant new information, new leads, turned it over, and now the professionals will run it to ground. If it turned out Tom Constable had hired Anto Grogan of Graywolf to kill his wife because she’d slept with Johnny Carson or Warren Whateverthatguy’s name was, then that would come out. Or maybe Mitzi Reilly had hired Anto Grogan to kill her husband and Anto got carried away. Or maybe someone in South America hired Graywolf to kill Mitch Greene because they didn’t like his young adult books. Or maybe—

Or maybe whatever.

Swagger sat way out in the weird, isolated departure terminal at Dulles. It was a strange, glassed-in island of mall commerce in the middle of an airfield. Great aircraft rolled by out the windows, but in here was nothing but TGIFs and Benettons and Starbucks as far as the eye could see. His flight to Boise was in another hour, but he always got to these places early because the metal ball-and-socket joint meant rigamarole in security as often as not. Here it had not. So he sat at the gate area on a terrible plastic chair, waiting for the flight to be called, watching the place fill up, ignoring the persistent pain in the hip where the ball-and-socket construction had taken a full-power cut a few years back and the flesh never healed quite right, tried not to look too enviously at a bar down the way, with its rows and rows of ever-beckoning bottles, then ordered himself not to imagine the pleasure it offered, and waited for time to pass so that the old man could get back to his rocking chair and watch the weather chemistry manufacture clouds the size of castles and more complicated structures over the blue-green meadow that fell back for miles until it broke apart on a sawtooth snarl of mountains.

I’ll count my money, see what to do with that nice bonus check. I’ll read a book or a gun magazine. I’ll think about building a tactical rifle in something weirdly off-center and interesting like .260 Remington, 6.5 Creedmoor, or Grendel or XC. I’ll hit the Dillon for a day and crank out a thousand .45 ACP 200-grainers. Then I’ll count my money again and be nice to my wife, whom I don’t deserve, and maybe help my younger daughter with her homework, though it’s rapidly reaching a level I don’t understand, because Miko has turned out to be sublimely smart and even at seven is attracting attention, not only for her unbelievable test scores but for her medal-winning riding ability. Then I’ll call my daughter Nikki and see how she likes that big paper where she now works.

You couldn’t have a better life. Did anyone? Land, daughters, love, guns, a little money, a sense of having done what you could to bring boys home alive, settle old business, stand for something even when the lead or the blades were flying. That was okay, that was a life, it was the best but—

But he couldn’t leave it alone.

It wasn’t enough to wait for that big joker Ron Fields and that girl they called Starling and that Walter Jacobs and even Nick himself to figure it out and bring it off. It wasn’t that he was better than they were, or smarter, it was just . . . what? Vanity, craziness, old-guy bullshit, he just thought he should be there, doing what had to be done, contributing.

Leave it alone.

I can’t.

Subversive thoughts kept churning up from his unconscious. There was a ramification, exiled almost purposefully from the FBI’s perspective. The FBI would not impose meanings; it would follow clues. They had new clues, new persons of interest, and they would methodically follow that course, letting meanings emerge. They had the resources for such an approach.

He, Swagger, had no resources. Thus such a broad-front approach was ruled out. He had to rely on intuition and strike in terms of specific interpretations. He had to have a working theory and had therefore to examine, test, or abandon that working theory.

Thus he was where he was, stuck with a buzz in his head that would not go away. And that was: if Carl Hitchcock’s irrational motive was not behind the killings, if Carl was in fact the setup with the phony motive, then the motive was rational. It meant to get something: money, revenge, threat elimination, satisfaction, something real. Therefore the killings were coldly plotted and executed by extremely high-end operators, based on a brilliant conception, brought off with near-perfection. No amateurs had been involved; it was elite-unit, state-level craft.

If that were so, then there was but one starting point: the target could not have been Joan Flanders, movie star and radical and ex-wife to T. T. Constable. Joan’s point in the proceedings was to unleash, as a function of her complex and well-chronicled life, her litany of “interesting” husbands, a chafe of covering information. Her murder would automatically flood the investigation with possibility, too much possibility, too much attention, too much information, all of which would hopelessly bog, clot, and overwhelm any investigation while at the same time pressurizing it for fast solution.

Therefore, sitting in the Dulles terminal in the middle of sunny Virginia, Swagger committed to his first principle: this is not about Joan Flanders. She is camouflage. This is about one of the others. It is about Jack Strong and Mitzi Reilly or it is about Mitch Greene, and from what he knew, it was probably not about Mitch Greene, who was, after all, a comedian. So he committed to his second principle: it was about Jack Strong and Mitzi Reilly.

But even that was a daunting task. They too, though on a smaller scale, had lived extraordinary lives, much chronicled, much documented. Political lives, social lives, intellectual lives, professional lives, writing lives, teaching lives (endless students, twenty-five years’ worth of students alone!). How on earth could anyone investigate them—that is, anyone short of an FBI task force with its nearly unlimited manpower?

He had to limit it. Limit it. How do you limit it? How do you find one thing to focus on, the right thing to focus on? What’s your principle of operation?

His head ached. He really wanted that drink. And who did he think he was? The feds in time would get to Jack and Mitzi, and they’d do their usual thorough, patient, professional examination, and if there was something to be found, they would find it. Maybe not this week or this year or . . .

What was different about Jack and Mitzi? Really, from a technical point of view, only one thing: Joan and Mitch had been killed in public. Their deaths became immediately the property of dozens of witnesses, then the law enforcement staffs, and then the maggots of the press. They were immediately public deaths.

But Jack and Mitzi had been slain in an alley and lay undisturbed for almost an hour. Well, there were easy explanations: they were, in fact, vulnerable and accessible in that moment when they were pulling out of their garage and the shooting team, in that van in the next block with only a bit of door opening, was itself well protected and generally impervious to discovery. Hmm, on the other hand, Hyde Park was notoriously well policed by a more than capable University of Chicago police force, and the lack of street traffic, the lack of public hubbub, could itself turn quickly enough into a deficit; there’d be no crowd cover for the escape route. It was, or rather it could be seen as a somewhat fragile operation, a chancy enough thing, the greatest dare of the operation. That put it out of the modus operandi to a significant degree. So it was . . . provocative.

What would be the meaning of that kind of kill? What did it permit? What advantages would it generate and to what ends, and why would those ends be worth what might easily become a risk?

He sat crunched in concentration. He didn’t notice that they’d called the Boise flight. He didn’t even hear his name being called by the gate attendant. He was a lanky man in jeans, a polo shirt, an outdoorsy coat, and a Razorbacks baseball hat, sitting there, his scuffed Nocona boots announcing to the world he was a cowboy of sorts, but his face taut and distant.

He missed the plane.

He felt he had something, almost.

He could feel it there, and even as he struggled to articulate it, it went away.

And then he had it.

Another problem: over the last years, he’d used the personnel department of the United States Marine Corps as his private intelligence agency. When he’d needed a contact or an expert, he’d called an old colleague and they’d dug up, quickly, a name for him that always fit a specific category. They got him in the game fast.

But that was changing. His generation was all but gone; new men came and took things over and they had no living memory of Bob the Nailer and were not by nature inclined to help him. So he had to do some thinking and some calling before he was finally able to set up the right linkage: a retired NCO in Personnel who was friendly with a current NCO in Personnel who would do the favor for the friend of the friend.

But finally, close to six, he got a name, a number, the sufficient in-between calls had been made, and he was talking to his man.

“First Sergeant Jackson.”

“First Sergeant, I’m Swagger, Gunnery Sergeant retired, I think Bill Martens may have—”

“Sure, sure, Gunny. After I got Bill’s e-mail, I ran you, and you were some marine, I’ll say. You were the best. Before my time, but the best.”

“Son, I was before everyone’s time.”

First Sergeant Jackson laughed.

“What can I do for you?”

“It’s this. I’m looking into Carl Hitchcock’s last week and death—”

“Gunny, this ain’t some crazy T. T. Constable did it thing like I’m seeing on the Internet, is it?”

“No, and I don’t think aliens took over Carl’s brain neither. No, I’m just trying to get a grip on it.”

“I’d love it if Carl turned out to be innocent. So would all of us. But I don’t see how.”

“I don’t see how either, but I told some folks I’d give it my best shot. Semper Fi, gung ho, ding how, and all that good shit. So here’s where I am: I’m thinking a lot of our people go into law enforcement after they retire. It’s a natural progression. So I’m guessing there’s a guy for real like the one I’ve imagined in my head. He would be ex-marine, now working Chicago police, maybe even homicide. He was part of the team that investigated the Strong-Reilly shooting. He was there, he was noticing, he had ideas, he heard what the other cops said. All that before the FBI took over as lead agency and concluded Carl was the boy. Once that happens, it’s all different, because they’re all looking at it only in the way it links to Carl. I want to hear what this guy might have to say about what he noticed before the news on Carl arrived. Can you help find me such a guy, if he exists?”

“I will make a big try. Can I reach you on this number?”

“Roger.”

“Okay, and I’m guessing time counts.”

“Yes sir.”

The call came at eleven, long after he’d checked into the motel in Alexandria, long after he’d had a chat with his wife, explaining that no, he wasn’t on his way home, he had a few things to check out first, that was all. Her silence expressed her mood. She believed he had a crusade pathology and was always looking for excuses to veer off on strange, violent adventures; she finally accepted it, but at the same time, her silence made it clear that she still hated it. But he repeated that this was nothing, this was just some low-level inquiries, and there was no danger whatsoever involved. Still, he told her, don’t tell anyone about this call. If anyone asks, I’m on my way home.

When the call came, he picked up the cell and said, “Swagger.”

“Gunnery Sergeant Swagger, retired, USMC sniper, all that, number two in Vietnam?”

“Yes, that’s me. Except it was number three.”

“Gunny, I got a call from my ex–battalion commander, who evidently got a bunch of calls, the long and the short of it being you wanted to talk to a Chicago detective who’d been on the Strong-Reilly crime scene.”

“I’m very glad you called.”

“My name’s Dennis Washington, I was an infantry officer, USMC, from ’88 through ’94, loved the Corps. Did the Gulf, got hurt a little, and had to give it up. Went to Illinois State Police, then came to Chicago. I’m a detective sergeant, Nineteenth Precinct, the Woodlawn area of Chicago. I do murder. It’s usually some gang boy popping another gang boy, sometimes a kid gets in the way, or it’s a Korean in a market, or a cabbie. It ain’t no CSI kind of thing. I’m not a master detective, if you think I am, Gunny, sorry to say. I’m a little reluctant here. I’ve never done nothing like this and I know I’m in violation of policy.”

“This ain’t official, Sergeant Washington. But I know you want to hear this, so I’ll say it. I ain’t asking for no violation of ethics on your part; I sure ain’t part of the press; I ain’t a Net crazy who thinks Tom killed Joan because she slept with Warren or any shit like that. I ain’t publishing, I ain’t talking, I ain’t telling. If you ask around about me, you’ll see that most folks think I’m a stand-up guy. What this is about is my hope for Carl’s innocence, and since I know a guy in the FBI, I got to go through the Bureau’s case.”

“It’s solid, I hear.”

Bob didn’t feel like explaining.

“Well, we’ll see about that. Maybe there’s a little thing or two off.”

“I hate to see it come down on an old marine, especially a guy who gave as much as Hitchcock.”

“Roger that.”

“So, I’ll try to help you. I don’t have a lot. The FBI took over within a few hours, and although they made a good attempt to keep us in the loop, once they got the call on lead agency it became totally their investigation. If you’ve seen their stuff, you may know more than I do.”

“It’s not their findings I’m strictly interested in. I know enough to know that findings are usually what people want to find. That’s the nature of the damn animal. See, I’m looking for stuff that wasn’t in no findings, wasn’t in no report, something that you, an experienced homicide detective might have felt, even if you didn’t know you felt it at the time. You might call it hunch or buzz or vibe, some soft, unofficial word like that. I have a specific idea on this but I ain’t going to give it to you because it’ll tarnish your thinking. So I guess what I’m asking—sorry it ain’t more specific—is, did you get any funny feelings? Was anything wrong? Did anything unusual happen?”

“I’d have to have an actual imagination to answer that, Gunny.”

“Well, do your best.”

“I went over my notebook, trying to recreate it carefully. No, there wasn’t much there, except a thing so tiny I’m kind of embarrassed to mention it. It ain’t the sort of thing that’s admissible in court. It ain’t evidence, it ain’t forensics, it ain’t factual. Like you say, a funny feeling.”

“Detective, I am so ready to hear this.”

“You know what a homicide dick is? I mean, really is? Forget all the CSI TV bullshit. From a practical point of view, he’s what you call a professional interrupter.”

“I ain’t reading.”

“Nobody ever plans on getting murdered. It’s the last thing on everybody’s mind. Even dope dealers with another gang out to get them, they don’t think today’s going to be their last day. They always live life like there’s going to be a lot of tomorrows.”

“Okay, I’m with you.”

“As that translates practically, I’m the guy who interrupts. I bust into their life on a day they never in a million years thought would be their last, and I see exactly how they lived, without scrubbing or cleaning or getting ready for company. And here’s what I’ve learned: everyone’s a secret pig.”

“I know I am. And my daughters! Wow!”

“Mine too. Those damned girls couldn’t pick up sock one if their mom didn’t yell at them. Anyhow, what this means is you go into a lot of messy homes. Mr. Brown got popped, so you go to the Brown home, and it’s the way it was exactly at the moment Mrs. Brown heard Mr. Brown checked out. She’s in shock. It’s like the house is frozen in Jell-O. Newspapers on the floor, socks on the floor, garbage cans full to overflow, the litter in the cat’s box ain’t been changed, a coupla glasses from last night’s cocktail hour are still out, maybe there’s some plates in the sink, or someone forgot to put the cereal away. You know, that’s how life is lived. To do stuff you have to take stuff out; then you have to put it away. But between the taking out and the putting back, sometimes a lot of time passes, and after having gone into a thousand houses in the past ten years with the worst possible news to deliver and then asking the worst possible questions, I’m here to tell you that most lives are lived, minute by minute and hour by hour and day by day, at some weird place between taking stuff out and putting stuff back. Stuff is everywhere. Daily life is about stuff. You follow me?”

“Sure do. You’re saying—”

“If it had been tossed hard and fast, it would have been a mess. You ever see what IRS does to a house when they toss it? Looks like a cyclone hit it. Our guys ain’t much better, and I don’t bet the Bureau’s are much better than that.”

“Got it. So the Strong house didn’t appear to have been searched.”

“That’s what you might think. But I’m concentrating here on his office, and what I saw was a room that had been searched and then overcorrected. Do you get what I’m saying? It’s subtle. All the stacks were neat. People don’t stack neat. They just throw things on top of each other. The computer monitor had been dusted, even on that pedestal and on the casing in back of the screen. Nobody dusts the pedestal, but this pedestal was dusted. The books were all neatly shelved, the stacks of—I don’t know, he was a professor, right?—articles, books, whatever research stuff a professor would have, it was all neat on the big table and it was centered on the table. It didn’t have the spontaneity of real life. It looked like a museum display. I noted it, maybe didn’t think much of it, but it was especially weird in retrospect because I went out to his office in the Circle Campus the next day with one of the Bureau’s people, and his office, well, it wasn’t a mess, but it was an office. It was kind of messy, not wildly messy, not a shit hole, no, but it had the usual human mess in it. The rest of their house: usual human mess. Glasses in the sink, unmade beds, laundry on the floor, not in the basket. No pigsty, but just the random crap of life. But that one room, it had the look of having been freshly tidied, as if a) he knew he’d be murdered in his alley and wanted his investigators to think, ‘My, what a tidy fellow this man was,’ or b) someone tossed it, but tossed it very carefully, and tidied it up so that no one could tell it had been searched. They just overtidied by a tiny degree, and only a guy like me, Mr. Interrupter with Bad News, would pick up on it.”

“Does the time line work out that someone could have been in the house between the killing and the arrival of the first units? You seem to be implying someone tossed the house, then straightened it out. Was there time enough?”

“Yeah. I checked, and that’s maybe why I’m glad to hear from you, because my thoughts on this were kind of subversive to the general thrust and momentum of the investigation. But of course once our lab people arrived, the FBI people arrived, the media, that sort of condition of his office was destroyed. I didn’t think to have crime scene photo work it, because it wasn’t the crime scene, the car was the crime scene. My bad. But yeah, in terms of time, it was about ninety minutes as far as we can say.”

Bob thought, that’s why he took them in the alley. To give the team time to penetrate, search, tidy, and disappear. No one would notice the search team, because of course it wasn’t a crime scene yet, charged with that special energy of such a place, that charisma. He kills them, the team enters and finds and—

Or maybe it doesn’t find.

Or maybe it finds but it leaves traces of what it found.

“Is this of any help?”

“It’s a great help, Detective Washington. Listen, I see now I’m going to have to come to Chicago. Can I call you? Can you help me?”

“When will you get here?”

“I’m already late.”

18

Nick groaned. “What’s the policy on this?”

“You can meet him or not meet him. It’s up to you. I should be there to ride herd.”

“You’re sure it’s necessary?”

“You tell me. He said one word. He said if I said the one word to you,” Phil Price continued, “you would want to meet with him.”

“And the one word was ‘Tulsa’?”

“Yeah. I checked the records. I know what it means.”

Nick sat in Price’s office, nicely appointed, on the third floor. Price was Special Agent in Charge of Public Information, but unlike most “public information” hacks in fancy offices all through DC, Price was more agent than reporter suck-up. He’d done street time in New York, LA, and San Francisco, had taken a round in his hip on a raid (a friendly round, no less, from a poorly trained SWAT moron), and now finished out his time in Public Information, cordially hating the reporters who bedeviled him even as they cordially hated him. The subject was a proposed meeting with a New York Times reporter named David Banjax, who was the Times’s man on the still-hot sniper story.

“I hate these guys,” said Nick.

“I hate ’em too,” said Price. “But that’s neither here nor there. What’s here and now is this guy is levering for a meet, off the record. He’s angling for a scoop, and the Times always feels entitled to scoops, so he wants his so he can get sent to the London Bureau or something.”

“Agh,” Nick said again, his gorge full of bile.

“Nick, in case you’re wondering, let me tell you he didn’t get this out of Public Information. We do not release background on special agents, not ever, certainly not in the age of terror. So I don’t know how he got it.”

“I do,” said Nick. “It seems I’ve displeased Joan Flanders’s big-foot ex-hubbo Tom Constable, that is, ‘T. T.’ Constable. His guy tried to nudge me in a certain direction, and I wouldn’t play. So this is their first move, and this guy, this David Banjax, he’s just a rube, a pawn, being run by a guy named Bill Fedders. Banjax doesn’t know how he’s being used.”

“Don’t tell him that. He’s Harvard, Harvard Law; he thinks he’s important.”

“Ugh,” Nick said. “Now I really hate him.”

“But they do hold cards, Nick. I can’t tell him to fuck off. I’d love to, then raid his crib for the ’ludes and pot he probably has stored in a waterproof baggie in the toilet, convict him, and send him to some hard ugly federal hotel where he and his new fiancé LeRoy could live happily ever after in anal cowboy bliss, guess who’s the gal? But I can’t do that. I have to play nice. And you can see how it might look. It could look bad or at least questionable. It could reflect poorly on the Bureau. And that’s what they pay me to watch.”

Nick shook his head. “Tulsa,” he said again.

He remembered being in an office window in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in 1992, his second year on the street. He was crouched behind and held securely a then state-of-the-art Remington 700 sniper rifle in .308, on a Harris bipod. He watched reality through a ten-power Leupold scope as a crackhead skank bank robber named Nathan Bowie rode down an empty street in the back seat of a convertible. Unfortunately, surrounding him were three women, cashiers in the Tulsa State Bank and Trust Morgan Avenue branch, while the bank manager drove slowly. Nathan was tripping wilder and wilder, waving his pistol around, addressing God, the whole evil white race, the Martians who spoke to him through his dental fillings, the various bitches who’d left him before he was done kicking the shit out of them. He was going to go firecracker at any second and it was Nick’s duty to put a 168-grainer into his cranial vault before that happened.

But Nick also had an FBI agent in charge in his earphones, a guy, now long gone, named Howard Utey, and Howard was one of the worst combinations: he wanted you to do exactly what he told you, except he didn’t know what that was, and if he told you one thing, he could very easily change his mind, and it was your fault you didn’t quite get that he hadn’t meant “Shoot” when he screamed “Shoot,” he’d really meant “Don’t shoot.” Any idiot would know that.

Howard was as flippy as Nathan Bowie, as the tapes later revealed, not that it mattered, because Howard had contacts on the Seventh Floor and was supposedly headed up there.

“Are you ready, are you ready, get ready, Nick, I can’t hear you, tell me are you ready are you ready, do you have him, do you have him, wait till he stops moving, now no not now, no, no the one on the left she moved, she’s crying, why the hell won’t she shut up, what is—”

Nick should have thrown the earphones with their little microphone on the pedestal, all cool SWAT TV-like, across the room and just buckled down, cinched in, made the fucking shot. But he didn’t; that wasn’t Nick. Howard was authority, and Nick had been drawn to, had respected and believed in the church of authority. Howard was boss, he was agent in charge, he was day-to-day a very decent guy, if a little moody when he thought he wasn’t moving fast enough, but he got good results out of his people and he was well liked, if thought a bit callow and overambitious. But he was—and this was well known—absolutely no good in an action situation.

“Do you have him, I can see him, Nick, acknowledge please, I have to—”

“Howard, the girl on the left, she’s—”

“Take him down, take him down!”

“No shot, Howard, goddamn, it’s not clear.”

It had to be clear. No other SWAT people were on call, the state police team couldn’t get set up in time, the city people were in their usual sullen fit about being overruled (by Howard) in their own town, so it was a mess, and behind him, nobody was quiet, there was a lot of moving around and chatting.

“You have to shoot!” Howard screamed.

But Nick couldn’t. There wasn’t gap enough between the two girls, one of whom kept leaning over, as if she was losing bodily control, so great was her fear, and her head kept swimming into Nick’s sight picture and the car would be turning in a second and he knew, he knew he had to shoot.

“Shoot, shoot, don’t shoot, don’t shoot, shoo—”

Nick thought he had it. The crosshair quadrasected Nathan’s head just behind the ear and it was clear. His finger did what it had been trained to do. He fired, the buck of the rifle, the largeness of the shot, it felt good, and when the scope came down—

“Oh God oh God you missed oh God he’s shooting stop him!”

—Nick saw one of the girls twisted left, blood on her back, her body in a heartbreakingly broken posture. Nathan Bowie shot the girl on the right, then shot the girl in the front, then put the gun in his mouth and blew the roof of his head off.

That was it. Med techs and cops with guns drawn raced to the vehicle, and from his perch Nick watched as the med team worked the fallen. He wanted to puke. He felt a surge of depression melt the strength out of his bones and fill his brain with self-loathing and remorse. Howard was there yelling, “Nick, Nick, my God, why did you shoot, didn’t you hear me? I told you not to shoot, God, it’s such a tragedy.”

God, what a fuck-up. What a total disaster. Nick had thought he’d be the guy with the strength and the coolness and the good decision. But no. He had to play the goat, the mistake, Quantico’s shame.

Poor Myra. He’d hit her in the spine, the bullet actually passing through her arm first, bouncing laterally off the metal of the car and clipping her spine. It paralyzed her in an instant. She never walked again and spent the next few years in her motorized wheelchair. She had deserved so much better than Nick and the FBI had given her that day, and he tried to give it to her, to somehow make amends, by marrying her. He discovered her to be a wonderful person, bright, funny, without a shred of self-pity. Once her father had gotten drunk and accused Nick.

“Why? Why did you do that to my baby girl? Oh, Nick, why, she didn’t—”

“Daddy, you stop that. I’ve said many a time that if the only way I could have met Nick Memphis was to get shot by him and lose my mobility, I’d take it even with that foreknowledge, because Nick is the best man I’ve ever met, kind and generous and gentle and honest and moral. You cannot blame Nick. You blame Nathan Bowie or the man who sold him the crack, but do not blame Nick. He was only doing his duty.”

Of the other two girls, one died, the other recovered and moved away. The bank manager recovered but died the next year, early, of a heart attack. Really, what had it proved? You take the shot and the shot goes off. It’s so amazing how much pain can be released into the world by the little six-ounce press of the trigger, how it changes everything, totally and forever.

Nick sat back.

“You can see how it would play,” said Price. “ ‘Sniper investigator had bad sniper shooting in background,’ that’s how it’ll read, and the implication is that maybe someone who had been a sniper, who’d had bad luck—”

“—Who’d fucked up.”

“—who’d fucked up, maybe he shouldn’t be in charge of an investigation involving a sniper. Maybe his judgment was clouded, maybe he was prejudiced. Maybe that’s why the investigation, which was going so well, has now bounced off in a strange new direction.”

“So is he threatening me, is that it?”

“They don’t work like that. He wants to meet you, develop a relationship. Tulsa will come up, sure. But just give him the idea of working with him, play him a little, buy us some time. That’s what the Bureau needs. Meet him for lunch. It’s just lunch.”

“Arggggh,” said Nick.

19

It was in the middle of the block on Fifty-third off Blackstone, what was called a row house from an earlier century, strange to the eyes of a man who thought of houses as being miles apart from each other. But it was still magnificent, with a broad stairway leading to a broad porch and vast oak door, its windows wide and deep, its gables peaked. It had the look of castle, something from Olde England, built with refined money in a neighborhood full of refined money, where everything old had been made new again, with the best in modern design, plumbing, lighting fixtures, and the best in burnished old wood and brick. Hyde Park, in southeast Chicago, in the shadow of the Museum of Science and Industry, all that remained of a White City where a hundred-odd years ago they had celebrated science, industry, and progress. A steady wind rushed in off the cold lake, throwing torrents of fallen leaves about.

“What do you expect to find?” Detective Washington asked Bob, who sat in the front seat of Washington’s unmarked Impala a couple of doors down from the Strong-Reilly house, now darkened in the falling light.

“I don’t know,” said Bob. “Evidence of penetration, I suppose.”

Washington, in his forties, 240, exceptionally black and full of unconscious tough-guy mannerisms with a sheen of graying hair that looked like gunmetal, said, “You sure you want to do this? You could get yourself in a peck of trouble, me too, and for something you ain’t even sure exists. Don’t sound like a good play to me. You could do it official and save us both time in jail.”

“I’m just looking at options,” said Bob. “If we go the route the law requires, I have to talk your department or the FBI into doing something nobody’s ready to do. Time passes. Then even if they say yeah, they got to get warrants, assemble a team, dot the i’s and cross the t’s, and that’s more time. Time is not on our side. My position is the guys we’re investigating right now—”

“If they exist.”

“Yeah, if they exist, they would have been the ones to toss the house that you picked up on, so at some level you think they exist. The point is now, they think they got away clean. They’re not taking any precautions, they think they’re so smart; this is when we have to go aggressively against them. If they sniff our interest, they’ll go into a much harder defensive position, double-check, begin to erase clues or witnesses, move against us. This is the sneaking-up part snipers are famous for.”

Washington shook his immense, wise head. “Gunny, okay, but answer me this one, then. Say, for example, you’re right. These guys had to get something, something physical, out of that house. So why do they need to go to the trouble of killing not only Strong and Reilly but also Joan Flanders and Mitch Greene? If they’re professional enough to put something like that together, they’d certainly be professional enough to hire some burglar who could take the house down, locate, and remove whatever it was.”

“Well,” said Bob, “he wants them dead. But in a certain way. If they sell everybody on the idea that crazed sniper Carl Hitchcock, fucked up from Vietnam, killed these four people, and all of that seems to add up, then that’s as far as you go, right? You got it all there—motive, opportunity, means, time frame. It’s so tempting. Everyone wants this thing solved, and there’s the solution, plain as the nose on your face. What you don’t do then is look into the lives of the victims. You don’t see what they were up to, what they had going on, who they were, what connections they had, what moves they were making. All that stuff’s off the board. So I’m putting it back on the board. My read is that something Strong and Reilly did or were planning to do got them whacked hard. The other two went down as smokescreen. Strong and Reilly were the target. If whoever he is kills just them, he knows their lives will be investigated, and such an investigation would lead to him. He needs a way to kill them in which their deaths are seen as unimportant, marginal, an afterthought, while all the focus goes on Joan. So if there’s an answer, it’s somewhere in Jack and Mitzi’s lives in the last few weeks, so I’m going to take a look-see. I’m going to shake the tree and see what falls out.”

“I got no argument except to say it doesn’t happen that way. Not hardly. Nothing’s ever that clever, that well planned, that secret in the real world. It’s just drunks getting pissed or going nuts, whacking the innocent. That’s what I see time and time again. Or some hothead kid fighting for his corner of Blackstone when Willie done took it, so he pops Willie with his nine-em and thinks he’s a hero. That’s the reality, man; you in James Bond land.”

“Even if you don’t buy it, and maybe I wouldn’t either if I’d seen all the people murdered with beer bottles and ball-peen hammers and twenty-five Brycos that you have, I hope you’ll indulge me a little, Washington. I can’t do this alone.”

“I wouldn’t do this for a guy without USMC tattooed on his arm, Gunny,” said Washington. “Okay, we’ll drive around back, and you peel out right behind the garage; there’s no crime scene tape anymore. Can you get through the back gate latch?”

“Yeah.”

“Okay, how about into the house?”

“Well, if my theory is right, one of the basement windows has already been opened. That’s how they got in. Hell, the team may have even been in the house before Jack and Mitzi left; they got in at night. That would save them time and exposure. They work the house, that office particularly, while the bodies are outside. When the cops come, guess what our team is dressed as? Cops. In ten minutes the place is jammed with cops. They emerge from wherever, join the crowd, mill, then slip away. Who’s to know? Did you recognize everyone there on the crime scene?”

“A big murder draws more gawkers than a new Star Wars movie. You always see strangers there, at least in the beginning. You got people from all different agencies, all different departments; you got brass, you got brownnosers and suck-ups, you got press assholes, the more the merrier. Yeah, I recognized about fifteen percent of the faces.”

“Well, there you go.”

“All right, Gunny, let’s play the game. When you’re done, you slip out the same way, call me on the cell, and begin to walk down the alley and I’ll pick you up.”

“Got it.”

“When do you think that will be?”

“About three a.m.”

“Three a.m?”

“Three a.m. Wednesday.”

“Three a.m. Wednesday! This is Monday!”

“I need to go through the house carefully. I need to get a read on their life. I have to find out who they were, what they were into, what they were planning, why this happened to them. You don’t learn that in an hour.”

“Just don’t get caught.”

Bob slapped the backpack he carried.

“Infrared gear. I can see in the dark. No lights will show on the outside. If anyone comes into the house, I’ll go to ground. Nobody’ll see me. I can be real still. The sniper thing again. I’ll call you when I’m done.”

It was a different America. He hadn’t seen this America. He’d been in the America of the United States Marine Corps, in mud and jungle and slatternly, jerry-built outposts and tempos, under monsoon weather or baking heat, and only glimpsed this America on the TV in the squad room, if there was a squad room. But everywhere in this house the late sixties and early seventies still lived, like some sort of Camelot, some sort of holy time when we were young and green and firm and the world was filled with possibility. Mr. and Mrs. Strong were narcissists for sure, in that they had dozens of photographs of themselves and their actions on the walls, as well as souvenir front pages—pentagon bombed, thousands disrupt downtown, campus admin building occupied, cops use teargas on demos, two killed in bank robbery, and finally wanted couple freed—as well as political campaign buttons, flyers, gas masks, anything that spoke of the realities, and maybe the fun, of the Movement.

A whole section was devoted to their day of freedom; Bob ran his infrared over the framed newspaper front pages, with its famous picture of Jack and Mitzi in midleap, full of the joy of freedom, as the famous radical lawyer Milton Tigermann had just checkmated the Justice Department into dropping all charges against them because the means used by pursuing detectives over the years, from FBI to Massachusetts State Police, were so flagrantly illegal. “Guilty as hell, free as a bird,” Jack’s comment; it made the two even more famous. Swagger’s eyes ran through the coverage, including the bitter sidebar interview with a Mrs. Samuel Bronkowsky, mother of four, identified as the widow of one of the two bank guards slain by robbers—robbers thought to be Jack and Mitzi but uncaught and made more unindictable when the bank’s surveillance film was stolen from the evidence closet of the Nyackett Police. And thus Mrs. Bronkowsky left history, her cause unmourned, her husband forgotten, her economic situation unsettled.

History turned on the next wall to great men, big men, giant men. These were the portraits Bob didn’t recognize, but they were helpfully identified as if in a hall of fame, people with names like Frantz Fanon, Régis Debray, Che and Fidel of course, W. E. B. Du Bois, Emma Goldman, Eugene V. Debs, Gavrilo Princip, and of course Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin, and some other big commie boys. Ho was there, and so were Chou and Mao, and someone called La Pasionaria.

The infrared gave the history a special green hue, as brought to life in the AN/PVS-7 goggles. He was a frogman swimming the bottom of the murky bay of radical America, 1969 to 1975.

Bill and Mitzi were everywhere in those days. Beautiful radical children, with wild piles and tendrils of hair and eyes wide as pie plates, elves, stars, charismatics, leprechauns of mischief. A hundred shots showed them with megaphone or loudspeaker, leading or addressing the masses. They were always sexy, in raffish war surplus cast-offs, with Indian bands about their heads, gaudy scarves, tight jeans that showed off their leanness, combat boots, sharp cheekbones, and everywhere they appeared they fronted rows and rows of hand-painted signs, like medieval kings leading an army of banners: stop the war now, stop the bombing, no more napalm, get out now, bring the boys home, legalize pot, lsd now and forever, and he realized that while they were painting, he’d been crawling through the bush, hoping not to get his belly blown open.

He checked for signs of search and came up with ambiguous possibilities. Yes, the cabinet locks in Jack’s office appeared uniformly scarred. But that could have been Jack’s own clumsiness with keys as easily as a professional burglar’s pick. There had indeed been an open window that allowed him to squeeze into the basement, and that lock too bore signs of picking—or of a careless window washer banging it with a squeegee.

He himself picked each cabinet, and inside, besides Jack’s secret stash of porno (he was a Penthouse guy), a pound of very nice hash, some prescription meds, there seemed to be nothing suspicious, certainly no obvious sign of something having been removed. But what would that be? A blank space on a shelf? An opening in a row of books? There wasn’t much.

He went over the office top to bottom, opening each cabinet, rifling through each book, looking in each drawer, searching for computer code words (and finding none). He’d wait to turn the machine on in the light, so that its glow wouldn’t radiate through the windows into the night. He thumped the walls for evidence of a safe hiding behind the bookshelves, but no safe seemed to present itself.

Nothing, nothing at least on a first pass.

He tried all the obvious hiding places, feeling under the drawers for tape strands that might indicate something had been secretly affixed in an out-of-the-way site, opening the battery casings of all the portable tape recorders, the cameras, the iPods that lay around, finally, laboriously—it took hours—opening each CD jacket, running from jazz to classics to heavy metal to songs of the Spanish Civil War, and in each finding nothing but a CD. He went to the bathroom, took the lid off the toilet for a waterproof bag—yep, but full of grass, not diamonds or other contraband—opened all the folded towels and washcloths in the closet. Went through the laundry hampers, the pile of folded clothes, the kitchen with its abundance of spices and herbs and exotic condiments from overseas; Mitzi was evidently quite the chef. Again, nothing, just life, lived by aging baby-boomer haute bourgeoisie with fading memories of the glory of the struggle, so long ago, when they were young and bold. It was a kind of counterbiography: for each demonstration they’d led, he’d been on a deep jungle mission; for each cop they’d confronted, he’d dropped a man with an AK-47; for each time they’d fled gas, he’d fled napalm or heavy bomber ordnance or some such. Same coin, different sides, and now the years have passed and what’s gone around has come around, and who’s the only one who cares why you assholes got your brains blown out but me, the guy you thought was a war criminal, a psycho kid killer. Ain’t it a strange fucking world, though?

He went upstairs and spent the rest of the night in the bedroom, the slow, methodical search, unfolding each item of clothing, paging through each volume—the house was stacked, crammed, jammed with books—emptying the wastebaskets and uncrumpling each wad of paper. Nothing, just the detritus of an involved professional life—notes on meetings, calendars, appointment books, nothing at all out of the ordinary. One of them spoke French and one spoke Spanish; there were many, many books in either language, and he went through them too, page by page, looking for notes either written in the margins (frequent and meaningless) or tucked between the pages. Nothing.

He worked through the morning, going to his low crawl during the daylight hours so that nobody walking by might catch a glimpse of shadowy movement and call the police.

He slept for two hours in the spare bedroom, then got up with enough light remaining, turned on Jack’s computer terminal, and didn’t get much beyond the desktop full of icons, because a code was required. He’d found no code; obviously Jack had committed it to memory. He tried number sequences based on obvious dates—Jack and Mitzi’s birthdays, the dates of big demonstrations, the date they almost got blown up in the house in New York, the date of the Pentagon bombing, the date they were freed from prosecution, that sort of thing. Nothing.

When it got dark, he reverted to the photos on the wall. He took each one down, carefully probed it for hidden documents folded between the photos and the matte backing, and that was more tedious than anything. He looked at each one for scrawled notes or something. This went on and on, as the Strongs literally had hundreds of photos. It seemed their every second was subject to a photo, some with celebs, most on the glorious ramparts. He even found one of the two of them with fists upraised after some sort of dinner with T. T. Constable and his then-wife, the beautiful Joan Flanders, four extremely beautiful human beings caught in a circle of love and adoration, all celebrating the smugness of the moral righteousness that made them so perfect for each other, maybe early nineties, when everyone was in from the cold.

He felt a momentary spasm of rage and had an urge to smash the picture, but what would that prove? Really, what would that prove? He hung it back up and continued with the thankless task, picture after picture, again coming up with nothing.

What am I missing? What is here that I don’t see? I’m too stupid to see, of course, because I’m the redneck marine from Arkansas and these people are so much smarter, so much more insightful, so much more penetrating. Bob Lee, Earl’s son, was just a grunt who followed orders, almost got killed, and killed too much. They knew better. They were above that. With their airs, their sophistication—the wine cellar was amazing, and clearly Jack knew his vintages, while Mitzi’s kitchen was the most complex room in the house, still full of life from the dinners she’d cooked for their many friends, the many joyous nights of camaraderie here in the old castle in Hyde Park. He’d seen the pictures, for many had been taken; Jack more or less holding court, lots of young, beautiful kids, lots of earnest intellectual types with the bushy hair, the wire-frame glasses, the women all with straight, undyed hair, in tight jeans, all of them so goddamned happy.

It was like they were some kind of European royalty, Bob thought. It had nothing to do with—

European.

That was something, yeah. Yeah, they really didn’t see themselves as American, did they? There was nothing anywhere in the house that was, strictly speaking, American. No pictures of landscape, nothing celebratory of American themes like farms, mountains, plains, no flag; instead it was all European in tone and texture. From the food to the books to the photos on the white walls, to the slick, hardwood floors, to tapestries of multitextured, usually African or Afro-Cuban tonalities, all of it belonged in a house in Paris.

What does this mean? Practically, not philosophically. They don’t shower enough. They have affairs, Jack a mistress? They drink espresso? They have wine with dinner? They won’t eat sliced bread? Hmm, among other things, it meant they put little lines through the letter Z and the number 7, after the European fashion, an idiosyncracy that he’d noted that meant absolutely nothing.

But it did mean something. It meant they were European.

He tried to think of other ways that—

And for some reason he thought of the computer, how he’d tried to run the famous dates of the glorious Strong-Reilly history as a way through the code. But Americans wrote dates month/day/year, as in March 25, 1946, 03/25/46. But Europeans wrote them day first, as in day/month/year, and put periods between them, so that March 25, 1946, came out 25.03.46.

Bob first drew shades so that its dead glare wouldn’t leak into the night, then flicked the computer on, watching it stir lazily to life, clicking mysteriously.

The blinking demand for an access code stared at him. He was an expert; he’d read Radical Romantics: The True Story of Jack Strong and Mitzi Reilly, by O. Z. Harris.

He remembered the date they got married.

He remembered the date of the bank robbery in Nyacett.

He remembered the date they got pardoned.

He remembered the date they blew up the Pentagon.

He remembered the date they blew up a judge’s house in Connecticut, during a Black Panther trial.

He remembered the date the bomb had gone off accidentally in their Greenwich Village townhouse, killing its poor builder and sending Jack and Mitzi into the streets.

No, nothing.

Then he remembered the date Saigon fell. He’d never forget that one; it had sent him off on a three-day drunk and he ended up in a jail in Alabama with his real estate business totally trashed and his first wife filing a missing persons report.

He typed it in, European style: 25.04.75.

And thus he entered the secret world of Jack Strong and Mitzi Reilly.

20

They met at Soleil, a tapas restaurant popular with the lunch crowd in the redeveloped sector of SE. It was a gaudy, mock-peasant place, full of young government workers and journalists and others who considered themselves quite fascinating. David Banjax was evidently well known enough here to command a table in the window, and Nick and Phil Price were escorted into the great man’s presence.

Banjax, about thirty-five, with a goatee and otherwise short hair, in a suit without a tie and a pair of Italian architect glasses, rose and put out a hand as Price handled the intros. Then they sat, and it turned out that thankfully Banjax was not one for small talk, didn’t offer an opinion on the Redskins or the new president or the war in Afghanistan or any other topic of the day. He commenced immediately with his sucking up.

“So, Agent Memphis, I hear you’re quite the hero. You shot it out with those bad guys in Tennessee last year or so. Is that why you limp?”

“That is why I limp, Mr. Banjax. But I wasn’t quite the hero. I was with a very skilled undercover officer who handled the gunfight. My only contribution was that I stopped a bullet that might have hit him, and I did manage to shoot a car twice in the right rear fender, which cost the Bureau over seven thousand in repair costs. But I think we’re countersuing now. Don’t mess with the Bureau.”

“Nick is known for his modesty,” Phil said smoothly, showing some minimal gift for the job. “Nick ran the team that broke up what could have been an eight-million-dollar heist and put seven men in prison for the rest of their lives.”

“Wow,” said Banjax. “No wonder everyone I talk to thinks so highly of you.”

“They’re a resilient mob. I’m sure they’ll have escaped and be drinking Jax beer and sporting with the gals this time next year. You can’t keep the Grumley boys down,” Nick said.

Banjax laughed, as if he got Bureau humor, or knew who the Grumleys were.

“Nick’s a kidder,” said Phil. “He has a lot of fans in the Bureau. Nick’s integrity and honesty are treasured in the Bureau, but it’s his sense of humor that makes him beloved.”

“I guess it’s not a laff-riot kind of place,” Banjax said.

“Not much shtick, no,” said Nick. “In fact there hasn’t been a good pie fight in years. But I’m not that beloved. Phil exaggerates, which is his job. I’m loved and I’m hated and I try to do my job and I wish I were smarter and I’m glad I’m not dumber. So, I know why we’re here, Mr. Banjax. Would you do me the favor of fast-forwarding to the hard part of the conversation? I have heard the word ‘Tulsa’ mentioned.”

“Oh, that,” said Banjax, smiling easily. “It was just something that came up. You know, what you do and what I do, it’s similar. You’re investigating a killer. I’m investigating a man investigating a killer. An agency, I should say, but that agency happens to be represented by a man. I’m very sorry for what happened in Tulsa, and I’m not here to make noises about it. It’s just that I’m in a very competitive news situation, and in my bureau there’s a lot of pressure to produce. There’s an awful lot of smart people there and we all want to do well. So I ask as many questions as I can and I throw out a very broad net, and somehow, this stuff about Tulsa came in.”

“Phil, help me, I’m not clear on the rules here. Is it fair for me to ask him how he found out about it? I mean it wasn’t part of any official release, so he had to hear about it from someone. Can I ask him who?”

“Probably not a good idea, Nick. The press values its right of confidentiality and feels that if it gives up sources to law enforcement inquiries, it becomes an arm of the Bureau. Nobody wants that.”

“Agent Memphis, if you must know, and I hope you’ll appreciate my candor here, it was a guy I know, one of those gray elder types; he knows everybody and everything. I’d prefer not to give you his name, but he said he heard about this from someone he knew.”

“You don’t have to give me Bill Fedders’s name, Mr. Banjax. I already know it quite well.”

“Well, there you go. Anyway, ‘someone’ forwarded through ‘my friend’ an envelope with a set of Tulsa front pages and the unidentified FBI sniper marked heavily in highlighter, with question marks. Crude, but effective. Anyhow, I called the reporter who wrote the story fifteen years ago and he knew your name, even if he didn’t release it then. I don’t think he was sworn to any confidentiality agreement, and I don’t think I’ve skirted any confidentiality issues. I got it fair and square, nothing dubious. I take it you’re not denying it.”

“Is this off the record?”

“Of course. Sorry, I should have said that earlier. I’ll let you know when we go on.”

“Well, obviously, I can’t deny it. Yeah, I took that shot and missed and all sorts of terrible things happened. And some good things: I got seven years with Myra.”

“I heard that part too. Extraordinary.”

“Anyhow, it’s not going to do the Bureau any good to get this all mixed in with the ongoing investigation. It’ll cloud matters. I’ll tell you, man to man, that I have no beef with snipers, as the implication seems to be, based on my unfortunate tour as one. My job is not to find the sniper innocent by some trick, it’s to find out who’s guilty and put him away or prove the case so totally that even if he’s dead, there can be no doubt he was the guilty party, sniper or not. But it’s more complex than it seems. We have to be diligent. We can’t be nervous about media pressures or outside political pressures. If you look at the Kennedy thing, you’ll see that Warren was rushed, made mistakes, and there was hell to pay for it. I don’t want that happening here. That’s my only concern, not my career in the Bureau, my next promotion, the book contract I’ll get when I go, how 60 Minutes will handle it. If I have to leave the Bureau because doubts are raised about me, then that’s what I’ll do. It happens in Washington all the time.”

“I haven’t published yet. I don’t know that I will.”

“What is it that you want? I mean, exactly.”

“Well, look, we’re not kids here. We’re all professionals and we’re all under great pressure from management to produce. Now, I have to come up with something. I have to publish something. I can’t go in and say, ‘Oh, I spent three weeks and I came up with nothing.’ That’s just not good. So if I have to, I suppose I could go with the Tulsa episode. It does seem like legitimate information that the public needs to have. There is a great deal of interest in this case, and you folks did such a good job and worked so fast and got there in time to prevent any other killings, but it seems to have come off the tracks since then. We thought we’d get that report in a couple of weeks. Now I hear that as of last week, you came up with a whole new area of investigation and that you’ve sent a lot more people into the field. If that’s true, maybe we could put it on the record, explain it, put it in some kind of context, and get it into the paper. Get it into the paper the way you want it, not picked up thirdhand from a variety of other sources.”

“See,” said Nick, “from a PR point of view and a career point of view, that would be the right thing to do. But the direction and thrust of our investigation has to remain confidential. In fact, details may alert some people we have to look at. They act differently when they know they’re being looked at, and it clouds the issue. We have to make preliminary inquiries confidentially to see if this is even worth pursuing. I’m not saying there are other persons of interest than Carl Hitchcock, but I have a duty to be diligent. Is that all right, Phil, what I said to him?”

“It’s your call, Nick. I won’t tell you how to operate.”

“Okay,” said Banjax. “I hear you. That’s fine. But I don’t have much wiggle room myself. I can only say, I’ll try and keep Tulsa out of the paper, but if I get in a jam, I may have to go with you. I’d have to put it in the record and come at you with hard questions.”

“I will be very happy to discuss Tulsa with you, Mr. Banjax. Here, I’ll give you my direct number, call me anytime you want. If I have some development, maybe I’ll give you a heads-up. That’s all I can say.”

21

Bob finally slipped out of the house Wednesday morning at

2 a.m. and Denny Washington was waiting for him.

He climbed into the car.

“Man, am I hungry,” he said. “Anyplace still open?”

“You look like a homeless guy,” Washington said. “I’d bust you for looking like that in the old days. Today I have to call you sir and ask you if you need assistance.”

“Welcome to modern times.”

“Ain’t it the fucking truth, bro? Okay, I know an all-night eatery, a cop place. You don’t mind eating with cops?”

“If they don’t mind eating with me.”

They headed to a joint called Johnny’s, outside of which a lot of blue-and-white cruisers idled. The place was bright, first from the lights, and second from the more than a few white faces among the black, unusual in this part of town. Everywhere Swagger looked, he saw the blue-and-white checkered hatbands that were the unique signature of the Chicago officer’s cap. He was in a blue-and-white universe. Washington made his way down the aisles to a booth in the rear, nodding to the other pilgrims as he led Swagger through but making no intros, and Swagger recognized the faces, all tough urban warrior mugs, under hair either short and frizzy or a little vain. Why did some cops have such elaborate hair? Anyway, he and Linebacker Washington sat in the booth, ordered coffee, eggs, bacon, toast, enough for a battalion, and waited for the food to come.

“So are you going to tell me anything, Gunny? Or is it need to know?”

“It is need to know, but you’re on the team, so you need to know,” said Swagger. “First off, guess what? Mr. and Mrs. Crusader for Peace and Freedom were broke.”

“Broke?”

“Broke, as in ‘broke.’ Broke, as in, We can’t make no payments. He’d had an inheritance—that’s what they’d been living on—but they’d been into the capital for years and now it was down to nothing. They lived big, did you know? Always a houseful of guests, always the hosts, spent a fortune on wine and food and big dinners out. You’d think he was rich; wasn’t that part of the joke, the rich protesters, them rich people who believed in the rights of the poor? But they way overspent their salaries, which weren’t great, and his book royalties and speaking fees were down. He spent six years working on a book for a big New York outfit, and in the end they turned it down and sued him to get their money back.”

“Boo fucking hoo. You’re breaking my heart.”

“Yeah,” said Bob, “and here this was the land of opportunity. So they were desperate, or so it seemed.”

“I guess being a revolutionary isn’t that high-paying a job.”

“Oh, and he had to pay a girl three hundred thousand a few years back because he fucked her after promising he’d leave Mitzi. Then he changed his mind. They didn’t want it getting out, didn’t want any publicity, so that ate up a big chunk. So much for bringing higher morality to the world.”

“How did you find this out?”

“I cracked the computer code, and he had a combination on file. I didn’t know there was a safe the first time I went through the house, but it was in the corner of his office, under the floorboards. If you know there’s a safe, you can find it. All this stuff was in there, the letters to the lawyers about the three hundred K payment, all that. In the safe.”

“Hmm. So to hit the house without the combination, you’d need a safecracker, right?”

“Yeah,” said Bob. “Yeah, yeah,” seeing how Washington’s insight seemed to lead to another development, a safecracker who could maybe be convinced to talk. “So there’d be a safecracker who—”

“Not so fast, bro. There was a guy in this town named Willie Beazel. Very good fingers. Could open anything.”

“Past tense?”

“That’s where he lives now, in the past tense. He was found floating in the Chicago River with a twenty-two through the ear three days after the hit on the Strongs. I’m thinking they paid him big upfront, brought him into the house, and he popped the box for them. They knew whatever it was they needed was in that safe. Of course, once he’s done his job, he’s a liability. He’s a loose end. Tidy motherfuckers.”

“These people ain’t messing around. If they want you dead, you get dead, fast.”

“And of course nobody would ever think to link Willie to the Strongs, no reason to. But he had colleagues, pals. I can run ’em down. Maybe he said something before he went for a float. You left the records in the safe?”

“Yeah. If we can get a warrant, we can get all that stuff into play legally, I’m thinking. But that might be for later.”

“So back to the Strongs: they were poor?”

“Running out of dough. But, but, but there’s a big but coming up.”

“I’m listening.”

“Just a month before they were hit, they opened a Swiss bank account. It sounds like a movie, but it was an actual Swiss bank account, number 309988762554. They were expecting some big money coming in. They didn’t want to pay taxes on it, they didn’t want to pay their creditors with it, they just wanted to spend it on themselves. They wanted the big life somewhere off in Europe. They were nuts about Europe. They thought they belonged in Europe. I think—well, no matter what I think, it’s clear they were getting ready to go underground again.”

“On the lam?”

“Yeah, but in a different way. Not on the run but under new identities. They had spent money they didn’t have, that they owed various relatives and friends, to get new identities. They had phony passports in that safe, under the names William and Mary Ives, of Dayton, Ohio. Very good phonies, and I’m thinking they used some old radical contact to get into underground culture to come up with that sort of high-end merchandise. I mean, you just don’t go to a phony passport shop in the mall; you’ve got to know somebody, you’ve got to be wired into the organization, you’ve got to have your bona fides up front to get stuff at that level.”

“Don’t it seem they was anticipating a big payoff of some sort, a getaway, a new life of ease and luxury somewhere?”

“It does.”

“Any idea what the scam was?”

“I only know that all this started around September first. There was a big flurry of activity the first week in September. That’s when they got the passports, that’s when they opened the Swiss bank account. I found an invoice from Amazon for a batch of books they’d ordered: Europe on $5,000 a Day, Castles of the Rhine, Luxury Tours of Europe, dated September third, then another one for September fourth. With all his money problems, Jack bought some kind of Italian Armani suit for six thousand bucks September eighth. Can you believe that? Jack Strong in a six-thousand-dollar suit.”

“Maybe he was turning her out for trickin’, and he was making his pimp hand strong.”

Swagger laughed. Washington was cool. Big, black, dead face, fists that should have been nicknamed ‘Thunder and Thunder,’ but he had a street wit to him.

“I hadn’t thought of that. But anyway he didn’t have the money in his account, but he bought it. He’s to pick it up from the tailor next week, after the alterations. He expected to have the dough by then.”

“You ought to pick it up, Gunny. Shame to see it go to waste.”

“I could. Man, my daughters would have a laugh at the old goat in a fancy suit!”

The food came, and Bob shoveled it down, though he stayed off the coffee, because he was dangerously blurred with fatigue and needed sleep next.

“Don’t leave any for the poor people in China, Gunny,” Washington said. “They don’t need it.”

“I am a hungry guy,” Bob said, beginning to feel more or less whole again. “Sarge, can you drive me back to my hotel? I need to sleep.”

He glanced at his watch. It was nearly four.

“Sure. You sleep. I go to mass, I take my kids to school, I go be a policeman for twelve hours, then what?”

“Tomorrow I call my guy at the FBI and I lay my stuff out for him, the Willie Beazel connect, where I think we should concentrate, what I think should happen next. He argues, we yell, eventually it comes around. I fly out to DC and lay it out for them people, and suddenly there’s a new lay to the land. And now we have a really good chance of getting Carl Hitchcock out of the murderer’s box. Maybe even putting the real shooter in it. That ain’t a bad night’s work.”

“Swagger is the man,” said Washington.

The big detective got him efficiently enough back to the hotel room, and he fell into bed and felt the rush as unconsciousness overtook him. He slept and slept and slept, and when he woke it was near three. How could he have slept so long?

He rose, rushed through a shower and the other ablutions, then picked up his cell and pushed Nick’s number.

No answer.

He tried three or four more times, never connecting.

Finally he called the other number, the task force working number that he had, got some earnest intern, asked for Nick, waited, and finally a young woman’s voice came on.

“Agent Chandler, can I help you?” she said.

The one called Starling.

“Agent Chandler, it’s Swagger, you remember me?”

“Of course.”

“I have to reach Nick. I can’t seem to raise him.”

The pause told him bad news was incoming.

Finally she responded.

“Where have you been the last ten hours?”

“I was asleep. I was working three days without rest and I had to catch up, and now I have some things I—”

“Oh. Well, there’s been a shake-up. You didn’t see the Times this morning?”

“I’m in Chicago.”

“Well, it’s national news. Anyhow, some Times reporter broke a big story on something in Nick’s background. Some botched shooting twenty years ago.”

Swagger knew the story; the shot that hit the woman, not the robber, and paralyzed her. He thought it was all over, forgotten. Whose business was it?

“What does that have to do with anything?”

“It’s caused a big stew. Some congressman is threatening hearings on how the Bureau is handling this. Nick’s been upstairs all day.”

“He’s all right, isn’t he? Jeez, he’s their best guy.”

“He is. But we don’t know what’s happening. There hasn’t been any news. There’s a rumor he’s resigned—”

“Resigned!”

“For the good of the Bureau. It’s all a mess, a typical Washington thing—politics, influence, lost time, anger, recriminations—and the press is eating it up.”

“Oh, Christ,” said Bob.

“Do you want to talk to anybody else? Ron is here.”

“Oh—No, I’ll wait and see how it shakes out. If you see Nick, give him my best and tell him, well, that I called.”

“I will,” she promised.

22

Bill Fedders hit the putt, watched it ride the undulations of the green and break right just where he thought it would. But he hadn’t quite hit it hard enough, and it quit short six inches.

“Great putt,” said the congressman. “I wish I could read a green like that.”

“My one true talent,” said Fedders with a glowing smile, and the smile was really his one true talent. He went to the ball, insouciantly leaned over it, and knocked it casually into the cup with one hand. Par, another par, and the congressman’s handicap kept him close so he wouldn’t go home embittered.

Bill could par any course in Washington. He was a superb gin, bridge, and poker player. He could drink ten Navy boatswains under the table. He had an aristocrat’s thick silver hair (you had to have had a relative at the original Round Table to get hair like that, he often joked), a keen, original wit, and a gift for strategy. His suits were Italian but subdued; he had an excellent collection of Aldens, in both wing tips and, for casual wear, the tasseled loafers. He had a good racquet sense, excelling at both squash and tennis. He could ride a horse or a motorcycle or pilot a sailboat or speedboat. He was a licensed flier. He was a Yale grad, from a grand old family. Skull and Bones, University of Virginia Law, Navy JAG during Vietnam, then a partner with Occam Dobalt Hunsucker until he established his own practice. He made three million a year and had put four kids through Ivy League schools and law school. He was on wife number three and mistress number twenty-five. He lived in a really big house in Potomac. He went to all the right parties, knew all the right people. He hated his life.

The cell rang.

“Oh, I know who that is,” said the congressman. “His master’s voice.”

Bill rolled his eyes and turned to wander to the edge of the green, while caddy and foursome gave him privacy, as all knew he was Tom Constable’s number one guy in Washington, and even here, on the fabled thirteenth green at Burning Tree, under soaring poplars wearing their fall russets and golds, when Tom Constable called, Tom Constable expected an answer.

“Yes, Tom. Did you see it?”

“I saw it,” said Tom Constable, from wherever he happened to be, in Wyoming or Atlanta or China, for Christ’s sake, Tom was always on the go; he might have even been on the twelfth or the fourteenth here at Burning Tree.

“Was it what you expected?”

“I liked the information. The tone was more sympathetic than I imagined.”

“Evidently Banjax got to know Memphis and liked him quite a bit. It seems everybody likes Memphis. I like Memphis.”

“I’m sure I’d like him too,” said Constable. “That’s not the point. The point is, he’s in the way, he has to be removed. That’s the point, the only point. Tell me what I want to hear. He’s gone as of now. Some obedient number two guy is about to release the report. I don’t see how they can keep him aboard with all this shit in the air.”

“No changes have been announced, but it’s still early. There’ll be a period when clarity isn’t available,” said Fedders. “It’ll be murky. Nothing will seem to be happening. What’s going on is that everybody is figuring out how the game has changed and how the situation now sits, where the power is, who’s got the momentum. That’ll take a bit of time. Then on to the next move.”

“I know, I know. If I ran a goddamn business like that, I’d be in the goddamn poorhouse by now.”

“That’s why I’ve always told you to stay out of Washington, Tom. You don’t have the temperament, and all you’d do is give yourself an ulcer. You pay me to have your ulcer for you.”

“Pay you goddamn well, Bill, as I recollect. So, the story ran, the Bureau is locked up behind closed doors, media pressure is building, there’s a lot of scrutiny. Has the White House said anything?”

“No, but Jack Ridings has gotten the Leader to threaten to hold hearings. The FBI does not want to go to the Hill and discuss dirty laundry, believe me. They want all this to go away.”

“Don’t they see? Dump Memphis, issue the report, watch the case-closed signs go up, and everything is fine. No more books on poor Joan, no more Internet shit about me. Have you seen the latest? Joan had pictures of me in a feather boa dancing with J. Edgar. We look like Alice B. Toklas and Gertrude Stein. I had her murdered to get the negatives.”

“Tom, there are lots of people who hate you. You know that. It’s not worth acknowledging their existence. They would love nothing better than to be sued by you.”

“Okay, okay. Don’t let this slide, Bill. Stay on Jack, stay on the Bureau, keep me informed. I want to be in the loop. I want this goddamn thing closed.”

“Yes, Tom.”

“By the way,” said Tom, “you shouldn’t have hit the seven on the approach.”

23

Give it to Chicago homicide. In the four hours between the discovery of the Strong and Reilly bodies and the arrival of the FBI on the scene, not as advisers but as lead agency on the determination that a murderer-for-hire had crossed state lines (even though it seemed not to have gone that way) and the formation of Task Force Sniper, the usual processes had already begun to proceed. Given that Strong and Reilly were well-known and that their deaths were unusual enough to merit consideration as major cases, two teams of detectives were dispatched and spent the day interviewing witnesses and acquaintances under the commonplace theory that the vics’ death was rooted in their own behavior, not their membership in some larger, national pattern.

Thus detectives interviewed neighbors, colleagues, some journalists (Jack was a favorite of theirs, always good for a radical quote to get readers’ blood boiling), and so forth. That campaign was formally halted around 3 p.m. and the detectives then reported to the FBI, which was not interested in their findings and reassigned them to crime scene inventory and other of the bureaucratic jobs important at a major investigative site. The feds already had their man, even if only a theoretical man, and local investigations were unnecessary.

But no cop ever throws out a notebook. So a few weeks later, casually and informally, Sgt. Denny Washington, under his own initiative, canvassed the dicks involved and recovered five of the six notebooks, with promises to return them. He turned them over to Bob, who alone had the patience, the time, the interest, and possibly the context to examine them carefully.

Bob was alone in his hotel room, sitting at a desk under a cheap HoJo lamp. It was near midnight, and today felt like a lost day, as he’d slept late, been disappointed to learn of Nick’s troubles and the way the case was now bollixed up in some sort of political situation. He’d watched the national news, where Nick’s face was prominently displayed, and anchor haircuts, without saying a word, communicated by eyebrow and turn of face their disappointment that the Bureau had chosen such a compromised candidate to head up this important investigation, and that the investigation, which had begun so promisingly, had seemed now to come off the tracks and was evidently barking up wrong trees or chasing wild geese hither and yon. What was wrong with the FBI? You’d think a case this big, they’d make sure not to screw up, huh?

Some reporter named Banjax was all over cable, documenting his disclosures, trying desperately to separate himself from the implication of his words. He of course had no opinion on the appropriateness of Nick to head the investigation, no investment, emotional or professional; his job was to report the facts and let others draw the conclusions. He just felt the public had a right to know that the FBI’s chief sleuth had been himself involved as a participant in issues similar to the ones here—tragically so, sadly so—and the question of why was a logical one to ask.

The Bureau had no comment; Nick, of course, had no comment. Bob saw a glimpse of the girl Starling, her head down, racing past the assembled cameras outside the Hoover Building in DC; he thought she looked upset.

Then the shows all cut to an interview with Joan Flanders’s ex-husband, the rich oddball T. T. Constable. He was all cowboyed up, because now he lived in the West, had essentially given up his eastern identity, and by now everybody was used to seeing him in a cowboy hat and open-necked red shirt with a red bandana about his neck.

As usual, he was ornery and colorful, and the cameras ate up his rugged, tanned face and grizzle of day-old beard, as if he’d spent the day ropin’ and brandin’ instead of sellin’ short and firin’ low producers.

“Well, damn,” he said, “I do expect more from the FBI. We all know who did this, and the sooner we reach that legal determination, the sooner we can put it behind us and celebrate Joan’s great life instead of her unfortunate death at the hands of some screwball marine who thought he was still in the war or something. It’s so straightforward, it’s a mystery to me how they could get it so knotted up.”

Then the Wyoming congressman—the shows didn’t point out that he represented the district in which much of Tom Constable’s vast ranch, one of several, was located, nor did they mention that his party affiliation was the same as Tom’s and that Tom had donated generously to his campaign—this Jack Ridings took over, and promised hearings on FBI hiring and promotional practices, and wondered how a situation like this could come about. Essentially you had a sniper investigating a sniper, and was it not fair to wonder where his allegiance lay? Did he have some sort of psychological investment in the act of sniping? Did he think it was noble to eliminate a human being at long range; would that cloud his professional judgment, cause him to refuse to accept certain realities?

Bob turned it off then. Enough. And shortly thereafter Washington called, at the end of the duty day, saying yeah, he knew what was going on, but he did have these notebooks for Bob, if Bob wanted them. Bob wanted them.

So Bob sat there, trying to make this or that out of the notes. Each guy or gal had his own scheme, his own method, his own set of abbreviations, so it wasn’t easy going, and a lot of it was guesswork or inference. Eventually, he got to know the two simplest styles of penmanship, so he could read those books easily enough, even if some of the initials remained mysterious, and another guy had gone back over his notes with a red pencil, starring each entry that he thought might lead to further inquiries.

Essentially what he found confirmed his own investigations. In the past few months or so, both Jack and Mitzi had been morose, uncommunicative, seemingly depressed. Friends wondered about the health of the marriage or the long-term depression the rejection of Jack’s book might cause. A perhaps too bitchy interviewee made the point that it had been so important to him to have a big New York publisher take it, but nobody would, and that had been a devastating blow to Jack’s dream of literary glory and a return to centrality. Plus, he now owed the publisher the money he’d been living on for five years.

But then everyone agreed that there’d been a miraculous recovery. Suddenly the old Jack, the old Mitzi were back: they always had a swagger to them, a charisma, and a happiness, an ebullience. Most people seemed to put this as happening somewhere early in September; it was as if that ship, which seemed to have vanished, had arrived at long last.

What could have happened? Bob wondered.

He wished he could get back into the house, maybe look more carefully at appointment books or calendars for that time period. Once he’d penetrated the safe, that’s all he’d cared about and he’d concentrated on it at the expense of everything else.

Fool! Idiot! Making mistakes! Sloppy, old, stupid, eyes not working, brain asleep.

He tried to think what to do with the information. He could go over the information from the safe again, for the fiftieth time; he could go over the notebooks again, thinking perhaps he’d missed something; he could log on to the Internet and call up newspapers from the first week in September on the possibility that it was something out there, in the real world, that had left a mark that he could understand and link to them for a clearer picture; he could go through the biography a journalist had written about them and check to see if something in their past happened around the first and they were celebrating—but that one was dumbest.

He was so tired. It was time to go to bed. His mind was blurring; he was getting nowhere.

But he couldn’t tear himself away. Silly as it seemed, he had to run it out. He got out his laptop, logged on to Google. He thought he’d just Google randomly for a bit, Jack Strong/Mitzi Reilly/September, and see what he’d get. He got nonsense. Nothing, crazy, insane, lots of refrains of some song or pieces of doggerel poetry like “Try to remember, it was the kind of September, when we were mellllllowwww,” whatever that was. He jumped through the listings, and then something caught his eye on about the seventh screen under the listing O. Z. Harris, an obituary, from the Chicago Tribune, page D15, with the lines blackened “. . . and was the author of four books, including Radical Romantics: The True Story of Jack Strong and Mitzy Reilly, a 1997 biography.”

He called it up.

The headline read Radical journalist O. Z. Harris, 81.

He read,

Oscar Zebulon Harris, a Pultizer Prize–winning journalist who challenged the system and earned renown for his integrity and intrepidity, particularly in the ’60s and ’70s, died Wednesday after a long illness.

Harris, 81, better known as “O. Z. Harris” and “Ozzie” to the many young writers who admired and loved him, covered the American left over many years and worked for, among others, The New Republic, The Nation, Mother Jones, Rolling Stone, and finally his own newsletter, called Ozzie’s Oz, a famous muckraking journal that took on the powers that be.

Frequently called an agitator and, in a different age, an activist, Ozzie was as prickly to his enemies—usually the Justice Department, four Republican administrations, the Department of Defense, and the Department of the Army—as he was loving to his friends, which included a generation of progressive journalists and activists.

His reporting on war crimes in Vietnam won the Pulitzer Prize in 1967 and he was the author of four books, including Radical Romantics: The True Story of Jack Strong and Mitzi Reilly, a 1997 biography.

He died September 3.

According to his own wishes, no services will be held and his body was cremated. Donations on his behalf may be made to the American Civil Liberties Union.

The Cook County Department of Public Administration warehouse was west of the city, even beyond Oak Park, in a town near O’Hare called Franklin Park, full of tidy bungalows and Italian, Mexican, and Korean restaurants, tracing the demographic tides that had flowed outward from the big town. It was flat, out here, and so far gone the skyscrapers that contributed to America’s second-greatest skyline were unseen. Trees filled the little crosshatched streets off the main drags, but the drags themselves were the usual run of strip malls, chain restaurants, the odd old free-standing restaurant, even a racetrack with an imposing stadium abutting it.

Washington and Swagger found the nondescript old factory building on Mannheim Road, in an area zoned for light manufacturing, each building separated from the others by cyclone fences with barbed wire discouragement up top. They turned off the busy Mannheim, pulled through a gate, earning admittance on the power of Washington’s police ID, found parking, and went through a green door to a grimy office with a counter.

What brought them there was Bob’s call to Dennis Washington, Washington’s to the coroner’s office to learn the hospital in which Harris had died, followed by Washington’s visit to that establishment. The hospital kept careful records, and it became clear that over the last months of his life, Ozzie Harris was regularly visited by his friends and comrades Jack Strong and Mitzi Reilly and nobody else. Washington did some quick, casual interviews, found a few people who remembered and all agreed that the old radical really came to rely on Jack and Mitzi, who in turn had treated him with respect and love. He remained “Mr. Harris” to them, never “Ozzie,” as everyone else called him.

The clerk eventually noticed Bob and the imposing Washington and ambled over with a melancholy weight to his movements. It wasn’t much fun, Bob thought, working among the aisles and aisles of unclaimed property of the dead; most of it, according to statute, would remain in escrow against claims by long-lost relatives for six months; then it was auctioned, and what remained went to the burner.

Washington flashed ID, laid the death certificate out, and the clerk toddled away, returning with a key attached to a necklace that wore a metal disk upon which H-1498 was stamped.

“Go on in, Detective. It’s pretty self-explanatory; you just follow the rows to H, then go down the shelves till you get to unit 1498. The key opens the padlock. I’d take a mask; it’s pretty dusty in there.”

“Thanks,” said Washington, and he and Swagger headed through the big double doors into a kind of cathedral of American stuff, a huge, darkened brick room that was crosshatched by a wooden latticework that supported Cyclone wire dividers.

Ozzie Harris didn’t have much, as his life had clearly not been about stuff. There was furniture, surprisingly Victorian, bags of old clothes, Oriental lamps, rolled-up woven rugs, an ironing board, a small TV that was probably black-and-white, various cheesy appliances like a microwave and a toaster, an old Mixmaster, a juicer, a crate of cereal and laundry products, surely burner-bound, an old bike, a Barcalounger, a state-of-the-art 2003 computer and printer from some clone outfit, tons of books and magazines, six filing cabinets, a ratty set of golf clubs from happier days, the inevitable framed photos of world events Ozzie had witnessed or written about, speeches he’d given, conventions he’d covered, great men he’d loved or despised.

They worked. On hands and knees, bent over the material in poor light in a cocoon of drifting dust in an airless room, they patiently processed all that was before them. The books took the longest, and many of them had notes or underlined passages that had to be examined and determined to be text-related, not secret messages. The photographs had to be probed for things folded and hidden, the files had to be gently exhumed, each sheet quickly examined.

Many were articles, razored out, dumped in manila folders indexed by various outrages: Racism, militarism, sometimes whole drawers like Vietnam ’64–’67, Vietnam ’67–’70, Vietnam ’71–’75. There was a file of erotica, surprisingly mild, mostly drawings of women in tight latex lingerie that pushed their breasts and buttocks out plumply and had highlights from unseen illumination glowing on them; many were tied, all were made up, with bright red cupid lips. Then too there were files of acceptance letters and rejection slips, fan notes from kids, letters from lawyers threatening libel suits or political opponents expressing disappointment or outrage or sucking up. A whole file was full of mash notes from celebs, mostly second-tier movie lefties. There was a file of letters from students wanting Ozzie essentially to write their papers for them or at least do the research or—

“Hey, Sniper,” said Denny, “hey, come lookee here.”

He was lying under the box spring, a tough fit for such a big fellow, and his suit coat spilled open, showing the Sig 229 holstered to his belt.

Bob scootched and knelt and wedged, and saw where Denny’s rubberized finger pointed: inside the box spring frame, toward the end of the structure, four yellowing strands of Scotch tape peeled away from the wood, drying out in the arid atmosphere. Each one showed one end that suggested being torn or twisted loose.

“It looks like he had something taped here. And judging from the yellow color of the tape, for a long time. Then recently someone pulled whatever was there loose, breaking and twisting the tape. I make it to be four by four, about.”

“Yeah,” said Bob. “I wonder if there’s prints on the tape.”

“Well,” said Denny, “I will mark it down, and if we find something corroborating, maybe I’ll get an actual search warrant and come in with technicians, and we can check the tape for prints. Be interesting if Jack Strong’s prints showed. There’d be your proof he took something. I don’t know where that would lead you, but you’d know Jack had dug through all this, at least.”

Bob looked at his watch. They’d been at it over three hours. He had a couple of drawers to go.

Bob went back and tried to find renewed vigor as he plowed through the details of the old lefty’s life, but it had never been new to start with and stayed old all the way through, although a file of letters from angry readers showed some life: “You fucking commie bastard, they ought to hang you from a lamppost. All you Reds will get your day of the rope, you just wait.” But even the craziness grew boring, and none of the letters—the signed ones, as most bore the signature A Patriot or I Gave to My Country—displayed a name that suggested anything or led anywhere.

Agh, he thought. What did you expect? You can’t do this sort of thing on the quick with a buddy helping out. This is what the FBI is for, to go through this stuff, run it down, track it, read it for fingerprints, analyze the forensics, do the dozens of tests, the magic stuff they do. You are stuck in the year 1948, and this is an obsolete black-and-white movie where the detective finds the Big Clue in some dusty old file.

But he didn’t find the Big Clue.

“Well, I guess we crashed and burned.”

“I guess we did.”

“Okay,” Bob said. “Nothing here. Nothing here at all. I’ll call the feds and see where we are. You were great, really.”

“No big deal. Semper Fi, all that shit.”

“All that shit.”

Washington rose and then said, “It is kind of funny though, a guy as red as this guy, so kill-the-rich and power-to-the-people and all that bullshit, of course he saves a letter from his broker. His broker! Can you imagine?”

“They’re all like that,” said Bob. “Look at Strong. He’s secretly trying to get a roll together, not to pay off his debts but to take off and live big like the millionaires he’d execute if he became, God help us, the big boss.”

But then he thought, why wasn’t the letter in the files with all the other crazy shit?

“Where did you find it?”

“Oh, it was folded up in Das Kapital. I don’t know why it was there.”

Bob thought, that is odd. That is unexpected.

“What did it say?”

“Nothing. It was just a recommendation of stocks for him to buy, sometime in 1972.”

Bob thought, nowhere else in all this shit is there any expression of interest in the stock market, any interest in capitalism except how to destroy it, any relationship with a broker, any connection to anything that isn’t somehow political—for Ozzie, whoever he was, was like Jack and Mitzi: a total creature of politics.

“You didn’t find any other letters like that?”

“Nah. Some guy in New York.”

A New York broker.

That set off a tiny alarm in Bob’s brain, from somewhere in his own past.

“You have the letter?”

Washington went to the case, bent, found the thick spine of the book, pulled it out, pulled out the envelope, and began to hand it to Bob.

“No, no, just look at it,” Bob said. “The guy who sent it. Was his name Ward Bonson?”

Washington looked.

“Give the man a prize. He’s a mind reader.”

“Jesus,” said Bob.

“Why? Who the hell is Ward Bonson?”

“At one time he was the highest-ranking Soviet penetration agent in the Central Intelligence Agency. In 1972, after he’d left Naval Intelligence and before he went to work in the CIA, he was a very successful Wall Street broker, just waiting for the Agency to come and lap him up, which of course it did soon enough.”

“You knew him?” asked Washington.

“I killed him,” said Bob.

24

Nick resigned every day at 8:30 a.m., and every day at 8:30 a.m. the director turned him down.

“I am not going to let those bastards tell me how to run the Bureau,” he said. “Get back to work. Bust this thing for me, Nick. Now. Soon. Fast.”

“We’re trying.”

Nick gave him a daily summary after the resignation ritual, on any given day reporting the task force’s progress along its new lines of inquiry: of the ninety-seven new suspects, Task Force Sniper, with its additional manpower, had eliminated over forty-one. But there were sixteen of that first already-vetted group who demanded more careful attention—reinterviews, records checks, travel and time line indexing, overseas liaison—and there were still over fifty to go who hadn’t been looked at at all.

Meanwhile, the scandal refused to go away. Usually things in Washington blow over as new news cycles demand new material, but the reporter David Banjax was clearly on a hot streak as he chronicled the life and times of Special Agent Nicholas Memphis, the hero and goat of Tulsa, Oklahoma, who now ran the Bureau’s sniper investigation. Banjax was given a quarter of the Times’s front page to tell the story of Nick and his first wife, Myra, whom he’d paralyzed and married. While some saw it as a human interest story that made Nick look like a prince, many others saw it as another example of Nick’s misjudgment, of his emotional cloudiness on the issue of snipers and sniper victims and the discipline and potential tragedy of the figure of the law enforcement marksman.

Then there was the issue of Nick’s “breaking” of the Bristol, Tennessee, speedway armored car robbery a year ago, in which, allegedly, the special agent had penetrated a violent mob, interdicted and destroyed a robbery attempt in progress, kept civilian casualties to a minimum, and apprehended the bad guys, all of whom now languished either in prison or in the graveyard (six had been killed).

But even that heroism, in Banjax’s telling, had its downside. Some sources gave all the credit to an unidentified FBI undercover operative who had done the actual penetrating and gunfighting. Nick had come along late and taken that man’s credit—so unfair to the unknown hero, who couldn’t be ID’d even now as, quite possibly, he was undercover in another caper. And looked at carefully, the episode itself had a sloppiness to it that made its ultimately happy disposition seem somewhat arbitrary, if not out-and-out lucky. If the conspiracy had been penetrated, why did the feds wait until the robbery itself to spring the trap? There were hundreds of shots fired at the jam-packed Motor Speedway venue, and only by the grace of God did they not kill or maim anyone. The public safety emergency also cost local law enforcement millions of dollars (to say nothing of the trauma of the wounds to several of its officers, plus the cost in medical and recovery expenses); couldn’t that have been avoided? It was also alleged by some, bitter at the Bureau’s high-handed treatment of the locals, that the real object of the Bureau’s enterprise, a professional killer who used the automobile as his weapon of choice, had escaped and still roamed the world, free as a bird. And finally there was the issue of a helicopter, shot down by an FBI sniper under Nick’s command. Again, only luck, or so it was charged, prevented a catastrophe; that crippled aircraft could have fallen from the sky onto a home or a bus or a school or a hospital just as easily as it fell upon the empty seats of the Bristol Motor Speedway, resulting in the capture of the pilot and all the personnel of the Grumley gang. Why didn’t Nick have to answer that?

Still another day, Banjax reached and interviewed one Howard D. Utey, former agent in charge of the Bureau’s New Orleans office, who’d also been Nick’s supervisor during the bungled attempt in Tulsa. Utey, now a professor of public safety and police science at a community college in Ohio, told how Nick’s poor judgment resulted in the botched shot in Tulsa and the escape of a wanted fugitive later in New Orleans during the furor over the assassination of a Salvadoran bishop, an event never really satisfactorily explained and occasionally brought up by enterprising reporters in search of an easy, sensational feature.

In short, Nick was emerging as the kind of bad-penny agent who had had a hand in a lot of disasters and yet, somehow, kept his career marching ahead, as if supported by men in high places with a secret agenda.

It was on just such a day when Ron Fields, Nick’s ever-more-grumpy number two, sat alone in the Cosi’s on I street, just down from the Hoover fortress, nibbling disconsolately at some garish salad concoction, when he looked up to see someone vectoring in on him with a raptor’s hunger. It was the girl agent, Jean Chandler, his partner in the raid on Carl Hitchcock’s abode that had broken the case wide open, or so they’d thought, weeks ago. He didn’t want to talk to her. He was depressed, he had a headache and a long afternoon ahead, and Nick had seemed even more uncommunicative that morning. Plus, spontaneous meetings between old stars like him and newbies like her were to be avoided, for a lot of reasons: he didn’t want it said he was mentoring her, which would mean he was ignoring the other juniors; still worse, he didn’t want rumors of an extra-hours connection, much less a sexual liaison, which scuttled careers fast in the Bureau’s puritanical halls. But at the same time he couldn’t be rude.

“Starling,” he said, nodding, “imagine seeing you here.”

“Isn’t this a little low-rent for a hotshot like the great Fields?” she said, somewhat insouciantly, for the AIC/SA relationship was an extremely tricky one, part colonel/lieutenant, part Hemingway/Mailer, part Jeter/Cabrera, part Conan/Andy.

He smiled tightly.

“I usually eat in the cafeteria,” he said. “It keeps me humble, which is hard given my natural state of magnificence.”

“Look, Special—”

“You can call me Ron, Starling, at least out of the office. We raided together, we’ve sat twenty-five feet apart in the same office for the past six weeks, despite the glass wall between, and I mean that literally not metaphorically, as I’m sure I’ll be working for you shortly, and we’ve worked the same endless hours. So I won’t wreck my career if I’m seen talking to you.”

She slid in.

“It’s said you’ve already wrecked it by hanging on with Nick. You could have gone to the director and unloaded on Nick. You could have watched as they sacked him and, if you played your cards right, replaced him.”

“Anyone can succeed by betrayal,” said Fields. “It’s time-honored, a beloved Washington tradition. I’m trying to do it the old-fashioned way, through ass kissing and dumb obedience. I do tricks. I’m the Lassie of the FBI, haven’t you heard? Now, I have to say, I have a suspicion you didn’t follow me for the classy banter; you’re here for a purpose. I’m a detective; even I could figure that out.”

“I wanted to talk about Nick.”

“You mean ‘Poor Nick.’ ”

“He is getting royally screwed. They say he’s finished and he’ll take you with him. Maybe me. Now, I don’t matter, because nobody’s shot at me yet, but you and he have been shot at a lot, and it’s no good that you guys get taken down in some political influence shitstorm.”

Fields made a show of being not impressed by her passion.

“That’s the way it goes in this town. He’s fighting the power: you got lobbyists for big rich, you got three departments who want to hang a ‘case closed’ sign on it and walk away, and you got the press. Those are tough odds. And in the end, we serve at the whim of the director. So far, he’s holding fast, but yeah, the pressure is mounting. If he decides to cut us free, wave good-bye as we drift out to the horizon, that’s the town. You have to get used to it.”

“I wish I could.”

“Seriously, you’ve done good work. Let me look around and see if I can place you somewhere. Oh, I know—in Fairbanks, going after Sarah Palin’s daughter for breaking curfew. How about the pirate porno squad, you know, enforcing those ‘fines up to $250,000’ for illegal showings of Debbie Does Dallas 32?”

“No, I don’t want to leave. I want to get this guy, whoever he is, Carl Hitchcock or not. I want to put him away. Or kill him. Maybe he’s one of the names in the notebook we haven’t cleared yet. I’d like to be there when he goes down.”

“Me too. That’s why I’m sticking.”

“Here’s what I’m asking: why can’t we do something? Do we just have to take it? Can’t we find our reporter? Who’ll tell our side and make Nick look good?”

“You’re so young, Starling. You must actually believe in justice or something fantastic like that.”

“I do.”

“Let me tell you what’s going on, and why this one is so touchy. We are fighting the narrative. You do not fight the narrative. The narrative will destroy you. The narrative is all-powerful. The narrative rules. It rules us, it rules Washington, it rules everything. Now ask me, ‘What is the narrative?’ ”

“What is the narrative?”

“The narrative is the set of assumptions the press believes in, possibly without even knowing that it believes in them. It’s so powerful because it’s unconscious. It’s not like they get together every morning and decide ‘These are the lies we tell today.’ No, that would be too crude and honest. Rather, it’s a set of casual, nonrigorous assumptions about a reality they’ve never really experienced that’s arranged in such a way as to reinforce their best and most ideal presumptions about themselves and their importance to the system and the way they’ve chosen to live their lives. It’s a way of arranging things a certain way that they all believe in without ever really addressing carefully. It permeates their whole culture. They know, for example, that Bush is a moron and Obama a saint. They know communism was a phony threat cooked up by right-wing cranks as a way to leverage power to the executive. They know Saddam didn’t have weapons of mass destruction, the response to Katrina was fucked up, torture never works, and mad Vietnam sniper Carl Hitchcock killed the saintly peace demonstrators. Cheney’s a devil, Biden’s a genius. Soft power good, hard power bad. Forgiveness excellent, punishment counterproductive, capital punishment a sin. See, Nick’s fighting the narrative. He’s going against the story, and the story was somewhat suspiciously concocted exactly to their prejudices, just as Jayson Blair’s made-up stories and Dan Rather’s Air National Guard documents were. And the narrative is the bedrock of their culture, the keystone of their faith, the altar of their church. They don’t even know they’re true believers, because in theory they despise the true believer in anything. But they will absolutely de-frackin’-stroy anybody who makes them question all that, and Nick had the temerity to do so, even if he didn’t quite realize it at the time. That’s why, led by brother Banjax and whoever is slipping him data, they have to destroy Nick. I don’t know who or what’s behind it, but I do know this: they have all the cards, and if you play in that game, they will destroy you too.”

“Why can’t we simply destroy the narrative?”

“Starling, it’s everywhere. It’s all things. It’s permanent. It’s beyond. It’s beneath. It’s above. It’s in the air, the music, the furniture, the DNA, the blood, if these assholes had blood.”

“I say, ‘Destroy the narrative.’ ”

“I say, ‘You will yourself be destroyed.’ ”

She achieved a particularly cute and fetchingly petulant look, so totally charming that he fell in love with her until he remembered he had a wife and three kids.

“So you think it’s hopeless?” she asked.

“Starling—Agent Chandler, Jean, Jean, that’s it, right? Jean, listen, you do not want to get involved with these birds. They are smart and in their way they are ruthless; they will smile at you and charm you and look you in the eye, and for something they believe is the Truth, they will cut your heart out and let you bleed out in the sun. You do not need that. You have a bright future in a job you were meant to do, and if Nick gets the ax and if I get the second ax, that’s the way the ax falls. You go on with your career and put a lot of bad guys away and don’t get hung up in this stinking town. Nick’s gone, sad to say; I guess I am too, sad to say. You do not owe us a thing; you owe that cornball lady with the blindfold and the weighing pans in her mitt. She’s the one you owe, not us. I say again, old goat to young babe, do not get involved in this. It can only destroy you.”

“If we could somehow find its weaknesses. It must have weaknesses. In its very arrogance, there have to be weaknesses. We can’t just—”

“It can only destroy you. This is Dead Man Talking: it can only destroy you.”

6

From the Franklin Park warehouse, they took Mannheim to the Eisenhower and headed east in light, late traffic toward downtown, which loomed ahead like some glittery city of the future, idealized by darkness and dramatic lighting. On either side of the highway, the dreary flats of west Chicago told a different story.

Then Washington left the expressway, taking the South Pulaski exit, heading toward the precinct house on the South Side. He cut diagonally across the grimmer parts of the city, stop-and-go all the way, through old neighborhoods, under the el tracks, down old Chicago boulevards, because like all cops he knew the secret, speedy rivers in the city’s traffic map. Finally he settled on South Kedzie as he found less traffic and gunned toward the South Side, which lay beyond the Adlai Stevenson Expressway ahead.

As they drove through the night streets of Chicago, Bob told Denny Washington the strange and twisted story of Ward Bonson, naval intelligence star, brokerage king, CIA executive, and Russian mole, and how he, Bob, had tracked him through the deaths of Donnie Fenn, his wife’s first husband, and Trig Carter, prince of peace. How it had finally, so many years later, become time to hunt for Donnie and Trig’s killer; how he had tracked Bonson and left him smeared on a wall in a Baltimore warehouse.

“Whoa, Jesus. Man, you are a player. I had no idea you were anything but a broken-down NCO,” said Denny. “That is all right, Jack. Swagger, sniper, operator, counterintel genius, world-class detective, outsmarting the professionals.”

“I ain’t no genius. I just had the motivation. In his way, he killed Donnie. So Donnie didn’t die in the Vietnam war, he died in some spy game that this motherfucker and his clown brothers dreamed up. I tracked down Donnie’s killer and turned him to splatters. Justice don’t come often, but now and then it shows up for a second or two, helped along by a good trigger finger.”

“Okay, Gunny. You tell me now what to do. We’ll get this thing figured out and between the two of us, we’ll run these fucks to earth, I swear. I’m on your team from here on in.”

“You’re a good man, Denny. Few enough of you guys left, sad to say. Nick’s another and they’re trying to ruin him. Anyhow, here’s what I see. This letter,”—still untouched by anything except fingers clothed in rubber gloves, now bagged and marked as Chicago Police evidence exhibit no. 114 and riding inside Bob’s pocket—“is a coded message. It’s an instruction from a Soviet agent, Ward Bonson, to Ozzie Harris, who was either a subagent or some kind of sympathetic freelancer or agent of influence under Bonson’s area of responsibility. I guess they got to know each other in Washington in the late sixties, when both were involved heavily in the antiwar movement, though from different sides. But it turned out they were on the same team. So somehow in 1972, Bonson sends Ozzie this letter, possibly in response to a letter from Harris. I’m guessing it’s the book code, which means it’s indexed to something easy to come by but impossible to penetrate if you don’t have the key. It has to be the New York Stock Exchange results for the date of the letter. They ran in every newspaper in America, and Harris would have no trouble getting them. So we have to find them, and run each of Bonson’s recommended stocks down. Maybe it’s as simple as first letter, maybe it’s a progression of letters, maybe it’s last letter; anyway, it has to be fairly simple. So we decode it. Maybe it refers to this thing, maybe it refers to someone like Jack and Mitzi. Then we’ll see where we are.”

“That’s good,” said Denny, “but we have to keep it in evidence. I’ve already risked chain of custody with it by removing it, but I want to get to the station, log it in to evidence in the minimum amount of time—since we logged out of Unclaimed Property at 11:04, I can get it logged in by midnight; I think that’ll stand up to any court scrutiny—then you can work on it at the police station in the duty room. There’s a computer terminal—”

“I’m sure I can dig up the stock listings from that date somehow, even if I have to buy an old copy of a newspaper—”

“Oh, I’m liking it.”

“Then, if it’s something we can use, I can call Nick and we bring in the Bureau.”

“And if you can’t reach Nick, tell you what. I’m friends with a real good county prosecutor. This is a Chicago homicide, after all. These are Chicago people they gunned down. We’ll run it by Jerry and maybe he’ll take on the case. It sounds like it could go big if it’s played right, and he’d know how to play it right.”

Up ahead, Bob saw the brown mercury vapor light of the entrance to the Stevenson Expressway, a little Jetsons architecture here in the derelict section of Chicago, a construction built of concrete and machine corruption. A green sign pointed to Gary and Indianapolis, but Washington hummed ahead. The car slid under the overpass, then found itself in traffic, and came to another overhead, the ancient trusses and rivets of an el station. Rain had begun to fall lightly, scattering the light points ahead into glittery red-green stars.

“Good thinking,” said Bob.

“Oh, and one other thing,” said Washington, slowing as a light went suddenly to yellow and he knew he wouldn’t make it, while another car suddenly slid by on the left, also halting. “There’s also a possibility—”

The first bullet, passing through windshield, smeared a quicksilver maze of fractures and hit Washington in the eye, destroying it, blowing his head backward and filling the air with arterial spray.

26

Tino was the driver, Rat the shooter. Both were good at their jobs. In their midtwenties, handsome, amply tattooed, muscular, scarred, well dressed, with beautiful teeth and glossy rolls of oiled black hair, they’d come up through the Almighty Latin Kings, South Lawndale division, at one time ruling the gang’s heaviest hitters, known as the Chi-town Two Fours for their locality, which was Twenty-fourth and Drake. But the two were ambitious, without scruple, cunning and hungry, a dangerous combination. Their reputations approaching legend in gang-related street violence, they knew that the gang universe had its limits; they made a contact with a guy who knew a guy who knew a guy in the outfit, and they segued into the occasional mob hit.

It was quick, clean stuff. Tino tracked the vic, cut him off, and Rat put him down, car to car, usually a subgun, sometimes a shorty twelve. Tino was good with cars, had a genius-level reflex time, while Rat had that hand-eye thing in spades, which meant if he saw it, he put lead in it, fast. They didn’t make mistakes, they didn’t leave witnesses, and the payoffs were surprisingly generous. They hit debtors, they hit strong-arm boys, they hit witnesses, they hit Insane Maniac Disciples who’d crossed the line, they even hit a cop or two. They rapidly became known as the best in Windy, and were thinking about taking their talents nationwide, maybe flying around for guest-starring spots in wired towns like Miami, Cleveland, Detroit, even New York, though of course LA was the real center of the world as far as they were concerned, but they’d have to work out something with MS-13 before they went partying in that town. They knew you do not fuck around on MS-13 turf without MS-13 permission up front, or those crazy fucking Salvadorans will stick pliers up your anus and pull your entrails out through it an inch at a time for a very, very long weekend’s worth of dying.

This one looked almost too easy. The vics were a cop and some out-of-town cowboy guy, whatever, and they didn’t have a thought in the world that today would be their last. They were just cruising without security or even much in the way of attention paying, and the very good intelligence came from Tino’s man Vito, who repped the outfit on the South Side and had go-betweened for Tino many a time. Vito was good, solid, dependable; he owned a restaurant and wasn’t no pimp or drug lord but just a courier from the shadowy higher organization that made the big decisions and set the big policies and negotiated the rules with the various players.

Tino stole a car and picked Rat up and they met Vito behind Vito’s pizzeria at eleven that morning. Vito handed Rat a grocery bag, heavier for its size than it should have been, and Rat felt something dense and mechanical and tubular and awkward slipping around inside. It felt like something for a plumbing job. Were they going to fix a toilet?

“Swedish K, they call ’em,” Vito said. “You can run a chopper, right?”

“If it shoots, I can run it, Vito,” said Rat. “Remember, I am an artist with a Mac-10. I paint pictures with a Mac.”

“Artist my ass. This fuckin’ thing is bigger than a Mac-10. Client provided, client insisted, to be returned to client. It’s got a silencer, which is why it’s so big. Untraceable. It’s some kind of spook shit. Let me tell you, do not fuck this one up, as these customers know their business and seem to have the kind of connections that turn your mouth dry and I don’t want to have to give them bad news.”

“They scare you, Vito? They must be some heavy motherfuckers. Nothing rattles them.”

“The heaviest.”

He gave them the drill. They were to get out on the Eisenhower to Franklin Park, off Mannheim, to the Cook County unclaimed property warehouse.

“I know it,” said Tino. “My mamacita bought me a bike at auction there.”

“You ain’t looking for bikes,” said Vito. “It’s a cop Impala, gray-black, plate number K599121, you got that?”

“Got it,” said Tino, who had a talent for numbers and could remember anything.

“You follow them back into the city. It’s best to wait till they get to the South Side, which is where they’ll head. You drive careful, Tino. Stay far back, don’t rush or do anything stupid. I’m told these guys, or at least the cowboy, is tricky as hell. He’s done this kind of work, on both sides. You up for this?”

“Man,” said Rat, who’d peeked into the bag and liked what he’d seen, “I am up for anything with this cockroach killer.”

“Don’t force it. Be grown-up. You follow ’em from a long way off, you wait till they’re in traffic down here, ’cause the cop is a South Side precinct guy, and you set up next to them and you just go buzz with the buzz gun. Then you get out, you buzz each body. That gun shoots fast, watch that it don’t run out of ammo. It’s so quiet, it won’t scare the squares away. But it won’t draw cops to you either, that’s the point. You buzz each guy, put a few in the head to make sure. Then Tino uses all that magical driving power he is known for and makes you invisible in two seconds.”

“What’s paydown?”

“Oh, that’s the best part. You get ten long apiece.”

“Ten!”

Even on a cop, that was very nice.

“I told ’em, you were the best. These guys are hard but fair. You don’t need to know nothing now, and I ain’t giving you no advance because you’ll spend it on whores and Ripple, but you do this job clean and you will make many friends and set yourselves up nicely.”

“It sounds easy,” said Tino.

It was easy. They made the car in the lot and parked across Mannheim and down the block a bit. There was even a temptation to go in, hit them in the warehouse, the last place they’d be expecting it. But Tino argued no, because then what was his part in it?

When the vics emerged it was after dark, so Tino and Rat got no good look at either. They were just shapes, blurs, targets. It was better that way.

Tino watched as the Impala took Mannheim south after a daring cross-lane left turn from the lot, highly illegal but something a cop would think nothing of. That maneuver accomplished, the Impala built moderate speed, and Tino fell in two hundred yards behind, no problemo. The traffic was light and he had no trouble maintaining the distance until the vics hit the Eisenhower and took it toward downtown, again through moderate traffic at reasonable speed. The Eisenhower could be a bitch at rush hour, jamming up for miles and miles so that the fabled skyline never seemed to advance at all and it was hard to predict the way the traffic would break and squirt in segments, so you could have some trouble keeping a tail. But that never happened and the cop held in the second right lane at fifty-five, never deviating, never jumping lanes, just droning along two hundred yards or so ahead.

He even, so helpfully, signaled about a mile in advance of the turnoff at Pulaski; he signaled again when he turned left off Pulaski and then still again in another mile when he turned right down Kedzie, running through gang neighborhood after gang neighborhood, running through territory Tino and Rat knew well.

“When he passes the Stevenson,” Rat said, “another three blocks there’s that el station overhead, it’s always a choke point. He’ll stay in the right lane, we’ll breeze by and drive him into the el supports, and I’ll put the heat to ’em. Then you left and right, hit Granada, and it’s just a shot back to the Stevenson. We’ll be home before eleven.”

“It sounds good,” said Tino.

Rat slid over the seat into the rear, arranging himself against the door behind Tino. He wanted maneuvering room. “When I say, you punch down the window. Try it.”

Tino hit the button and the right back seat window hummed down, admitting a blast of fresh air. Then Tino raised it.

“Good,” said Rat.

He slipped the gun out of the grocery bag, beholding it for the first time. It looked like it felt, like some enterprise of plumbing, a joinery of pipes and tubes at right angles. It was, moreover, a kind of powdery green. A bolt riding a spring pronged from the righthand side of the main tube, just behind a cartridge ejection port; what made the thing look funny was that the tube didn’t diminish into a barrel, as on most guns, but continued, thick and long, for another full foot out, giving the whole apparatus a front-heavy look. Beyond the ejection port, that long run of tube, that was the “can,” as the silencer was called, Rat knew. This was a high-class, well-engineered professional tool, dedicated to exactly one purpose—the silent, fast extermination of the designated. He picked it up and realized that its wire stock was folded alongside. He peeled it backward by the leather-encased top strut through spring pressure, finally prying it loose, and it snapped into place, the stock fully extended. He reached back into the bag and came out with three mags, each dense for the size because each was loaded with thirty-odd 9mm cartridges, and at the top of each mag, a single cartridge was imprisoned and displayed in the lips of the magazine. Making certain it was oriented correctly, Rat eased a magazine into the housing, gently lifted it toward its destination, and felt it lock in place. He turned the gun sideways in his hand and drew back the bolt, feeling the slide of lubricated machined metal against lubricated machined metal and the increasing tension of the spring until a click signaled the bolt was set. He knew the gun was of an older type like a tommy called an “open bolt gun,” meaning you simply locked the bolt back to fire it, and when you fired, the bolt rocked in its groove, and when you let the trigger up, it collected itself at the end of the groove, ready to go again. He bent close to it, found no safety lever anywhere on the primitive firing mechanism of trigger and rear grip, and realized that a notch cut above the bolt groove, where the bolt could be lodged, was the safety. Man, they built ’em simple-simon in those days.

The gun cradled in his arms, his right hand locked around the wooden panels of the pistol grip, his right thumb resting in the nexus between magazine housing and barrel, his trigger finger indexed along the receiver over the guard, Rat mentally rehearsed his moves. Tino pulls up by the still car in the right lane and cranks hard to the right, pinning it, at the same time hitting the down button on the right rear window. Rat scootches over, favoring the left half of the window to give him angle into the car. He never bothers with eye contact or target marking; not enough time, he’s too close, these guys are too good. He raises the piece and stitches the first burst right to left, driver to passenger, across the windshield. He tried to imagine the details so they wouldn’t be shocking to him and disorient him when they occured: the spitting of the spent brass, the chug-a-chug hydraulic sensation of the bolt reciprocating at killing speed in the receiver, the muzzle flash blowing holes in his night vision, the stitchwork of punctures as the burst ate its way across the windshield, turning the glass to lace and frags, all this at a time much faster in the happening than in the telling of it. Then quick out, put a burst into the driver’s head, then step aside to get an angle and put a burst into the passenger’s head. Then back into the car and Tino drives him off.

His reverie was interrupted.

“Okay,” Tino said, his lips dry, his tongue dry, his breath dry and shallow, “just passed under the Stevenson. I see the el tracks ahead, I’m accelerating to catch up, they seem to be slowing down in the traffic, the light is changing.”

Expertly, he maneuvered the stolen vehicle through traffic, cutting a guy off, peeling through a gap, spurting into the oncoming lane, then back again, closing the distance on the unsuspecting Impala, which was itself slowing for the yellow-to-red light that impeded its progress.

“They’ve stopped, don’t have to hit them,” said Tino.

Rat held calm, felt good, had no trouble breathing, marveled at Tino’s grace behind the wheel, and the seconds rushed by. Suddenly they were even with the vehicle, then a little past it as Tino jammed to a halt just exactly where he should, and as Rat slithered forward on the seat, the window magically sank into the door, and he raised the gun to find a perfect angle on the driver and he thought, “Eat this, motherfuckers,” as he pulled the trigger.

27

Banjax reached Bill Fedders at nine, as Fedders had become his ex-officio counselor, his Deep Throat, if you will, but also his adviser, his mentor, his confessor, his priest. Banjax explained what was happening and sought Bill’s advice on whether to fish or cut bait. Go for it—Bill knew in a second—but he was smooth, he knew well enough to keep the greed out of his voice, and so he did a number on the young reporter, all wisdom and gravitas and admonitions to the ethical side of the equation, but in the end, he felt confident he’d made the sale, and he sent Banjax off on his mission with enthusiasm high.

Then Fedders poured himself a stiff Knob Creek in a crystal highball glass, let the bite of the bourbon blur a little as the ice melted, yelled upstairs to his wife that he’d be up in a second, went to his Barcalounger in front of the fire, and placed a call to Tom Constable’s private number.

“Can this wait?” said Tom, clearly in the midst of something energetic and interesting.

Bill took great pleasure in responding. “No,” he said. “Not really. You’ll want to hear it.”

“Okay,” said Tom, and the phone was set down at his end as various arrangements were made, until finally he returned.

“This better be good. She was worth every penny of the thirty-five hundred dollars and I don’t know if I can get back to where I almost was.”

“You will, Tom. Trust me. You might even surpass yourself.”

“Let’s hear it.”

“Well, it seems that brother Banjax, ace reporter that he is, has just gotten a very interesting tip. It could be the end of our problems with Special Agent in Charge Memphis.”

“He has hung in there a long time.”

“The director likes him. Everybody likes him. But not after this.”

“Go ahead.”

Fedders savored his drink, letting the mellow glow spread.

“It seems that maybe Memphis isn’t the boy scout everybody thinks he is.”

“Interesting,” said Tom.

“He may be dirty.”

“Very interesting,” said Tom.

“Now the one thing the FBI needs is sniper rifles. They’re in the lengthy proces of acquiring three hundred new ones. These rifles are traditionally built by the custom shop at Remington; they’re something called a Remington 700. A special barrel is mounted on them, a special scope, special ammo is used, all that stuff, and they’re guaranteed to shoot, hmm, I think it’s angle of minute—”

“Minute of angle,” corrected Tom, the world-renowned hunter. “It means very accurate.”

“Yeah, well, although the contract isn’t big in monetary terms—less than a million—within the gun industry it’s considered a big prestige thing. Remington has had it for years, and on account of the FBI’s belief in the product, they’ve become the preeminent sniper rifle supplier to police forces and military units the world over. That million-dollar contract is really worth twenty million annually; it also feeds civilian purchases, because so many of these gung ho gun guys want the rifle the FBI uses, for their hunting and targeting and whatever. Maybe to play sniper themselves, who knows.”

“So?”

“Well, there’s a European firm called FN. It’s part of the Belgian government, actually; FN just means ‘National Factory,’ and it has been making guns for a hundred years, and now they make a lot of our machine guns and stuff. But recently they bought up what was left of the old American firm Winchester, which produces a gun called the Model 70.”

“I have a dozen. Very fine guns, the old ones at any rate.”

“Yes, well FN has started manufacturing Model 70s again at a plant it built in South Carolina. Now if FN could get the FBI sniper rifle contract from Remington to replace the 700 with the 70, it would be an incredible coup.”

“What does this—”

“Nick Memphis, an ex-sniper, is on a committee to pick the next rifle. It seems there’s some internal feeling that it’s time to shake things up by going to the FN product, and according to Banjax’s source, Nick is in the forefront of that move. Now, it turns out he accepted an all-expenses-paid trip to South Carolina—”

“Good God, I can see selling out for a trip to Brussels, but South Carolina!”

“Hard to believe. But they flew him down there to talk to the big shots at FN, which is a big no-no without prior executive permission. It seems also that there’s a long track of ‘gifts’ made to Agent Memphis from his good friends at FN that may well be in violation of FBI guidelines. There’s lots of receipts for dinners at a local Ruth’s Chris and some mysterious checks for a place called the Carousel. And here’s the best part: there may be—and Banjax has a line on it—a photo of Nick at the FN range in South Carolina, with the new FN rifle; there’s even a date visible in the picture, if you blow it up, because he’s holding a target where he’s just fired a .321-sized group, or whatever, and signed and dated the target.”

“Where did all this come from?”

“In my opinion, it came from Remington. These guys play rough and they are very worried about losing this contract. So they hired a security firm to monitor the process, and one of their guys evidently came up with it.”

“So, Memphis is dirty. The Bureau can’t stay with him then, right? He’s out, he’s gone, he’s history.”

“He’s definitely history.”

“And the Times will run this story?”

“They’re way out ahead of everyone, and in that business, that’s the greatest thing. They can feel it so close it’s driving them nuts with desire. A scoop. A big, government-humiliating, career-wrecking scoop. That’s how Pulitzers are won. Corruption and misjudgment, sniffed out by a vigilant press—it’s the cocaine that makes them insane. You’re damn right they’ll run it.”

“So that’s the straw that broke the camel’s back. Or the rifle that shot out the camel’s spine.”

“That’s right, Tom. When Banjax gets the photo and it’s vetted by the photo experts the Times hires, we’ll have him. Memphis has to go. And I’ll make sure the next guy is more cooperative.”

28

Swagger hit the floor hard amid a spray of glass sleet from the windshield as the burst atomized the glass, a bullet flying so close by his neck he felt the breeze. He wedged himself low into the cave under the dash, thanking God he’d forgotten to buckle up for safety, hearing the bullets bang hard off the hood, the engine block, back again to the windshield as the gunner dumped his mag into the vehicle. He blinked hard to force himself to face the reality of what was happening, knowing that if he stayed there in the fetal curl on the floor, the gun boy would come out, stick the snout of his subgun through the window, and dump the next mag entirely into Mr. B. L. Swagger, late of planet Earth.

Inspiration came from—well, who knows? God? Intelligent design? A hundred previous gunfights? The obviousness of what was before his nose, which was Denny’s gigantic foot resting on the gas pedal? Swagger craned upward, spun the wheel against Denny’s dead hands hard to the left, then elbowed Denny’s dead foot, pushing pedal to floor. The car leaped and, as the distance was short, built no killing momentum, but still it hit the killers’ car on the oblique with a clanging charge of energy, enough to spin Bob himself almost backward against the seat.

But now he had a plan, and a man with a plan is a man with a chance. He reached up, pushing Denny’s jacket aside, and plucked the Sig 229 from his hip holster, unsnapping it and making sure to pull it straight out, duplicating the draw angle so that the sights wouldn’t get caught in the holster and no security device would pin it. Out it slid, and now he had a plan and a gun, and he had his opponents possibly in a daze from the unexpected smash of car one into car two. He squirmed back to his own off-driver’s-side door, hit the latch, and tumbled out. Crawling madly down the length of the car, ripping knees and hands to shreds on the pavement, he emerged over the right front wheel well, putting tire and heavy axle and brake system as well as engine block between him and the killers, and saw the enemy car at an angle, slightly askew, its door caved and wearing his own car’s left front as its new fashion accessory. A figure behind the wheel struggled with his seat belt, clumsy from the shock of the collision, mind a stew of confusions.

Bob found the Sig a blocky little piece of guncraft that fit his hands glove-smooth and went to target hungrily; he locked his elbows as he put the front sight smack on the target twelve-odd feet away, fired four times on the angle and watched as the windshield fogged into quicksilver as the penetrating bullets left their legacy of fractured abstraction. Behind those smears, the dark figure kicked taut, then slumped sideways.

Bob withdrew, and a good thing too, as in seconds, maybe nanoseconds, a burst of automatic fire came hurtling his way to spall off the hood and spray randomly into the air, chewing up metallic debris, paint dust, and friction-driven sparks. He saw now what was so strange about all this—the absence of the other man’s percussions, as his weapon was clearly suppressed. The bursts had a low, wet, rattly sound, as if made by a child playing at tommy gun with a throatful of phlegm.

Swagger started to rotate right, to get around the bumpers of both cars, flank the shooter, and take him down from the low defilade, even as he knew that if the guy was no idiot, he too would now be on the move, rotating also to the right. So he stopped, reversed his direction, and began a journey to the left, the long way around, to find and kill his man.

Rat watched the bullets take out the windshield and all behind them in a long sparkly rip, right to left, horizontal, but had a kind of inkling of disaster as the dancing web of punctures didn’t seem to catch up quite to the rapidly disappearing number two target. He realized he should have gone left to right, goddamnit, and cursed himself for fearing the cop’s handgun more than the agility and quickness of the unarmed but highly experienced man. He ate up the rest of the magazine—once you start shooting these things it’s hard to stop, so seductive is the rhythm, the power of the recoil, the imagery of the world dissolving before the godlike reach of your bullet stream—shooting out more windshield glass, tearing up the hood, hoping to start a fire or send something through to take out the quick mover, but he knew: Houston, we have a problem.

The gun ran dry. If he’d more experience, he could have dumped the empty in a second and been back on target in the next, but he wasn’t sure where the mag release was, and by the time he got it tripped to drop the empty box, found another, heavier box, got it inserted and locked into place, he raised his eyes just in time to experience astonishment.

The Impala piled into their car. The clang sent him thundering against the door, and the gun slipped from his grip. Holy fuck, where’d that come from? Spangles, fireworks, flashbulbs, all kinds of optic disturbance filled his tiny, concentrated mind, and he had to head-shake hard to get himself back to reality. He reached, felt for the gun, got it up, checked intelligently to see if the mag was still locked in place, checked again that the bolt was back and locked open, and came up to rejoin the fight just in time to blow his night vision on the four fast, bright muzzle flashes of his guy firing across both hoods through his front windshield, where dazed Tino struggled with seat- belt confusion. Too late for Tino; the bullets found him in chest and head, and Rat felt the hot spray of blood splattering from a high-velocity impact on flesh as Tino made some indecipherable sound of regret and slumped to the left like a sack of apples. Rat got the subgun—now it seemed so long—up and oriented in that direction and squeezed off a burst that ripped hell out of at least three panes of thick auto glass—his own right front, the guy’s left front and, going through and out, what remained of the windshield; the bullets left a galaxy of spatter-pattern fissures as they flew, and many hit the hood where the other shooter had been but was no longer, spanging off in a spray of sparks and pulverized auto paint.

With his elbow he knocked the handle on the door behind him and spilled out. He hit the ground, gathered himself quickly into a shooter’s crouch, and looked for targets. It was so quiet. All street sounds had died, all traffic had stopped, the many civilians had frozen or slunk away to let the players work out their gun drama on their own. For the first time in his life, Rat felt fear. His bowels almost came loose and the ice water that he’d thought filled his veins churned into his lower colon instead.

This guy was a pro. He was so fucking good. How could he get to guns so fast? Usually when the bullets flew, even the most hardened cops went into a kind of daze and it took seconds, sometimes minutes, before they were functioning efficiently, and it was in that gap that Rat made his living.

But not tonight.

Move! he ordered himself, rising slightly, again peering over the horizon of shattered glass, bullet-pierced vehicles, drifting smoke, and lights diffused in the drizzle for a target and saw none. He realized: he’s coming to get me, meaning he’ll be coming around the front of the locked cars, and when he gets to my bumper, he’s got cover and I don’t.

That got his ass moving. He scrambled left down the side of the car, dipped behind its tail, and felt vaguely secure, when the second brilliant idea hit him.

Shoot under the car.

He dropped to his knees, inserted the K under the car horizontally and squeezed out an arc of 9-mil, the gun spurting, the muzzle flaring, the bullets digging up dust and earth from the pavement as they swept right to left in search of the legs of the other man. Surely they’d take him down hard, and Rat could advance from the rear, put some finishers into him, and disappear down an alleyway. He wondered, Will I get Tino’s ten long?

But the gunman wasn’t crouched behind the car. His legs were not available for Rat’s strategy. Instead, guessing it, he’d climbed upon his own hood, and in six agile steps bounded over his own roof to his trunk, where he stood above Rat, whose gun remained planted underneath the vehicle.

“Drop it,” he said, though both were aware that Rat could no more drop it than he could drop his trousers, and as Rat pulled back to free his weapon, the tall cowboy shot him three times expertly in the chest so fast it sounded like he was the machine gunner.

The shots hit like hammer blows and scattered Rat’s mind. He thought of all kinds of extraneous bullshit and had a kind of memory dump as half- or quarter-images from his twenty-six years fluttered through his brain like a fast shuffle of cards, and the next thing he knew he was choking on blood and looking into the close-up face of his slayer, who pressed the gun muzzle hard into his throat, to fire the spine breaker if that were necessary, though both realized by now it wasn’t.

“Go to hell,” said Rat.

“No doubt,” Rat heard the reply, “but not before you.”

Gunsmoke and silence hung in the air.

Swagger kicked the machine pistol further under the car, where the cops would find it.

He walked around the tilted Impala, looked in and saw Denny, ruined head back against the headrest, eyes unblinkingly open, blood like a broken bottle of wine down his shirt.

“I’m so sorry, Captain,” he said to nobody. “You were the best; you deserved so much more. I swear to God there will be justice for this.”

Then he reached into his pocket, made sure the plastic bag with Ward Bonson’s coded letter to Ozzie Harris was still secure.

He stood. All along the street people were emerging from shadows.

Now what?

If I stay, I’m hung up in Chicago cop paperwork for a week, and these bad guys hunting my ass know exactly where I am. I have to give up the letter and wait for the Bureau to save my ass, assuming the Bureau, meaning Nick, can save my ass.

If I disappear, I have no resources, I am probably wanted as a witness, I am fleeing the scene of a crime, though I didn’t commit it, and there will be questions to answer for months when and if we finally get this goddamn mess settled.

But there is one thing I can do on my own that I can’t do in police custody.

I can hunt.

With that, he fired a shot in the air, to drive the peepers back to cover, turned down an alley, and was on the next block in total darkness before he heard the first siren.

29

Late night DC, traffic down, the city full of shadows, even parking available, most of the food joints that depended on lunch trade closed, few pedestrians. David Banjax found a space on the street, wandered around the buildings along Fifteenth Street between M and K, noted that the one on the southeast corner belonged to the competition. It was some seventies monstrosity, characteristic of the horrors of Big Paper architecture the world over. The places, even his own, all looked like midrange insurance agencies, both inside and out these days. At any rate, he kidded himself that they were working late at the Washington Post, maybe trying to keep up with him and the Sniper scandal. But they never would. He was so far ahead.

He walked around the corner, past a Radio Shack and a Korean lunch joint, and turned into a parking lot entrance, a wide, descending driveway, in the corner building, which adjoined the Post. It was deserted but not dark, and he wound down the spiral two levels, past a helter-skelter of the medium-price sedans that reporters and copy editors preferred, until he finally reached the bottom. He didn’t like it: no escapes, not that there should be any danger. Still, his breath came hard, the air tasted icy, his lungs felt too small. He licked dry lips with a dry tongue. Are you sure this is how Bob Woodward got his start?

In a row of cars ahead of him, headlights winked on and off. He made his way to that vehicle, a Kia, clearly a rental, and made out the figure of a man in the front seat, behind the wheel. David nodded, the figure nodded back, but at that moment, across the way, an elevator door opened, a blade of light penetrated the dimness, and a couple of people walked out, laughing. David dropped between cars and waited as the two made it to a nearby car—“He actually thought ‘disinterested’ meant ‘uninterested’! He must be in his fifties! How stupid is that?” he heard—climbed in, started up, and pulled out. Copyreaders! The same everywhere!

When the car had disappeared, David approached the mystery vehicle and noted with both approval and a chortle that the man was wearing a fedora and a pair of Wayfarer sunglasses. He opened the off-side front door and heard a voice say, “Rear, please, that side. I will look at you in the mirror. You do not look back; keep your eyes down.”

Now the convening literary master seemed to be John le Carré. It was turning into a spy novel. Wasn’t this the part where the pawn gets murdered by a silenced .22? Or does the pawn miraculously escape the assassination, go on the run, and somehow still bring down the government and put the bad CIA cell in prison and win the Pulitzer Prize and write a best seller, all in 350 pages.

He obeyed.

“This is a little melodramatic, isn’t it?”

“Look, pal, I don’t need snark. I know you people like wisecracks, but stow the fucking wisecracks and be dead literal and we will get along a lot better. This isn’t a fucking movie.”

“I understand.”

“Throw the tape recorder in the front seat.”

“I—”

“Throw the tape recorder in the front seat.”

Banjax threw the tape recorder in the front seat.

“Now throw the other tape recorder in the front seat.”

“Hey, I—”

“Throw the other tape recorder in the front seat.”

Banjax threw the other tape recorder in the front seat.

“I may have to prove this meeting took place, you know.”

“I didn’t turn ’em off. I’ll return ’em if I conclude you’re straight and that I didn’t give something away I didn’t mean to give away.”

“Okay. Sensible. Now what have you got for me? And who are you?”

“Who I am is not relevant. I may be this, I may be that. I may be a courier or a controller or a rogue. You will never know. But I have a gift for you, as I said I did. It’s amazing how successful you’re about to be on my generosity.”

“I’m sure you’re getting something out of it. Nothing’s free in this town.”

“Hmm, fast learner,” the spy guy said. Then, with a kind of practiced insouciance, as if he’d done this many times, he tossed a manila envelope over the seat to the rear, and it landed exactly in the space next to Banjax. Banjax noted the man was wearing gloves.

“Okay,” he said. “Should I open?”

“Not here. What you have is Xeroxes of internal FN documents, from their South Carolina headquarters, recording their courtship of, their involvement with, their bribes to, their payoffs to, and finally their comments on Nick Memphis, FBI.”

“How the hell—”

“We’re good. We’re not amateurs. You are not dealing with self-dramatizing whistle-blowers who are trying to get a segment on 60 Minutes. You get to go on 60 Minutes, not us.”

“How can I authenticate? I have to authenticate.”

“That’s your problem. Our mole didn’t have time to get affidavits.”

“Well, there’s a time thing here. I—”

“Jesus. Let’s see, you might use Freedom of Information to get FN’s original cover letter to the FBI seeking submission paperwork for the sniper rifle contract trials. Then run a typefont comparison. Or I’ll tell you what, since time is a factor, find someone in the Bureau to leak those documents to you to shortcut the FOI process. You pick ’em, not us; that’s your guarantee of integrity. Run the typefont comparison. If you get a match, you’ve proven that the FN official submission and the internal memorandum came from the same printer.”

“There’s only one printer in South Carolina?”

“In the FN USA headquarters, yeah. How big do you think it is? We’re talking a gun company, not IBM.”

“Okay,” said Banjax, who had no picture in his mind for a thing called a “gun company.”

“So you’ve made your guy. Hello, Mr. Pulitzer Prize. Why, good morning, Miss Senior Editor, Big New York Publisher. Do you know who I’m talking about?”

“Yes, I know. Woodward’s—”

“David is a smart boy.”

“You said you had a photo.”

“I do. But it’s not in the package.”

“Why not? If you’ve got it—”

“I want you to authenticate this thing first. Then you contact me by, hmm, I don’t know, wearing an orange toilet seat around your neck to work one day. That’ll be a spy-type tip-off.”

“I’m out of orange toilet seats. Will pink do?”

“Wear a hat one day. Guys your age never wear hats. It can be a baseball cap, a stocking cap, I don’t care, a Sherlock Holmes cap. Wear it, we’ll note it, and you’ll get the photo by courier that afternoon, your bureau. If you’re not an idiot, you’ll figure out that the photo has to be vetted by top photo professionals, to make sure it’s legit. Can your failing newspaper afford that?”

“If I can get it before they turn the bureau into a bowling alley, yes.”

“Otherwise it goes to Drudge.”

“I hear you.”

“David, fast, fast, fast now. We can work fast. Can you dead-tree folks stay with us?”

“Yes, I can.”

“Good. Now take your tape recorders—no lookee, see?—and get out of here. Go stand in the corner while I drive away. No peeking. And welcome to the big leagues, Woodstein.”

30

Swagger awoke from ugly dreams with a start. The phone was ringing. Not his cell phone, the room phone. He blinked, trying to remember. Oh, yeah, Indianapolis. Near the Notre Dame campus, for its theoretical richness in wired coffeehouses. An Econo Lodge; it looked like the best room in Nowheresville, decorated in a nice shade of babyshit brown.

He stared at the ringing monster on the nightstand. This was not good. If it had been his cell, it could have been anybody, but if it was this phone, it meant someone was already on him. On the other hand, maybe it was housekeeping. He looked at his watch, saw that it was almost eleven. He’d sacked out here at 3 a.m. after a dreary bus ride.

He picked up the phone.

“Yeah.”

“Bob?”

It was Nick.

“You figured out where I am.”

“We are the FBI, you know. We do this kind of thing for a living.”

“I—”

“No, you just listen to me. In words of two syllables, what the fuck is going on? I have some big gunfight in Chicago with a dead officer, two dead gangbangers, and a missing witness thought by many to be an FBI undercover. That sounds like a Bob Lee Swagger operation. I have the Chicago cops, I have the Cook County prosecutors, I have my own Chicago field office all screaming bloody hell at me, and of course I have my own director furious at me because he warned me Swagger couldn’t be controlled and I assured him I could control Swagger and then I assured him I’d sent you home to rock on the porch. Oh, and I have the New York Times alleging on its front page that I’m dirty. Hmm, I think we could agree, it’s kind of a mess.”

“I sure wouldn’t want to be in your shoes,” said Bob. “Can’t help with the papers. Never read ’em. I get my news from Fox.”

“I need you in. I can have Indiana state troopers at that motel in ten minutes if it’s an issue of security. I need you cooperating with the Chicago people, playing by all the rules. Maybe, just maybe, we can make fleeing the scene of a crime go away. And when we get all that straightened out, then maybe we can see where we are on the sniper. Oh, and I need Denny Washington’s Sig back. For his widow.”

“I will personally return it to her when this is over. Right now, I may need it, even if it’s only got four rounds left. Maybe I can put ’em where they’ll do some good.”

“Swagger, listen to me.”

“Nick, if I go to Chicago I’m stuck there for weeks. I have to move fast. These people now know I’m on to them, and they will go back over their tracks and wipe everything out and I’ll be left with nothing but suspicions. And when it all dies down, they’ll come to Idaho, and just like Joan Flanders, they’ll put a little cross on me from a long way out and put a 168er dead bang center into me.”

“Chicago thinks this was a gang hit on Denny Washington, who had busted several Latin Kings leaders on big murder ones over the past few years. He was a very good cop and he did them a lot of damage. So they targeted him and took him out. The shooters were Kings; you just happened to be in the car.”

“No way,” said Bob. “That’s how it was supposed to look, but the signature of this outfit is that it sets up its hits inside fraudulent narratives, which you guys get roped into every goddamn time. But tell me, did you see the piece? It was a submachine gun—”

“Bob, it’s a mob town from way back. That doesn’t prove a thing. Every Italian restaurant in the greater metro area probably has a Thompson hidden in the wine cellar.”

“This was no Thompson. It was a suppressed Swedish K, an agency favorite in the ’Nam. I had an SOG tour, I saw the cowboys with them all over the place. That’s a rare piece of spook hardware, probably aren’t two hundred of them in the world, put together in the late sixties by company armorers at Tan Son Nhut. You don’t get a subgun like that from the wine cellar or the local machine gun store. You have got to be wired into spookworld to pry one free, ex-spook, some kind of mercenary, some kind of spec ops professional, someone in the big game one way or the other. It’s exactly what Graywolf would have in its arms vault, and it’s just made for maximum firepower with minimum noise, exactly what’s needed for street gun- downs.”

“The report just said European machine pistol.”

“The Chicagos didn’t know what they had. I did, because I saw it up close after the shooting. Get your weapons people to look at it, and I guarantee you they will be impressed by the high quality of the workmanship, the genius of the engineering, and the absence of a serial number or any identifying marker. That baby’s as black as the hubcaps of hell.”

Nick was silent.

“Nick, I have a lead. Washington and I found something that points in a certain direction. We were headed to the station to enter it into evidence. But now that Washington is dead, I’ve broken the chain of custody, which means it can never be used as trial evidence. It can only be used by a rogue, someone unaffiliated. Let me follow it, and before I do anything stupid, I will clear with you. But if I come in now, all that is lost, Denny Washington’s death is meaningless, and what we found goes away. I can’t let that happen. I want to run the lead and lay it before you. It’s only a matter of a few hours doing some basic research. You keep my involvement secret, you let me operate the way I have to operate, and I will clear with you before I jump. Just cover for me a little while longer.”

“See, that’s the other thing. There may not be ‘a little while longer.’ This reporter today published some bogus documents all across the front page of the Times alleging that I’m on the take from some gun company to get them a contract. I may be gone at any second. Then what happens to Swagger?”

“Swagger’s been on his own before.”

“Swagger’s been lucky as hell before. That luck will turn; it’s way overdue.”

“Nick, I’m begging you. Let me hunt. I will bag you something big, I swear.”

“You’ve got six hours,” said Nick, and hung up.

It took nearly the full six hours. Bob called his broker in Boise, asked how he could obtain a copy of the final stock market report from—he checked the letter from Bonson to Ozzie, still wearing his rubber gloves—September 23, 1972.

His broker didn’t know of an Internet archive, but he himself had a brother who worked in a big New York brokerage and would place that call. In the meantime, Bob checked the phone book, discovered a nearby place with computer rentals, and called. They delivered an Apple MacBook Pro, and he got online from his room, checked e-mail, news accounts, read the Times piece on Nick—aghhhhh!—and got a call finally from his broker, who said his brother had suggested he try the Wall Street Journal, which had its pages all archived online. The broker had another client who had, he knew, a son-in-law on the international accounting desk of the Wall Street Journal, so through that client and his son-in-law, a tenuous but impressive skein of fragile connections all beholden to or fond of the person next to them in line, an e-mail with an attachment containing those pages arrived in Bob’s e-mail account a few minutes later.

And the son-in-law was as good as his word. There it was. Bob held his breath because getting things open wasn’t his strong suit, but he managed to do just that. As a document it would be hard to manipulate, because he could only go through one long column at a time, to say nothing of the fact that he hadn’t broken the code yet. That would be the first order of business.

It turned out to be the easiest thing he did that day. Bonson, all those years ago, was a very busy man and kept his professional espionage communiqués simple and the codes hiding them even simpler; he knew that was how far under the radar he was, even then. So what looked like a simple letter containing a list of stock recommendations was instead organized to yield a message, once the key was determined and the pattern figured out. It had to be simple, so that a man without training could piece it together.

It was. His pattern was a backward regression. Thus the first stock recommendation in the letter, ITGO PAK, yielded a K; the second, AMJWEL, an E, the third, KOMEST, another E, and the fourth, NOPINC, a P, for a first word of keep. This went on a few progressions, then, as the stock abbreviations were necessarily short, began again, usually on the fifth letter. Bonson, rushing, even made some mistakes. But three hours later, Swagger ended up with:

Keep item secure. It may prove useful later. Do not share any hint of it with anybody, and don’t release to press, no matter how it clears clients.

The clients? “Clearing” them? Would that be Jack and Mitzi, and would “clearing” them have some reference to the bank robbery, with two guards shot dead, that they were suspected of committing? So did it mean they were not guilty of that? That proof would be a nice thing for them to have, even at this late date. It would open a lot of doors. The item? What could it be? He realized he’d have to go back and read more carefully about those days to even come up with a guess. But whatever it was, Ozzie Harris, in his travels through leftist America in the early seventies, somehow got hold of it. He held it. For years and years he held it. Possibly he contacted Bonson again over those long years, and Bonson could see no use for it and continued to order Ozzie to hold tight. Eventually, as Bonson joined the Agency and began his rise, and his career of careful betrayal, he may have forgotten about it. Or maybe he was saving it for some reason, with some great goal in mind. But then he ran into one Bob Lee Swagger and ended up looking all Jackson Pollack—except for his legs—on a metal warehouse wall, and if he’d been controlling Ozzie Harris all those years, he’d left that one thing undone. Ozzie, dying ten years later, knew all along that it had major bearing on the case of Jack Strong and Mitzi Reilly. In the end, only Jack and Mitzi had been there for him, and Bob saw how it would be of use to Ozzie in “clearing” them, and so he told them about it, maybe gave them the key to his apartment, and they’d gone to the place, looked under the bed, reached up into the structure, and Jack had yanked it free of the four yellowing strands of Scotch tape that had held it in place for so many years.

But when they realized what it was, they also realized it somehow had value. Great value. Somehow, it could be used to leverage millions of dollars to them, a lot more than “clearing” them ever could. That was the game they had tried to play, possibly seeing it as their reward for long years of service to the cause but not seeing how dangerous it was. Typical of the type: they love the violence of the game but can’t believe it will ever turn, as it always does, monstrous and eat them alive. Whomever they had tried to leverage was such a monster and decided on a different course. He didn’t want to give them the money; he gave them, instead, a bullet in the head in their broken-down Volvo in the alley behind their soon-to-be-foreclosed house. And this monster, whoever he was, found it so important to him that he not be connected to the case and that he obtain the whatever it was, the MacGuffin, the whoozie, the whatsit, that he buried that enterprise in a larger, camouflaging enterprise, a false narrative about an insane marine sniper, who’d snapped when he found that someone else had more kills in ’Nam. And he’d hired the best mercenaries in the world to make it go down just right. Joan Flanders and Mitch Greene were assholes, sure, but guess what, nobody’s asshole enough to end up like that, with a 168er punching your guts or brains out to help someone keep his dirty little secrets buried. And Carl and Denny, even less did they deserve their parts in the drama; to this guy, they were just action-movie extras the hero blows away, without names or pasts or lives. He was protecting himself; he had money, he had juice, he had influence, he was part of this whole thing and always had been. There was only one man it could be, because there was only one player on the board big enough to make it all happen. And that would have its own set of terrible problems to solve, formidable obstacles to climb, penetrations to be made, confrontations to win. But Bob couldn’t bring himself to say the name and face those challenges yet. It filled him with depression and it sucked his energy: so far to go, so hard a trek. Instead, he looked at his watch and saw that it was time to call Nick. He knew he had to do it fast or he’d decide against it and instead go hunting again, as in the old days.

He picked up the cell, dialed Nick’s number. Not only was there no answer, there was no voice mail.

That was odd.

He tried again and found the same, tried three more times. Finally he called the general 1-800 FBI number, waited for a human to arrive after two minutes of robo-voices, got an operator and asked for Special Agent Memphis. He was transferred to what had to be a ten-year-old intern and told that Special Agent Memphis wasn’t available. Would he care to leave a message? Bob thought a second; then he said, “Give me, uh”—what was the name?—“Special Agent, uh, Chandler, I think it’s Jean Chandler.”

Clicks, pops, silence, at least no Muzak.

“Chandler.”

“Special Agent, this is Bob Lee Swagger—”

“Swagger! Where are you? Everybody’s trying to find you.”

Nick hadn’t told anyone. Would she have time to set up a trace on the call? He guessed not, then second-guessed himself and started to hang up, then third-guessed himself and decided he had to know and he could bail out fast if it came to that.

“Ma’am, I’d prefer not to say.”

“You have to come in. We need you here.”

“I am not out of control. I told Nick I wouldn’t do a thing without his say-so. I will stick to that. May I please speak with him?”

“I’ll call you back.”

“I’d prefer to call you back. You’re not tracking me? You’re not setting me up or nothing?”

“We don’t operate that way.”

“Give me a number and a time. I’ll call you tonight.”

“I won’t track you, Swagger. I have things to tell you and you have things to tell me. This is not a good place for a conversation.”

Christ, she was stubborn!

He hated being at the cusp of the decision, but he remembered his earlier conversation with her and how she’d seemed to adore Nick. So maybe she was still on Nick’s team.

He gave her his cell number, knowing that she’d already written it down from the caller ID feature.

He left the room, looked for a fire escape, found none. He went back to the room, went out on his balcony. The motel backed onto fencing and an alley, now deserted. Through trees, some kind of university structure was visible. But no one could see him. Groaning, remembering how the limberness had seemed to lessen with each day he aged, he pulled himself from the balcony railing by way of the gutter and got to the roof. His hip still ached a little from an old wound, then a bad cut in Japan, but he made it. No one saw him. He went to the front of the building, looking over the parking lot and the busy avenue. If cops came, he’d see them come and could maybe, somehow—

The cell rang, some absurd ringtone, out of vaudeville. Had to get a new one.

“Swagger.”

“Nick’s been benched,” she said.

“Jesus.”

“It’s not formal. He didn’t have to turn in his badge and gun. It’s not a suspension. The director said he would appreciate it as a ‘favor’ if Nick went home while the Times story was the big news in town. The idea was he would not be suspended and have to turn in his things, nothing goes on the record, but at the same time, he would take no part in Bureau business until the situation clarified. He turned in his cell phone and the key to his office and went home at three; he is officially out of the loop for now, while Professional Responsibility investigates these charges the Times has raised. He will be interviewed sometime next week. So he can’t be called, he can’t be consulted, he is officially out of the game, and if you reach him somehow and try to talk, you compromise him, and I know you don’t want to do that.”

“No, of course not. He’s not dirty. For God’s sake, you know that. He’s not dirty.”

“I agree. However, the Times claims its experts have matched fonts on two letters, proving the incriminating one came from this FN outfit in South Carolina. That’s why you have to come in. You may have to talk to our investigators and give a deposition on your arrangement with Nick and make them see that he can’t be dirty. If you avoid that, you do him no good at all.”

“Oh, Christ.”

“You won’t help?”

“It’s not that. It’s that I found a piece of evidence in Chicago that’s very suggestive. Unfortunately, because of that gunfight, it got taken out of the chain-of-custody linkage. That means you folks can’t never use it. I have to follow up on it, because only a rogue can do that, and I have to do it fast. This is a fluid situation, the people behind this are very clever, and now that they know I’ve made a connection to them, they will retrace their tracks, wipe them out, wipe the slate clean, make sure no evidence, no witnesses, no anything survives. I was trying to move against them before that could happen.”

“You cannot ‘move against’ anybody, Mr. Swagger. You are not authorized, you have no arrest powers, you are not an FBI agent. I know you’re a lone wolf type, but you will only screw things up. Please, for Nick’s sake, come in here and make yourself accessible. You have friends here, people who knew about and remember Bristol. Take advantage of that good will; don’t squander it on cowboy stuff.”

“What happens to the investigation during all this headquarters bullshit?”

She hesitated for a second, her silence a harbinger of bad news.

“A new temporary supervisor to Task Force Sniper has come aboard. He’s a headquarters guy, and his job is to smooth over things. We have been directed to prepare the report for release to the press. The report finding Carl Hitchcock and Carl Hitchcock alone responsible for the murders of Joan Flanders, Jack Strong and—”

Swagger felt the floor of his stomach give out. He had a dizzy flash, then a headache.

“I thought you’d agreed the baked paint debris on the weapon indicated—”

“There will be an appendix dealing with other possibilities. As yet, we’ve interviewed over seventy-five new persons of interest and come up with nothing concrete. We have Chicago and Ohio and now the New York State Police telling us to declare the case closed.”

“So he wins?”

“Who wins?”

“You know who.”

“No sir, I don’t.”

“Of course you do. Only one man connected to this thing has the power, the influence, the ruthlessness, the—”

“Swagger, listen to me very carefully. That kind of thinking has no place in modern law enforcement. We work from facts, not theories. We let the facts point to the guilty. If we have theories, they twist the way we see the facts. So far we have not turned up one fact indicating that someone else is behind this. No matter what you surmise or what seems conspiratorially logical to you by the rules of too many movies, we cannot and will not operate that way. Let me further warn you that any action you take to investigate or intimidate a private citizen, a rich one or a poor one, a violent one or a passive one, a professional or some Joe on the street, may well be viewed as assault, and it will be prosecuted extremely aggressively, if the Bureau has anything to do with it.”

“There’s a campaign to ruin Nick. You know it, I know it. To ruin him because he bought into my read on the case and made time to run it out. Someone hated that, couldn’t allow it, and set out to destroy him. So right now, ma’am, it looks like his only chance is me, not you. I don’t know what you headquarters people are doing. You’re just letting somebody railroad your best man, and it ain’t right. It is not right, I don’t care what the law says. Now tell me, please, confirm for me, who is behind this campaign against him? I know you’ve examined it.”

“I am not able to share any investigative product with you, Mr. Swagger. No names, no information. It’s for internal use only.”

“I have—”

“You don’t have anything, Swagger. The Bureau will take care of Nick fairly, I guarantee you. If you go off on some crusade, you lose our protection. As it is now, Nick’s last official act was to call the Cook County prosecutor’s office and inform them that the missing witness was undercover FBI and therefore should not be identified and pursued in alert bulletins. You’re a free man now because of that decision, which frankly I think is a bad one. Don’t do anything to hurt Nick, to make him look bad.”

“Someone’s got to protect him. You guys aren’t doing a goddamn thing, it sounds like.”

“Look, just be cool. If you won’t come in, go to ground. A week is going by with nothing happening. It’ll take that long for us to polish the report and for Professional Responsibility to run checks on Nick and the FN fonts to see if this holds water. On top of that, you respect our rules, by which I mean you have no information whatsoever that’s actionable, no name has popped up, you can identify no suspects, and anything you do is groundless and can only end by screwing things up. You stay put. Do I have your promise?”

“Same deal. You don’t have me arrested, I won’t jump without clearing it by you.”

She moaned.

“Swagger, you are a bastard.”

“I am, but I’m an honest one, Agent Chandler. If it comes to it, I will move aggressively to right this wrong, inside the law I hope, but outside it if necessary. I ain’t telling you no fairy tales, young woman. I am a sniper and I will go about my business the sniper way.”

“A week, or I cut papers now and make you number one on the hit parade.”

“A week then. Dammit, you drive a hard bargain, young lady.”

“A week,” she said. “By the way, that gunfight? Great shooting, Sniper.”

31

The hat seemed redundant as well as ridiculous. The story appeared today, featuring the confirmation from a bonded legal document master that the FN proposal and the FN internal notes came from the same printer, thus verifying the internal notes as being of FN origin, so what was the point of the hat? But the guy had said a hat, so Banjax wore a hat, an old Yankees cap. He had a moment of unease; the Redskins had just been creamed by the Giants, and maybe that idealized scrollwork NY on the blue cap would get him beaten up by an angry mob of notoriously volatile Redskins fans from, say, the hard guys at CNN or USA Today—he laughed at his own joke—but in seconds he saw that there was no particular brand loyalty on the streets of DC, as everyone wore a hat of his own choosing, from some kind of knit Afghan cap to stockings to baseball caps pledging allegiance to teams from all over the world. There was probably one from the Tehran Mud Hens.

He arrived late to the bureau, as befit a star. He actually didn’t like big story days, because he was somewhat self-conscious; he preferred to not appear when he had a big one riding above the fold. But he had to be here, and so he made the most out of his victory lap, modestly accepting the congrats that came to him, the looks of admiration, the winks and thumbs-up. Still, he had to admit, it was pretty cool, though not quite as cool as when his editor told him the document master had confirmed that both docs had come from the same printer and that page one was taking the piece. He’d been so lucky; Will Rashnapur, who covered the Justice Department, had a Bureau source and had been able to get a Xerox of the original FN proposal quickly. That was the hang-up and it could have taken weeks, but whoever it was delivered within twenty-four hours, so the freight-train momentum of the scandal was maintained.

He sat at his desk and began his ritual. First, he turned on his monitor and onlined the Post, the LA Times, the WSJ, the Tribune, and none of them had caught up, although on its Web site the Post had rushed a denial from the FBI PIO and another no comment from FN, as if gun companies ever spoke with the press. He checked Drudge and was gratified to see “Paper—FBI Agent in Snipergate took free air, steaks and a night at Carousel from gun boys.” He Googled “Sniper Nick” and got a thousand hits, the first fifty of which were simply repeats of an AP follow-up that some poor schmo had put together at 4 a.m. after the Times’s first edition broke on the Net.

Someone lurked. He looked up; it was Jenny Fiori, the TV

liaison.

“Okay, hero,” she said, “take your pick. Matthews, Olbermann, or O’Reilly. More audience at O’Reilly, but he’ll just call you a commie and yell at you. More prestige at Matthews, but he won’t let you finish your sentences. Olbermann will be the most fun, unless his leg starts twitching, at which point he turns nasty. Some dweebs at CNN also want you, but that doesn’t look like much. I’d go with Matthews.”

“I like Chris. He’s okay. You can’t get me off cable and onto one of the big networks? Katie? Brian, that guy—”

“The nets don’t give you enough time and New York frowns on them. It’s usually about making the anchor look smart. You can do any of the cable from here with our hookup, or just go over to Matthews, it isn’t far.”

“Okay, sure, Matthews.”

“Great. I’ll get it rolling. Hey, what’s with the hat? Are we trying to be colorful now?”

“Uh, no, I forgot I had it on.” He shucked it.

He checked his phone messages. Oh, so fun. His agent, “Call me.” Two other agents, including a famous one. The local station, WRC, for a nooner, the girl should have gone through Jenny and could be safely ignored. Someone he knew at Esquire, someone at the Atlantic, someone at TNR. A couple of FBI-hating civilians. Someone calling him a rat.

Then he went to e-mail. Over seventy, not bad.

“Way to go,” said Anthrax, of New Orleans.

“You the man,” said Jefferson, of Florida.

“Did you discuss this with God first?” wondered a Mrs. Salatow, of Cape May.

“You red shit,” observed ex-PFC, from North Carolina.

“Why are you tearing down the FBI?” wondered Gordon. “Do you want the terrorists to win?”

“You’re doing a great job, David,” said Bill Fedders. “Call me if you need any more help.”

And on and on it went, the queue lengthening even as he tried to read through it all. Finally it was too much.

Time for lunch.

“Killer, join us?” said a colleague. “Thai, that little place on K.”

“That’ll be fun,” he said, pulling on coat and hat.

“You’re a Yankees fan? Never would have guessed.”

“Yankees, baseball, right? Where they hit that thing with a club?”

Then they saw he was being ironic and laughed, and off they went and had a fine, merry lunch.

He got back late, again okay for a star. He ran the afternoon blogs, saw that he had heated up the boys at Power Line but was a god on Huffington, and the Daily Kos seemed close to declaring him a new religion. Calls from some tag-along foreign pressies—Australian, Japanese, Dutch, the Swedes and their pals the Danes—all wanting to do phoners. Ho-hum. Another call from WRC, a call from NPR, some woman who claimed she’d met him at a party.

It was almost time for the 4 p.m. meeting, and no, nothing had—

“Oh, David, this came for you, meant to drop it off earlier,” said Judi Messing, who administered the office as its receptionist.

He took it. Big envelope, manila. He breathed hard.

Okay, maybe so.

He felt it; yes, there seemed to be a sheet of photo-thickness paper inside.

“David, the meeting. Don’t be late,” someone called, rushing past. “They’ll be singing your praises.”

“I can’t come. Something just came in.”

He saw all the reporters gathered in the conference room and the assistant bureau manager running the show, with the big man himself off to the side, hiding behind those half-lens reading glasses he’d affected for twenty-odd years. David watched through the glass, as if observing a pantomime, while each boy or girl self-promoted his or her own stories, and the great man handed out nods of acceptance or frowns of denial. There was a lot of laughing, as there always was, as the very smart people who constituted the office enjoyed each other’s company, camaraderie, shared values, sense of irony, dedication to professionalism, and, of course, ambition.

He felt above it.

I have transcended, he thought.

Now it was time. He looked around—nobody nearby; someone taking dictation; someone on the phone, too busy to attend the meet; Jack Sims, notorious curmudgeon, boycotting as he had famously for twenty years; researchers sitting at their screens still grinding away; yadda yadda, the same old. God, he loved it. It had taken most of his life to get here, and it had seemed so far away for so long, but now he was actually a member of the bureau in the biggest, fiercest town of all, for the greatest newspaper that ever lived and breathed, and he counted, he was one of them, he was part of it, he moved, he shook, he influenced. Yet for an empire it was a seedy palace: it looked, to continue with the customary metaphor, like a second-tier insurance company branch office, decorated in early-twentieth-century political posters. Some trophy front pages also hung about, but mostly it had the industrial cheeriness of the New Office Interior Design, littered with piles of crap, stacks of crap, pieces of crap, little doohickeys that reporters always got sent, for some odd reason, and a few morale-boosting quotations taped to the walls from men like Breslin, Mencken, Liebling, and Baker, the latter of which was the most helpful:

Q: Mr. Baker, what do you do when you write a column and it’s just not there, you know, you just haven’t done it right, it’s not very good, you know it’s not your best?

A: Publish it.

David always got a smile out of that truth. Anyway, now he opened the flap and slid the paper out, seeing that yes, it was a photograph, though upside down. He turned it around and his eyes drank up the details.

The first thing was the target. He thought it would have a black bull’s-eye, but it was of a configuration he didn’t understand: the predominant feature was a heavy black square about three by three inches in the upper quarter of the face. It lay across and occluded the top of a collection of circles within circles which seemed to form the nominal “target” of the thing. He looked at the printed label up top and made out “I.B.S. Official 300 Yard Bench Rest Target.” Whatever. The sheet was mounted in a frame of some sort. The bullet holes actually weren’t in the center of the circles or in the box either, but just off the box at about ten o’clock in the third ring. The cluster of shots had landed nowhere near the center, but the three men gathered about the target appeared joyous.

The one with the rifle was clearly Nick Memphis, sleeves rolled up, tie loosened. He held a big gun, a rifle, with a tube along the top, an imposing-looking gadget with turrets and markings that sort of resembled a camera, if a camera were a tube instead of a box. The gun looked massive, and it wasn’t the machine gun type of thing, with handles and bolts and cooling ventilation and curved magazines, but more like a hunting rifle, though somehow swollen, as if it had been ingesting steroids. It was black, like the scope, and lay against Nick’s knee as Nick posed kneeling by the cluster of holes, five of them, a little constellation. Next to the cluster, as David bent and squinted to see, someone had written in magic marker, “Nick Memphis, 300 yards, FN Model PSR, .308 Black Hills 168, 1.751!, June 23, 2006, Columbia, S.C.” David didn’t know what the 1.751 referred to and why it bore an exclamation point. He didn’t recognize the two men flanking Nick on each side, their sleeves also up, their ties loosened, each with an earphone pushed up on their heads, as were earphones pushed up on Nick’s. In fact, it was like a glimpse into a strange world, maybe on a distant planet or a million years in the past or future, full of protocols that were mysterious, full of traditions that were meaningless, pride that seemed arbitrary, and most of all that big, immutable gun right in the middle, the center of it all, as if these three guys worshipped it. Very odd.

But the point was, here was visual, dramatic proof that Nicholas Memphis, Special Agent, Federal Bureau of Investigation, had journeyed to South Carolina in June of 2006 to examine FN’s entry in the FBI Sniper Rifle Selection, against FBI regulations, especially, as the documents already obtained and proven authentic had revealed, at the expense of the Belgian arms manufacturing concern.

If it was real.

David leaned over as he opened his desk drawer and removed a magnifying glass bought two days earlier for exactly this purpose. Not knowing just what he was looking for, he ran his eye, through the magnified lens, over every square centimeter of the photo. He certainly saw nothing obviously fake, like a shadow going the wrong way or a subtly incorrect relationship of head to neck or a line around this or that figure or object. But who knew what they could do these days?

“Is that it?” Jack Sims asked, leaning over. Jack was of the old-professor type, usually a study in tweeds, jowls, horn-rims, rep-striped bow tie, blue Brooks Brothers button-down even though, regrettably, Brooks now had its shirts made in China, a man with whiskey breath and a memory for arcane political minutiae that was legendary in DC.

“Yeah. Jack, were you in the Army?”

“I was. A thousand years ago. No guns then, we used spears. I was in the 235th Spearchucking Regiment.”

“Seriously, see where he’s written ‘1.751’ here, with an exclamation point and an arrow to the cluster of bullet holes. Any idea what that means? Is it a score or something?”

“No,” said Jack, “it’s not a score. Not with the decimal point.”

“Could it be a caliber? Is the gun a 1.751 caliber?”

“Hmm, when I was in in the sixties, we shot something that had millimeters. I don’t know what the inch measure would be. Wait, I know a photographer who’s a gun guy. For some reason photogs are gun nuts, more often than not. Maybe it’s the love of small, well-machined little gizmos. Anyway, let me Rolodex his cell and see if I can get an answer.”

Jack disappeared, not that David noticed, so absorbed was he in the drama of his examination, and it seemed that Jack came back in a second, when it was really twenty minutes.

“Okay,” he said, “the 1.751 is a group size. In other words, the guy fired five rounds at the target and the five made up a group. They’re trying to figure out the mechanical accuracy of the gun, not the shooter, and they get that from the group. So they use calipers to measure from center to center of the two farthest shots, and it comes out to be one and seven hundred fifty-one thousandths of an inch.”

“Is that good?”

“At three hundred yards, that’s magnificent. My guy says an inch per hundred yards is very good, so at three hundred it ought to be three inches. It’s one and three-quarters of an inch. That’s a wow.”

“Okay,” said David. “Thanks, Jack, big help. Now I get the exclamation point.”

Just at that moment the bureau chief came over.

“I see you guys acting like teenage girls at the mall. Did it come?”

“It sure did,” said Jack. “David’s Pulitzer, gift-wrapped. He’s taking the office to Morton’s for dinner tonight, right, David?”

“It did come,” said David, modestly.

“Okay, bring it in, we’ll see what we’ve got.”

David trekked into the chief’s office, and just about everybody important in the bureau followed. He laid the photo out on the glass table as they crowded around.

“That’s Memphis,” somebody said.

“It sure is. Does anybody know who those other two guys are? David, was there any information with it?”

“No, Mel. It was just the—”

“Sir,” came a voice; it had to be an intern. They were everywhere, ambitious little reptiles, incredibly smart and industrious, desperately wanting to eat the flesh of anyone who stood in their way. Little show-offy monsters.

This one’s name was Fong, but his ethnicity wasn’t Asian, it was ambition. David hated them, even though he realized he’d been one himself.

“I stopped at a gun store in Silver Spring. It’s called Atlantic Guns. Anyhow, they were giving away catalogs of all the gun makers and I thought we needed the FN catalog, so I picked one up.”

“Good, Fong.”

“Let’s fire David and give Fong his job,” said Jack Sims, and everybody laughed.

“David, we don’t need you anymore. Fong’s here, he’ll take care of things.”

“Fong, you’ve just been appointed bureau chief in place of Mel,” Janie Gold said. “Mel, can you be out of your office by five?”

When the laughter died down, they let Fong do his thing, and naturally he worked at a speed beyond the comprehension of everyone older.

“The guy on the left, see, that’s a fellow named Jeff Palmyrie, head of operations, FN of America, and on the right, that’s Pierre Bourre, President, FN International GMBh, Brussels. Here, look, make sure I’m right.”

He put the slick paper catalog, opened to the executive page, down right next to the photograph, and yes, it was clear indeed that those were the two others in the picture.

“Did you call FN today?” asked Mel.

“No, not yet,” said David. “But they’ll have no comment. They’ve had no comment for eight days; I can’t believe they’d change now.”

“Still, you should do it.”

“I will, Mel. Right after the meeting.”

“What’s the gun?” somebody asked.

“It’s what they call their PSR,” David said. “Police Special Rifle. I got that from the Web site. It’s in the catalog too. It’s a three-hundred-eight-caliber rifle. In the catalog you see the rack where they attach the telescope, yeah, but of course the one Nick is holding has a telescope. See, look, the stock, the handle, the trigger thing—it’s all there just like in the picture, dead center. That’s the one FN wants to get the sniper contract, and this proves they brought Nick in early, to get him on the team.”

“He’s not a very good shot,” someone said. “I thought he was a sniper.”

“No, he’s a very good shot,” David said. “See, he’s shooting what they call a ‘group,’ meaning he aimed at one place and tried to put all the bullets as close together as possible. See, all of them went into a group at three hundred yards.”

“Tell them what it is,” said new friend Jack, setting him up with a smile.

“The point is to show off the accuracy of the gun. This one kept five shots inside two inches, and the standard is what they call angled minute or something, which means one inch per hundred yards. So if it’s under three inches at three hundred yards, it’s really good.”

“Wow,” somebody said, with the same enthusiasm with which he might have said, “My wife is divorcing me, but that’s okay because I just totaled my car.”

“Have you set up the photo examination?” Mel asked.

“Yes, by special courier. I’m sending it to Rochester, New York, to the Donex Photo Interpretation Laboratory, part of the Eastman Kodak system there. They’re supposed to be the best commercial photo examiners in the country. We should know in a week.”

“I don’t want to know how much this is costing me,” said Mel.

“To save some money,” Jack said, “we could fire young Fong. Really, he’s going to fire us when he gets the chance.”

“I am not Young Fong,” said Fong. “ ‘Young’ is Korean. I’m Chinese.” He said it pure deadpan, and everyone laughed. The goddamned kid was funny too.

“Okay, so David, get busy on your calls. FN here, FN overseas, the Bureau, some governmental or law school ethics think tank. Hmm, Dershowitz ought to be good for a quote, maybe Schumer, anyone else?”

“GSA.”

“No, they’ll come in officially sometime later. Look for whistle-blowing pork barrel outfits. I’ve got some good numbers for you.”

“What about gun people? Someone in the NRA who—”

“No, no, they’ll just run your ears about the evil Times and how we use the Second Amendment for toilet paper,” said Mel.

“I’ll call Remington,” said David. “They’re the ones that stand to lose their cash cow. God, whoever realized there was so much money at stake? Anyhow, I’ve developed a relationship there and I think I can get to the president.”

“Good, David, and check with Fong Young if you have any other ideas and he’ll OK them,” Mel said, again to great laughter and Fong’s embarrassment. “Okay, meeting adjourned. Go, go, go, get away from me, I need to sneak a drink from the pint in my drawer.”

Everybody filed off, and David trotted away to package the photo and begin his calls. A few people clapped him on the back, there was a punch on the arm, a thumbs-up and a wink, but best of all someone genuinely, and without irony, congratulated him.

It was Fong.

32

She was right, of course.

He sat in his motel room in Indianapolis, depressed.

Starling, the young FBI agent, seemed to have dealt him a mortal blow. You have imposed a meaning on these events. You have not discovered a meaning. And your imposed meaning stems from your anger at Tom Constable, billionaire lefty, business genius, owner of lefty networks, famous playboy and sportsman, above it all, husband to movie stars, friend of Castro, hero to millions, shit to millions of others, such as me.

The way you get Constable is simple: the man behind this thing has to be wealthy and powerful. He has connections in the government, he has immense resources, he knows everybody; in the end, he simply has the resources nobody else really does. Therefore you have assumed his involvement.

You have no proof.

It was true. Other than the marriage to one of the victims, there was not one single objective fact that connected the four deaths—five, counting Carl, six, counting Denny—to Tom Constable.

The guilty parties could have been some other players entirely—political, criminal, governmental, any entity with some power and some leverage in the spook world, and these days that could be just about anybody.

What do I know? he asked himself. Know as fact, know as reality, know as physical presence in the world?

I know somebody made very good shots to kill the four. Very good. Too good.

I know baked paint debris linked to the ceramic coating on the iSniper911 was found on Carl Hitchcock’s rifle, and the iSniper911, in skilled hands, was capable of permitting the kind of shooting that took down the four.

Who knows? Maybe it was Carl. Maybe he secretly spent seven grand on an iSniper911, put it on his own rifle, did the deeds, then took it off, tossed it in the river, put his old Leupold back on, and blew his brains out. Maybe he was so titillated by the accuracy the unit offered, he wanted to claim that as part of his legacy too. If he was nuts enough to conceive of the plan in the first place, anything is possible.

Or maybe it was some other iSniper school grad, with the same anti-lefty agenda, and he just wanted to take out those bastards, but he didn’t want to pay the price. So he put the thing together; he was one man; he was somehow able to do it and was just sitting in his trailer enjoying the big show. Meanwhile, as he said he was, Tom Constable was going crazy with all the speculation and he wanted to put it to an end, and being a big-foot asshole, he put a lot of pressure on poor Nick, and it had nothing to do with nothing. And again, it was just coincidence that he was in the shotgun chair with Denny Washington when the Latin Kings decided on payback for Denny’s takedown of some Chi-town Two Four gangbanger now sitting in Joliet and getting cornholed each night by the Black Pagans or the White Aryans or maybe the crazy Salvadoran gang, MS-13. And the object that was in Ozzie Harris’s hands was nothing of relevance to this case; and the look of Jack and Mitzi’s house, its tidiness, which Denny picked up on, that was more coincidence; it was just that Jack happened to spend ten minutes straightening up that day. And the fluctuation in the mood of Jack and Mitzi? New meds, possibly?

Ach. Ugh. Oof.

He wished he were still a drinking man. The lure of the bottle was immense now. Boy, would it be nice to go for a fine dip in the bourbon pond, feel the world turn blurry and mellow, slide away greased by delight and optimism. Oh, it would be so nice now. The bottle was so tempting.

He shook his head. His hip hurt. He’d left his new painkillers in his room in Chicago, which, incidentally, he was still paying for. It was a dull buzz, not a throb so much as a grind. Somehow the sword blade—that fight seemed so long ago, in a Japan he hardly remembered—had ruptured the surface of the stainless steel ball joint, and that irregularity had cascading consequences of unexpected pain. That had to be taken care of. He was tired of the limp; he was tired of being on the wagon; he was tired of looking for conspiracies where only coincidence existed on top of bad luck and strange but not impossible occurrence.

Okay, he thought, train back to Chicago. Check out, settle up. Go to Denny’s funeral. Give the Sig to the police and cooperate with them. I am guilty of nothing; it was righteous self-defense shooting and I wasn’t even carrying illegally. Get your head out of the screwball conspiracy bag. Then fly back to Washington, clear it up with the FBI, and if they have made any progress, fine. If not, then that is the way of the world.

Then back to Idaho. Back to the porch. Back to the rocker. Back to my daughters, to my wife, to the world.

He called her.

“Okay,” he said, “this one’s over. Coming home. Standing down.”

He explained brightly how he’d been mistaken and launched off on a fool’s crusade, an old goat’s dream. But his new plan would change all that. He told her about going to Chicago to somebody’s funeral, then back to Washington to straighten things out with Nick and his people, and then he’d be coming home, for good. Gosh, it would be so great.

“Bob,” she said, “I love you so and want you with me, but you are lying to me, and you are lying to yourself. I can hear it in your voice, and if you don’t get it settled in a way that satisfies you, it will suck the pleasure out of the peace you’ve earned. I know you. You are samurai, dog soldier, marine fool, crazy bastard, marshal of Dodge, commando, the country-western Hector. You are all of those things. They are your nature. The girls and I are just where you park when you’re not warring. You love us, yes you do, but war is your life, it’s your destiny, it’s your identity. My advice, old man, is win your war. Then come home. Or maybe you’ll get killed. That would be a shame and a tragedy, and the girls and I will weep for years. But that is the way of the warrior and we have the curse upon us of loving the last of them.”

“You’re terrific,” he said. “You help me see clearly.”

“If you have a problem, solve it the old-fashioned way.”

“And that would be?”

“The way your people and my people always solve problems. Hard work. Hard, hard work. Now hang up, have lunch, and get to work. Good-bye. Call me on DEROS.”

All right.

It was clear now: he had to locate some kind of connection between Tom Constable and the deaths of Jack Strong and Mitzi Reilly. Something real, something palpable, something authentic.

What do I know?

I know that Strong and Reilly knew Tom Constable; I saw the picture of the four of them, Joan Flanders being the fourth, at some dinner. But that proved nothing. That proved only that in a glittery, jet-setty kind of life lived by minor celebrities, people whose pictures got in magazines, these two couples had known each other socially. That indicated nothing meaningful, mere acquaintanceship. They were both strong left; why shouldn’t they have had a social relationship?

The question was, did Strong have a way of reaching Constable, an e-mail address, a special cell phone number, a contact? That would indicate something more than a casual relationship.

The second question was, how does a guy in a hotel room in Indianapolis with no powers, no contacts, no sponsorship, no authority, no resources, find that out—fast?

Impossible.

Can’t be done.

It took him three minutes.

He went to the University of Illinois Chicago Circle Web site, clicked on the Department of Education, found that of course it hadn’t been updated since the deaths; then he went to the departmental secretary, a Eustace Crawford, number given. He reasoned that secretaries know things, they see things, they get things. But nobody has talked to this one, because Jack Strong was never investigated; he was the victim of the obviously mad marine sniper who simply chose him for his symbolic value.

Bob made the call, thinking, concentrating, ordering himself: verb-subject agreement. No ain’t, no don’t, no profanity. You are some mealy little nobody who makes his living doing things for other people.

“Education, Ms. Crawford. May I help you?”

“Ms. Crawford, I wonder if you remember me,” he lied. “My name is Daryl Nelson and I’m a special assistant to Mr. Tom Constable. I spoke to you many times in the last few weeks before the tragic passing of Jack Strong.”

A pause indicated she didn’t, but there is a certain something in people that makes them reluctant to disappoint strangers.

“Uhhh—Well, I suppose, Mr., uh, Nelson, you know it was so terrible around here, the deaths, they were such wonderful people.”

“Yes ma’am, and I’m sorry to interrupt at this time of tragedy. Actually, I put this call off as long as I could.”

“Yes sir. Well, I suppose, is it something I can—”

“Ms. Crawford, you know that Mr. Constable was a friend of the Strongs, I’m sure; you’ve seen the picture in the house, the four of them, when Mr. Constable was married to the late Joan Flanders?”

“I have seen that picture, actually. I loved Mitzi. The Strongs knew so many people. There was something so magnetic about them.”

“Yes ma’am. Well, here’s the problem: Jack and Mr. Constable had a friendly e-mail relationship. Maybe too friendly. You know that Mr. Constable has a weakness for speaking his mind in public and he sometimes says unfortunate things.”

“Yes. I remember that time he called George Bush a war criminal on Jay Leno.”

“Yes, that sort of thing. Well, in private, it’s even worse. Here’s what he’s afraid of—that somehow some of the private e-mails Mr. Constable sent to Jack could get into the newspapers or, worse, onto the Internet; you know all these terrible blog people. It would be very embarrassing and I don’t think Mr. Strong would have wanted that.”

“No, I’m sure he didn’t.”

“Now, I know his e-mail has a secret code, of course, a sign-in. Obviously, I don’t know it. But I’m guessing, in the normal course of actions, someone such as yourself in daily contact with him might have noticed what that code was. He might have even called you and asked you to check for messages that came into that account.”

“I have some idea.”

“Of course I’m not at all suggesting you give it to me. What I am asking is a favor. If you could get into his e-mail account and run a quick scan or a search of some kind; you might search for ‘Tom,’ or you might try the name ‘Ozzie’ or ‘O. Z. Harris,’ he was a friend of theirs in bad health in Chicago over the last few months. If you come up with a batch of messages, again, don’t open them.”

“Do you want me to delete them?”

“No, I would prefer if you would change the entry code, to something of your own preference. Our firm will make an official petition to the university to recover them, but their existence right now is very troubling to us, and to know that the code had been changed would be a very good thing.”

Don’t let her say, Oh, I’ll just forget the e-mails and change the code now. It’s a very good idea irrespective of Mr. Constable’s wishes.

But that seemed not to occur to her.

“I’ll check,” she said.

Two minutes passed, and then he heard the phone being picked up again.

“Well,” she said, “if Mr. Constable was TomC@Starcrostdotcom, then there were quite a few. They turned up when I searched for the Ozzie Harris name. Quite a few in fact, as if they’d been talking heatedly about Ozzie.”

“This would have been in September, just around the time of Ozzie’s death on September third?”

“Yes, exactly. Just to check, I did open the first. Mr. Strong was going to write a book about the seventies, and he’d found some items or relics that he thought might be of interest to TomC and he hoped they could continue their discussions, which he thought would have an excellent outcome for both of them. That was Mr. Strong, always trying to help. He had such a feeling for the underdog.”

“Ms. Crawford, that’s great. So you will change that code, and our conversation will be private, and I might say, you have earned Mr. Constable’s appreciation. He will reach out in some way to show that appreciation; that’s the kind of wonderful man he is.”

“It was my pleasure, Mr. Nelson.”

He put the phone down, exhausted at the effort of sounding so well-spoken for so long. But he had it. Tangible, objective proof of a contentious relationship between Tom Constable and the Strongs immediately prior to the killings. It wasn’t something he’d made up, some “interpretation” that an old man who saw conspiracies in the choice of public restroom toilet paper had come up with. It was real.

Also real: “items” or “relics” of interest to TomC. That would be whatever it was that had been taped to the frame of Ozzie Harris’s box spring for thirty-odd years, which now, in play, had the power to change lives and move mountains—of Tom Constable’s money.

It was clear what had to happen next.

Whatever it is, Constable has it.

So I’ll go get it.

33

It had been a quiet few days as David waited for the return of the photo and the report from the Rochester lab. He’d broken a minor item: his friend Bill Fedders—boy, was that guy wired or what?—had heard from somebody that Nick Memphis had a somewhat neurotic relationship with another sniper, a man named Bob Lee Swagger, who had, briefly, been the number one Most Wanted man in the country, fifteen or so years ago, and who, when the case against him for the murder of a Salvadoran archbishop was disproved, disappeared. Evidently this Swagger and Memphis had had adventures and engaged in some barely legal shenanigans, which somehow redounded with great credit to Memphis and got his career back on track.

But the point was that Swagger—“Bobby Lee Swagger,” the name sounded like someone had run an algorithm on every NASCAR driver in history, Banjax joked—had somehow had a Svengali-like hold on Memphis, and maybe Nick’s reluctance to push forward the case against Carl Hitchcock was some kind of psychological projection; he saw Hitchcock and Swagger as the same man, that tough-as-nails southern shooter marine NCO type so appealing to the immature mind.

“I mean, it seems funny on the face of it,” Bill had told David at lunch at Morton’s. “Memphis is an educated professional of great attainment, and evidently this Swagger is kind of a cowboy type, unlettered, cornball, barely a high school education, but possessing some magic charisma that certain types of people fall for every time.”

“Weird,” said David, who could make no sense of it at all. He hated the kind of man he sensed this Swagger to be, some kind of macho blowhard who radiated aggression and stared down every man in the room. Football captain, cop, jock, that kind of guy, hopelessly obsolete in America today, but too dinosaur to realize he was dinosaur. Dinosaurs: not too keen on self-awareness.

“But if you think about it, it makes a little sense,” explained Bill. “Think of it as the puppy and the cat. The puppy comes into the household where the cat is a god. The cat can do anything—leap, fight, climb, race, hunt, kill—and he does it with utter disdain, ignoring the puppy, as if the puppy is too insignificant to notice and completely unable to ever impress him. And that is how the relationship is cemented in each mind, forever and ever. But what happens over time is that the cat grows old and feeble while the puppy grows into a sleek, magnificent animal that dominates every single transaction it enters. It has become the god. However, when it looks at the scrawny, desiccated, mangy old fleabag of a cat, with its rotted teeth and bloated stomach, it still sees deity. For him, the cat will always be the god, even if to the whole world, the cat is long past its prime and headed to the sharp end of the vet’s needle.”

“Maybe I could do a piece on that relationship. A holding story. To keep the scandal in the news.”

“I’m sure there’s not much on this Swagger. But there might be a little.”

David worked it hard and came up with more myth than reality. No one had ever written a book about Swagger, and he’d never been the marine celebrity with the SNIPR-1 license plate that Carl Hitchcock had been, he was no gun show autograph seller and nobody had ever named rifles, ammo, or shooting matches after him, but it didn’t take long to establish his bona fides as a war hero. He’d been a real mankiller in Vietnam, and two sources confirmed some ambush of a North Vietnamese unit heading toward a Green Beret camp. He’d won the Navy Cross for that. His kills were fewer than Carl’s, to say nothing of that new guy, Chuck McKenzie, but still, he’d spent a long time in the boonies.

David shivered inwardly. These guys, where do they come from? They spend all that time alone, crawling through swamps and up mountains, just to snuff out another man’s life. What was the point? What did you get out of it? It seemed somehow creepy. What was the difference, really, between them and the DC snipers, those two fruits who’d roamed the Beltway picking off people randomly while living in a car? Okay, the marine wore a uniform, but really it was the same thing—the same charge, that kick a fellow got from playing God and watching somebody else a long way out die of his own agency.

But after Vietnam the record got vague for this Bob Lee Swagger. There was a divorce on the record in South Carolina in 1975, and a few DWIs and minor scuffles with the law around the same time—drinking problem was written all over these years—and then silence, as if the guy had disappeared to reinvent himself. There was a Soldier of Fortune magazine story not available on the Internet now, because this Swagger was litigious; some Arkansas lawyer had beat the publishers of that magazine out of a substantial sum, and try as he could, David could never come up with the copy. Then there was that very odd business in 1993 with the Salvadoran. Again, it was hard to know what was real and what was fantasy. What was documented didn’t make a lot of sense, and the way the case had disappeared without a trace gave the odd impression of some kind of government entity at work. Intelligence? The Bureau? Now it was said Swagger was retired and lived a quiet life as some kind of businessman in the West. But nobody really wanted to talk, and David kept running into a wall of silence, along the lines of, “Well, Bob Lee’s not the sort who likes attention, and I love him too much to disappoint him. If you knew him, you’d know what I mean. So why don’t we just agree to end this conversation right now.”

As for Swagger, there was a listed phone number; he called it, got a frosty-sounding woman who would give him nothing at all and kind of frightened him, truth be told. His usual phone charm didn’t cut him any slack with her.

In the end he turned out a little piece that page one wouldn’t take, but it did keep the story alive on the From Washington page until the news from the lab arrived. His story simply pointed out that Memphis had a history of involvement with “sniper types,” as this “Bob Lee Swagger” certainly was, and it didn’t ask, there being no justification for pointed observations in a legitimate news story, whether an agent with known connections in the “sniper community,” including a long-standing friendship with one of its legends, was an appropriate choice to investigate a series of sensational murders whose perpetrator was suspected to have come from that community. Maybe an editorial writer would pick up on it, and the next day, indeed, one had.

It wasn’t the lead editorial, but even an off-lead got noticed in the Times.

We wonder what is going on at the Federal Bureau of Investigation these days. The Bureau, charged with investigating the heinous deaths of four Americans whose only crime was that they used their constitutional rights to protest a war that was both a tragedy and a mockery, turned that investigation over to the stewardship of an agent whose experience put him more in sympathy with its alleged perpetrator than with its victims.

As the Times reported yesterday, Special Agent in Charge Nicholas Memphis, who ran the investigation that quickly identified former marine sniper Carl Hitchcock as the primary, indeed only, suspect, has long enjoyed a relationship with another well-known marine sniper, Bob Lee Swagger, formerly of Blue Eye, Arkansas. One doesn’t begrudge Memphis his choice of friends, but at the same time, perhaps one should begrudge the Bureau its choice of executives. In matters of such importance, it would have been better for all concerned if the Bureau had selected an agent in charge whose connection to the act of sniping—the cold murder of a human being, guilty or innocent, at long range for something called “military necessity,” though too often neither military nor necessary in application—was more distant and less inclined to be tarnished with emotion.

Perhaps that is why the investigation has apparently fallen off the tracks and a final report, which all Americans must regard as an act of closure to these final, horrible war crimes, is nowhere in sight.

That got him the usual invites to the usual talking head roundtables—he was getting pretty good at it—but he passed that night because, well, because he too felt some combat fatigue; it had been a nerve-rattling few weeks, and he knew his career hung in the balance. It was still unclear whether he would ultimately join, in Howell Raines’s memorable phrases, the culture of complaint or the culture of achievement that prevailed in any given newsroom.

I am so close, he thought.

And when his cell rang and he looked at the caller ID and saw a Rochester area code, he thought he might have a heart attack. It had to be the lab. He’d appended a note with his number, asking for notification. He knew he just couldn’t face opening a FedEx package with no idea in hell what it contained, especially as the whole office would be secretly watching.

“Banjax.”

“Mr. Banjax, hi there, it’s Jeremy Cleary up at Donex, in Rochester.”

“Oh, hi” was what David came up with, so lame, his heart tripping off in his chest.

“Yes, you’d sent us a note; you’d asked for a call with our preliminary findings, before we sent out the final report?”

“Yes sir. Yes, I did. Do you have information for me?”

“I do.”

“Well, gee, let’s have it, Mr. Cleary.” He felt his heart bounce into overdrive.

“We find nothing.”

That was it?

What, nothing?

“I don’t understand. I’m not sure of your nomenclature. Is that good or bad? Is it real or not? Is it authentic or what?”

“Oh, you don’t know much about this, I see.”

“No, not a thing. Is nothing good or bad? There’s a lot riding on this.” He had not told them he was with the Times because he didn’t want that influencing their interpretation. Instead, he was just a David Banjax, of the given address of the bureau, Washington DC.

“Well, what we do is track fractal discrepancies. We examine by electron microscope, infrared scanner, spectroscope, even digitally break it down to sound waves and look for noise. That’s what your money buys you.”

“Okay, well, nothing would mean . . . authentic, right?”

He held his breath.

“We don’t operate in terms of ‘authentic’ or ‘inauthentic.’ What you get from us is a report of a digital forensics inspection. We look at a number of things: the smoothness of the images, patterns of relationship between adjacent pixels in the images. Altered images have distinct differences between the edges of the images and the original area next to them. We look at the length of the shadows, the color consistency; we measure the lighting to see if it is consistent in various parts of the image. We look deeply in the eyes of the people to see the reflections that appear there and determine if they are consistent with the rest of the photo. We search for clone-stamped areas of an image—parts that are so similar to each other as to make them suspect of having been the same image from the original area. The lab also assumes that all original photographs have ‘noise’ to some extent, and the noise has a certain consistency. Introducing a piece of another photo will give a different noise level and pattern that cannot be detected by the naked eye. If we had the original neg, we would be able to analyze much more information.”

“Did you have enough to make a call?”

“Well, our technicians don’t make calls. They measure, they tabulate, and they issue a finding. In this case, the finding was nothing.”

“So nothing is good?”

“Nothing means we can detect under various of our testings no indication of the presence of fractal discrepancies which would suggest photo manipulation techniques have been employed. Is it genuine? Well, that’s the kind of contextual decision you have to make. That’s about history, provenance, even trust. Not our department. What I’m telling you is that we will issue a bonded statement, and defend it in court if so required, that we discovered no meaningful evidence of photo manipulation in the photo you sent us. If that’s your definition of ‘authentic,’ then you have your ‘authenticity,’ Mr. Banjax.”

“Nobody doctored it?”

“You’ll never get me to say that. What you will get me to say is that at the level of detail of which our laboratory is capable—the best in the country in commercial use—there is no tangible evidence of fractal discrepancy.”

“To me, that would be authentic.”

And to the Times, that would be authentic too.

Suddenly the air was sweet and chilled, and oh so much fun to breathe.

I did it, he thought. I got him. I got Nick Memphis.

34

It was not a good day, but then there’d been few good days for Task Force Sniper since the suspension of Nick and the arrival of the Robot. The Robot had a name but no one ever said it; he was, it was alleged, human, just as they all were; he just never showed it. He was the director’s designated enforcer, who was sent to trouble spots in the Bureau with instructions to make the trouble go away and make all the people who were making the trouble go away as well. His means were generally not pleasant. Like his namesake, he accomplished this task with mechanistic grinding and trampling; it was said that he could walk through walls and that heat rays burst from his fists when necessary.

It wasn’t that the Robot was on the warpath. He was never not on the warpath, the warpath being the state of his life and career. It was that this particular day, he himself had gotten a prod in the butt from the director about the Task Force Sniper report, and since it fell to the team of Chandler and Fields to write it, and since Fields was a bum writer, it fell really to Chandler, and she felt everything grinding downward upon her.

“You can’t move any faster?” the Robot demanded.

“Sir, it’s writing. It’s more nuanced; you have to find the best ways of saying things; you have troubles and problems and you have to reconcile conflicting evidence on nearly every page. It’s not like something you can just do.”

“It’s not a novel. It doesn’t need a style. It’s not supposed to fly along. Nobody’s publishing it except a Xerox machine.”

“Yes sir, and I’m not Agatha Christie either, but it’s got to make sense, be smooth, hang together, and give its readers a clear view of the case and our conclusions. That takes time.”

“Is your support up to par?”

Of course it wasn’t. The problem was Ron Fields, a brilliant operator, a former SWAT hero with more than a few gunfight wins to his credit, an up-and-comer of the Nick school, decent and true and modest and funny, but . . . he seemed kind of dumb. He was certainly no writer. A giant in the professional world, as her coauthor he became a kind of erratic junior member, lazy and mysteriously absent, and his warrior’s reputation made it difficult for poor new girl Starling to cope.

On the other hand, she had a terrible crush on him, as she did on Nick, and she was never going to be one of those headquarters snitch bitches who rises on complaints of others’ ineptitude.

“Agent Fields is a fine collaborator, sir.”

“There are a lot of people in Washington who want this thing on their desks yesterday. I only tell you what you know, but I tell it in a loud voice in case you’ve forgotten it. If you need help, sing out. I’ll get you interns, secretaries, typists, the works. I’ll even hire John Grisham.”

“I’ve just got to get it right.”

“I know you liked Memphis. Everybody liked Memphis. But you can’t let any affection for him frost your efforts for me and your job on this assignment. I’ve heard it said that the task force agents are dawdling because they want to see Memphis cleared of these charges and are waiting to see if someone on the new suspect list takes the investigation in another direction. Tell me that’s not true.”

“Sir, I’m just working as hard as I can, that’s all.”

“Okay, okay, get back to it. Why are you wasting time on me?” And with that the Robot lurched onward, looking for another target to destroy, slightly frustrated because the girl had not crunched under as he’d thought she might.

And the other thing: he had her dead to rights. She had been stalling dreadfully, trying to keep from reaching the last page, and getting the sign-offs by the others. Because once the report—this report, with this conclusion—was issued, it became the narrative, the official version, even if she and most of the others weren’t quite sold on it. But it seemed everyone in Washington wanted this poor guy Carl Hitchcock hung out to dry and all the evidence accepted as planned. The only way to halt that narrative was to halt the report that encapsulated it; that was its primary marketing tool. So she was in the absurd position of subverting her own biggest professional break because she didn’t quite believe in what was being said. And because she felt something for Nick; he’d been decent to her and he always apologized when he called her Starling, even though everybody now did and would forever.

But there wasn’t much more she could do. Wiggle room was down to zero.

The narrative, as they wanted, was all but done. It was exactly what everybody said was called for, a professional indictment of Carl Hitchcock, all i’s dotted, all t’s crossed, each bit of damning evidence assembled in its place, properly weighted, admirably described, the chain of events transparently clear: how this old warrior had cracked and gone off to reclaim the kill record.

She kept waiting for the day when one of the field agents working the list of new possibles that Swagger had turned up would deliver the key piece of dope that would smash the Hitchcock thesis, but it never happened. One by one the possibles became impossible: out of the country, dead, accounted for during that week, almost all of them, if not killing, off teaching. Jesus, far from being macho gung ho gun boys, professional snipers were like rabbis during the Middle Ages, heading from talmudic center to talmudic center, there to instruct, argue, dispute, spread reputation, enforce the orthodox, denounce the apostates, form and reform cliques, network like young movie actors. Good lord, who would have thought it?

But now—

Oh great, the cell in her purse. That was her private number and only her boyfriend had it and her boyfriend was in Kuwait this week going through some Al Jazeera tapes that might have been plants or might be the real McCoy. Only one other person had the number.

“Swagger, what?” she said.

“Agent Starling, hello. Consider this an anonymous tip—”

“Where are you?”

“If I’m anonymous, I ain’t nowhere, am I? Here’s your tip. You go to the University of Chicago, Department of Education, where Jack Strong was a professor. You subpoena the hard drive on his computer; you open his e-mail. Be sure to do it nice and legal-like so it can go into evidence.”

“Swagger, what the hell—”

“Are you getting this, young lady? What you’ll find is an amply documented relationship between him and a fellow named TomC, who you will certainly be able to identify as Tom Constable—”

“Swagger, I warned you—”

“You warned me that I had to have something real, not something that was my opinion. This is as real as it gets. Strong and TomC discussed an object which Strong had come up with that gave Strong leverage over TomC. Strong wanted dough, lots of it, tons of it. He wanted a new life in Switzerland, Armani suits, all that fine bullshit. He thought Tom would be oh so happy to give it to him. All this, by the way, was happening in the last few weeks before the killings.”

She was writing it all down.

“That will prove that TomC had a motive to eliminate Jack and Mitzi, while hiding it behind the camouflage story of old man Carl having gone nuts.”

“That’s fine, but without formally verified evidence, we couldn’t get a search warrant to impound. It has to be legal, don’t you see? That’s not legal.”

“It is true, however.”

“Unfortunately, there is a difference. I’ll try to figure some way to justify it.”

“Yes ma’am, I knew you would. Then there’s the boys he hired to make all this happen. I know where they are.”

“Then you have to give them to us.”

“If I do, them boys are gone so fast you won’t see the blur. They’s professionals, the very best operators in the world, way above all your pay grades down there. You’ll never git ’em. Nope, if I give you them, I’m letting them git away, scot-free. A lot of people died on account of this and I mean to see the ancient law enforced the ancient way.”

“Swagger, where are you?”

“Remember, I said same deal with you as with Nick. If I jumped, you’d know it.”

“Swagger, I don’t like the sound of that.”

She swore she could hear the old man laugh from whatever twisted arroyo or stunted tree he now hid himself within and had an image of him in torchlight, gleaming with blades and rifles and bandoliers of ammunition and Molotov cocktails, some kind of coonskin cap on his head, a tommy gun in his left hand and a Winchester in his right, all frontier 24/7.

“Well, young lady, this is my courtesy call. Here’s the news: I’m jumping.”

35

Swagger snapped the folder shut and slipped it into the cargo pants. Then he went back to his Leicas and 15X’ed what lay at the bottom of the hill before him.

It was not Tom Constable’s big, beautiful Wind River ranch house. That imposing structure, to all appearances manned only by a skeleton crew with its master somewhere else, lay a mile to the west, a strange accumulation of turrets and arbors and roofline nooks and crannies next to the most beautiful streambed in Wyoming, beneath the mountains and the wide blue sky.

This was the security compound. Tom wouldn’t live way out here without a small army of protection; it wasn’t his way. So Swagger reasoned: whatever he got off the Strongs, that’s where it’ll be. That’s where I have to go.

He was unarmed. This wasn’t a murder raid, even if the fucking New York Times had essentially decreed him a murderer yesterday. No sir. You could kick the door down way past midnight with an M4 and twenty magazines and try to kill all these boys flat, cold out, and what would it get you? A lot of return fire once they figured out what was going on, a running gunfight on the way out, blood loss, and bleeding out in a ditch. You’d never recover what it was that was at the heart of this thing. You might shoot the right shooters, but in the dark and the mayhem, who could tell?

No, the way you took this unit down was you got what they were here protecting. You got that and you made off. That got their attention. They had to get it back; that was why they existed, and if they didn’t get it back, it wasn’t just failure, it was something worse, some professional shame that only the best can feel, some place beyond shame. So they came looking for you somewhere out there—out there lay behind Bob, and it was the largest parcel of privately owned land in America, a wonderland of mountains and gulches and high meadows and glades and forests and mesas and canyons—you got them out there, hunting you, and like many a man before, they discovered you were hunting them. But to play that game the way Bob had set it up, he had to get the goddamned thing, and he didn’t even know what it was, much less where it was. Probably in a safe. And how do you get the safe open? Maybe if you asked politely, they’d oblige.

He eyed the building, whose details were vanishing in the setting sun. It was the old ranch house, refurbished for this duty. Its barn was a garage that housed four jeeps and a dozen wheeled off-road buggies, ATVs. The house itself was an old piece of prairie design, familiar from a thousand and ten westerns, rewired, rewindowed, redoored, remade as a modern security vault. Bob saw cameras everywhere, and a network of lights, and some kind of bar code entry mechanism, and alarm circuits at all the windows, all seemingly high tech, maybe higher tech, maybe nowhere-near highest tech. Men—none of them Graywolf commandos, but all of them tough-looking townie cowpokes—hung about, all armed not with the ubiquitous M4s but with Ruger Mini-14s, which looked a little more ranchlike in the hands of boys in jeans and boots and hats. There was a regular patrol rotation, and every hour, three vehicles left to run perimeter; there was another complement of two after dark and one during daylight that staffed the entry gate, which was miles away. There was a big kitchen and a day room, and that was the downstairs. Who knew what was in the basement? Upstairs were sleeping quarters for the night shift. People came and went by a utility route that led off to the right and into an arroyo, because the grand people in the big house didn’t want to be troubled by the sight of Johnny Lunchbucket showing up for work every morning.

Swagger had picked a zigzag approach, meaning a long night’s crawl in the bulk of a ghillie suit. His entry point was the basement window, southeast corner. The building wasn’t properly speaking patrolled or guarded, except by the presence of those living within. There seemed no steady, regular surveillance, no pattern of lights. He could pick out no motion detectors or Doppler radar screens. Security developmentwise, it was mid tech, definitely late twentieth century. Constable had laid out the bucks for it fifteen years ago, and that was that; maybe an upgrade was on his to-do list but he hadn’t gotten to it yet.

The problem was the window. Kick it in? Noise, alarm. Cut the wires? Probably couldn’t reach ’em. Set some sort of diversionary element—a charge, a fire, an alarm? Get too many cowboys awakened. Pick the lock? He had picked locks before and knew how to do it, and this lock was probably pretty easy; it was just wired.

No, the only way was to cut a hole in the glass, reach in, and cut the wire, then get through the lock.

Then he’d slide in and see what was what. He had no weapons, but he had five smoke grenades and five flashbang munitions, all of which would create considerable confusion if necessary. Here was the official version of the plan, the one he had to convince himself he’d believe in, the one they’d try to beat him away from, and he knew, if he gave it up, it was the first step toward losing this one. The idea seemed to be to find “it,” booby-trap the place with smokers and flashbangs, disable most of the vehicles—not exactly high tech, he’d just pierce each tire with an icepick—and disappear with one. By the time they got the vehicles up and running, he’d be long gone and they’d have to call in the big boys, the trackers and the snipers, the Graywolf pros, to hunt him down.

But he knew that hope was a dream. The reality: this’ll be a bad one.

There’s going to be a lot of pain ahead, getting through this one.

You’re going to pay for this one.

Then he thought, man, I am too old for this shit. I do not need this shit. I saw the six-zero a few years back and I ought to be rocking this way, then that, not putting gunk on my face and slithering in a suit that looks like a bush downhill a thousand yards to try to get in and out and away and gone, but instead probably getting my ass kicked hard and long until I ain’t hardly human no more.

I do not want to do this.

But he looked around, and as usual, nobody else was there. If not him, who? Tell the feds. Telling the feds just opens a can of worms and lets lawyers and politicians and bullshit artists of all stripes into what is essentially clear-cut and demands action and justice.

So here I am and here I go.

His face blackened, he began the long crawl down.

It took six hours and he arrived at 0230. The temp had dropped, and a keening wind knifed down from the mountains. There was no moon, but tides and pinwheels of stars splattering the vault of dark threw off enough dim glow to let him navigate, and he’d committed the plan of the place, the location of the trees, the spotlights, the shadows, to memory. He slid between cones of light, riding the shadows, moving with a kind of slow swimmer’s urgency as if through mud. You’d have to look hard at him to see movement at all, and he doubted the cameras were high-res enough to pick him out of the shadows in what was undoubtedly black-and-white. Every time he heard some odd noise, he froze, waiting to see if anything would develop, and of course it never did. At one point, around eleven, a couple of cowboys came out and smoked on the porch, had a good laugh at a supervisor’s expense, and one took a nip from a secret flask. Then they ducked back in. At two-hour intervals, there was some clambering as a security shift climbed into vehicles, tested engines and lights, then left for a perimeter patrol, making a lot of noise as they went. Each circuit took four hours, so the first crew was back while the second and third were still out, prowling around inside the barbed wire in the dark in far distant places. It was a hell of a big spread.

Now he scooted the last few feet until he was flush against the house. He lay, stifling his breathing, waiting for discovery. Why didn’t they have dogs? A dog might pick up scent, where a man never would. But maybe Tom Constable, ever conscious of his image, didn’t want the world to see him as guarded by baying howlers, long in teeth, red in fang; he was the modern billionaire, too cool and streamlined and ironic for that. So his muscle was hidden under down-home cowboy wardrobes, townies and locals in jeans just like in olden days. It made him more interesting for the celebrity magazine people whom he always had out for his big parties.

Bob touched the low-lying window. And what if he got through it and came across that drunken cowboy? Did he kill him? Choke the life out of him? Some nineteen-year-old townie punk who just needed a job and ended up on the night shift at Big Tom’s. That wasn’t right. Oh, “knock him out,” that good one from the movies. Yeah, and brain-damage him forever, or siphon off IQ points the boy couldn’t spare? What then? Cross that one when he came to it. He had a couple of Kimber pepper sprays aboard, which wouldn’t put a man out but should put him down. But if it came to that, the whole thing had gone to hell anyway.

He slid out of the ghillie until he felt like he was lying next to a dead buffalo, a puffy weaving of silks and cottons configured to look like the great outdoors. With a good one you could go to ground and a hundred men could walk right by you and never catch on that you were the sniper, you were here to kill them. This one was very good. He hated to leave it behind, even if he had others.

The wind cut his cotton shirt, which was sweat-soaked after the long, hard creep, and the cold penetrated as he finally came free. He nestled next to the low window. He pulled a small waist pack around from his backside, unpeeled the Velcro fasteners to display a cache of small tools and one piece of Double Bubble bubble gum. He opened the gum and threw it in his mouth—it was cold and hard, dusted with sugar—and began to knead it to something malleable with his jaws. He took out a small SureFire and checked each corner for wires and went four for four. He went to the latch, saw that it snapped shut. He ran the cone of illumination across the room he was about to penetrate and saw that happily it didn’t contain sleeping men but mostly housed stacked junk—some kind of storeroom. Very good.

He removed a glass cutter’s tool from his pouch, tapped the glass to make certain it was no super security plastic, and was rewarded with the vibration of regular window pane. He turned the tool so that the auger installed at the other end of the grip was upmost and crudely drilled deep into the glass, feeling it yield to powder as he rotated, until finally he’d opened enough edge for the cutter to bite. Quickly he sliced a four-inch wound in the glass, cranked the thing horizontally and cut another. In short enough time, he’d cut a four-by-four square in the window. He plucked the gum from his mouth, applied it to the window gently, pressing hard enough to make it stick but not hard enough to break. Then he pulled, and the sixteen-square-inch glass rectangle plopped out. He gently set it down.

Wire cutters snipped the central wire to which each of the corner devices was linked; then he popped the lock, opened the window, jimmied his body, and slid through. He closed the window behind him, though a breeze now pulsed through the open square in the glass. Nothing could be done about that; the cowboys wouldn’t notice, or so the theory went.

He waited, his eyes adjusting to the quality of indoor darkness, with no starlight or far-off spotlights. It was clear he was in the kitchen supply depot, as industrial-sized plastic bottles of ketchup, mustard, and relish stood everywhere, as did other wrapped-in-plastic foodstuffs. A glowing stainless steel door admitted the cookie to the walk-in freezer where perishables were kept. Bob ignored it, slid to the door, unlocked it, and opened it a crack. Not much to see: institutional green walls, a few other closed doors probably giving admittance to other storage facilities, at the far end a hold tank, where drunks or paparazzi could be secured until LE came out from town to haul them away. At the close end he saw stairs, slipped quietly to them, eased halfway up—would there be a crack as the old wood adjusted to weight bearing? no, not this time—and slipped up a bit further.

He could see into the big room, well-lit but empty. Junky Walmart furniture mostly broken down from daily use, piles of magazines from Guns & Ammo to Pussy & Juggs. In other words, the debris and squalor of men living together. Coke cans, paper plates, candy bar wrappers, like any day room in any guard post anywhere in the world. The guys were upstairs, he guessed, having a feeling of dense sleep above him, hearing the wheeze of one, the fart of another, the dream-driven toss of a third.

He slid along the wall, peeked into the kitchen and saw the cookie hadn’t arrived yet to throw the day shift breakfast on. Beyond it lay the security HQ office, he could tell, because although he did not see into that room directly, he saw the gray glow of security monitors on the wall through the doorway. A man or two would be in there; so would the arms safe and, he’d bet, in that would be the package, the whatever. Wouldn’t that be the safest spot on the ranch: in a room guarded 24/7 by armed guys with orders to shoot to kill? It made sense, if anything made sense.

He didn’t let rogue thoughts fly. He suppressed the notion that a) Tom Constable had simply destroyed the object (he wouldn’t; holding it would thrill him too much; he would think there’d always be time to destroy it; it had some kind of meaning to him), or that b) he’d lock it in a safe in his bedroom, where his various wives and now visitors stored their jewels, or c) he had it with him, wherever he was, just to keep it near and dear, or d) he put it in a safe deposit box in the biggest vault in the world. Nope, none of those: couldn’t be, wouldn’t be, no way.

Bob stepped around the corner.

“Hello,” he said.

“Huh?” said the security officer, rising from a soft chair where he’d been watching not the bank of monitors on the wall but a television showing some kind of spaceship thing.

Bob hit him in the face and eyes with the Kimber pepper and down he went, coughing spastically, and before he could reorient, Bob had him trussed in plastic cuffs pulled tight.

“You shut up, partner, or I’ll have to hurt you harder.”

The man spluttered, groaned, bucked, and Bob put a knee against the back of his neck.

“I can close you down the hard way if you don’t do what I say.”

The man went limp. But then he said, “Mister, do you have any idea what you’re fucking with? You are going to be so messed up.”

“Anyone else here? A partner, another patrolman? You alone, bub? Tell me or I’ll hit you with two or three more shots of pepper, and son, you won’t like that a bit.”

“I’m alone,” the man said. “Down here. But there are six very tough guys upstairs, so my advice to you is to run like hell and hope you get off the property before you get them pissed.”

“I didn’t come this far for the fun of it,” Bob said.

Bob looked around the room, and yeah, there was the secure steel door of what had to be an arms vault, snug behind a combination lock the size of a dinner plate, very old-style.

“You keep the rifles in there, right? But because the guys go in and out, you only keep it day-locked, right? You don’t want to fuck with the big combination six times a day, right?”

“I don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about.”

“We’ll see about that.”

He raised the man to his feet and shoved him ahead.

“Key or more pepper?”

“Shit,” the guy said, and gave it up. He nodded toward the desk drawer. Bob reached in, pulled out a big key ring. He went to the arms vault and inserted a key in the day lock and pulled on the heavy door. That easily, it swung open.

Bob pushed the guard in, then followed.

“Y’all planning for the invasion?” he asked.

Serious weaponry: not the Ruger Mini-14s but a rack of M4s, all with high-tech red-dot optics, several crates of 5.56 NATO and 12 gauge, four short-barreled pump shotguns, some chemical crowd control gimcracks, a rack of gas masks. On a metal shelf in the back, he found some papers, someone’s copy of Atlas Shrugged, and a nice but well-beaten briefcase with the initials JTS, for John Terrence Strong, he guessed. He opened it, saw only a small cardboard package, four by four, white, that bore on its corners yellowed strands of old Scotch tape.

Got it, even as he realized the absurd ease with which all this had happened.

He grabbed the case, pulled the guard with him, closed the vault.

“Okay, here’s the deal,” he said to his captive. “If I had a brain in my head I’d snap your spine and be done with you, cowboy. But I’m a nice guy, see. So you and me, we’s walking out the door like buddies, to the motor compound in the back. Then I’m popping tires on all the other vehicles, and you and I are going for a ride. I’ll toss you out somewheres along the way, and tomorrow night you can have dinner with the wife and kids. You’ll be out of a job but not out of the rest of your life.”

“Mister, you are in so much trouble. You put that goddamn briefcase back or—”

“Let’s go, bub.”

He led the now cooperating man through the back entrance, and as he stepped through the door, someone hit him a perfect shot in the brachial plexus, the nerve group that ran from his shoulder to his neck, and his body went useless and puttylike on him. He fell, and the others were on him in seconds with their hard professional knowledge of leverage and application of force and pain. In another second, his own hands were snared in flex-cuffs. He was hauled roughly to his feet.

Whack! the man he’d taken hit him in the face, and for his troubles was shoved hard to the ground by another dark figure.

“You’ll be minding your manners now, mate,” said his persecutor.

Then he turned to Swagger, smiling. “Well, damn me eyes, look and see what the cat has brought in from the meadow.”

It was Anto Grogan.

36

Nick was alone in the house, as he had been for much of the week. Sally was finishing up some big case and wouldn’t be home until much later. Nick had read, watched DVDs, listened to music, and otherwise filled the time of his exile. But enough with the Lean Cuisines nuked, stirred, renuked, and stirred again. No more macaroni and cheese!

He looked out the window. Finally, they’d all gone away, the entourage of reporters who’d set up shop in the front yard to bedevil him. The weather had turned cold, it was late on a Friday night and nothing happened in Washington on a Friday night, so all the boys and girls of estate4.com had gone home early.

He should have shaved, but what the hell. He slipped on a sports coat, went into the garage, and pulled out. God, for just a few seconds the liberation was its own reward, the sense of being outside the house, away from the same four walls. He drove aimlessly through Fairfax and finally decided, since it was late and the line would be down, to head to Ray’s the Steaks in Arlington. He slid through the Northern Virginia night without much difficulty, found parking on the street, and headed into the old house that had become one of the most popular restaurants in the area.

“Is the kitchen still open?” he asked the maître d’.

“You just made it, sir.”

“I can eat in the bar if it’s easier.”

“No, we’ve got tables. This way, please.”

He followed the man through the three-quarters-full room to a corner table for two, approved of its darkness and obscurity, and took a seat. In a bit, he ordered a drink, since he sure wasn’t on duty and wasn’t carrying anything except his credit cards.

“Bourbon and water.”

“Preference, sir?”

“Sure, Knob Creek, if you don’t mind.”

“Yes sir.”

He studied the menu and ended up with what he always ordered—house salad, filet, medium rare, mashed—and since Sally wasn’t here, he allowed himself to enjoy the luxury of skipping the asparagus. He sat, meditating, enjoying the mellow power of the bourbon to confer its merciful blur on things, and tried to figure out what to do next but of course knew that whatever he decided would be preempted by the Bureau’s next move.

Would he be formally terminated with cause? It might happen. More likely, he’d be demoted to some make-work job—hmm, had they closed out the who-really-fathered-Bristol-Palin’s-baby investigation?—while the Office of Professional Responsibility put together a case against him; then he’d be advised of a hearing, he’d have to hire a lawyer, there’d be some back-and-forth, and what would happen would happen.

A shadow fell across the table.

He looked up.

“I figured it would be you. At least it’s not Banjax,” he said.

“Hi, Nick. I’m hoping you won’t chase me away. We should talk,” said Bill Fedders.

“Sure, Bill,” said Nick. “Sit yourself down. Waiter, waiter, bring Mr. Fedders a drink, whatever he wants, on my tab.”

“Well, aren’t we feeling generous,” Fedders said. “Better let me put it on my tab. It’s the least I can do.”

Fedders ordered a vodka martini, dry, Grey Goose, and explained that by “dry” he meant that the olive should be allowed to read the label on the vermouth and that was it for vermouth.

Nick thought it was actually kind of funny but suspected that it was a treasured Feddersism, famous all over DC. He was hearing it late because normally he was so distant from the fabulous Fedders orbit.

“So, Nick,” said Bob.

“So, Bill,” said Nick.

Fedders’s drink came and Fedders toasted, “Nick, to you. I always liked you. None of this was because anybody disliked you. You’re a hell of a guy, Nick, and a hell of an agent.”

“Hear, hear,” said Nick, drinking to himself.

“It’s not too late, Nick. You can call the director, tell him in the time off your thinking has clarified on the case and you are one hundred percent behind resolution now and moving onward. Get that report issued, hang the case-closed tag on it, and sit back and relax. Then maybe some of the forces that seem to be conspiring to destroy you could conspire to help you.”

“You can make it happen that fast?” said Nick. “You can stop the Times in mid hue and cry—or maybe that’s full hue and only half cry—and turn it around to help me?”

“Well, Nick, you overestimate my power, sure. But I can make some things happen. I’ve been in this old town since the first Roosevelt. I used to date Alice Longworth, in fact. I’ve got a few favors owed me; I’ve sure done enough in my time.”

“Impressive, Bill, I give you that. Impressive.”

“Nick, really, what’s the problem? The Big Guy doesn’t want to spend the last years of his life reading how he hired aliens to murder his ex-wife because she was sleeping with some kid with too much mousse in his hair. Can you blame him? Once all you guys go to case-closed, the report is the record, the verdict, the official version. Nobody will have access to the evidence. No more nutcase articles, nobody getting rich on craptastic books and DVDs, no movie versions, no Rushes to Judgment. The whole circus dries up and dies.”

“Wow, again, you can do that?”

“My pleasant voice, suave charm, brilliant instincts, and, oh yes, Tom Constable’s six billion bucks. Money talks loud. He just wants this goddamn thing to go away.”

“I’d think he’d want the guilty party drawn and quartered.”

“Nick, I can’t argue the case with you, but the crazy marine sniper thing made absolute sense to Tom and he bought it totally. Maybe he’s deluding himself, because he also saw how quickly and neatly it ended things.”

“Or maybe he did pay somebody to kill her and frame Hitchcock. Or maybe killing her wasn’t even the point, maybe it was killing one of the others, like that, what was his name, the comic, Mitch Greene.”

“Nick, believe me, nobody would go to that much trouble to kill Mitch Greene.”

“Well, I’m sure you’re right about it, but I can’t see hanging it up until we’ve worked out all the possibilities, not just the most obvious ones. That’s my obligation as a law enforcement officer. I can’t walk away from that, no matter what.”

“Nick, really, the news isn’t good. Not tomorrow, but in a few days, the Times has another bombshell. It’s bad, Nick. I don’t think even your most ardent supporters in the Bureau will stand behind you after this one. I can’t tell you what it is, but it’ll leave a crater the size of Manhattan.”

So that was it. That’s why Bill was here, to deliver the news in person. Nick had no doubt that at some level Fedders was genuine in his affection for Nick and was probably going to some kind of extra exertion out of some kind of twisted nobility to deliver the news in person.

“You know, it’s all crap,” Nick said. “I never did a thing for FN, took one red cent, one lousy meatball. I didn’t even know they’d bought Winchester. I have no brief for the Model 70 over the 700. I don’t know anything about firearms acquisitions; that’s handled at Quantico. I missed most of the meetings for the Sniper Rifle Committee.”

“Nick, the evidence says different, and it’s a hard one to talk your way out of. I’d get good counsel, if I were you, and I’ll tell you what he’ll say. He’ll say, ‘Let me cut a deal. You sign off on something else, maybe behavior detrimental to the Bureau, have a suspension, and when you come back, they’ll move you someplace out of the mainstream. That way you keep your pension and it all looks rosy and cosy.’ That’s good advice, Nick. Don’t try to play hardball with this thing. It’s too big. It’ll squash you. The more you fight it, the worse off you are.”

“See, Bill, here’s the funny thing. If you want to go after me, that’s fine. I’m a big boy, I’m in a hot-seat job, it’s what I wanted, it was the risk I ran to pay for my ambition. I can go down; it’s the way of the wicked world. But you guys went after Swagger. Let me tell you, it takes a powerful kind of fool to go after Swagger. He never did anything but his duty, hard and straight, no bullshit, and he dodged enough lead in his time to sink an aircraft carrier. He did it for something he thought of as his country, and his country is a lot better off because of the risks he took and the wounds he bore and the responsibilities he embraced. Now you make him out to be some kind of cracker Svengali manipulating me into stupidity. I will tell you this: I’ve seen smart boys try to throw the rope around Swagger before and it always turns out the same. They think they’re hunting him, and it turns out he’s hunting them.”

“Nick, it’s nothing personal. It’s just—”

“So when I talk to you, Bill, the truth is, one way or the other, it’s like I’m talking to something that’s already been hit and just doesn’t know it yet. You and your rich boss and all the thugs he’s hired? Baby, you’re walking into bullet city.”

37

They took him downstairs into a blank white room with a heavy lock. It was one of those zones of permanent noon. Two TV cameras monitored it, mounted on brackets in the corner. It had an antiseptic quality to it, and a drain in the floor, in the center of the cheesy linoleum. The lights were harsh and shadowless. A sink hung off one padded wall. He knew what it was for.

The search came first: it was hard and professional, a bunch of clapping and probing and rubbing. Jimmy, one of the hulking, muscle-knotted gym rat contractors, even peeled a bandage back on one of his fingers, looking to make sure it covered a bloody wound, and only picking at the scab to draw a drop of blood convinced him it was real enough. “Cut ourselves wanking, have we now?” he asked, as he squashed the thing back in place. Raymond, the scrawny one, went to it on his boots, probing the lasts for hidden blades or whatever, finding nothing.

Then they threw him in a chair, the four of them, three hulking men in desert tan battle dress and Raymond, who he now realized was Carl’s doppelgänger during the week of shootings. Of course, there had to be a guy of Carl’s size and coloring who, in grubby clothes with a three-day beard and a ballcap pulled low over the eyes, could pass as any grizzled loner.

But that was the past; in the present, he could feel their weight and concentration of purpose palpably, filling the room. His tightly bound wrists, the plastic bindings deep in the flesh of his arms, sang in pain; his hands felt like blue gloves.

“I see Team Homo has formed up again,” he said. “Shouldn’t you boys be puking up green beer behind some dive in Boston?”

“Oh, Bobby,” said Anto, “with the smart comments, as if he’s reading from a movie script. He ain’t scared, is he, Ginger?”

“He is not,” said Ginger, “or if he is, the fellow controls it well. But we’ll change that.”

“We’s in for a long night’s journey, I’m afraid.”

Two departed and returned with folders, and Anto Grogan sat across from Bob, taking off his ballcap, running a hand through his dark crew cut, smiling broadly; handsome fellow he was too, radiating charisma.

“Nicely handled in Chicago,” he said. “Too bad we haven’t it on film. Counter-Ambush Tactical Improvisation. A damn classic. Also too bad that damn kid was so slow on the gun. He liked filling up the black gentleman with lead, and by the time he came around for you, you was gone. And three seconds later, he was dead. Very nice. Who said this was no country for old men?”

“You killed a second good man that night,” said Bob. “That goes on the list. When payback comes, I’ll kill you twice for that alone.”

Grogan and the fellas laughed.

“Him talking so big, all trussed like a pig,” Grogan explained. “Still, it’s the ego of the alpha. Even now, beaten and captured and in for who knows what ahead, he’s bellowing insults and kicking up the dust. See, here’s what I don’t figure. Ginger, help me here; he’s so damned good, the best, yet he comes in here like a clodhopping amateur and he’s taken down easily as can be. Which Bobby would it be with us tonight, the tough operator or the clodhopper?”

“I wouldn’t know, Anto,” said Ginger. “Maybe it was overconfidence? Even the best make mistakes when they get overconfident.”

“Possibly that’s so, Ginger,” said Anto. “Bobby, luv, here now, what’s your interpretation? What explains the different levels of your warcraft?”

“Go fuck yourself,” said Swagger.

“Now that’s not helpful.”

“I didn’t think you boys would be here. I thought I was way ahead of you on the figuring-out. My idea was to get in and get out before you realized how much I knew. It was a recon, figure on what I’d need next time. I thought you’d still be at Graywolf HQ, going over intel, tracking me down, sending out other kill teams, better kill teams.”

“Now, see, he is mixed up,” said Anto. “He thinks Graywolf has a thing to do with this and it don’t; this is private enterprise between us and his lordship Constable, who’s making us all rich boys who won’t be working no more teaching kids how to pop camel jiggers at a thousand meters out. Not that it ain’t fun, now, but still, I’d rather live in Spain with seven gals and three pigs and a nice big potato patch. Give an Irishman his potatoes and you’ve made him happy.”

He yawned and checked his watch.

“It’s late, Anto, best get on with it,” said Ginger.

“Yes, Ginger. You and the boys, fill them pails.”

The three—Ginger, Jimmy, and Raymond—went to the sink, and with bangs and crashes and a lot of drama, they filled three pails with water, the water rushing hard into the tin confines, drumming like God’s final rain upon the bogs, gurgling and seething.

“You know what’s coming, Bobby boy, do you now?”

“Fuck you and the green horse you came in on, Grogan,” said Bob. Yes, he knew what was coming.

“I will not lie to you, no sir. I respect you. I even love you, as soldier loves soldier in the pure and manly way, not like them camel shaggers love each other. You’ve been and done, I’ve been and done. We’re mates of the rifle; we give out death and risk our own. Wish it could be easier.”

He sighed, as if a tide of melancholy had rolled over him. He began to unbutton his sleeves and fold them back.

“You see how it has to be. Wish it didn’t but it does. You’re on to something. You’ve seen through the little rigged game the boys and I set up for Mr. Constable, as maybe no man on earth could have. Nobody knows enough about the things you and I know about to read the signs clearly. My bad luck you came along, your bad luck you came along. So what’s a fellow to do?”

“Tell you what, Grogan. Surrender to me with a full confession and I’ll get you life in a good joint, and you and Ginger can fuck each other three times a week. And Jimmy can have seconds.”

Grogan laughed.

“What about poor Raymond, then?” asked Ginger.

“Hear that, mates? With them Yank wisecracks, all Sergeant Rock style. Damn, the fellow’s a prince.” Then he leaned forward. “Look hard in me eyes, Swagger. I don’t want to torture you, but torture you I must and I will. Nothing you say means anything unless it’s uttered by a man broken in spirit, all his defenses crushed, his sense of doom large as this room, him knowing that it’s his last words and they must be true, and that as a reward he gets to sleep and there’s not to be any more pain. Do you see that? I have no choice.”

“There’s always choices, Grogan.”

“Not for Anto there’s not. All right, I’ll give you a chance. You tell me honest, maybe we won’t go to the waterboard. It’ll just be a quick nine in the ear. That’s a fine bargain, isn’t it? Why should a man like you suffer? You’ve given so much. I know death don’t scare you a bit, you’ll take the bullet like a man eating a piece of toast. But the water in the lungs, the panic it looses in your head, the fear of drowning as deep as any ancient human thought, the joy when the air comes back, and the crushing tragedy when the water comes again. It takes your soul, it takes your dignity, it eats your courage, and it dissolves your nobility. You don’t want to be where it leaves you. Believe me, I’ve seen it. This is how we ran intel in Basra, until the Clara Bartons got on us and ruined our fine game. This is how we became Lord High Death with over a hundred kills in a week. This is how we broke the fucking back of their insurrection and put their leaders facedown in the sand with flies nibbling on the brains all over the wall. I know it, I’ve seen it. Nobody can work the board better than I, and I’ll kill you dead a hundred times and you’ll believe it each time. Ready for a hundred deaths, Bobby Lee Swagger?”

“All right,” said Swagger. “You get an Oscar for the speech. What do you want to know?”

“Who are you working for? What have you told them? What is the state of their intel? What are your callback protocols? How far have you gotten? How far into it are you, and do they believe you or are you here as some kind of prelim, as a way to snatch evidence to convince them? Do they expect a callback by a certain time? Do you have a control in a motel a few miles away? Or is there a team there, a big SWAT thing, ready to jump? What will their next move be?”

“Jesus, you think I’m some kind of FBI undercover, don’t you? You poor fool, you better watch the paranoia. I’m pure freelance on this one. Like you, I’m mercenary. I want the money, the gals in Spain, and the patch, only mine’ll be full of peas, not potatoes.”

Grogan looked at him.

“Do you believe him, Ginger?”

“Not a bit of it,” said Ginger. “Let’s wet him a bit and see how the tune changes.”

“I was asked by the feds to look over their case, because I’m such a smart guy,” said Bob. “I realized whoever done the shooting couldn’t have done it with the scope on Carl’s rifle. I do know someone at the FBI, and I got a chance to look at the evidence. They got me in your school. But I told ’em the bad guys had to be one of your clients and when you gave me the client list—brilliant, someone smarter than you figured it out, right—”

“That was me,” said Ginger.

“Someone around here has to have some brains. Anyhow, they’ve been out wasting time on those names. I knew it was you on the trigger, Anto, when I saw you nail those beachballs. You know how? You hit ’em dead center. That was your mistake, you shot too well.”

“I told you that,” said Ginger.

“Go on,” said Anto. “I’m listening hard.”

“So I realized all the sniper bullshit was camouflage to run a mission on the Strongs. I used a cop connection I had to get into their house and I found evidence that their mood had suddenly gotten real good. They were going to get big money just ahead. It tracked back to the death of a guy named Ozzie Harris. They got something from Ozzie Harris, and as I reasoned and later proved, it gave them leverage over Tom Constable. They thought he was going to move a chunk of dough into their Swiss account and they could live happily ever after in the land of chocolates and ski bunnies. Instead, they got 168ers through the central medulla, courtesy of one Anto Grogan, along with two other poor souls, including the babe Constable once was married to, and her presence emptied tons of irrelevant bullshit into the case so thick you need a pitchfork. I knew that underneath it, under all the crap about movie stars and stand-up comics, all that yellow smoke, there was something, I don’t know what it was, but some little object, maybe a photo or a letter, whatever, that was worth billions to Constable. I thought it had to be here at this ranch, in this house once I saw it. My deal was I’ll crack that place, I’ll recon, I’ll see what I need, for next time. Then I’ll blow and put a team of professionals together. When we come back, we’ll take whatever it was and we’ll leave a yardful of dead Irishmen, payback for Carl and Denny. Then I’ll run the deal with Constable, and because I’m a professional and have been around the block a bit, I won’t end up with my brains on the windshield. My guess was it’s here. So I’m here.”

“Don’t believe him, Anto,” said Ginger. “I smell the constabulary all over him. Them FBI fellas would never have pulled no strings to get him into our tutorial if he weren’t working for them. He’s with them, they’re waiting for a callback, and if he don’t give it to ’em soon, they’ll hit this place and we’ll have a gunfight on our hands, twenty dead garda and the Americans after us till forever turns to cheese.”

“I think Ginger sees through you, Bobby Lee, friend. I don’t for a second believe you’d go for money. Your kind doesn’t need money. Your type gives it all to king and country, no matter who’s king. You’re rotten with honor, that’s you, sniper. You stink of the shit. I always hated your type because the bloody smell of virtue just made you stronger, and the more pain you racked up, the more you loved it.”

“I say, work him hard now,” said Ginger. “Get his callback and get him to use it, and make sure we don’t get the SWAT boys in their little Johnny Ninja outfits tossing them bangers in and trying to be all herolike.”

“That’s good advice,” said feral Raymond. “Anto, Ginger’s got the point. He’ll be tough, but we have to snap him now.”

“Wonder if he’ll go as long as the lieutenant colonel,” said Jimmy, contributing for the first time.

“Good question, Jimbo. Bobby, the lieutenant colonel rode the board for close to three hours. He was a believer, head boy in al-Sadr’s militia. Strong and tough he was, hard inside as he was outside. Lord, the man fought us. Remember, fellas? But in the end, even Lieutenant Colonel Abu Sha-heed broke, and he gave us a coupla caches and we set up upside and dropped them sand niggers for a day and a half before we called in sappers to blow the joints. Got me nineteen in the first hour alone, great sniper shooting it was too.”

Swagger said nothing while the Irishman recalled his day of killing, probably the episode that got him nicknamed Lord High Death.

“All right, sniper,” Anto finally said. “I hate to do this, but I only half believe what you said. I have to know the other half. It’s time for the water.”

38

Constable was precise, organized, immaculate. He left little to chance. He knew what was important: that was his talent. He cut to the core, acted swiftly and decisively, and made endless preparations.

Now the thing was coming to a climax. The forces he had set in motion were brewing and would explode. He had to be at his best, he had to be ready. Two days hence, the Cold Water Cowboy Action Shoot, at Cold Water, Colorado, would commence and he would—there was no doubt in his mind—win the Senior Black Powder Duelist Shooter championship.

To that end, he sat at a table in the rear of his gigantic rec-V and tested cartridges. They were .44-40s, for his two Clell Rush–tuned six guns, painstakingly assembled by Custom Cartridges of Roswell, New Mexico, 14.5 grains of Goex FFFg over 250-grain semi-wads from Ten-X. CC was the best in the business, and they’d weighed each and every piece of brass (from Starline), reamed the primer holes, squared the primer pockets, measured the rim thickness, and segregated the two thousand rounds by that thickness into four lots, so that he’d always be shooting cartridges in the same lot together, for continuity of point of impact.

But that wasn’t enough. Constable now sat with the two thousand cartridges and a Wilson .44-40 cartridge gauge—that is, a replica chamber precise to the nanomeasurement—and now he inserted each cartridge into that chamber, making sure that it fit, that it slid in easily, that no rogue burrs or lead smears in any way defiled the circumference of the shells. When he loaded, over the next few days, he’d load fast, and he didn’t want some unseen microscopic chip of metal screwing him up.

He worked intently, some might say insanely. When he was done he would do the same with the .44-40s for his rifle and 12-gauges for his 1897 Winchester pump, just like the fellows in The Wild Bunch had carried. Everything would be tested; any shell that was in the slightest out of spec would be discarded. He would have the best and it would be up to him to be the best.

He loved the way the cartridges slid neatly into the chamber; that was one of the joys of guns, the way parts fit, meshed, clicked, moved in syncopation, smoothly and efficiently. He had a gift for the mechanics of it and saw the big picture, the way the rods and pins all worked together, powered by the mechanical energy of the springs. It was such genius old Sam Colt had rendered onto earth all those decades ago when he ushered the modern revolver into existence in 1836, and in that way, Tom Constable felt a part of a great American tradition, totally and completely.

Totally and completely could have been his creed. Tom never did things halfway. He was a creature of obsessions, and when he discovered a new one, whether it was sailing, radical politics, billions making, movie star courting, book writing, network starting, old movie colorizing, whatever, he hammered it with the full force of will and intelligence until it became his, he beat it into the shape he desired. This cowboy gunfighter business: stupid, sure, with the aliases—“Texas Red”—the costumes, his being jeans, leather vest, red placket shirt, and ten-gallon Stetson, as he was of the realistic school, whereas some were of the fanciful school and still others of the character school (Hoppy was big, and so were Marshal Dillon and Paladin) and some of the Wild Bunch school. Yet the culture, the challenges, the guns—all of it was incredibly

satisfying.

He loved being Texas Red. Wild as a pony, fast, loose, beautiful, proud, dangerous, all the things that Tom himself had once aspired to be and that, even though he was a buccaneer of business, he felt he’d never really let out. He’d always played by their rules, and somehow Texas Red, the twenty-four-year-old gunman with twenty notches, was his way of imagining a life, of touching a life, lived by his own rules.

Where did Tom end and Red begin? He got into character and he got out of character by simple act of will. It wasn’t some horror-movie freak show of him turning into Texas Red, and there being no Tom Constable to turn back into. Maybe he’d caught an acting bug—he’d caught several others!—from Joan, maybe the TV images had poured into his unresisting head in a torrent of unfiltered power when he was a defenseless seven, maybe it was his quest for the outlaw ideal that had moved millions of men, only he, in his T. T. Constable way, had let it go too far, as was his tendency. Whatever, like no one else in his life, from a father dead early to business associates to women to smooth operators to whomever, Texas Red made him happy. He would not let Texas Red down.

If he could just hold together on the multiple target scenarios, especially the last one Sunday night, just before he flew to Seattle for a speech as Tom “T. T.” Constable. But he worried about his hands.

He’d worked for a year to strengthen them, developing forearm muscles, relentlessly squeezing rubber balls, finger-cruncher gizmos, rolling up weights at the end of ropes, anything. The problem was he was cursed with fast-twitch muscles, and the strength simply would not adhere. Someone like Clell had large, strong fingers and abnormally shaped and defined forearm muscles and off-the-charts natural dexterity that would have made him a superb pianist, watchmaker, blackjack dealer, or surgeon; his fingers were living organisms, each with a seeming brain to keep it on mission. Goddamn it, Tom’s were not so gifted; his strength stayed level, his grip stayed at the same measure, and he simply was not dextrous enough to manipulate the gun, even with Colonel Colt’s great imagination for ergonomics, with efficiency. So Tom had substituted labor and repetitions for genius and had been practicing six hours a day for the last few weeks.

He could shoot fast. He could shoot accurately through three targets. And then that goddamned fourth target came up and he missed. Or he stopped, readjusted his grip, and fired again, this time hitting but hopelessly blowing his time. He’d even hired a numbers cruncher to examine the course from an arithmetical point of view and answer definitively the question of priority: speed or accuracy. Which was more important? After hours on a mainframe computer, the fellow came up with an answer: both.

Agggh. The problem was that the gun shifted with each report, as it took a long stretch of his short, weak thumb to reach the hammer spur, ratchet it back, then resettle thumb on frame, then fire again. Each time, the gun shifted incrementally, and by the time it had been fired three times, it had cranked around to such a degree that it no longer aligned with his wrist and held true; thus, misses.

What on earth can I do? He’d tried an orthotic brace, adjustments to the gun (such as lowering the hammer spur, which was technically illegal, but even a few unspottable hundredths of an inch might help), and ammunition selection (the last three rounds being a load that tended to shoot, compensatingly, to the right), and nothing worked consistently.

I am so afraid of that goddamned Mendoza, where I go against the five Mexican brothers I—

His cell rang, his very private cell. Only one person had the number.

“Yes, Bill.”

“Well, Tom, tomorrow’s the day. The Times has verified that photo. It runs, page one, with a dynamite piece by our friend Banjax, and I don’t see how the Bureau can do anything but make Memphis’s suspension official, make the Robot the new head of Task Force Sniper, and get the report out by the end of next week. Then it’ll go to the judge and everything’s sealed up forever. No ‘Did Tom kill Joan’ books or articles, not without any access to evidence.”

“Good, Bill. Boy, that’s good news. Bill Fedders comes through again. You know that town, I give it to you, pal.”

“Tom, for what you’re paying me, I’d better.”

“I think you’ll be pleased with a little bonus that comes your way when all this settles down.”

“Why, thank you, Tom.”

“The pleasure is mine, Bill.”

Yet the victory over the FBI didn’t delight Tom as much as it ought to. Such manipulations were a part of his way of doing business, and he hired expensive experts, such as Bill Fedders, to get them done—fixers, nudgers, influence peddlers. He never expected a different outcome. This one just took a little longer than—

The phone again. No, the other phone, the encrypted satellite phone, entrusted only to those who handled Tom’s special business. He checked the number, knew in a flash what it was, felt a spasm attack his heart.

“Yes.” He was breathing heavily.

“Mr. Constable, his self-same?”

“Of course. I hope this isn’t an emergency. I told you, only in cases of dire emergency.”

“I have that instruction learned, sir, that I do, and no, this ain’t no emergency. Still, I do believe you’d care to hear what’s been happening, if only to set your mind at ease.”

“Go on.”

“’Tis himself that came, that annoying fellow I’ve been telling you about. He presented himself to us as predicted. No miscues as in the unfortunate business in Chicago. The fellow all but surrendered himself.”

“No problems?”

“It’s him I’ve got for certain, sir. Presently we’ll learn what secrets he’s carrying and what’s he’s after and what his knowledge would be. We’ll know what authorities he’s told and how much. He won’t wish to tell us, but then that’s the nature of the game he and I chose to play many years ago. We’ll know all his secrets and see then where we stand. As for him, he’ll be gone forever and a long day, sir, if that’s still what it is you desire. I’m only checking so there’s no misunderstanding, this being strong stuff.”

“It is, Grogan. That’s why I chose strong men. You do this thing as you said you would, and it’s over and gone, and the little taste you’ve had of life at the topmost level is only a start. I’ll settle on each of you enough for an estate in the aulde sod.”

“That’s a right fair thing, sir, and me and all the boys be thanking you, though if you don’t mind, I think we’ll choose Spain instead. It don’t rain there so much and the taxes are lower.”

39

Anto had many interesting observations and thoughts to share. He commented on the events transpiring before him as if the man were a learned don at Trinity College, Dublin, a barroom poet known for his loquaciousness, an epiphany-rich critic of the art in the great days of the Irish belles lettres tradition, say around the 1920s, when revolution made for murder and brilliant prose.

“Now,” he explained to Bob, “there are to be found several kinds of torturers. First there’s the sex torturer. He is deeply miswired. In his fetid little atmosphere, he’s got pain and pleasure not only entwined but hopelessly confused. He’s not the one to take pleasure in the suck of nipple, the lap of cunt, the piquancy of the anus, the zoom of the first wet plunge; no, no, more likely he gets his member heavy with blood at the sight of the welt, at the tightness of the buckle, the way it imprints so deep, down to bone itself, in the flesh. He is all monster, and any sane society would cull him early, put the nine just behind the ear, and throw him by the pathway for the trashman. But no, that rigor has left the formerly Christian nations of the West; only the barbarians have the strength of will and the confidence to execute the perverse on sight, though it is said that they themselves lean toward perversity behind the casbah’s closed byways.”

Raymond and Jimmy wrapped heavy rope around Bob, binding him tightly from shoulder to wrist to the chair. Then, each taking a side, they carefully tilted the bound man backwards, not fully to the floor but to a crate nested where it was to give the chair support while putting Bob’s head at precisely the right downward angle, which all the boys knew from long experience.

“Now your second type,” Anto continued, “your second type is driven by stupidity. He is of slothful demeanor and mental habit. He’s after knowing nothing of the torturer’s trade and art, of the subtle progressions in debasement, the delicacy of psychology, the nuance of pain. He’s pure brute, usually a fat boy whom all the wee ones picked on when he himself was wee and wan. So he grew in pain, he hated his own fat self for its immensity, for how slow it made him at games, for the way it drove the girlies far away, as who’d cuddle with a fat one, who was probably moist in odd ways too, and breathed also through his mouth. This fella takes all the pain and he simply inverts it; after fifteen years or so of torment, he decides he will himself be the dispenser of torment. By this time, the fat that exiled him has turned to muscle via the alchemy of rage and he learns that size has its virtues: he is the crusher, the stomper, the basher, the giant atop the beanstalk, chanting, ‘Fee-fi-fo-fum, I smell the blood of an Englishman.’ His empathy has been burned out of him, spent all on himself. He feels nothing for what he does to you. It does not register. He is relentless, energetic, unstoppable. Alas, he has no finesse. Be glad it’s not him who’s your guide through the land of torture, but someone a filigree wiser. For the crusher would crush; he’d have broken all them ribs by now, knocked out all them teeth, crushed all them fingers. Your nose would be a lamb patty, and if your lips locked shut in seizure, you’d drown in your own blood and puke before they could be pried open, as he’d have no idea which nerve was the button to pop the lock. It would be a banjax and a half, I’ll tell you, and I’d be breathin’ hard as if at sport, and the boys would be drenched in sweat and blood and vomit—messy, messy, and worst of all, so inefficient. For if I put my strength against yours, I put your ego into the equation and you see a way to beat me. No matter how I pound you, no matter how my sharp knuckles rend your flesh, your ego keeps your hate alive, which anesthetizes you. Give you hope of victory, and it’s victory that comes your way.”

Next came the towel. It was wrapped heavily around Swagger’s face, flattening his nose, clogging his breathing passages, taking his vision from him. Why imprison the body when one could imprison the head? It was the same thing. Claustrophobia, most men’s scourge, was set free by these powerful folds encasing the face, making the air itself a labor to obtain, sowing seeds of fear meant to blossom in the coming minutes.

“Then there’s the regretful torturer,” said Anto. “Him I despise the most. He’s too good for his line of work, and what got him here in the dungeon with the animals unleashing debasement and humiliation and filth upon another human being, that is such a complex story, and he’d love nothing better than to tell it to you in all its ironies and comic macabres, straight out of our minor Irish writers, but alas he hasn’t the time, because he’s got to crank the telephone wires full of juice to fry your man parts. ‘So sorry. Don’t think ill of me. I’m as much victim as you are. I feel your pain. My heart is with you. We should bond and somehow, if you’d but break, you can spare us both the torment of the next hours. It’s in your power. Don’t make me do it. I don’t want to do it and it’s only your intransigence that forces it upon me. Is it not manifest that, morally and intellectually, I am so far in advance of such behavior?’ Do you not see the play of narcissism in the fellow’s maunderings? Your torture isn’t about you, it’s about him. He’s the secret hero and victim of the transaction. The first bucket, fellows. Bobby Lee, try not to fight it, me friend. If you fight it, it goes far worse, and it ruins your heroism. Accept it, go with it a bit, and then you’ll have done your duty. You’ll probably beat the lieutenant colonel and that’s enough, but no man can stand more than two buckets. You’ll go three, that’s an hour. You’re the hero type, I’m knowing. He’s a right bucko, eh, Ginger?”

“I don’t know, Anto. Possibly he’s a shitter. Many are, you know.”

“Indeed, many are. The lieutenant colonel, I remember, he was a shitter, finally, at the end.”

“He was.”

“Still, I doubt Sniper Bob will be a shitter, Ginger. His head is on too tight and it’s far too full of chary notions like honor and dignity. He’ll keep his bottom plugged hard, you’ll see.”

Swagger felt the water, first as weight, then as damp, then as wet, then as drench, finally as death. It came as infiltrators arrive, from all points, without a lot of commotion or hubbub, glimpsed from far away and then somehow suddenly gigantic and everywhere, the world was water.

The water rose through the towel and clamped itself upon his face. He tried to hold his face tight to fight it, keep it from tunneling into his systems, but that defense lasted only a second. It unleashed fear. Swagger was not a fearful man and had learned over long, hard years how to separate himself from the rat teeth of what little fear he felt, how to objectify the agony and examine it as if it were the product of some other mind, a scientific phenomenon to be studied. That worked for a bit, and then that defense too was overwhelmed.

He felt his body jack and spasm as the Irishmen leaned into it and all his strength went against all theirs and since there were more of them, they prevailed, leaving him alone, finally, with the water.

Water, water, everywhere. Funny little rhyme from somewhere lost, it was nevertheless the hard truth of this moment, as his mind now spasmed, just as his body did and lost control against the totality of death and wet that clamped upon his face, until he blew hard against the towel, expelling some small portion of what had come in, and then he reflexively inhaled and there was no air, only a rushing wall of water, coded with cold and death, and here it was at last, he’d dealt enough of it to men the world over, turning Panther Battalion’s legions to anonymous grave markers in a foreign land, blowing Payne’s arm off and Shreck’s lungs out, outsniping the general in the bitter woods of Arkansas, taking down the Cubans on the high road in the mountains, oh so many, sending the fat Jap’s head spinning through space as he was about to dispatch Susan, then upstroking Kondo, the man stunned that his own blow had bounced off a steel hip, him driving the sword so hard to spine, God, the blood, a man had so much blood inside him, and those four Grumley fucks, in store and parking lot, each thinking himself such a gunman and finding out no, I’m not much of a gunman next to Swagger, and finally those two gangbangers in the car fight, so many of them, and now he’d join them, they’d saved him a place in hell right among them—

The air rushed in. He breathed it hard as the towel was torn off, sucking it in, pure elixir of ambrosia, cold and life-sustaining, his lungs inflating greedily.

“Did I not tell you, boys, did I not? A strong fellow, sure, so he is. Almost a minute in the universe of the drowning and not a word for it.”

“And no shit at all,” said Jimmy. “His buttocks got a cork a’tween ’em.”

“He is tough,” said Ginger. “Give the poor beggar that. Impressive start. A right bucko, as you said, Anto. Maybe ’twill be a long night’s work.”

“On the other hand,” said Jimmy, “maybe that was it for the fella. Now he’s spent. He gave it a good go, but he isn’t holding it today, not now that he knows what it’s like and how far beyond deciding it is.”

Anto took the opportunity to continue the lecture.

“Finally,” he said, “there’s my kind of torturer. I am what is called the duty torturer. I ask no understanding, and if caught out by the Clara Bartons of the news, then I go to me fate with dignity, sure in the conviction that what I done was in the right, no matter how them lady-fellows spun it round and made it seem evil. Because of Anto Grogan and his three leprechauns, there’s a hundred-odd British squaddies back in Blighty, drinking Mr. Guinness’s black velvet and enjoying their fine plowman’s lunch. We won’t comment on the fact that the fookin’ Brits always make their pet Irish their torturers, because they know we have the strength, which they themselves do not, and at the same time will take our ultimate fate, our dismissal and disgrace, with dignity befitting our proud race. So when the four of us are found out and called beasts and driven from the service we have given our lives to, then that’s fine by us, it is. We seen the duty, we done the duty. We take the crap that comes afterwards, the shit the Clara Bartons bring to us. You may ask the boys, perhaps they differ, but because of what we done in the night in the cellar of the jail with the buckets and buckets of lovely snotgreen water—because of that we knew in the day where the camel jiggers would be, and we put them down. Lord God, Sniper Swagger, you alone of men would know how godly that was, how Christian civilization was what we defended with our manly trigger fingers. Remember that wolfish Yank in the movie and his speech about standing on the wall? That was us, boyo, on the wall, doing the duty that had to be done. Or do you read Orwell? You’ve heard the one I loves so, about the comfort and warmth of many fine people in England, which I extend to Christian civilization, because rough men do dark deeds by night. We here in this room, all of us, are mates, having done the dark deeds, having been the rough men. Sniper, are you ready for more?”

Who could outspeak a poet? Not Swagger.

“Fuck you, Mr. Potatohead.”

Anto sighed, as if disappointed in the lame zinger that Swagger had improvised, and more disappointed that his hero was no Oscar Wilde, answering in honed epigrams.

“A comment bespeaking futility. No better than the sod carrier’s curse. Are yis not finished yet?” he wondered and stared into Swagger’s twisted, drenched face, and answered his own question. “You are not. Still, I think you’ll be before I have my breakfast eaten. Second bucket, buckos.”

“You talk too much.”

“I do, I do. The Irishman’s curse.”

The second bucket was a creature. It hunted him through the towel and he squirmed and struggled, trying to fight for a last wisp of oxygen trapped in the fibers of the towel, but then it had him. He thought of some kind of wet squid, something monstrous from the dark, dark well of human fear, some glistening, tentacled, boneless crusher from the deep that wrapped its wet strong arms about him and buried his face in the nexus where all those legs formed some kind of hideous, pink, cold, horror-movie sucking mask. Wet and cold and slimy, oceanic and ancient, it fought to snatch his soul from him, and he felt his body bucking against its grip, his bound knees trying to rip free, his hands trying to claw away from their plastic wires, and he had an image of ripping the thing off his face and throwing it to the floor and stomping it, smashing it with his boots, feeling it squirm in endless pain as it died spewing green greasy guts across the floor and then it all went black—

“You said he’d be a fighter, and a fighter he is,” Ginger said, as Bob came back to consciousness through a sense of dislocation. Air, there was air.

“Almost nobody lasts long enough to actually pass out,” said Jimmy, with just a hint of awe showing in his voice. “I don’t recall any man ever passing out. They panic and beg for release, but no one can consciously hold their breath long enough to simply make themselves faint like that.”

“Agh,” said Anto, “he does have the fight in him, for such a string bean of a fellow. You’d have thought a bruiser might have a bigger lung capacity and do well under the towel, but this fella’s nothing but skin and bones, yet he’s got a lot of battle in them scrawny pants of his. And again, Ginger, not a shitter, is he? I should have bet you, Ginger, on that. Give it to me. I knew he wasn’t a shitter.”

Anto leaned into Bob’s face, peering intently, seeking answers.

“Sniper, you’re a lot of trouble.”

“Begging your pardon, Anto,” said a new voice—it had to be the one called Raymond, who hardly ever spoke—“but maybe it’s best if yis don’t be calling him ‘Sniper.’ It reminds him of who he is, and in that perhaps he’s finding his bloody strength.”

“Hmm,” said Anto, “good point, Raymond. Should I try the reverse then?”

“I should,” said Raymond. “Don’t build him up, tear the fellow down. Make him see how little he is, how he cannot win, how we hold all the cards, we are the power. This man here is a man being tortured in a cellar, the lowest form of life there is, at the whim and mercy of them that has him.”

“Did you hear that, you bloody bastard?” Anto asked Bob. “Raymond thinks I’m all wrong, I’m building you up when it’s tearing you down that should be my pathway. All right then, I’ll try it. Nobody can say I don’t listen to suggestions. Hero! What tripe! What rotten spew! What yellow runny shit! You’d be nothing. Do you hear? You’re a man who’s killed boys and women in your time, as have we all. You ain’t no hero, you’re a bloody killer, with your fancy rifle, lyin’ up in the grass, waiting for the poor sods to come out and then taking all from them with but the three ounces you put into the trigger, and it’s nothing to you, but somewhere there’s a widow cryin’, a baby or two starvin’, a mate grievin’, a father disconsolate, a mother ruined. But that’s nothing to the bastard in them bushes calmly and without a scratch on him looking for his next voyager and hoping to get back while the scoff’s still hot. Aye, looking at him makes me sick, boys. Douse him again. Get this bastard done so I don’t have to truck with the gobshite.”

The next bucket was pain. That’s all. Through all Swagger, the pain was general. It had nothing to do with concepts such as “water” or “torture” or with who he was and what he knew and who he was responsible to; it had no meaning whatsoever. It was just pure, harsh, absolute pain, radiating outward from his lungs as his discipline gave and he took water deep inside all his channels, and yet through it all, he noticed that a little pain in his backward-bent wrist, where the flex-cuff’s sharp plastic edge cut him enough to penetrate the general blanket of agony, and in need of something to control his mind, some servomechanism on panic, he twisted that wrist harder, feeling the goddamned plastic edge bite deeper and deeper, and he tried to imagine how it sawed through the muscle fibers, rawly separating them, and how of their own volition they peeled upward, away from each other, emitting a thin penmanship of blood from the subcutaneous network of capillaries in his skin, not a gush of blood, just a scrawl of it, but he concentrated on the pain, the sharp, biting pain of that tiny wound against the larger insult to body and mind and—

“Goddamn the fellow, will he not give!” screamed Anto. “The bastard is getting on me nerves. We’re all knackered hard, sure we is. What, how many buckets now, Jimmy?”

Three, thought Bob, I’ve lasted three buckets on these motherfuckers.

“That would be seven now, Anto,” said Ginger.

Seven! He’d lost track, his mind was falling in and out of gear. Seven. He must have been there for hours. He had no idea.

Someone slapped him hard in the face. His eyes opened, revealing nothing but blur and sparkle behind which figures moved, and then someone wiped them clear of water, and he saw now the four had stripped off their shirts and were down to undershirts, the bulky ones, tattooed muscles glistening with either sweat or splash from their labor, and scrawny Raymond like a wet rat. They were breathing hard, and all had hair pasted down flat and damp.

Seven buckets on you motherfuckers, he thought, even though it was hard to remember who, exactly, he was, and why he was here or what this was all about. That had vanished somewhere along with the untracked buckets.

“Jaysus Janey Mac, he’s hard of head,” said Anto. “All right, goddamn your black heart, Swagger, now I’m giving it to you straight. You listen hard. I’m bloody tired of you acting the maggot. This time, we kill you. If you’d any to tell, you’d have told, I’m sure. Your silence makes its point: you’ve told no one of your findings, because if you had, you’d give them up. You’d put them between you and the horror of the water. Remember Winston in Room 101, when finally he gave up Julia out of fear of the rats lunching on his nose. If you had a Julia to give us, you’d have given us she long before. So there is no Julia—”

What was this asshole ranting about?

“—there is no Bureau, there is no report protocol nor coded words, there is no waiting SWAT team. You’re on your own, Sniper, and I should have known because us snipers is lonely bastards, out beyond, doing the dark thing solitarylike and crawling back then where all the boys pretend they don’t see you because you’re naked death, whilst they’s battle-killin’, a whole different kettle of shad, unless of course Johnny Muhammad has snipers, and then it’s your ass sure they be lovin’. But you’re alone in this one, and that means that in the way things are, you’re no better at all than I. You’re not a holy warrior fighting for some holy cause like the goddamned rug weavers, you’re a bloody mercenary. You take your wages and you’ll soon be dead, and heaven ain’t suspended and earth’s foundations ain’t fled. You’re just dead. Okay boys, this is it, I’m done fooling with this one. Swagger, ’tis a shame to end up drownded dead in a bucket like a Titanic rat after all ye’ve been and done, but there it lies.”

Again the towel was clamped and the hard muscled limbs pressed against his bound body to hold against the spasms of the drowning man, and again he felt the dread infiltration of the water, its first mild licks, its rising chill, its fingers somehow clawing to rip at his mouth and nose and tear them wide open to fill them and kill him dead drowning.

This bucket was blue. That is to say, as the water rushed through the towel and clamped its intensity across his face, he was taken back in memory close on fifty years, and he remembered a day at the public pool in Little Rock, sometime in the fifties, a bright, hot summer, he and a thousand other kids flapping and jostling and splashing in that vast blue wetness, and he was trying to swim on his own and somehow his thin boy’s arms propelled him a certain blind distance in a certain blind direction and for just a second he actually was flat in the water propelling himself along on the rhythm of his muscles and then he ran out of strength and settled to the bottom, and that was when he realized he had swum too far in the wrong direction and was now in over his head. This is how children drown; caught in the grip of panic, he opened his mouth to scream but it didn’t happen and instead the cold, chlorinated brew of the pool raced in torrents into lungs and gut, and the lack of oxygen tripped off a flare of fear and he flappity-flap-flapped and he sank yet further and he had a moment when he knew he was dead and he saw blue blue blue shot with bubbles arising as if he were dying in Alka-Seltzer or some terrible thing, and suddenly someone strong had him, and the sun burst above him as if it were some kind of skyrocket, and the air rushed him, sucked with all the hunger of the young, and he was propelled this way in the strong hands of his savior, who of course was no one less than his father.

“Whoa, Bobby, you almost went to Davy Jones on your old dad, would have upset Mommy for days!” his father sang as he brought the boy to safety. “Yes sir, she’d never give me a moment’s peace!”

The man laughed, and Bob saw his father’s face clearly for just a second, a great man, a good man, a brave man, the best who ever lived for this among a million other reasons, all much better than this one, and it occurred to him that if he died, who on earth would remember his father? No one. He was the last who’d shared time on earth with Earl Swagger, of Blue Eye, Arkansas, the son of Sheriff Charles Swagger, Earl who’d gone off to war with the Marines and won the Medal of Honor on Iwo Jima and come home for ten good years as a state trooper in the Arkansas Highway Patrol before he was taken from the world for nothing, really, nothing that counted. And Bob felt some kind of sudden strength: if you kill me, if I die in this water, it is of little interest to the world, but it means Earl Swagger’s memory dies too, and I cannot let that happen.

Time passed.

His father aged.

It was a few years later. Daddy left in the late afternoon, knowing without looking that his son watched him go, and he raised a hand. So long, little boy. See you soon, little fellow. Daddy’ll be back and we’ll play some catch or walk in the woods or something, yes sir.

But his father didn’t come back again, ever. Instead, late at night, the colonel showed up, and then Sam and then some newspaper people and then some neighbors, and then some Negroes from the other side of town. They were all silent, except for his mother’s sobbing, and in time, the colonel came up and told him that his father was dead. Compared to that pain, that long, hard trek through wasteland and jungle, this shit was nothing.

“Goddamn him,” screamed Anto, in lost and wild fury, as the towels came off in what seemed like only three hours. “Look at the bastard. He just looks at us, him growing stronger, with them mad sniper eyes. Does he like it, do you think? Has he grown gills to live in water? Has he evolved himself backwards to some fishy lurker? The bastard, the bastard,” and he let fly, smashing Bob hard in the face with a muscle-clotted palm, driving him to the floor with a clatter.

There was silence in the room, except for the heavy breathing of the torturers. Finally Anto spoke.

“Get him cleaned up. Rinse him down. Get him some food. Let him piss and finally shit. I’ve got to try something else. The bloody fooker. He must be Irish to have a head or heart that much of steel.”

40

Nick had, for the first time in his life, taken to sleeping in. And why not? He had nowhere to go or be; he was just home, besieged by press, waiting for various accusations and investigations to reach some kind of clarity or resolution.

But that morning, Sally nudged him awake at 7 a.m.

“Umm. Ummphh. Yeah, what?”

“Sweetie, sweetie, wake up. Something’s happened.”

He blinked, rubbed shellac out of his eyes so that they finally cracked open to admit the dawn, and sat up.

“Whattya mean?” he mumbled, his tongue still stuck to the roof of his dry mouth.

She stood by the window, trim in her blue business suit, her horn-rim glasses glinting.

“The vultures,” she said, hooking a thumb to indicate the alien gathering on the lawn, “they’ve tripled. Maybe quadrupled.”

“Kill some of ’em when you back out, will you?” he said.

“I just want to break the foot of that prissy little bitch Jamie whatever. She’s out there, the wan, pale little zombie. She nailed me on the Mason thing with an ambush on the courthouse steps. I still owe her.”

“Really,” Nick said, “it’s much cheaper to kill them. If you just maim them, you have to support them for years. If you kill them, their buddies lose interest in a couple of weeks.”

“Okay, sweetie, have to run. Summary’s at ten thirty. Have a good day.”

“Doubtful.”

She turned and left, hustling with efficiency and purpose. She hadn’t let this thing throw her off one iota and believed that Nick would, as usual, triumph in the end.

He lay there, heard the door slam, the garage door rise, her Volvo ease out as the reporters reluctantly made room, and then she sped off.

Lord God, thought Nick, looking at the now swollen mass camped in the front yard of his home, where they crushed grass to mud, left McDonald’s cups and wrappings everywhere, and annoyed the hell out of the neighbors, though nothing was said, as all of them worked themselves for the gov and knew this sort of thing happened every once in a while. It was what you got for pursuing a career in the town of power.

Nick stumbled into the bathroom, decided to shave for the first time in three days, showered, then climbed into blue jeans, New Balance hikers, and his favorite University of Virginia hoodie. His glasses were where he’d left them, which happened about twice a month; usually the strange men who came in and moved his clothes around in the dark did the same for his glasses. He made it downstairs, turned on the pot she always left prepared, and in a few seconds had himself a nice cup of joe, dead black and steaming, while he watched the news, which didn’t, for once, picture him and bring out breathless updates. These guys outside, they were ahead of the curve then, while local TV was behind or couldn’t get its stand-ups into position quickly enough.

He thought he might let ’em stew; he thought he might go online and read the papers and get the info that way, but after a while, it seemed sort of pointless. He got up, went to the front door—no jog today, too many morons on the front steps—and opened up.

“Nick, Nick, what do you have to say about the Times’s photo?”

“Nick, were you there? Did you let them pay your way? Why didn’t you tell us?”

“Nick, did you just forget about the photo somehow? It slipped your mind or something?”

“Nick, are you going to resign today? Save the Bureau the trouble of putting together charges against you, going through the whole charade, a hearing, that kind of thing?”

“Nick, have you talked to your lawyer yet?”

“Nick, is this like the classic Greek thing, where a mighty hero makes some errors in judgment out of a sense of entitlement and—”

Nick held up his hands, and near-silence briefly alighted on the mob.

“You guys, I can’t comment, I don’t know what the hell you’re even talking about. And no, I haven’t talked to my lawyer because I don’t have one.”

“You’re going to need one now,” it seemed a dozen people said at once, and somehow a copy of the morning’s Times was located, expressed hand-by-hand through the mob, and presented to Nick, who looked into his own face, kneeling, surrounded by two guys said to be FN reps, holding a rifle and looking at a group he’d just shot. It had a terrible familiarity to it but it touched nothing coherent enough to be called a memory.

photo shows fbi agent at gun company, said the headline.

There was—it was the Times, after all—a subhead: “Evidence disputes Memphis’ claim to ‘no prior involvement’ with Belgian firm.”

The byline, of course, was that of David Banjax. The story began,

The New York Times has obtained and authenticated by laboratory examination a photograph showing beleaguered FBI special agent Nicholas M. Memphis at a shooting range owned by a Belgian armsmaker after having tested a new rifle for consideration by the Bureau’s SWAT teams, in contravention of Bureau rules.

Charges have been raised that Memphis, whose stewardship of the famous ‘Peacenik Sniper’ investigation has been called into question, inappropriately attended gun firm functions as the federal investigative agency prepares to decide on a multimillion-dollar sniper rifle contract.

The photograph, which was obtained by the Times’s Washington Bureau, depicts Memphis kneeling with two executives of FN, an international arms company headquartered in Brussels, Belgium. Memphis is displaying a target he has just tested the rifle on, the new FN PSR model, which is to be included in upcoming FBI sniper rifle trials, the winner of which stands to gain not only the agency contract but commercial advantages throughout the world.

“Whoever wins that contract,” said Milton Fieldbrou of EyeOnGovernment.com, a think tank that keeps track of government procurement and its commercial implications beyond the actual monies, “will have a PR bonanza that could spell survival in the troubled firearms industry.”

FBI regulations specifically forbid employees to attend industry sales events, particularly at industry expense, and despite documents that seemed to suggest Mr. Memphis had traveled to the Columbia, S.C., headquarters of FN USA, he has denied any involvement with the company.

Oh Christ, he thought. This is what my good pal and drinking buddy Bill Fedders was warning me about. Not warning. Just telling me to hang on, I was about to get creamed.

He looked at the photo and half-believed he’d been in Columbia, South Carolina, for a second. Who wouldn’t believe it? And how do you prove a negative, in the face of visual evidence so compelling? And who were the two grinners on either side of him? And how the hell had he shot such a great group at three hundred yards?

“Nick, Nick, what do you say?”

“I have no comment at this time,” Nick said, and ducked indoors.

Oh Christ. He sat on the sofa, stared at the photo so long he began to believe it was real. He tried to straighten it out in his mind: did I forget?

But that was insane. Amnesia was for bad movies from the fifties.

It was phony. Yet the goddamn thing had a familiarity to it that haunted him, that rooted it in some sort of previous experience, though he could not place it. The two other men were utter strangers. Then there was the rifle: there was something peculiar about it too, but again his brain couldn’t find the file and yielded no information. He knew one thing: it was a suit day.

He poured himself a cup of coffee, went upstairs, and opened his closet to his festive collection of workplace garments. Hmm, which shade of gray? Okay, he decided, plucking a middle-toned, somewhere-between-destroyer-and-sweatshirt hue, a brilliantly colored white shirt and a tie that was more toward the R than the O of the Roy G. Biv spectrum, and oxfords that were shined up too gleamy to show off that nice shade of black suggesting death, taxes, and cervical cancer. He had the pants on and was buttoning the shirt when the phone rang.

“Memphis,” he said, having recognized the caller ID as the director’s office.

“Special Agent Memphis, hold for the director, please.”

“All right.”

He waited, and then the man himself wished him a brusque good morning.

“Good morning, sir,” he said.

“Nick, I suppose you’ve seen the Times.”

“Yes sir.”

“Are you lawyered up?”

“No sir, not yet. I’d hoped this would go away when the full forensics report on the documents came in and the suspension remained unofficial. Has that changed, sir?”

“Well, Nick, we have to discuss it, I’m afraid. Can you come in today for that discussion?”

“It’s not as if I had anything else to do,” Nick said.

“Okay, I have to restructure my whole morning, and I’ve got a lunch I can’t avoid, so let’s say three p.m.”

“Yes sir.”

“Nick, I’d like to send a car. You don’t sound upset, but I’d prefer not to take any chances.”

“That would be an excellent idea. I might lose control backing out and crush nineteen reporters to death.”

“That would probably make you America’s hero. Okay, Nick, I’ll have it there at two.”

“Thank you, sir.”

Nick continued dressing, and then, feeling rebellious, tore off the white shirt, dumped it in the hamper, and put on a nice blue one. Now that was sending a message! he thought as he tightened the tie.

41

They cut the flex-cuffs off after clamping on walking manacles that allowed him mobility and slightly more freedom of movement. He was allowed time in the bathroom. Food followed, served carefully—protein bars, a frozen meal thawed by microwave, a diet Coke. He ate it down, astounded at how hungry he was and how desperate for sleep. He began to feel slightly civilized again until a blindfold was plastered over his eyes.

Then Jimmy and Raymond marched him in the small-step shuffle of the bound man along a hallway, their bulks marshaled against his, turned him through a door, and sat him down on a folding chair. He sat for five minutes, hearing mechanical things being manipulated behind him, some small appliance of some sort, he guessed, wondering if the water phase was over and now came the telephone electrical generator for applications of voltage to delicate areas. But why coddle him first?

“All right, Sniper,” Anto said, having slipped silently into the room and sidled up close, “God help me, but I love you. I’ve fallen hopelessly into a man-crush. What a bucko you’d be. Lord, wish I was as much man.”

“Anto, have you joined the fairies now?” asked Ginger.

“Sounds like it, don’t it, boyos. No, I don’t want to fuck the fellow, I just want to pay him what he’s due, even as I struggle with the problem of putting him down. That won’t be a fun task, but it has to happen then, doesn’t it?”

“It does,” said Raymond.

“But look what he’s done. He’s made us sniper fellas look good, brave, tough, the best. He’s made us the chivalric heroes of the land, instead of the screwball creepy killer dogs we’ve been so many years. He’s stood up against the water over what was left of night, the whole morning, even into the afternoon. He is a dead-on lad, no man can deny it. Game, yes he is.”

“You think he can’t be broken, Anto?” Raymond asked.

“Maybe still.” He addressed Bob. “We found, the boys and I, that a respite, a rest, some new information, even a hope can have an immense effect on the subject. He realizes the comforts of the normal life and suddenly yet another session with the buckets don’t seem so sporting. And he realizes he can’t get his little dick hard for it again, and so he folds easylike, and there’s no need for any more water drama. We’s all knackered, we’d all like sleep, and that would be the best for all. But you’re tougher than that, I know. So here’s what it is. I’m going to show you what this little caper’s been all about. You’ll see it, you’ll know it, and to a fellow like you who’s killed near three hundred poor souls, you’ll see it ain’t, by your standards and mine, no big deal. And you’ll wonder, why on earth am I going through the tortures of wet gagging vomit-hell over this wee thing? And that too will have its way with your mind, and then we’ll have a nice little discussion and see if we can’t settle this matter amicably and make it all coolaboola, so?”

The blindfold was pried off. Bob blinked, dazzled at first, and as his vision settled in, he saw that he was in another small institutional room, linoleum-floored, bland and neutral. Before him was an actual movie screen of the old kind, not a plasma flat-screened monster television monitor, but an old white screen impregnated with glittery stone for better refraction, a true relic of the fifties. It was mounted on a rickety tripod, the sort of thing Ozzie showed Harriet and the boys the home movies on.

“Had a time finding such an antiquated piece of hardware,” said Anto. “But it’s the old things that contain the treasure. Now, Sniper, you’ve probably thought this caper was about some forgotten atrocity, no? Hmm, let’s see, the villagers didn’t want to move for the pipeline, so the contractors genocided their black heathen asses, something like that? Or some huge business deal his lordship Constable put together with the Russky mafia, Al-Qaeda, and the Home Guard? Stolen warheads for the Moluccans, heavy water for the Albanians, poisoned bird poo for the Lakota? No, it’s nothing like that, it’s merely a man trying to hide a long-ago mistake and get away with a thing you and I and all the boys and any man who’s fought for his king and country has done as well. Collateral damage. Something happened that needn’t, there was tragic loss of life, but then that’s the way of the wicked world, then and now, forever. That’s the cost of operating; it’s a crime, a shame, a tragedy, but now, do we really want to destroy so much to pursue a thing called pure justice, when a more appropriate behavior might be forgiving, followed by forgetting? I’ve had a talk with the man on the subject, as I had to know before I committed my team to this enterprise. I had to settle in me own mind the righteousness of what I was about to undertake, at such risk to meself and mine. He had to sell me and I had to buy. So I will convince you as he convinced me, and when it’s over, you’ll see what has to be done, of that I’m confident. Ginger, turn on the picture show.”

The lights came down. From behind came the electric grind of an old, small projector, also vintage, and that bright beam of light splashing against the screen before it disappeared in the opaqueness of the leader, which sprocketed through the aperture between lens and light displaying only scratches and smudges and trapped pieces of lint while that eerie movie-projector sound, familiar to anyone who’d been in a western world school anytime between 1945 and 1985, a kind of 24-frames-per-second clicking hidden in greasy grinding and turning, filled the dark air of the little room and its cargo of watchers.

Swagger put eyes to screen, saw a black-and-white, herky-jerky, grainy, badly lit, artless, dead-hand image of some kind of room full of some kind of people in the costume of a long-ago period called the early seventies. Swagger saw bushy hair covering ears, bell-bottom jeans, lots of army surplus, no baseball caps, and through all of that divined from the listless lines of customers at two counters, waiting to get to a teller, that he was in a bank and that this was some kind of security camera, exactly like the one that immortalized Patty Hearst. He could see a tall, beardless but mustached hippie kid up at the window. Bank? That meant he was watching a robbery, and he knew at once that it was that fabled day in counterculture history, February 10, 1971, when, or so it was alleged by their haters, Jack Strong and Mitzi Reilly pulled off the Nyackett Federal Bank and Trust robbery, leaving the realms of amateur radical criminals and joining the ranks of professional killers forever. Somehow it had been stolen from the police evidence room and somehow, through the political complexities of the radical underground in those days, it had been stored with Ozzie Harris, known for his probity, his toughness, his loyalty to the cause. He would be an earnest protector of the fates of Jack and Mitzi.

Except that, Swagger saw now, as the action began and two strangers came in and suddenly, from postures both too influenced by movies and too freighted with uncertainty, drew guns, it wasn’t Jack and Mitzi. Not at all. Oh, they were radical hippies, yes, in Army surplus, watch caps, a droopy mustache on the fella, the gal with her hair all frizzed up as if electrified and a watch cap to encapsulate it, both wearing shades, but both not Jack or Mitzi, by body type, by coloring, by gracelessness, by the clutch of fear that enveloped them as they screamed at the poor girl behind the counter, as the other customers backed away in their own fear, the tall boy last, and the camera watched numbly from its perch above it all.

So that’s why old Ozzie Harris, on his deathbed, wanted to will the thing to Jack and Mitzi; it proved undisputedly that they were not the perps of the bank holdup, who were some other, not this particular radical couple. That would take the cloud of interpersonal violence off the necks of Jack and Mitzi, remove the taint of murder for money. It was, in the way the imagination of the public sometimes works, possible that it would end their hated exile to the left and gain them readmittance to the parade of Normal Life. So it was a great gift old Ozzie thought he was bestowing on his friends, the only people who attended him as he neared death.

What Ozzie couldn’t have guessed, however, was that for a reason not yet clear, the tape had a bigger importance to Jack and Mitzi, represented some kind of opportunity they could not turn down, a temptation they could not ignore. So that was the road they chose to follow, not to redemption but, like so many a tarnished pilgrim before them, to the bucks. Their final creed had not been Revolution Now or Give Peace a Chance but Show Me the Money. They tried to go big time and, like many a rat with ambition, ended up with brains on the windshield and cops eating doughnuts over their body bags.

As for the true brigands in the scene, Bob knew that if he spent a few minutes on the Internet going through the radical rogues’ gallery that some Web sites had accumulated, he could tease out the names. But then Anto saved him the trouble.

“I’m told by himself that the couple with the peashooters is Miles Goldfarb and his girlfriend, Amanda Higgins, soon to be dead in a shootout in San Francisco with FBI and police types. They’d fled the East for the West, and on unrelated charges were sought, betrayed, required to surrender, and shot to pieces when they refused. So is justice sometimes served.”

Bob watched the drama unspool in the haunted, blurred silent imagery of a film that was nearly forty years old. It continued; the girl behind the counter got ahold of her senses and began to shovel money across the teller’s counter before her, as Amanda leaped forward to scrape it into a bag so movielike it should have had the helpful $ imprinted on it. Meanwhile Miles, with a long-barreled .38, stood behind nervously, waved the gun, shouted contradictory orders, stomped his feet, tried to control bladder and colon and hyperventilation difficulties, and waited for the bag to get heavy enough to signal success.

It was such a different time and place. The two-handed shooting thing, invented in the sixties and seventies in the far West and popularized on Starsky and Hutch, hadn’t caught on yet, so all the gun handling was one-handed, and on the film it looked childish, particularly that big thing in the right hand of bandit Miles, and he seemed as scared of it as the others were. He kept waving it this way and that, hopping up and down like a clown with a cold pickle up his ass, very nearly out of control. Meanwhile, slightly higher up the coordination tree, Amanda scooped the bills into the bag, even stooping to retrieve a crumple that had fallen to the floor.

A rule of the world: when the shit happens, it happens fast. And so it was in suburban Boston in the Nyackett Federal Bank and Trust, February 10, 1971. A blur suddenly exploded behind very-nervous Miles, as the men involved moved faster than 24 frames per second, and when stopped, they revealed themselves to be two Boston armored car guards, who had been alerted by passers-by. They too were one-handed revolver gunners, in their Ruritatian Elite Guard uniforms, complete to braiding and double-breasted tunics; they too were scared and excited; they too gestured foolishly with their weapons, but they did, or so it seemed, have the drop.

As if he anticipated failure, Miles gave up without a twitch and yielded to the momentum of the transaction. His hands shot up before he even turned to see if the adversaries were armed, and that probably saved his life, for had he turned, almost certainly the very nervous truck guards would have fired away and dropped him, Amanda, the clerk, and any other poor soul whose body came to be in the line of their twelve-shot panic fusillade. Then Amanda turned, dropping the bag; her hands came up. And for just a second, the blurry frenzy turned to tableau: downward forty-five-degree angle freezing five human beings—clerk, two robbers, two guards—in perfect stillness while the moment downticked, or so it seemed, from violence. The poor clerk didn’t even have the thought to now duck, as her presence in that same line of fire was no longer required.

Then it all changed.

More blur, more craziness, more seventies mayhem. A person separated himself from the herd of frightened customers who’d fallen back to form a clot at the bank’s wall, his one hand out in some unusual fashion that one didn’t usually see in bank customers. That was because it held a gun, another revolver, surely a Colt or a Smith from right there in New England. It was the tall hippie boy first glimpsed at the teller’s window, now in the shape of pure counterculture wraith—a Prince Valiant hank of hair that flopped over ears, an out-of-place Zapata mustache—and he was himself in the costume of the day, the tight jeans, the Army field jacket, the crunching black of Navy blue watch cap pulled low. He looked like any kid in those days, except that now he held a revolver. He held it low, cowboy style, clearly an untrained shooter, but he was so close—less than six feet from the furthest of the uniformed men—he couldn’t miss. He fired six times in a second, discharging all his ammo, and he shot faster than the film itself ran through the camera, so that shots three, four, and five were not seen between frames, and only one, two, and six were documented. The powder was clearly smokeless, but it still produced a great fog of gun haze by today’s standards, and the muzzle flash illuminated itself as blades of sheer incandescence against the otherwise grainy texture of the filmed reality, as it spurted, then vanished. The guards, blindsided from the right, never had a chance, and Bob knew from reports that five of the six .38 bullets struck them, moving right to left, through biceps into chest cavity and blood-bearing organs. One simply yielded to death like a sack falling off a truck and went down graceless and stupefied, dead before he hit the floor. The other tried to respond and was halfway into turning to return fire when his knees pointed out to him that he was dead by giving way, and he went down to ass on floor, though still upright, then curled over in the fetal and died.

Another moment of stillness, though in the back you could see the knot of terrified customers recoiling further into themselves; the clerk put her hands to her ears, because the gunfire was so loud. Miles hopped up and down in feckless panic; Amanda stood still, frozen by the eruption of killing violence so close. Then, again almost too fast, Miles and Amanda leaped over the fallen guards and bolted out the door, presumably to the getaway car. It was the new shooter who had the brains to dash to the counter and pick up the fallen sack of money, turn, command the customers to remain rigid; he did so by pointing a now-empty gun at them, although they didn’t seem to notice. Then he knelt, picked up Miles’s dropped revolver, and instead of fleeing in panic, backed out coolly, keeping the gun on the crowd. He pivoted and was gone.

“Did you recognize him?” asked Anto, as the film ended in more opacity and scratches. “Yes, it was himself. He was twenty-one, had just been kicked out of his fancy university. He knew he had to return south, where his daddy would await with opprobrium and disappointment and put him to work in some dreadful department of his advertising agency. Little Tommy wasn’t yet ready for that life, so instead he floated about in the Boston underground in them days, grew the pile of hair and the guardsman’s furry brush. Too bad he didn’t have the hormones in him yet for a beard. He smoked pot, he got laid, he went to the demonstrations, he drank cheap wine, he met people, and he met other people. Somehow he volunteered to go along as tail gunner on a robbery attempt for some radical heroes of the moment. They never knew him as anything but Tommy, and he only realized later who they actually was, as all those boys and girls liked to play at IRA tricks like noms de guerre and suchlike. They was Nick and Nora to him, revolutionary pseudonyms. They gave him bus money and he left town that night for Atlanta—where you can bloody bet he shaved mustache and cut hair and became Mr. Neat n’ Trim, which appearance he clings to until this day—and ain’t been back to Boston ever since. The film was somehow stolen from the development laboratory by some kind of radical affiliate, and being hot was stored with a man who was loved and trusted by all them boys and girls of the time, the saintly commie journo O. Z. Harris. There it sat for thirty-odd years while Tom Constable built a life, enjoyed the lucky break of a father dying young and rich, and took that nice gift and expanded it into something gigantic and world famous.

“So there you have it, Sniper. Are you going to take him down for a second’s madness all them years back? Are you going to make a mockery of the name? And what about the good? What about the thousands of employees, dependent upon his lordship for their sustenance in businesses that will surely collapse when the news comes of his fall? What about the more than two hundred million in philanthropy over all them years, perhaps driven by guilt over the lives of them two fellas he gunned down? That’s a lot of good in this bad world to outweigh the moment of craziness. And you’re being the one sittin’ in judgment? You, who’s killed and killed and killed, mainly poor men doing what they seen as duty to country and cause in their own land. And for that, the mighty Bob Lee snuffed them from a mile out. Some of them sure never killed nobody nor would have, as you know most private soldiers is just marking time till they’re homeward bound. You must have killed your share of peasants without a hint of politics or patriotism on the mind, just working-class slobbos on patrol against their will when the mighty sniper took it all from them with but three ounces of pull in one finger. You’re going to judge another fella who pulled a trigger, and he in hot blood, not our sniper way of cold execution?”

Bob said nothing. He had not spoken since, “You talk too much,” which seemed from the Jurassic but was only from the Triassic BT—Before Torture.

“You haven’t reached him, Anto,” said Jimmy.

“I haven’t,” said Anto. “He won’t speak. He just looks off, his eyes going to hard little kernels of hate, like pieces of black corn. Give him a pistol at this second, and we’re all dead in the next. He’s a hard man. Unforgiving, like a bloody IRA gunman.”

“I’ll cuff him about a bit,” said Ginger. “Loosen some teeth, maybe it’ll loosen some words.”

“I’m not having that, Ginger. We’re the gentlemen sort of torturers, not the mad brutes bruisin’ our fists up. All right, Swagger, play it hard down the line. But I’m laying something on you now that may keep the sleep away, even if we leave you alone in the dark for some hours. You listen now: no better offer will you ever get, ever, never, no way in the whole black parade of a life full of so many wanton killings. Call it professional courtesy, call it sniper’s honor, call it me own damned sentimental weakness, but listen and then sleep, and then we’ll see if you can keep your silence.”

Anto took a deep breath and sat back, peering intently at Bob.

“It’s this. Here’s an offer you never thought you’d hear. Your life.”

“Anto,” said Ginger. “Have you cleared this with his lordship?”

“Hush now, Ginger. His lordship is off playing cowboy. So it’s on me, if you’re worried, but I tell you his lordship is no Clara Barton. So yes, boys, we’ll let him walk. We require only his cooperation, then his word. He can walk, go back to them daughters and that handsome woman and that farm or whatever piece of paradise it is. Think of it, Sniper. Put it in your mind: home, hearth, love. You’d bade ’em good-bye, but maybe prematurely.”

The silence in the room grew uncomfortable. Bob simply looked off into nothingness, as if what Anto had said didn’t matter.

“Next you’ll be offering him swag,” said Jimmy.

“He would spit on swag, am I right, Sniper? He’s the ideal, of which us four are only poor third-gen copies. Swag would tarnish the holiness of his cause. No, not swag but something else will buy him for us. We need to pay him in honor.”

“What are you talking about, Anto? Honor’s not a coin to be handed out.”

“It is. Here’s the offer, Sniper. You agree to walk away from all this. Being a man of your word, I know you will. And for us, the issue is finished. We’ve done our mercenary mission for his lordship. But a rub’s coming and here it is: I then move not to Spain but to some other, nastier place, and I blow the caper from there. I give you his lordship on a platter by way of a confession to the federals, with copies to all the papers and nets. I put it on the bloody Internet. I offer up some specific pieces of hard evidence, so there can be no denying. Thus is brother Hitchcock cleared and reelevated to his rightful spot. Thus is his lordship felled. Thus I blaspheme the mercenary code, and I do it the coward’s way, in some land that lacks an extradition treaty with America. I live in decadence and guilt, go to drugs, kill meself in five years on an overdose of pleasure. I don’t expect his lordship goes on trial or to prison, but I am most certain that the done thing equates to the ruin of his reputation and the hounding of him over his last few years, perhaps even hastening that end. So, Sniper, there you go: right has been restored to the world, and you yourself are alive to see it happen. A better offer no man was ever given.”

Swagger said nothing.

“In his eyes, though,” said Ginger, “I seen the reflection of thought. They widened, narrowed, and looked to sky, signifying recognition and cognition. It’s in his brain. That’s a hell of a break you’re cutting the man, Anto, and he knows it. I’d never do it. Sniper, I’d put a Browning bullet through your head, I would. You’re lucky Anto’s running things here; he’s so much smarter than we are.” Then he turned back to Anto. “He ain’t ready to talk yet, but let him sleep upon it, and when he wakes up and faces either the water eating his lungs permanently or a world with more justice than he ever dreamed, maybe he’ll make the right choice.”

“Maybe he’s just tired, Ginger,” said Raymond. “After all, he’s been up longer than we have, and I know I’m tired.”

“All right, boyos,” said Anto, “get him trussed tight in flex-cuffs again, wrists and ankles; he’s got too much movement in them manacles. Take him to his cell; we’ll give him some sack time and take some for ourselves. Then we’ll get this thing finished, one way or the other.”

42

It was like being a movie star, only without the fun part. When the car pulled into the driveway, Nick was swarmed as he walked to it, amid a whirring buzz of digital Nikons, lit up by the flashbulbs and the Sony Steadicam lights, as if they expected him to wave and bow and escort a goddess to the car. Instead the bright blades of light cut at him and he winced and hunched furtively like a felon. The questions hung in the air, and though he pretended not to hear them, how could he not?

“Nick, how much gun company money did you take?”

“Nick, will you resign today?”

“Nick, was it worth it?”

“Nick, will this ruin your wife’s career as well as your own?”

“Nick, do you regret your love affair with guns? Has it ruined your life?”

“Nick, are you in the NRA?”

Nick ducked, bobbed, wove, sidestepped, and ultimately got into the limo with no dignity intact.

“Go on,” he said to the driver, “back out, kill ’em all, I don’t care.”

But the driver, a decent guy from the Federal Protective Service, just laughed and handled the issue coolly enough, and soon had Nick hurtling downtown along the parkwayed banks of the federal river amid the usual assortment of inspirational marble monuments, arching white bridges decorated with valiant steeds, and Greek-styled buildings that were designed, on such broad avenues, to glow white with the fervor of democracy. Yeah, well, whoever thought up democracy never heard of the Times, he thought.

The driver got him there a little early and in by an obscure entrance on H Street, so when he dipped into the fortress of the Hoover Building, he was spared the Evil Clark Gable treatment. With a little time to kill before the meet with the director, he headed up to the Major Case Section, curious to see if his various IDs with their computer chips still admitted him or he’d already been classified a nonperson by the hall watchers, who had their ear to the ground as stealthily and efficiently as anyone. Yet all doors opened, the elevator stopped at all floors, and in another surprisingly quick transit, he stepped into what had been the work area he commanded, and before they saw him, he saw them, Fields and Starling talking at her computer monitor, a dozen others on phone or monitor, all intently absorbed in their tasks, as if this huge cloud weren’t whirling about them. He looked, saw his own glass-enclosed office with its glory wall still intact—the photos of his career, all the stops in hick towns and taco circuit cities, the triumphs, the setbacks, the pics of himself and Sally at this vacation spot or that, the pics of himself and the four men who’d served as director in his time, a couple of grateful senators and other DC lizard species, so forth, so on. The Robot sat erect at his desk, and though Nick should have despised the Robot, he really didn’t, as a man did what a man did to keep a career running hard, and the Robot hadn’t made a fetish of clearing out all traces of disgraced former team leader Nick Memphis.

Fields finally saw him.

“Nick, hey!” said the big guy, and a dozen faces snapped toward his. It wasn’t like he’d been in a POW camp or anything and his unofficial exile had only run a week, but still there seemed to be a sense of welcome, as people rose and came forward to wish him luck.

“Good to see you back, Nicky,” said Fields warmly, his eyes brilliant but not with brainpower. “I know you’ll beat this shit. We all know who’s behind it.”

Starling smiled. He smiled back, and then others clustered about, so he uttered banalities like, “Oh, nice to see you guys. Hey, how’s it going? Great haircut. New tie, huh? How’s Mary?”

Finally he asked, “So can anyone tell me what’s going on?”

“Well,” Starling said after a pause, “I’m working on a case narrative, and we’ve gone through most of the names on the new list and are trying to close that out. Maybe one of the last few will break it open, but even that seems—”

But she trailed off as the Robot came over, leaned in, and said, “Nick, if you want to use your office, go ahead, I’ll take a hike. I tried not to disturb anything; most of my stuff’s in the corner.”

“Nah, thanks,” he said.

The quasi-reunion, strained as it was by the necessity of avoiding commenting directly on what had appeared in the Times and what brought Nick here today, went on for a bit and then, when Nick glanced at his watch and saw that it was now five till, had to end. He joshed a bit, then by body language indicated it was time to slide and began to make his way to the door.

He was somewhat surprised to see a lurker in the hall, someone clearly waiting to escort him to the elevator to the Seventh Floor. It was Ray Case, of Arson-Robbery, a legendary gunfighter who with Nick served on the oversight board to the Sniper Rifle Committee. He’d actually taken it seriously. What was he doing here? Was it just coincidence?

But no, it wasn’t, because Ray made eye contact aggressively, followed by a little nod signifying a need for a quick chat.

Nick pulled away, gave a last broad good-bye to the team he had assembled, proud of them that they had done such a totally professional job and stayed on task despite all the political bullshit and the flamboyant crash-and-burn scenario enacted by their leader, and then headed to the door, the hallway, the elevators, and his fate.

Ray Case slid next to him.

“Baby, we’ve got to talk,” said Ray.

So Nick was a few minutes late to his beheading. Still, the director, who wasn’t the sort of man who cared about little stuff like that, welcomed him with warmth, considering the situation. They stood in the director’s office making idiotic small talk, then the director led him to his private conference room.

“Nick, I asked Jeff Neely and Rob Harris of Professional Integrity to drop by. Their report isn’t due yet, but I wanted them to give us their preliminary findings before you and I try to figure this thing out, so we’ll know just what’s going on here and I have something to say at this press conference I’m scheduled to address in”—he checked his watch—“fifty-one minutes.”

“Sure,” said Nick, nodding to the two headhunters, who nodded back behind tight, professional, noncommittal office smiles.

Everyone sat, the director at the head of the table, Jeff and Rob on one side, Nick on the other.

“Okay, fellows,” said the director, “you’re handling the forensic document examination of the items the Times ran.”

“That’s right, sir.”

“Now, Nick, just for the record, although you aren’t under oath, this meeting is being tape-recorded, and I want it acknowledged that you’ve so far forgone legal representation and are here without counsel or professional advice.”

“Yes sir,” said Nick, loudly, as if to help the tape recorders do their job.

“And, although I hate to say this to a special agent of your seniority and brilliant record, you understand that any misrepresentations can be considered perjury, and if in the opinion of prosecutors it is necessary and appropriate, you will be charged under statutes blah blah and yadda yadda if it can be shown you’ve willingly misrepresented.”

“Yes sir,” said Nick.

“So, for the record, you deny any trips whatsoever, either under your own expense or at their expense to Columbia, South Carolina, and the headquarters of FN USA, is that correct?”

“Yes sir.”

“And you maintain that these documents, which the Times uncovered and published, are some sort of fraud?”

“They’d have to be. Other than that I have no opinion on them.”

“So we asked Professional Integrity to run forensic document tests on them, to try to ascertain their authenticity. I’m speaking for the tape recorder: these are documents allegedly showing FN USA’s transcribed notes on Nick’s alleged trip to Columbia, as compared, for authenticity’s sake, to the proposal on their official stationery that accompanied their formal submission of their rifle to the sniper competition and was already logged in our files. You have compared them, to establish the authenticity of the notes, assuming the baseline authenticity of the

submission. I’m about to learn their results. Okay, Nick?”

“Yes sir.”

“Okay, guys,” said the director, turning to the two internal affairs specialists. “Are they authentic or not?”

Jeff looked at Rob, who looked back at Jeff, who looked at the director.

“We have been able to ascertain that both documents were, as the Times reported, prepared on the same word-processing system and printed by the same printer. That is, we find corresponding letter eccentricities, imperfections, spacing issues, and misalignments in each document consistent with the same in the other document. I can show you our courtroom presentation exhibits if you want, Mr. Director.”

“I’ll take your word for it. So that means they’re authentic?”

A brief look passed between Rob and Jeff, which then fluttered to Nick, then back to the director.

“That’s what the evidence suggests, sir.”

“Suggests? Interesting choice of word.”

“Yes sir.”

“What would suggests mean, as opposed to proves?”

“Sir, it means that wherever that word processor/printer is, that specific one, a Hewlett Packard 960 with the capacity to print in a font called MacPhearson Business 3, that is the origin of the letter and the copied-over notes and comments. As for the receipts, all are photocopies in various hands, which might be authenticated later on, assuming there is a later on.”

“Hmm,” said the director. “So if I get this right, what you’re saying is that the two key documents were from the same typewriter?”

“Word-processing system software, printer hardware, sir.”

“But the same machine. The same physical object, right?”

“Yes sir.”

“I see. And the fact that one of the documents was an officially notarized and authenticated submission from the factory headquarters itself—you wouldn’t regard that as proof? I don’t understand.”

“Well, I hate to say this, sir, but it depends on the meaning of is. Yes, the documents are—present participle collective declination of is—from the machine. Yes, that machine printed out a document located in our files and thereby officially designated as having come from the gun company. However—”

“However?” said the director. “I hate however.”

“Yes sir.”

“Okay, let’s have the however.”

“However, as the document was kept in the files of the Sniper Rifle Oversight Committee, which is held under extremely loose security in Admin and Logistics—after all, remember, someone leaked a copy of it to the Times—there’s no way of authenticating that document. I should say, no way accessible to us at this point in the investigation.”

“Our next step, sir,” said the one called Rob, or maybe it was the one called Jeff, “would be to obtain search warrants from the federal district court in Columbia, and examine each word-processing system on FN property, and determine if one of them—presumably in the CEO’s office—matches up. Then you’d have a good case that the origin of both documents was the CEO office in Columbia, South Carolina. But absent locating that machine, and given the lax security in Admin and Logistics—”

“I think I saw a memo on that,” said the director glumly. “But if the documents aren’t from Columbia, South Carolina, then that would lead to a highly implausible scenario, right? I mean, what are the odds on it being fake? Pretty remote, right? I mean, for it to be fake, one of our own people would have had to sneak into the files, filch the submission document, take it out of here, reprint the company letterhead in some convincing way, recopy the submission letter, then type up the commentary, replace the faked submission document in our files where it could later be found, and leak the commentary to the Times reporter. Then the reporter would have to find somebody to leak him a copy of the submission document. Pretty elaborate hoax. Is that logical to assume?”

“Sir, we can’t comment on odds. We don’t investigate odds. We can only prove that the docs came from the one machine. We need authorization to proceed, and while we have requested it, it is not forthcoming.”

“So basically, we have . . . nothing.”

“Not until we get that subpoena, find that machine. People think documents are magic, but the truth is, in cases of law their application is usually surprisingly limited. We need that application approved to get that subpoena.”

“I’ll see if I can’t shake it out of the tree for you,” said the director. “Okay, fellows, you can go. Good job.”

They smiled drily at Nick, collected their undisplayed exhibit, and trundled out.

“Well, guy,” said the director, “you dodged that bullet for a little while at least. I must say, I thought the Times had made a pretty convincing case, even without the photo.”

Nick nodded.

“Hmm,” said the director. “Well, let’s see what we can make of the photo itself. All right, Nick?”

“Yes sir.”

“All right, for the record, can I ask you to state categorically your position on the photo, which appeared today on the front page of the Times.”

“Yes sir. I have no recollection of ever having traveled to Columbia, South Carolina, and visiting the corporate headquarters of FN USA, not in 2006, not ever. I have no recollection of shooting a one-point-seven-inch three-hundred-yard group with what the caption identifies as an FN PSR .308 rifle at their firing range and no recollection of posing for a picture with any executives of that company.”

“Yet this photo exists that shows you doing exactly that. The photo has been authenticated by the newspaper.”

“Sir, let me point out, the photo hasn’t been ‘authenticated.’ It has been characterized by a photo lab as having ‘no fractal discrepancies suggestive of photo manipulation.’ It’s the same difference as the previous document situation. Lack of evidence doesn’t prove anything except lack of evidence. Photo interpreters and analysts, like document interpreters and analysts, don’t ‘authenticate’ in the pure sense; they only testify to the presence or absence of discrepancies and from that come to an inference, a best professional guess.”

“Noted. But again, for a photo to pass muster without discrepancies, it would either have to be authentic as stated or it would have to have been manipulated by technicians of such skill and with access to such sophisticated, not to say expensive, equipment that it is highly unlikely to be found in the private sector, right?”

“Sir, I have no opinion on that. I haven’t looked into what equipment is or isn’t available. It’s beyond my area of expertise. You’d have to get expert opinion.”

“Yes, I agree, and in fact, I’ve already started the process to obtain the original from the Times by subpoena and place it with top people in the field for a confirmation. I’ve also examined the reputation of the Times’s investigating entity, Donex Photo Interpretations, and it is top-rate. It’s bonded, gives frequent expert testimony in legal cases, and has a worldwide reputation.”

“Yes sir.”

“Nick, is there anything about this photo you want to tell me? This is the killer, you understand. I don’t know what I can do about this situation with this photo on the front page of the Times and leading every network news show tonight. The presence of the photo is pushing the action, and for the sake of the Bureau, I have to be ahead of the action, not behind it. If there’s anything, tell me now. If, for God’s sake, you made a mistake, tell me now. We can deal with it. A quiet resignation, a saved pension, recommendation to positions in the private sector. If I have to formally suspend you and Professional Responsibility files a complaint and it goes to formal hearing, there’s nothing I can do for you. Your record is so damned good, I’d hate to see it end like this.”

“Sir, I can only say, I have no opinion on the photo, and I have no recollection of ever traveling to Columbia, South Carolina. I didn’t do it.”

The director sighed.

“Okay, Nick,” he said, “then I have no choice but to—Nick, I have to say, you seem to be enjoying this. That’s what I don’t quite understand. I see, well, not quite a smirk, but a kind of look. Ace up the sleeve, I know something you don’t know, nonny-nonny-boo-boo, my class wins the Bible, that kind of look. A shoe waiting to drop look. Am I wrong?”

“No sir,” said Nick and then he couldn’t hold it anymore and started to laugh. The more he laughed, the more he had to laugh, until the laugh became a fit, almost a seizure.

The director adopted a look of benign condescension, let Nick go on and on.

“Okay,” he finally said, “you’ve enjoyed your joke at my expense, and I’ve heard you are a very funny fellow. But it’s time for the punch line. I’m due at a press conference very shortly and I’ve got to tell them more than ‘Special Agent Memphis is upstairs having a good yuk.’ ”

“I’m sorry, sir.”

“Go ahead.”

Nick thought.

“I just don’t see how I can be suspended for a picture of me at the FN USA shooting range in 2006 with a rifle that doesn’t exist.”

“I don’t know what—”

“It’s not even an FN rifle. It’s from their arch competitor, Remington. But not only is it a Remington rifle in my hand, it’s a

Remington rifle that didn’t exist until 2008.”

“I don’t—”

“That rifle hadn’t even been designed in 2006. It’s in their current catalog, but in 2006, it wasn’t even a dream in an engineer’s eye. So the picture’s a fake. It’s manifestly, self-evidently a fraud. I don’t know who did it, or why, or how. But not only that, whoever did it understood exactly what the Times knew nothing about and he took advantage of their congenital weakness, and the upshot is, he got them to publish a photo that twenty million people will instantly know is phony!”

The director looked at the picture.

“Well,” he said, “it looks like the joke’s on them, doesn’t it?”

“Yes sir.”

“Do they know yet?”

“If they don’t, they will soon enough.”

“Boy, would I like to see that.”

43

David Banjax decided to award himself the morning off. He knew no one would mind. He was the hero. He wanted to savor it. So instead of going to the bureau, he slept later, just wandered a bit on the streets of Washington, past the Post on Fifteenth and the garage where he’d gotten the original pack of documents, down K, past McCormick & Schmick’s, which had become a lunchtime favorite, down to Connecticut, then up it, past the square, past the Mayflower, past Burberry’s, up still further to Dupont Circle, then a deviation down embassy row on Massachusetts, all the great old houses from the gilded age converted to little bits of sacred ground of other nations, behind walls and hedges and largely Mediterranean architecture, giving this arcade in the capital city a Roman Way look to it.

I am Spartacus, thought David with a bit of a grin.

He felt as he always did of late when he’d landed the big one, the talker. He felt painfully self-conscious, aware that everybody was aware of him, that his few fans admired his success, that his competitors in the bureau resented it, as they hated it when someone stepped away from the pack and became an individual, a star, and got on TV and had calls from editors at S & S and Knopf and Chris at MSNBC and Bill at Fox and Larry at CNN and Scott at NPR and Charlie at PBS, even Jon at Comedy Central. He wanted to stretch it out, settle himself down, enjoy the day and the exquisite anticipation.

It was chilly but bright. The brisk wind blew his raincoat against his sports coat, fluffed his hair, blew tears into his eyes. Everywhere people looked hearty and happy, absorbed in the narcissism of their time and place, consumed by scandal, a soon-due report, an upcoming meeting, a conference, a screening, an opening, a reception, a recital. It was a town of meetings. Everyone except David seemed to have one that morning; his wouldn’t arrive until four, and as he planned it, he’d wander casually into the office about, say, hmm, 3:43, just enough time to deal with any invitations, take the begrudging congrats of peers and admirers, nod at those who weren’t moved to offer their congrats, and make a quick run-through of his e-mail to see if the congrats from his liberal friends outnumbered—they usually did, these days—the hate mail from his conservative enemies. He figured, I bet I set a new record today. I bet I get over a hundred e-mails.

He had a solitary lunch, late, after the lunch crowd had left, across from the Motion Picture Association of America on I street at BLT Steak, a quiet, sleek new beef house in town. He chose it because it was out of the way, a good seven blocks from the bureau and from the Post, and nine blocks in another direction from the National Press Building, so it was unlikely he’d run into any journos there. And he was right: nobody he knew entered, and he spent the time sipping a nice midrange merlot while eating his steak salad and reading his own paper, the Post, USA Today, the LA Times, and the Boston Globe, to assure himself that nobody else had anything, that he was out front, that the scoop was his. Tomorrow they’d catch up, and he knew right now that in various newsrooms around town, the scramble was on.

He paid, left the papers, ambled out and down the street toward his shop, enjoying every second, every atom, every nanophenomenon, every twitch of unmeasurable black energy that comprised the wonder of his life until at last he reached the lobby of his own building.

“There’s the champ!”

It was that hoary old legend Jack Sims, looking like he’d just stepped out of a confab with FDR himself, all tweeds and oxford cloth, with that square, ruddy, Washington face. Jack, on his way out for the late lunch or an early martini, still wore a belted, buckled Burberry trenchcoat foreign correspondent style, and with a fedora low over his eyes looked like Mitchum in a film noir, but he had the gravitas to bring it off and seemed authentic in the role, not affected.

“You know,” he said in his booming voice, “at my age, my only pleasure is watching one of you young kids kick ass and take no goddamn prisoners. Congrats, Dave. You ought to be so goddamn proud!”

“Thank you, Mr. Sims,” he said modestly, not even bothering to correct the old guy for calling him Dave, which he hated. It was his ambition to be admired by all the players in the office, no matter the generation, not just his immediate peers.

“Go get ’em, Tiger,” said the old legend, eyes twinkling, with a last clap on the shoulder.

David rode the elevator in silence, aware that everyone in it realized from the Sims greeting that he was somebody special.

Yet when he got to the office, there was a different vibe ahum in the air than the one he expected. He hung his coat, slid down the aisles between the desks, and was aware of just some kind of . . . difference. Usually he felt love, hatred, admiration, begrudging respect, a whole palette of emotions. Today it was, hmm, what? Embarrassment? Shame? Hostility, even anger? What was this all about? It seemed that people squirmed not to make eye contact, that his appearance carried with it the power of silence. All the office chitchat dried up; the place went silent.

What could that—Was it—Why was—All very strange. He looked, and backlit against his window, Mel the bureau chief was huddled in conference with some others, and they spoke tensely, even urgently. His secretary was even in there with him.

David didn’t like the feeling.

He got to his desk, sat down.

Everything seemed the same, everything seemed fine. So what was the big deal? Maybe it was just his nerves.

He looked at his watch. It was 3:50, ten until the 4 p.m. news meeting. Just enough time to get the lay of the land.

He clicked on his computer, waited for it to warm up just like a fifties TV, until the code prompt came on and warned him he had to change codes in nine days but he could do it now if he wanted, and he didn’t, and he waited till his icons came on, little cartoony emblems against the field of deep blue, and he decided to skip the Net—Drudge, Huffington, Power Line, TNR, NRO, and the others—and instead moused straight to Lotus Notes, double-clicked, waited again until the e-mail index came up, checked to see how many he’d gotten, good Lord, it was over 200 and—

Wait, it wasn’t over 200.

He looked carefully.

It was over 8,000.

8,456!

David felt his respiratory system ice over in that moment; it just solidified into something heavy with cold and death, immovable and gargantuan, something not him.

He flicked away from the page to refresh it, and when it came back, the e-mail count was up to 8,761.

He looked around, convinced that everyone in the office was staring at him but would make no eye contact, as if his colleagues were turning away exactly as his eyes rose to meet theirs.

That many e-mails could mean but one thing: the Big Mistake.

He glanced at the displayed topic lines of the e-mails in the column that ran the length of the screen.

ASSHOLE

Times commie

ignoramus

Should have called NRA

Fool

what about seven-day waiting period for YOU!

Can’t tell Winchester from Rem

Not a PSR, clown

DUH

And on and on it went.

He picked one that seemed less incendiary than the others, its topic line reading “Visual vocabulary insufficient.” At least this guy might understand punctuation and capitalization.

Dear Mr. Banjax,

I suppose by now you have been notified you ran a four-column photograph on the front of your newspaper claiming that you had a picture of a crooked FBI agent firing an FN PSR at the FN range in 2006, when what he is actually holding is a Remington VTR 700, a model not introduced until late 2008. You must also realize that the photograph completely invalidates the premise of your story and your investigation, reveals itself to be a fraud, and suggests that the integrity of the Times has been tarnished beyond recovery. All in all, a smashing performance. Congratulations! You couldn’t have done more harm to your cause if you actually TRIED to harm your cause.

This represents a distressing tendency on the part of Mainstream Media. You all are so opinionated on gun matters, gun policies, gun politics, yet you lack even the most fundamental gun knowledge to buttress your implicit claims of expertise. Quite the opposite, you oh so frequently expose your woeful ignorance and laughable grasp of reality. But even by that standard, this morning’s blooper is quite spectacular.

You represent the media assumption that a gun is just a gun. Any gun is any other gun and therefore you of the enlightened, educated ironic classes needn’t trouble yourself with actual facts about it. The facts don’t matter, only something you’re sure you see, called “the truth.” But if there are no facts, there is no truth. It’s a pattern we see repeated over and over again. Someone once defined a newspaper gun story as “something with a mistake in it.”

You idiot. You were incapable of looking at one rifle and distinguishing its differences from another rifle. It’s not rocket science, chum. Thus you publish a picture misidentified that literally millions of people—not all redneck neanderthals listenin’ to CW n’ drinkin’ moonshine in trailer parks, neither, Snuffy—will see through in a second.

The FN PSR is a refined version of the Winchester Model 70 and still bears the hallmarks of that VERY FAMOUS weapon. The most obvious of these is the trigger guard; the Winchester designers of the early 30s who created that piece of metallic (later alloy) genius had a sense of streamline and grace and they managed to come up with a classic interpretation of the oval. That Winchester oval is part of the visual vocabulary of our times, and any hunter recognizes it instantaneously; it carries with it a trace of art moderne, reflecting the fashions of the period of its creation, and, serendipitously or not, it was so slick and eye-appealing and perfectly scaled and brilliantly machined and blued that even now, over 70 years later, its inheritors in South Carolina can’t bear to part with it. That is why all the new FN rifles bear approximations of it, and any rifle claiming to be FN bolt action would feature such an emblem. The rifle you identify as an FN SPR does not.

It contains another equally vivid symbol of an American classic. Remington had a different, though just as distinctive, interpretation of the trigger guard. They knew that their rifle, the Model 700, had to have an immediately apparent visual signature that marked its difference from their main competition, the 70 (do you get the 70/700 dynamic?). They were coming into the market 30-odd years later (1962) and at that time, the Model 70 was the baseline, but they saw an opening because they knew that Winchester was planning an upgrade that would ease manufacture but coarsen the product. So they had to deliver something distinctive. Their trigger guard has a kind of bow to it, an expansive exaggeration that takes it out of the oval, opens it up, out, and downward (some say the function is to allow a gloved finger easier access to the trigger), but again with a harmony and grace that is instantly recognizable to anyone who knows even the slightest thing about firearms.

Evidently, you and your confreres at the Times missed this OBVIOUS distinction, as you missed several other unique hallmarks of the VTR that make it all but impossible to confuse with the PSR.

I could go on to various differences in the nuance of stock and bolt design. I could point out that the scope on the rifle is a Leupold 9X and unlikely to possess the refinement for the kind of shooting (less than MOA at 300 yards) the picture and the story attribute to Mr. Memphis and the “PSR.”

But you get the point: all in all, pathetic, ignorant, transparent. Quite ugly. You think we’re so stupid, while you’re the one who’s stupid. You should be ashamed.

Sincerely,

Neanderthal P. Country-Music Redneck

3d Trailer on Right

Passel O’ Toads, NC

aka

Lawrence M. Fisher, MD, PhD

Director of Oncology

Methodist Hospital

Kansas City, MO

Banjax realized he had been had. He had been faked and ruined and he’d walked right into it.

“David?”

It was the bureau chief’s secretary.

“David, Mel would like to see you.”

“Well, I—”

“David, right away,” she said in a voice that communicated the secret meaning David, right away.

44

Swagger lay in darkness, too focused to sleep. He was curled on the cot, facing the wall under a thin blanket, aware of the TV camera in the corner of the dark room, its red eye signaling its activity. He waited for time to pass, for his torturers to select a guard, then bed down for the night.

His wrists were bound together by the tough plastic of the flex-cuff, impervious to most blades; it took a pair of clippers and a great deal of force to cut through them. Thus, by the configuration of wrist on wrist, his fingers were closely intertwined. With the fingers of his right hand, he went to his index finger, left hand, and began to carefully peel the Band-aid around the base of the finger—“Cut ourselves wanking, have we now?” It was a process made more arduous by its taking place behind him, in the dark, and inside out, with the left to the right and the right to the left, with numb, swollen fingers. But by picking at the edge of the Band-aid, he got it loosened, and by stretching, sliding, manipulating with great focus and energy, he got the Band-aid removed from the base of the finger. There, buried in scab from the skin-cutting tightness with which it had been wound about the finger, a few inches of hard cutting wire used in certain surgical applications rested, coiled tightly. He got the coil off the finger, ran it through his hands to open it and clean off the dried blood, then—again straining at the awkward angles, the stretch of joint, the numbness in his fingertips—he looped the cutting wire over the plastic of the flex-cuff, caught an end in thumb and forefinger of each hand, and began to saw.

It was not easy. He felt the sweat rising, slicking his body in the dark little chamber, and he tried to lie quietly, as a man asleep might lie. Meanwhile, the wire would not bite into the plastic and kept slipping. It would snake out of one hand and was tense with inbred circularity, having been wrapped around his finger for such a long time. He focused everything he had on the ordeal, trying to get his fingers to obey, trying to get the cutting wire to bite into the plastic, trying to hold it taut, trying to keep his whole body still for whoever was watching the television monitor, and it seemed for the longest, the most frustrating time not to be happening, it was not happening goddamnit to hell it was not happening he could not get the wire to catch to—

And then it happened. Why then and not a minute earlier or a minute later he’d never know. Somehow he scored enough into the flex-cuff for the wire to catch and bite, found some leverage in his hands (though they cramped as if being crushed in vices) and, emboldened by his tiny taste of success, began to saw away. On that surge of energy, he got the flex-cuffs cut in less than twenty minutes.

The trick then was not to give in to the temptation to throw out and stretch his cramped arms, to flex and satisfy his tightened fingers, to rub his raw wrists. He lay still, breathing, waiting.

Time passed.

No one rushed in, beat him senseless, and clapped the iron manacles about his limbs.

He squirmed, turned, and still keeping his hands, though now free, behind his back, twisted downward and got the wire looped over the flex-cuffs about his ankles. With free hands, he had better leverage this time and was able to wrap the wire about his fingers instead of pinching it between them; he was done in five minutes.

He flicked his ankles, and each shoelace in his left hiking boot presented itself to him, as if specially weighted. It was weighted; from each he withdrew a two-inch-long piece of titanium needle, extremely strong and unbendable, a millimeter wide. Again, he waited for the sound of footsteps, the crash of the door opening, the arrival of the Irish goons with fists and truncheons to beat him to pulp for his audacity. Nothing happened.

Now, tricky. Was the fellow on the monitor asleep? Was he just drowsing? Was he watching an episode of Star Trek on TV or jerking off to an old copy of Juggs? Or was he enjoying Swagger’s struggle and letting it build in hope until it was time to crush it?

Swagger’s hard combat mind banished doubt and speculation. No purpose was served, except to slow his directness, and he needed speed, decisiveness, surprise for what lay ahead.

Easily, he slid off the cot, coming to rest on the floor. He was aware of the red light as if it were a red eye, a dragon’s eye, staring at him. But he pressed on, snaking his way across the dark floor to the door, where he slid upward, leaning against the hard metal, and found the key hole. He probed, a pick in the fingers of each hand. The job required delicacy, and after thirty-six hours of bound torture, he had none; his fingers felt like stone, when they weren’t atremble like the wings of a butterfly. The process seemed to devour time. It seemed hours, as he probed, felt the give of levers inside, the weight of tumblers, the dense cylinder that was the core of the lock, whose flanges had to be manipulated properly, while he held a spring down by pressing hard against it with strength he no longer had. Hours passed, then days and nights, then months. Somehow the years changed, and decades later, the door at last yielded, not with a click but with a whisper. He eased it open, stepped into the well-lit hallway, blinked for focus and clarity, looked each way for a weapon, saw none. He did exactly what he’d done earlier when he’d first entered the house, but he did it more artfully this time, using the sniper’s gift for silent movement, the sniper’s patience for goals reached surely but without rushing, and he came at last to the steps and then to the doorway atop the steps, and he slid through, hearing heavy snoring. His trip took him through the kitchen; he quietly pulled a drawer, then another, and finally a third until he located a butcher’s crude blade with enough point and length to reach blood-bearing organs in a single cut.

He eased around a corner into the security office and there saw on a screen his own empty cot and the door of his own cell half ajar. Alas, no one was awake to notice, for Ginger, the smartest of the Irishmen, lay sound asleep in a chair, his feet up on a desk under the TV monitor. No time for deliberation now, as Swagger’s trembly, weakened muscles were pumped by the pressure of adrenaline foaming into his bloodstream, and in three swift steps he was upon Ginger, had the man’s neck wrapped in the crook of his elbow, securing it, and with the other hand, drove the knife point into the delicate skin of the neck just tenths of an inch from the river of red blood known as the carotid.

“Wake up, you Irish fuck,” he said sharply, jerking on the neck as if to break it, for that was another of his options, given the leverage he had attained.

“Ggggg—kkk,” was all his crushed passages allowed Ginger to mutter.

“You listen to me, I’d just as soon cut you open”—he put pressure so that the tip of the butcher’s tool sank another tenth of an inch or so into skin entirely too fragile to offer it anything of an impediment—“and watch you bleed dry on the floor, but what’s going to happen is I’m going to roll you to the vault just like this and you’re going to open it. And if you pretend you don’t know the combination, I’m cutting your carotid clean through and you die vomiting blood and shitting and pissing, while I go upstairs and get myself another Irish artery to split. I will kill all night if I have to. I’m only letting you live because I want some dough, and you’re the messenger.”

The softness of surrender flashed through Ginger’s big body, and Bob rolled him on the strength of his shoulders, and in a few seconds they’d arrived at the heavy door. This time it was locked, but Ginger got his hands to the dial, a silver disk the size of a destroyer day-room clock, and spun and clicked the knob back and forth half a dozen times, and a vibration announced that he’d opened it, and then the door, of its own volition, unlinked and opened an inch.

Bob rode Ginger to his feet, not wanting to give the bigger, younger, stronger man any space to acquire leverage; Bob could not afford a fight now, even if he won it. When Ginger was upright, Swagger said, “Open it,” and the door flew wide, and Bob pushed Ginger in. He saw stacks of rifles, bins of ammo, and just where it had been, the film, safe in its cardboard package on the shelf.

“Knees,” said Bob, and Ginger went down.

Kill him, Bob thought. One fewer of the bastards. Murder his ass and send the message that this is to the death.

But cutting a half-strangled thug’s throat was not a thing he could do; instead, he released the clamp on the neck, quickly seized a rifle—it was a Remington 700—inserted the butt into the cleft between skull and shoulder against the neck, and forced Ginger facedown.

“Tell Anto I’m too old to give a fuck about honor. I want dough and lots of it. I’m sick of being poor and noble. But I want to be in control, not him. I want to get paid for my trouble. I want to get paid for that war in something other than nightmares. This is my chance and I won’t let him fuck me like everyone else. I’ll contact him tomorrow and we’ll rig an exchange somehow in the wilderness. And I want dough up front so they best get on the phone to Constable and get a big pile of cash here. You can remember that? Oh, and I hope you don’t suffocate.”

With that he withdrew the buttstock a few inches, then drove it hard into the back of Ginger’s skull, knocking the fellow either out or, more likely, into a grogginess so intense and a pain so heavy he could do nothing for minutes.

Swagger wished he had time to disable the rifles or at least twist all the knobs to hell and gone, but he didn’t. Instead, he snatched the film, slid out, and locked the heavy door behind him. Whether Ginger lived or died did not at this point seem an issue to ponder.

He went quickly to the shelf, plucked off a radio unit next to the blinking receiver by which the professional security people stayed in contact. He looked around until he saw a heavy ring of keys. Then he slipped out the door.

Piles of stars filled the western sky. A wind pushed cold air across the plains, fresh out of the mountains close by, whose darker bulk obliterated the low starlight. Vegetation, moved by that cascade of air from above, filled the sky with the sound of its own rustling. Far off, a coyote howled, and his mate responded.

Swagger sucked the cold air, glad of its plentitude, hoping for energy. Then his adrenaline took over.

He set out on a course to the vehicle compound next to the barn, stopped to retrieve a knapsack he had wedged into a culvert on the way down. He opened it, removed an ice pick.

At the compound, it took a second to find the right key, and then he unlocked the padlock and lifted the gate back. He walked past each vehicle—five four-wheeled all-terrain vehicles, two jeeps, a pickup truck, and a Cherokee—and thrust the penetrating needle of the ice pick into each tire. It sank without difficulty into the tires, and it produced in him a reverie of vengeance as he fantasized it was going into the thoracic cavities of his captors. In a very few seconds had disabled all the vehicles save one of the ATVs.

He knelt, used the grip of the tool to shatter the plastic housing of the ignition, found the wires tangled beneath, did some pulling and jiggling before he freed the leads up, then sparked the vehicle to life. Maybe it was loud enough to awaken the sleeping Irishmen, maybe not. It didn’t matter by now.

Throwing the ice pick in the knapsack, he threw the whole thing on his back and his leg over the saddle of the ATV, a thing built by Honda called a Foreman. It was essentially a broader, slower, but more agile four-wheel motorcycle, its broad base giving it stability, designed to negotiate the back country, the vehicle that made hunting fields accessible to lazy, out-of-shape suburbanites. He kicked it into gear and twisted the throttle at the handlebar’s end and peeled out of the compound, turned, and headed out into the wilderness. No noise arose behind him, and he roared onward in the dark, his pains forgotten, his angers quelled, his righteousness unstoked. He was only thinking one thing: time to get my rifle.

45

At five, Raymond’s alarm woke him and told him it was time to relieve Ginger. He rose, dressed, brushed his teeth, ran a wet comb through his hair, smiled at his cheeky beauty in the mirror, and thought of the many gals he’d had and the many more, with all that swag, that awaited. Then down he went, whistling and calling, “Is the coffee hot still, Ginger, or must I make it meself?” and first discovered that Ginger was missing, then saw the empty cell and open door on the security monitor, turned quick to check the vault, saw it locked, then heard the pounding from inside.

Things happened in a blur after that. Raymond pulled Anto and the others from sleep. They got the vault open in time to save the gasping Ginger’s life, though the man was cross-eyed with a skull as bloody as if the red Indians had taken his hair from the pounding the sniper had administered.

The team made quick checks, discovered the useless vehicles, the stolen radio set, got Swagger’s message as relayed by the slow-of-wit Ginger, and realized they’d just inherited a new game.

“Do you see?” said Anto, the first to figure it out. “This was the bastard’s plan from the start. Remember how daft I thought it, him coming in all clumsy and stupid, him giving up without much fight, him just a sponge in our hands? Give it to the bold bastard, his plan was canny—to let us work him hard, him believing it was in him to last us out, and last us out he did. Then, knowing where the film was, he became himself again and ceased with the stupid and the slow. He got out, took down poor, unsuspecting Ginger, and now he’s the one with the cards.”

“The bloody magician,” said Raymond, a little awestruck, “but a hard man he’d be to know what was coming and ride it through.”

“Hard he is,” said Anto, “hard and smart, but he’ll be dead, I swear. It’s Twenty-two he’s fighting here, not some ragtop A-rab boy petters.”

“What now, Anto? Do we track him? I’m thinking them tire tracks would make the job easy.”

“We do not. He has a rifle cached, I’m sure of it. We track him, he puts us down one at a time, from way out. I’ll not have that.”

“Then what is left for us to do?”

“Well,” said Anto, “what we must do is figure where he’ll set up and be ahead of his thinking, not behind it.”

“Anto, yis cannot read minds. That’s a hell of a spread out there in all directions. He could be anywhere. Guess wrong and you’re the dead one.”

“Yeah, Anto, Ginger’s got a point. The smart move, I’m thinking—”

“Jimmy, don’t wrinkle your brow with thinking now. It ain’t becoming. And no, I don’t read minds, and yes, it’s a hell of a big spread and he could be anywhere. But think of him, think of us. Snipers all. He fears us; what’s he want? Where does he seek safety? How would he feel at his most comfortable? And who would know of such a place?”

“Anto, I—”

“That fellow who manages the ranch operation for his lordship. He must know the land like his wife’s wrinkly arse. Get him by phone, please, Jimmy. He’ll have an answer.”

Jimmy searched the database—the task normally would have fallen to the brighter Ginger, but Ginger’s head was a little messy—and in time, the phone was handed to Anto.

“Mr. McSorley, it’s Anto, of Mr. Constable’s security team, sir, and I do apologize for the early nature of the call.”

Anto listened to the old grump pretend to be undisturbed, fight for time to clear the grogginess, remind Anto that he, Anto, had told him to clear the property of working men for a few days, and then settled in to listen.

“Sir, I’ve heard from Mr. Constable this very morning and he’s asked me to set up a security exercise to keep the boys sharp and for him to watch when he returns. Thus I wonder if I might explore the knowledge ye’d be havin’, livin’ here your whole life, and help us find a chunk of land out there suitable. Yes, thanks, Mr. McSorley, what I need is distance, space, a long way for the eye to see and no place to hide in nature. Not glades and trees and rocks and foothills but an open valley, short grass, and it would be helpful if it weren’t too far out, because transpo’s an issue as well. Oh, I see. Yes, that’s right. ‘The Goggles,’ you say. Perfect, you say. I’d have looked at the map a hundred years and not have known, but you’ve got me right to it, and I’m thanking you kindly, sir, and will tell Mr. Constable of your cooperation. Good day to you, sir.”

He hung up.

“What would ‘the Goggles’ be, Anto?”

“Look to the map, boys.”

The geodesic survey chart was quickly pulled from a drawer and unrolled.

“He says there’s a couple of broad valleys about, twenty

mile out, the first one, the second another four mile along. He guessed a compass radial from security HQ to be around two-fifty, not quite true west, but a little shaded to the south, over rough

territory, foothills and the like. He thinks they was formed by comets striking the earth a million years ago. A double tap, you might put it.”

“There, Anto,” said Raymond, pointing out the irregularity on the map, “and can you not see why they’re called the Goggles?”

Indeed, the broadness, the circularity, and the separation of the elevation lines to convey gentleness of slope appeared to the naked eye like two broad, clear lenses against the density of marking that expressed rougher ground. Squint and you were looking into the eyes of an aviator from the open-cockpit days.

“He’ll be able to see a long way coming,” said Ginger, as if his head had cleared, “and having set up, and alone knowing the site and having a chance to examine it with his fine eye, he’d have no fear of hidden shooters.”

“Moreover,” said Raymond, “the land right on the approach is rugged, craggy, with lots of dips and arroyos and valleys, then it crests up, you cross over, and there’s a big emptiness. He’ll bounce you through them valleys on the approach.”

“He will indeed,” said Anto. “Then this is where it’ll play out. He’ll call late afternoon. He’s got to sleep the day away; he’s not slept in three and he’s had that bout with the water, which would break all other men. So this I’ll tell you: he’s in a fog now. He’ll know that and not want to make mistakes. He’s found a fine bog and and he’ll sleep like a bear. Then he’ll call, and the game begins.”

“And we arrive at the crest once he’s exposed himself, you’re thinking, Anto,” said Raymond.

“Then with iSniper we write The End to this story,” added

Ginger.

“No, fellows, too many slips could occur. This is how it must happen. This is the fulcrum, the key. It’s that you’re already there. You moved in at night—tonight, that is—you set up a hide so good it can’t be spotted, because when he gets to the place after the long game he’s run, he’ll pass his shrewd eyes over it. That’s where your snipercraft must be as I taught you, and I won’t be there to check and improve. It’s on Team Irish, not on Anto. It must be perfect, and your patience and your stalker’s stillness and your shooting ability with iSniper911 and Mr. 168-grain Black Hills must be at the top of the heap, because you’ll only get one chance. You put the beam on him, let the magic bean do its trick and solve your jumble of numbers and designate your point of aim, and then you hold, control breathing, press to surprise, break, and put the man down.”

“Anto, suppose we search the body and the MacGuffin ain’t upon him? Should we then shoot for hip, smash it up, and leave him still breathing for further interview?”

“You will not. Shoot him dead. I don’t want him wounded, I want him belly up, the Sniper nailed. He’ll have it on him, as it’s fragile and can’t be left in nature, and if he’s hit or takes a fall, or the play blows him this way or that across the land, that makes picking it up afterward a consideration he’d rather not face. He’ll have it upon him, that I know.”

“I’d like the shot, Anto,” said Ginger, “if it can be arranged. It was my head he thumped, enjoying the blow, and it was my lungs that would’ve come up empty if Raymond hadn’t needed his cup of coffee, so with me, it’s taken on the personal.”

“You’ll understand, then, Ginger, why I’m placing you low, with a carbine, for close-in if it must be, because I don’t want you brooding in your hide and getting anxious and bumbling on the delicacy of the trigger. I’ll let Raymond take the shot from above, with Jimmy spotting, and you’re my security, down close. I’m putting you in a ghillie where I think he’ll make the play and you’ll be closest to him. If Raymond misses, you’ll have but a second to dump a magazine into him, or it’s poor Anto among the angels, what a mighty tragedy that would be. So Raymond, the shot you’ll take will be through the moving stuff, and that’s why it’s yours, because you are the best wind reader and through shooter on the team, as I know the fellows would agree.”

“It’s true,” said Jimmy. “Raymond’s a genius in the breeze. Otherwise, the poor man’s the dullest blade in the drawer, but fluff up the weeds and set the leaves to rustle, and Raymond’s the man you want.”

Everybody laughed, even Raymond, who was known to be a sensitive type.

“Then, mates,” said Anto, “we’re done with this bloody job and this bloody country with its thin beer and bad poetry, and it’s off to castles in Spain where his lordship has set up our fine lives for us.”

46

Swagger awoke from dark sleep that felt drugged, shook his head to drive out memories too grotesque to be recorded, wished hard for a cup of coffee. He didn’t feel refreshed or enlivened a bit; he wanted to go back to unconsciousness and escape his reality: in a dirty-smelling nook in the rocks, heaped with the crap he’d brought along, faced with a mission he felt too old for. Have to get my combat mind back, he told himself: have to!

He crawled out of his sleeping bag, crawled up the incline to the mouth of the cave, and went to his Leicas for a good five-minute examination of landscape. It looked fine—a drift of low hills and sparse forestry, a glimpse of green-yellow valley floors, a haze of far-off peaks. At one point he thought he saw a line that seemed a little too straight for anything in nature, and he put down the binoculars to take up the rifle. Through the Leupold Mark IV’s 10X, he studied hard and realized it was a length of birch trunk 240 yards out.

He glanced at his watch, saw that it was nearly 5 p.m., meaning it was 8 p.m. in the East and he was already behind schedule.

He ate three protein bars because he’d need the energy for the long night ahead, and stuffed a couple in his cargo pants pocket. Then he crawled to the mouth of the cave, checked again, crawled out, and pulled out his cell and punched in a number.

Come on, goddamn it, work, goddamn you, and in a bit he heard ringing.

“Where the hell are you?” said Nick Memphis.

“Never you mind,” said Swagger. “Are you back, are you out of the woods, are you the boss?”

“I’m back. Long story. Forget me. You said to Starling, ‘Jump time,’ and then you went incommunicado for three long days. What the hell is happening? What the hell are you doing? What is your situation? What are your plans?”

“Here’s what’s important. I have to get you something. No point describing it. Hmm, don’t see no FedEx offices around this neighborhood, so tomorrow I’ll find a way to get it sent FedEx; tomorrow being Saturday, I’ll pay for Sunday delivery. I want you ready for it, expecting it, set up to receive it, protect it, and understand it.”

“Where’s the nearest big city?”

“Lord, it ain’t that near, probably Missoula.”

“Too far? Give me a town then. I’ll have a team there tomorrow.”

“Place called Indian Rapids, Montana, downstate and east a bit from Missoula.”

“I’ll fly a team in. Bring it to the Indian Rapids airfield or airport. Anytime after noon. Go to the American Eagle desk, tell ’em it’s for Mr. Memphis. An agent will take it from you.”

“And take me too, no doubt. Well, I don’t think it’ll matter none by tomorrow. Tomorrow’s going to be a very damned interesting day, Special Agent Nick, that I guaran-fucking-tee you.”

He broke the connection, put the phone away, then reached in and pulled out the radio unit he’d taken from the charger in security headquarters. It was a Motorola CP 185 VHF two-way, set to MAINT DIRECT. He turned the unit on, then snapped a selector switch to VOX, which automatically voice-activated transmission on the preset frequency.

“Mr. Potatohead. Calling Mr. Potatohead.”

“Is it you, Swagger?”

“It’s me, Potatohead.”

“Tricky bastard, yis screwed all me plans,” came the voice, clear against some marginal static. “We needed them machines to get into Indian Rapids before the bank closed at noon, so’s I could access an operational account with more cash than a scoundrel like yis ever seen. Now it’s all buggered.”

“Then rob it tonight, I don’t care. If I don’t see a ton of cash tomorrow, you get nothing but a bullet between the eyes. The film goes to the feds. Your boss goes to prison. Then I bring some friends in, boys who know a thing or two, and we hunt down the other three O’Flanagans and take heads. I don’t have an Irishman over my mantel yet.”

“Him with the big talking. What’s the game, Sniper? You’ve got a game.”

“Tomorrow you’re up at oh-five-hundred. Oh, and you’re naked. Buck-ass, jaybird nude. That’s so you don’t have a shiv or a .45 slickered away in some dark place.”

“For God’s sake, what about me dignity, man?”

“Not my department. You get aboard an ATV, also stripped, except for that big bag of money, and you set out on the Water Hole Road, and you make tracks to the hole. At the hole, you take High Ridge Trace and you make tracks down it. I’m guessing you’ll hit Big Bend Creek at oh-six-thirty just as the light’s beginning to come across the valley. I’ll call you on this radio, this frequency, so you better have a headphone set. Then you can guess the drill. I’m going to give you GPS headings and bounce you up hills and down valleys and over streams. Sometimes I’ll be watching, sometimes I won’t, but you’ll never know. You move straight and fast to where I tell you. You’re alone, you’re unarmed, you’re naked. When I satisfy myself that your goddamn boys aren’t following you and that you aren’t in communication with them, I’ll take you to me, someplace wide open where nobody gets close. I take the dough. I give you the first half or so of the film. I leave you naked, I take your radio and your ATV and I’m gone. Again, when I’m satisfied I’m not being followed and your boys aren’t around, I’ll call them and give them the coordinates of your spot and they come get you. The first part of the deal is over.”

“You’re a bastard, Swagger. Do you know who you’re dealing with?”

“Yeah, a naked Irishman hoping a grizzly doesn’t decide he’s lunch. Sometime in the future, when I’m feeling secure and have thought out the angles, I’ll make contact again. This time there’ll be an exchange not of cash but of account numbers. When mine’s full up, I’ll turn over the last of the film to the naked Irishman. You’ll never see or hear of me again unless you come after me, and if you do, I go after the big guy, and since you know how good I am, you’ll sell him on the proposition that if he wants his legacy clear and to live out his years in peace, he stays the hell away from me. Have you got that?”

“I have.”

“And no one else goes out either. I’ll be watching the house tonight, and if I hear motors on those ATVs as you send the boys out, I’ll sneak down and cut your throat and head into town. They’ll have a long wait tomorrow, and when they get back, they can watch the FBI arrest the boss on the TV.”

“They’s not going nowhere. Where would they go?”

“Tomorrow, oh-five-hundred. Tonight you better hope I don’t have nightmares of you guys holding me down while the water crushed my lungs, because I might decide to take it personally and put a bullet in the potatohead.” He clicked off.

The call finished, Bob knew he had to check kit while it was still light. Though it was probably an unnecessary precaution, he didn’t want to be throwing flashlight beams into the darkness.

Weapons: He wore Denny Washington’s Sig 229 in a Mitch Rosen horizontal leather holster under his left shoulder. It was loaded with twelve .40 Corbon +P hollow points, and he had two more twelve-round mags hanging vertically under his right shoulder, to balance the weight of the automatic on the other side of the harness. That gave him thirty-six; if he needed more, he should have had an M4 along.

The rifle was a stainless steel Remington 700 Sendero with a gray-green camo McMillan stock, more hunting rig than dedicated sniper, but accurate as hell way out there with its 7mm Remington Ultra Magnum 150-grain cartridges loading Swift Scirocco polycarbonate-tipped bullets, of which he had four boxes of twenty. The only tactical flourish was the Leupold Mark IV 4–15X scope with the old mil-dot range-finding system built into its reticle, secured in heavy Badger Ordnance tactical rings and bases. The barrel, which he had taped black to mute the dull silver gleam, was fluted, which theoretically meant it cooled faster and empirically made it lighter, and it wore a Blackhawk black canvas cheek pad lashed to the stock to provide the higher stockweld necessary from the prone.

He had an SOG black steel Bowie with seven inches of razor-sharp death taped to the ankle of his right 5.11 assault boot. He had a Colt .380 Pocket Automatic 1908 in his right cargo pocket, with eight Corbon 95-grainers aboard.

Wish I had an M4. Wish I had that Swedish K. Wish I had the best weapon of all, which is two thousand marines.

Food and drink: He had a hydro-pack on his back, a water bladder slung flat against his spine and sustained by shoulder straps, with a tube that curled around his neck, so he could hydrate anytime he needed to without the excess motion of unlimbering, then unscrewing a canteen, then reversing the motion. He also had a Depends on, for obvious reasons. He had six energy bars. He had insect repellent, lip balm, alcohol swabs, and a trauma kit strapped to his lower left calf, with scissors, bandages, a couple of packs of clotting agents, disinfectant, and morphine Syrettes.

Communications: He had the radio unit from the ranch, freshly empowered with new batteries. He had his Nokia folder, freshly charged.

Camouflage: He had his best ghillie, a cumbersome exoskin made largely of heavy gauze secured to a one-piece reinforced tactical unit and woven cleverly with six-by-one-inch strips of cloth in the green-brown-gray dispersal pattern of the natural world in autumn, an abstraction so dazzlingly authentic that it all but disappeared when inserted into nature and further camouflaged by its wearer’s willingness to endure the ordeal of complete stillness. He had a boonie hat, soft and floppy-brimmed, itself multihued but more importantly also woven with tufts of the nature-toned material. He had three sticks of face paint—green, tan, brown—that would fold the whiteness of his face into the blur of natural color. The only odd color visible would be the lenses of his Maui Jim prescription shades, tear-shaped, brown, sprayed with lacquer to counteract their tendency to reflect the light. All in all, he looked like a bush.

He geared up. An observer, though of course there was none, might have thought of a samurai preparing for a duel at a temple against a hated enemy, or a knight strapping on the armor for a joust to the death with the forces of darkness. Swagger, no romantic, thought of none of this, only the careful placement of gear, the protection of the film reel inside a nesting of bubble wrap inside a thickness of duct tape, in his left cargo pocket, the buttons well closed and checked; he thought of the ordeal of the night and the different ordeal of the day. He put on his war face, smearing alternating abstractions of the green, tan, and brown face paint this way and that, until all his pink flesh was hidden and only the absolutism of war camouflage showed. He thought of the long shot, of the short, quick encounter, all of it shooting for blood. He thought of his plan and how many ways it could fall apart and leave him alone surrounded by enemies; he thought of his age, which was way beyond the limit for this kind of mission; he thought of the soreness in his joints, particularly in his right hip from both a bullet and a sword cut, and six or so operations; he thought of his wife and two daughters and how he missed them; and finally he thought of Carl Hitchcock, head shot open, his legacy tarnished into crazed marine sniper, and all other thoughts, memories, dreams, hopes, and fears disappeared. Now the advantage was his. No more recon, no more recovery, no more negotiation. It was straight killing time, at last.

It was time to hunt.

47

The boys, heavily geared up, left at 2100, when the last smear of sun disappeared. Theirs was a hard thing: they had to cover the miles on foot, hung with weapons, ammo, ghillies, knives, water, and protein bars; night-navigate off their GPSs, shortcutting over foothills and down draws to achieve crow-flight directness; arrive in the dark still, low crawl a thousand yards, dig in, camo up, and settle into perfect stillness for four or so hours of perfect snipercraft awaiting the shot. It was more ordeal than job, just barely doable by war athletes at the peak of operational perfection with two hours in the gym and a five-mile run per day behind them for years. But then, this is what you trained for.

Anto was left alone in the house. He didn’t fancy his own agonies: he’d be naked to the elements in harsh weather for a barely survivable length of time, and riding the goddamned ATV fast over rough territory, his bollocks bouncing and squishing, the brutal cold—in the thirties, sure—turning fingers blue and bum white, and when he got there, there being the goal at the end, then a new game started and he’d be thrown this way and that on the radio or the mobile, all of which was getting him into a delicate shooting situation where he’d be so close to the target, a hair’s width of mistake in hold or press would dress him in a 7.62 forever, which might only last the eight seconds it took to bleed him out.

He’d smear his flesh, particularly his feet and hands, with thick grease to fight the cold; he’d wear gloves and socks, surely the bastard wouldn’t complain about that; and he’d stoke on amphetamines, the soldier’s little chemical buddy, that would keep aggression, alertness, and quick thinking at the highest pitch until the natural juices of combat took over.

He tried to sleep but couldn’t; he jacked off to a dirty book, but that didn’t calm him; he didn’t want to mix booze with the recipe of pills he’d take on leaving, so he just tried to sit there, soothing himself with memories of kills.

The best: a squaddie of fellas setting up an ambush in deepest slum Basra, the hide given away by waterboarding that Iraqi lieutenant colonel. So he sets up to the east with Ginger spotting, and Raymond’s shooting from the west with Jimmy on the tube. It’s pure sniper pleasure. He got nineteen in about two minutes, firing, finding a new target, firing again, throwing the bolt in a blur, watching them boys pivot when hit, then go slack as death sent them to paradise, them falling with the thud of jointless collections of bones and meat. The bastards had no place to run that day, because that was their plan, to blow a Coalition Humvee at a place where all the exits was blocked, and shoot down the survivors. Ha! Hoisted on their own petards, was they.

Now that was a goddamn day a sniper lives for. He doubted even Swagger at his finest hit so many so fast. Maybe Swagger did more in a day, but ’twas over time and involved moving about, staying ahead of his hunters, a different game altogether. But he’d never had the intensity of taking that many that fast. A machine gunner might get it, but again, different: blurred, rushed, the working of the gun, the spray of empties flying, the muzzle blast and noise. His was pop, pop, pop, the suppressed AI taking them down, but each image against the reticle was memorable.

Was they all insurgents? He was shooting so fast and Ginger was changing magazines so fast, Anto couldn’t tell if indeed each had a giveaway AK on his back; did it matter? Not really, and what dif could it make if the Rockies howled “atrocity” or “massacre” or “murder” or whatever? The point was to give ’em a taste of obliteration in the boldest of ways, so it would haunt them, and maybe that was the beginning of the turnaround in Basra, even though his teams never got no credit, and soon enough the Clara Bartons had turned on them.

He glanced at his watch. He’d eaten enough time. It was 0430, time to grease up.

Nobody was blown, but Ginger, still fighting the concussion, wasn’t in the best of shape. He breathed raggedly, held his guts in, crouched low. A bit groggy, he swore he was fine, but Jimmy didn’t quite believe it. Eighteen miles is a long haul on the double time with all the stuff aboard, as well as the extra load of Anto’s rifle and pack with clothes, even though they were at acme shape. They’d made the crest, hidden Anto’s stuff where he’d designated, and now crouched just under the ridgeline, looking down on the broad, dark valley. Because he was cautious, Jimmy checked the GPS again and confirmed for himself that this was indeed the valley Anto had selected, the more southern of the two goggle lenses on the map.

Ginger gulped some water from the tube running out from his backpack.

“Easy, mate,” said Raymond. “You may be needing that around noon.”

“I’m fine,” said Ginger. “It’s me goddamned head, hurts so much. That fucker done a fine job on me.”

“He’s a grand one, he is,” said Raymond.

“We’ll see his corpse lying still in the grass tomorrow.”

“For sure we will.”

“Okay, lads, time for a last piss, then to camo up.”

They turned for modesty to hasten a last urination, pulled their own Depends adult diapers tight afterwards, and zipped and buckled up. Then came the squishing of the face paint, easy enough, for all had experience in this theatrical craft. Their features gone gray-green-brown, the next thing on the list was the wretched crawl-squirm-tug-wrestle into their ghillie suits and the button-up that followed as the heavy garment closed, heated, and tightened about them. This was followed by the labor of arising and pulling on packs and hats, and finally seizing rifles.

Each, of course, looked like an animated fluff of greenery, some cartoon-factory creation. It got worse when, three large beasts of war, caparisoned in the texture of the natural world itself, with packs of gear and mean implements of death strapped on, they began the long crawl down. At the halfway point they separated, partners Jimmy and Raymond heading for a shooting site and Ginger veering directly downward, to place himself and his M4 close to the creek and therefore, by design, close to the action.

A chill wind bit. He wore slippers at least to the bike. Above, moonglow but no moon lit a sector of sky, and in others the stars lay out in their millions. He could barely make out landforms, though some of the drugs he’d taken were said to enhance night vision. He felt revved, twitchy, intense. His ears were closed off by the headset leading to the radio, which was affixed to his one garment, a Wilderness belt about his gut.

“Potatohead?”

“Go ahead, bastard,” he said.

A scrambled crackle of mixed syllables responded.

“What?”

“I said, ta——socks off.”

“You bastard. Me feet’ll freeze.”

“An——gloves.”

“What again? I can hardly hear you, this radio transmission sucks. Can we switch to me mobile? It’ll be so much clearer and—”

“No. Gloves. Take off——loves.”

“Ach,” complained the Irishman, and complied. “See, nothing.”

“Ho——ight leg up.”

Anto did. “See, nothing.”

“Ok——going.”

The radio went dead.

“Bastard,” said Anto.

Anto threw his leg over the Honda Foreman, turned the key. At least he didn’t have to kick-start it, as in the old days. The little engine turned over, and with his bare right foot, he threw the gears, slipping once, tearing some skin, but he was so drugged up and so charged with uppers he barely felt it. He settled it, throttled up, and the four-wheeler’s tires, roughly nubbed for backcountry treks, bit into the earth and the thing lurched ahead.

It was easy going, though the wind bit at him, even through the drugged haze, and now and then a pebble or twig flew up and took off a chunk of skin. His bollocks were undisturbed as long as the road was more or less smooth, and in no time he’d gotten it up to forty, which was top speed on the Honda. He roared through the starglow, through the dark forms of mountains, following the directions he’d been given.

The water hole came up, and he circled it, looking for another track that was the High Ridge Trace, found it, and headed along. Here the going was rougher, as this wasn’t a road shared with pickups and Jeeps, but more of a bouncer, and it also took him so close to trees and brush that the limbs and leaves whipped him hard, sometimes very hard, as he rushed along. By now his hands were all but numb and controlling the brake and the throttle was getting harder. His feet, being close to the motor’s warmth, were surprisingly comfortable still and hadn’t begun to edge toward nothingness. He bent at another lash, saw some fine open road, ginned the throttle, and leapt ahead. As he flew, he checked his watch. It was only 0545 and he knew he’d make his destination in plenty of time.

Jimmy and Raymond, breathless and ragged and clotted with bits of grass, burrs, a slathering of dust stuck to sweat after the long crawl, set up about three hundred yards from the center of the valley flat, with a great overlook on the creek below, with no undulations or folds between them and the presumed target zone. It would be easy shooting, especially with the iSniper911 to solve the shot.

They got down in the prone, and rather than exactly digging in against the slight cant of the land, more or less insinuated their way into it, as if it were a crowd, not the planet Earth itself, squirming, adjusting, kicking now and then, trying to do all this without raising telltale signs like clots of thrown earth and dead weeds about themselves. Finally they had enough room to scootch down flat and not at the tilt, and Raymond took up the rifle, unfolded the bipod legs and had a time on the adjustments, getting the height just right, digging into the earth so that the legs of the support would be even, which would make the traverse easier, if indeed that’s what was called for. Meanwhile, Jimmy set up the spotter on its baby tripod, adjusting it for the same presumed target zone three hundred yards and fifteen degrees beneath horizontal out. It was still too dark for him to focus, though in fact a satiny glow had begun to light the eastern horizon across from them. After a bit of busyness, both were as set as they could get, and it was then that Jimmy unfurled a camo tarpaulin, a sheet of canvas threaded heavily with the strips of nature’s-coloring fabric as well as the odd twig or piece of thatch, so that it enveloped them, leaving only a peep slot at the farthest extreme, which left them barely enough room to observe and shoot. They settled in for the long, slow wait in abject stillness, a zen beyond death that was the sniper’s hardest discipline.

As Anto had predicted, it was much harder on Ginger. He was alone, and after breaking contact with his colleagues, he was really alone, seemingly on the face of the Earth. He continued his downward slither, swimming against the soil. It ate his energy and got him dirty, sweaty, and breathless in a hurry, exactly as he stayed throughout the downward progress. He persevered, reaching the valley floor, and before venturing out on the flat, tried to pick the best spot. Certainly dead center, right? But then his mind grew confused: he tried to imagine which way to orient himself; Anto hadn’t specified.

Did he want to be on his belly, looking forward to the action, able to haul himself up to his knees, throw the rifle to shoulder, and open up? Or was the best posture on his back, flat, his soles to the action, by which he could simply sit upright as he drew his legs in and fire from that situation? That would be faster by a second, involving less movement and adjustment on his part. On the other hand, he could only see straight up in that position, and he’d be bereft of visual keys. Suppose Raymond hit dirt, to clear the way for his fusillade, and he was just lying there watching the clouds roll by.

But if he were on an incline with his head lower than his feet, sure he might see, but just as sure, with the blood collecting in his damaged skull, he might pass out or endure so much pain that he would begin to involuntarily twitch. Thinking it over, he decided on a compromise and would lie on his left side, facing the creek bed. He could push himself to knees off his left arm and get to firing almost instantly—full auto, safety off, his finger in the guard housing, resting on the curve of the trigger—yet watch the action as well, and best of all, his head wouldn’t be a collection point for all the bad blood that still cruised his veins.

He chose the middle, as near as he could find it, and slid himself down among the higher grass, the knots of brush and bristle, the gnarly little twisted stems of the strange things that grew upon the plains. He settled in possibly twenty-five yards out, with a good view of a hundred yards either way. He felt for comfort and finally achieved what little he could arrange. That done, he threw the camo tarp over himself, like a blanket, so that he only peeped out from the smallest of cracks at the edge, which itself was concealed largely from view by two knots of brush. The matting of fabric strips and leaf clusters stitched to the outside of the tarp vibrated slightly in a soft, predawn wind. His diaper secure, his water source a lick away, his fingers on grip and forearm, the rifle cinched by combat sling close, twenty-eight Corbon 5.56s in the PMAG, and another PMAG so loaded secured to it by a Magpul link for the fastest reload in the game, he allowed himself to settle in and try to relax. As the sun began to paint the limits of his vision, it caught on the tips of trees and the upper reaches of the valley slope across the way.

* * *

Ninety hard minutes had passed, and Anto’s balls were now turning blue and his hands no longer belonged to him. An uncontrollable chill wracked his body. The amphetamines seemed to have worn off as well. He felt pain everywhere, the numbness of the cold, the bite of the wind, the sting of all the particles and branches that had pelted and whipped him.

Jaysus, he hated this evil bastard Swagger like the devil hisself. Him a fine strong man, the sniper’s sniper, an NCO in 22, the finest of all units on earth, reduced to nude messenger boy in forty-degree morning, cold and shot through with pain. Aghhhhh, such pleasure ahead, in seeing the man take Raymond’s 168er and ride it hard to ground, not believing it had finally happened to him. Anto hoped for a bit of eye contact there at the extreme moment, so Swagger would know who’d nailed him. But he’d pass that up for a simple sure death, and if this ordeal, by Jaysus, were the price, he’d pay it in hard, cold cash.

At last he rolled into a grove of trees in a narrow valley that announced the presence of a creek; it had to be Big Bend. He pulled up, turned the motor off, and watched as the sun began to light up the higher bits of elevation, turning the tips of the trees bright with warmth and hope. His machine ticked as it cooled; he sat, immobile, waiting, enjoying the cessation of the vibration against his bollocks, the cut of the wind and the branches against his shoulders and arms. Only his feet were warm, and he put his hands down and opened and shut them against the numbness in the soothing radiation from the engine.

“Potato!”

He responded into the microphone held on a strut just beyond his frozen lips.

“You bastard, Swagger, this being one hairy fooking bitch of a tumble. Man, I’d wring your goddamned neck if I had the chance.”

“Not——day,” Swagger said, the transmission just a little clearer. “Set your GPS on a radial two-sixty-five an——distance indicator for one-point-seven miles. When the b——ings for one-point-seven, turn to .109. Go. Fast. Now.” Then of course the radio went to nothing but static.

Anto struggled to get his GPS out of the bag with the money—

actually, old magazines and TV dinner packaging—and with his clumsy fingers found the proper buttons and set the heading, then switched modes and set the distance. It was the Garmin trail-marking model, set to ring when he went the 1.7. Looking at the route, it looked as if he was going straight over the foothills, not around them, and that would be a lot of jostling, a lot of barefoot shifting, a lot of diddling with the throttle and the brake for leverage and control.

Fooking bastard.

He set the GPS onto its neat little bracket affixed to the handlebars for that purpose exactly, gunned the engine to life, and set out, cursing all the way.

Nothing. It was nearly ten now, and the sun was bright and hot. Under the tarpaulin the sniper team did what ninety-nine percent of sniping is: they waited. In the flashy books and movies, the waiting part is always skipped. Alas, for Jimmy and Raymond it could not be. They just felt the numbness spread through their bodies, the warmth of the morning meeting the chill from the ground beneath, and were soon enough miserable, too cold from below, too hot from above. They knew: best not to think of time or check watches, best not to anticipate action, contemplate the future, make plans, hope it would end soon. Best to concentrate on the now, confront the suck in its pristine suckiness, attempt to engage it without letting it destroy the mind, not fret, whine, think of what could have been, refight old fights, discuss anything with meaning, comment on the situation in their adult diapers, profess either hunger to kill or fear of death. Just endure, as snipers had since the first Chinaman threw charcoal, saltpeter, and stinky sulfur together in a bowl and mashed them up.

“Think I’ll light a nice cigar, have a piss, open a bottle of stout, and go for a little stretch-it-out walk,” said Jimmy, the joker.

“You will not,” said Raymond, who was cursed with an earnest, literal mind, “that would completely blow our—” and then he saw it was Jimmy’s joking and pulled up.

“Had you, boyo,” said Jimmy.

“That you did,” said Raymond.

“You poor sod, believing everything that’s said. That’s why you shouldn’t buy nothing till you run it by me, ’cause you’re such a gentle, trusting fool, you’ll be taken ad of every time.”

“I wasn’t raised to no fast ways in a city like,” said Raymond. “Out in the country, all was what was said, and all you city lads, you play these damned games on me.”

“If yis wasn’t the best shot in Ireland, what woulda become of ya, I’ll never know.”

They settled down again, for their spurts of conversation came about every twenty minutes and lasted but a few seconds.

Each rode the optics before him. On the spotting scope, Jimmy’s was by far the wider view, and he patrolled the valley floor, then up and down the opposing slope in calm, orderly fashion, as he had been trained, never rushing, never tiring, never blinking, apprehending each and every detail, hunting for some kind of change—the straight line, the shadow falling in the wrong direction, a quick movement, a puff of dust where there was no wind, a dead branch amid bright green sprigs. But there was no change at all, only the lapping of the grass under the pressure of the steady, slight wind and, above the horizon of the valley, the slow, magnificent rush of the clouds, boiling cumulus that looked like frozen explosions with utterly detailed fretwork in their tumbles.

“Look,” said Raymond, who’d seen them first.

A flock of strange beasts had moseyed in, with white tails and throats, the size of goats, their horns like the arms of a lyre for a Greek god to pluck a melody on.

“Jaysus, what craytures them be?” wondered Jimmy.

“Did we take a wrong turn and go to Africa, I’m wondering, Jimmy,” said Raymond.

“We did, sure of it. No, we did not. Them’s antelopes of the American type. Good eating, so I’m told. Hunted hard, the more you kill, the more they breed.”

“Who could kill a beauty thing like that?” wondered Raymond.

Agh. How much longer? And how had it gotten so hot so fast? And where did the left half of me butt go?

Ginger lay, like any sniper, hard and calm in the hide. But this was no ordinary hide. In all the fighting he’d been in—considerable, what with Gulf I, Gulf II, the odd secret tiff in times of alleged peace, the long hard pull at Basra during the insurrection, all the security jobs for Graywolf after the fall—the hides offered a bit more comfort and movement. An apartment, an arroyo, a station on an outpost sandbag wall looking across a valley of heathen for movement. He’d never been asked before to pretend to be the earth itself, silent, abiding, unmoving.

Not an easy role to play. Thank God for the water, he could not stop drinking it, and what happened if it went too soon, by midafternoon say? He was out here till well after dark if nothing happened.

And of course his head. The Yank had battered him good. Hit him hard; you could understand it, the fellow paying him back for the water procedure. But still. A doctor would have put stitches in and given him light duty for a week, as well as the best painkillers Irish medicine could produce. But no such niceties existed here in wild America. No stitches, so under the bandages, he could feel the wet of blood seepage. The painkillers were over-the-counter, and any more Advil and he’d be a walking Advil himself, all brown and bluntlike, a six-three, 240-pound pill of ache medicine.

Worse, at least Jimmy and Raymond had visuals to amuse them. His vision was locked on to a spread of a few dozen yards about the creek, and even when the strange craytures came down to drink, he hadn’t a good look at them because they never quite came into his zone of vision. Ach, what was they? Some kind of—

He heard something.

Low and far off at first, then it rose. He waited for it to clarify, and presently it did. His heart leapt in actual joy, a rare thing for a man so stoic and duty-bred as he. He knew it to be the sound of the ATV Anto was driving.

His hands tightened on the pistol grip of his M4, he said a quick Hail Mary; he wished he had time to pop another upper for a jolt of energy and concentration; he flexed what he could flex and got ready for the action.

The ATV climbed a ridge and a bell sounded and Anto was happy to see from the GPS that this was where, according to previous radioed instruction, he turned from radial 265 to 109, that is, along the rim of this ridge. He had been worried at first, with all the this-way and that-way until he was confused, but he had a general idea he was trending away from the valley he’d designated as the spot for the final play, toward which he’d bet Swagger would guide him, and where, obedient to his wishes, the Spartans Jimmy, Raymond, and Ginger now lay concealed in ambush.

That sense of despair increased as the game progressed and the clock wound its way onward, but now, finally, he was oriented correctly, or so he believed.

He felt like he was on the moon, as on each side of his ridge, a wide-to-forever stretch of undulating hills, dips, crescents of shadow, outcrops of rock yielded spectacle but little information. Beyond in a distance too far to be measured, he saw snaggled peaks arise, some even snowcapped. But here in the high grasslands, it was all dips and humps, a frozen sea of waves dappled in shadow.

He followed the heading and might have gone to eternity or at least dark when he heard the buzz of the radio signal. He dropped to idle, twisted, got the radio out. Of his clothes, now that he’d adjusted to nakedness, what he missed most was pockets.

“Potato?”

“I am here, goddamnit,” he said.

“Stop. Re——ent to heading zero-nine-six, go for one——iles and stop. It’ll be—”

“How many miles, goddamnit?”

“One-point-six. Stop. Stay on the scooter——isappear on me. Ro——r?”

“Roger that, ye slabber.”

As usual, the voice didn’t rise to any provocations but merely disappeared. Anto reset the GPS and followed its guidance, pleased to see that now indeed it seemed to be taking him where he thought his designated valley ought to be.

The 1.6 passed quickly over bare ground and slopes that weren’t quite hills until, at 1.5, he found himself on a steep upgrade, rising to a rim that, examined from a distance, seemed larger than the others. The machine chugged stubbornly against the incline, and in a few more minutes he halted.

The promised land. The valley was vast and he saw in it the same features that had been represented pictorially on the geodesic survey map. It took him a second to orient himself, then he realized he was at the south edge, which meant that of the slopes before him, the right hid his ambushers, and the left would in time present Swagger for the killing.

He was certain that at this moment he was under observation, and so he fought the impulse to show emotion at the success of his strategy, and he fought the instinct to double-check his placements by looking for signs of his hiding men. He kept his face impassive and registered no excitement, no recognition, nothing but the sullen war face of his breed.

He knew he’d wait a bit. Wherever he was, Swagger himself had just arrived, for just as certainly as Anto had been moved about, Swagger, monitoring him, had to be moving too, to get from place to place and watch for followers. But now Swagger would study the valley, for perhaps as much as an hour, examining every tuft, every rill, every knoll, every bush, every rise, every fall, looking for signs that Anto had somehow done exactly what Anto had indeed done—that is, guess the spot and place men there. So this was where the boys’ snipercraft had to be at its highest.

The day seemed to disconnect from time. The only noise was the persistence of the wind; otherwise the surface of the earth seemed devoid of life except for the naked, now red-shouldered man on the odd four-wheeled vehicle, which looked more like a toy than anything of serious purpose. A bird rode wind funnels in circles, hunting for prey—another sniper, in his way. Some kind of yowl rose briefly and disappeared as briefly, as something ate something else. The time passed, second by second. Anto sat alone on the bike seat, straddling the engine, buck nekkid as the day he was born but now used to it and not feeling shame at all.

Finally a voice crackled through the earphones.

“See the creek running through the valley?”

“I do.”

“Aim for its center. Bisect it——fectly. Within fifty feet, halt. Climb off——ike on the right side. ——ands are up, you sidestep ten feet, and stop——n grass. Any sudden mo——ullet in the brain. Whe——dy, I come out of hide.”

“I read.”

“Now do it.”

Anto turned the ignition key.

As the vehicle jumped to life, he tried to fight the grin that split his face, but he was thinking, Dead bang center.

48

Like all western boomtowns, Cold Water had a raw quality to it. Money brought in commerce, which required construction, and soon enough a Main Street sprang up—a bank, a general store, a saloon, a restaurant, a bathhouse, a hotel, all slatternly and crudely constructed of fresh wood, wearing coats of bright paint. The shoppers and watchers and townies, the pioneers, the travelers, the dance hall gals, the town sheriff, all trod back and forth along the dusty street, while above in bright sun the mythic clouds rose and tumbled, and much happiness was felt by all present, for all belonged, just as all adored. All, that is, except Texas Red.

Because Cold Water, for its acquisition of capital, its possible destiny as a railhead, its array of vices and pleasures, had also attracted scum, crude and violent men, for whom civilization meant only one thing: banquet.

Texas Red was one of them.

Wild gun boy, fine dancer, quick to shoot, quickest from the leather, holder of grudges, kisser of gals, he was the whirlwind. His reputation was made in blood and lead. He shed the former, he dealt in the latter. He was the devil to the good citizens of Cold Water, who had formed a posse to take him down. He faced fifteen men.

The first five were to be engaged by rifle, through the window of the hotel. His .44-40 1892, loaded, would be lying at a table to the right of the window. He’d seize it, throw the lever closed, and fire. Then, having put them down, he would set down the rifle and move fast to the window of the saloon, where seven more waited. Seven meant of course he’d have to use both his handguns, the down-loaded .44-40s from Colt, one at his hip, one on his other hip in the reversed and tilted holster. Done with that, he’d move to the next window in the hotel, to see where four more fellows awaited just down the street, and by that time, his smokepoles empty, he’d go to shotgun and slide two 12-gauge red boys into the loading gate of his supremely polished and finished Model 97 Winchester—by way of the Harbin Industrial Fabrication Plant No. 6, Hwang Province, China—and quickly pump and shoot and pump and shoot. Then a reload from the leather bandolier he wore across his red placket front, and two more blasts of justice, and he’d be finished with the first stage of this year’s Cold Water Cowboy Action Shoot. After that, until late tomorrow afternoon, eleven more stages would determine if Texas Red was indeed the best gun in the Senior Cowboy Black Powder Duelist category, and if all his work was worth it. He just had to be finished—to win!—in time to be airborne by six for his eight o’clock in Seattle.

Now, finally, it had begun.

He reached the loading area, and when the shooter ahead had finished and cleared, and the targets had reset, he was approached by the lead range officer.

“Load ’em up, Red.”

“Yes sir,” said Red. He walked to the lever gun, slipped ten .44-40s into the chute on the ’92 receiver, leaving the lever down to show empty chamber, and laid the rifle where designated. He returned, drew each Colt, threaded five robin’s-egg-heavy cartridges—“cah-ti-ges” the Duke had called them as Ethan Edwards in The Searchers—into each chamber as accessed by the popped-open loading gate of Sam’s marvelous, intricate machine, an orchestration of lines and symmetries and streamlines and densities like no other. One in, he spun the cylinder past the next, then sliding in four more, then cocking under control to rotate the cylinder one last time, then closing the gate and restoring the masterpiece to its leather. That ritual was to assure that no live cartridge nested under the firing pin’s pressure, a design weakness in the old gun so grave nobody noticed it for over 110 years. Then, finally, he took his shotgun from his guncart, its pump racked backward to expose empty chamber and empty magazine as well as all the spring-driven, leverage-turned ingenuity of its interior, and moved to set it on the table next to the far window.

He readied himself at the starting line, shivering a little, pianoing his fingers to get them loose and ready, tensing and relaxing his upper-body muscles. He put his earplugs in, then his hands came to his waist and he put on his grimace-tight gunman’s face.

“Shooter ready?” came the question, muffled by the ear protection.

He nodded.

He heard the three-beat timer ticking down, ding, ding, and dong, and on dong—more precisely on the d- so that he was halfway to the first station by the -ong—he raced forward, seized the ’92 in a liquid, practiced choreography, slid it to shoulder, keeping muzzle level and downrange even as he was closing the lever, and fired the first shot as the sight came into focus over the blurred image of the bad guy, in this case a black metal plate, and the trigger came back and the gun shuddered gently as it sent its hunk of lead on its way at a little over six hundred feet per second.

The trick here was not to wait for the clang of the hit and the sight of the plate toppling on its hinge but to be already into the leverwork and already moving the gun by that time, and he fired again and again and again and againagainagain, only aware at the unfocused edge of the drama of the ejected shell casings flipping through the air but most attuned to the great spurt of white, a billow at each report that rivaled the clouds above. And when the last plate fell, he left the action open, set the rifle down, and moved his ass fast to the next window.

This was the killer. The subtlety of cowboy action was that it wasn’t an athletic contest of speed of foot and dexterity, but of course it was, and that it wasn’t a fast-draw contest, but of course it was. You had to calibrate effort versus grace, for to seem to hurry could be called “against the spirit,” a ten-second time penalty; at the same time if you loafed, you lost.

Red had it today; the gods had been kind, and in his last practice, he had suddenly felt the gun rock solid all the way through the string. He’d hit plate after plate yesterday, watched them prang and fall, and felt oddly accomplished. All that practice. He’d done it. He’d mastered the goddamned thing. He was a gunfighter.

He came to the window, turned, drew, and in the same fluidity the gun was in his hand, thumbing back as it rode up, and he saw the sights against the black blur, and axiomatically the gun discharged, and again he thumbed a new cartridge home, rotating up from the next-in-line position in the cylinder, perfectly sustained and perfectly timed by Sam’s engineering genius all those frosty years ago, and each time the gun popped, and he was moving it and thumbing back the hammer and restoring the grip just as Clell had taught him before the just-hit plate fell. Five and he was done with gun number one, holstered smooth as butter. He rotated to the left for the next snatch and brought that beauty in line, cocking as he got it there. Five soft pops, five spurts of glorious white fume; they stood for America, for liberty, for the West, for patriotism, for old movies and TV, for growing old with grace and still winning every goddamn thing. He was done, slipped number two back into its leather den, and was halfway to shotgunland before the last plate fell.

This was pretty easy for Red because in another life, as a southern billionaire playboy, pheasant and dove hunts with $14,000 Perazzis had been a Sunday necessity in the fall, if the Falcons weren’t playing at home, and he had no problem with the four inserts, the four pumps, and the four shots, each of which delivered a handful of spattering birdshot to the larger, heavier plates, and down they went ker-plunk.

“Good shooting, Red,” said the range officer, reading off the time—29.2—to the scorekeeper, adding, “all targets down, no penalties.”

Red sat back, smelling the gunsmoke, watching the white gas drift and seethe until a light breeze took it and it dissipated.

Soon enough Clell would be there to tell him how well he’d done, urge him to stay cool and collected—no rush, no sweat, no nerves, no expectations, just there, in the zone—and a nice round of applause rose to congratulate his efforts, some of it from people who surely recognized him and were sucking up as if he’d give a clapper a mil just for kicks, but much of it genuine, from those who didn’t know.

But he knew it best of all: Texas Red has it.

49

Anto slowly revved the ATV, then slipped into gear and took it down the gentle slope of the valley toward the center. He had a black-comic thought of accidentally running over the heads of his own sniper team as he progressed, and had to fight a grin in case Swagger, from his own hide, was eyeballing him.

He switched back, left then right, eating up the distance, came in out of the high grass onto shorter, where ugly prairie things—they looked like turds but were some kind of cancerous vegetation—littered the ground, along with the odd low scrub of bush, the scraggily but unspectacular cacti, stones, smallish boulders, what have you. He was a man who’d spent many days in action and had taken more fire than even the many professional soldiers of his culture, with the scars to prove it, and he wore that time in hell well. In fact it was not even hell to him, as it is to most men. The truth is, high-level professionals like Anto and his mates from 22 SAS and most commandos in the forces and Seals and various foreign alphabet-soup high-contact teams don’t fear battle at all; they relish it. To them it’s an exhilaration like a drug high, and they truly savor the act of taking life, at close range or by rifle through optics; it’s like scoring baskets or goals in the sports-driven youths that most had.

So Anto was far from scared, far from choked with dread, far from concerned with his own death, which, through many wounds and much recovery time, had nevertheless only seemed like a final joke. He was pure alpha, the war dog in its most distilled form. Oh, this one would be so damned much fun!

He got to the creek where advised, eased down the throttle to an idle, came out of gear, and slipped into neutral. He let the motor run on general principle. Although unlikely, a mechanized getaway would be a lot more efficient than a barefoot one, running uphill nude for nine hundred yards among prickers and buffalo shit.

As instructed, he scissors-stepped off the vehicle, moving ten feet away. At that spot, he assumed the position, faced east, hands up, legs spread. Now where was that bad boy Swagger? Would he come over the hill on an ATV and take his time, letting Anto bake even redder in the sun as he trekked down for the exchange? Raymond knew: don’t shoot until he’s still, and he and I have had a chat. That was the sign. Then take him, because of course Anto wanted to watch him die from as close as possible, possibly even having a word or two with the mortally stricken man.

Jimmy had gone to binoculars, so much easier to manipulate than the tripod-mounted spotter’s scope, if somewhat less steady. He fixed on Anto as he came down the hill, watched him course this way and that, detected no nervousness. And what happened if Swagger simply killed Anto, shot him dead on the spot? Then he, Jimmy, would find the sniper’s hide and give the site to Raymond and talk Raymond into the shot, and Raymond, steady as an ingot, would put the man down.

Then they’d bring their fallen Michael Collins back and give him a burial Irish style that he’d deserve. There’d be drinking and keening and piping, with the banshees howlin’ of a great man’s death on the glens and in the bogs. But it would be all right: that was Anto, giving himself up for the team and the mission, without even a thought to the sadness of it all.

“Would you see anything?” asked Ray, stuck in the smaller field of vision of the iSniper911 atop the AI.

“I do not,” said Jimmy, “only fat Anto’s fat arse scrunched up on the bike’s seat. Not a pretty vision, I’m telling yis.”

“No man should have to look on Anto’s great ass, sure,” said Raymond, and Jimmy couldn’t tell if it was Raymond’s first joke or if he meant that with his customary earnestness.

Anto arrived at his designated location, stilled his machine, and slid off. He moved to the side in odd steps, keeping his hands high. From the site of the boys, he was on a slight oblique.

Raymond, as practiced on the iSniper as any of them, shot the distance and reported it to be 297 yards in 0-5 wind, a downward angle of 13 degrees over the yardage, not enough to require any correction. The device then told him three down, .5 to left, and so he went back to the scope, traced three lines down the axis of the center of the reticle from the larger reticle, adjusted the rifle ever so slightly until the fat, slightly angled, red-dappled shape that was Anto’s naked back rested exactly in the space between the third hashmark of the vertical axis of the crosshair and the first small + to its left, and there he rested. He could kill Anto easy enough, but that wasn’t the point then, was it?

Jimmy ran the binoculars over the known world fast enough to make time, slow enough to see what he was looking at. He was just on the edge of blur. It should be happening soon enough now.

Suddenly he saw Anto jump, not as if hit, but startled. All of Anto’s muscles became tense, even his buttocks, clenching in the drama, and he turned, stopped as if commanded, and began to speak.

“What the fuck,” said Jimmy, shifting his binocs after concluding from the evidence that somehow the sniper was close to but behind Anto. “Raymond, Raymond, look at where the bastard is!”

Ginger didn’t jump when Anto appeared at the edge of his vision; nor did he twitch, tighten, or kick. He was professional. He just let the scene unfold. He saw Anto arrive at the creek, not thirty yards away.

So it begins, it does, he thought.

He double-checked his weapon under the camo tarpaulin, ran his thumb up to the safety to see it was indeed swung all the way around to full-auto, then broke contact with the grip to crawl his fingers up the receiver to test the cocking handle, pulling it back toward the butt to find it loose, which signified the weapon was cocked fully with a round in the chamber. He slid his hand up higher on the receiver to the face of the Eotech holographic sight, a clever tactical enhancement that looked like a small TV set mounted in a smooth plastic streamline bolted tight on the receiver’s Picatinny rail. Activated—Ginger did that, pushing a button first for power-up, then pushing it a dozen more times to elevate the brightness—it beamed a holographic circle on its screen of glass, a powerful icon glowing red against the clear, so perfect for close-quarter battle because you didn’t even have to look for it, it was just there to your eye, and you put it on target and squeezed and sent a fleet of 5.56s off to do the job right and proper. Now he was ready and sure that what might happen to need his assistance in settling would be occurring soon enough, and he said a brief prayer to Jesus to grant him the favor of putting a mag into the Yank, to pay him back for the fooking cracked skull he took and the embarrassment of being the fella to let the team down.

That done, he screwed up his focus, his concentration, his war persona, and watched as poor naked Anto just stood there, his bollocks all loose, his shoulders red, waiting for whatever.

Surely soon the American would appear, coming on down the far hill, approaching for the exchange, and it would all—

What the—?

Jaysus, will you look at that?

Who’d have guessed? Not a man among them.

The earth moved.

It did, it did. Twenty yards behind naked Anto, a smallish knot of brush and grass quivered and gave and transmogrified itself as beneath it rose, like a prehistoric beast coming out of a millennium or more’s sleep, a shape that soon enough took on the damned image of a man in ghillie, black pistol in hand, face a green-black-brown silent killer’s mask. He rose to both legs and extended the pistol toward Anto, as if to shoot.

Ginger had a moment of panic: should he rise himself now and fire the killing burst? But before he could commit, it appeared that the enemy sniper was not about to fire. He too, it appeared, wanted a little chat.

Anto seemed to wait forever and almost put his arms down out of sheer fatigue, ready to throw them up again at any sign of the approach, but then he heard a voice from too close to be real but real indeed say, “All right, Potatohead, you stay frozen,” and felt himself jump in surprise.

What in God’s name?

He turned halfway and saw in his peripheral the man himself, or rather a man disguised as planet, all fronds and frills and floppy hat, as ghillied up to perfection as any sniper could be, a Sig pistol in his grip, the camo smock falling away. He wasn’t a mile away, he wasn’t a half, a quarter, a hundred yards, a hundred feet. He was right there, almost in spit’s distance.

“Move another inch, Irishman, you’re dead as shit.”

Anto froze. The fellow was there, unseen by Jimmy and Raymond and even close-in Ginger. He’d been there all along. He had to have gotten there ahead of them. He’d planted himself in the earth and outwaited the stillest, best men in the business!

Anto’s mind hurried then to another ramification; who’d been on the radio, who’d been guiding him in?

“Is it Ginger?” asked Raymond.

“No, no, get on the damned gun, man, put the bastard down. It’s him, it’s him, can’t you goddamn see how dif his camo is from ours? Do it, do it now.”

Raymond didn’t panic, professional that he was, but reacquainted the rifle butt with his shoulder, settled microscopically, tried to quell a heart rush, took a breath or so. Then he reshot the iSniper911 laser ranger to initiate the target acquisition sequence, committed to screen, and saw that it was 281 yards off, and the angle had risen to 16 degrees, still too little for a cosine correction, and the new shooting determination was still three down, but now without the .5 left adjustment, so he found stock-weld, acquired reticle, acquired new target—large man in grassy ghillie suit—tracked downward on the central vertical axis of the reticle to the same third hashmark but this time didn’t need to make the same .5 to left, let the rifle settle, let his breathing settle, and began to take slack out of the trigger.

“How much did you get, Anto?” asked Bob mildly.

“’Tis over two hundred thousand for the sniper’s pleasure,” said Anto with a merry, comic lilt to his voice. “Oh, sure yis be having some wicked pleasures on that swag. It’s yours, Sniper. Want me to bring her to ye, or will yis grab it yourself?” him thinking, now, prang the boyo, finish him with Mr. .308, blow lungs and heart out, Raymond, don’t let your old sarge here down.

“Won’t that be fun?” said Bob.

“It’s good craic you’ll be having with that—”

The shot sounded from above and away and far out, not an eardrum-snapping whack, but more a soft report as if muted by distance.

Anto flinched and turned, thinking to hell with the position, and was surprised to see Swagger standing, unhit. He saw then why the radio was decreed instead of the mobile: it distorted voice and made recognition impossible. He’d been talking to another fellow while Swagger lay in his ghillie still as death in this valley.

There was another damned sniper.

Goddamn him!

“My boy just tagged yours,” Swagger said.

A second shot followed, Anto flinching.

“And now he’s done the spotter.”

Raymond felt the slack giving, he was on the cusp of the shot, his finger’s steady press against trigger, the crossed lines of the reticle steady upon the ghillie-suited man who held the pistol and

Lightning lightning lightning.

A storm suddenly blowing in, the sky full of jagged illumination.

The green glow of the countryside.

Over a hundred kills.

The taste of Guinness.

And that was all.

Nine hundred and thirty-four yards away, Chuck McKenzie watched as his first shot splashed the shooter hard in a jet of crimson at the left quadrant of what, before destruction, had been skull, and the ruined fellow went limp in supertime, giving it all up as he became instant meat, the upper half of his body falling hard at gravity’s insistence, but then Chuck was so quick into his throw and correction he lost his first target, knowing he’d killed it, and came across to the second. Number two had dumped the binocs and was tugging the rifle from his dead pal’s hands, driven even now to finish the mission, even though his face wore splatter everywhere, as did his shirtsleeve and hand. Brave guy: it never occurred to him to chuck the rifle and go to hands up, which might have saved his life, as Chuck wouldn’t shoot a surrendering man. But number two was all warrior and actually had the rifle half in play and was setting up, albeit in panic time, for his shot, when Chuck snuffed him with another head shot, even as he heard a spray of gunshots and automatic weapon fire from down in the valley.

Anto’s speed surprised even Bob and the speed was more efficient for the decisiveness driving it, but even if Bob had the shot, he let it go, because even before Anto was yelling, “Kill him, Ginger,” Ginger was rising from the dead. Bob was surprised Ginger was so close, though he knew him to be about from the noise the fellow’d made just before dawn as he put himself into the earth.

Still, it was long for a pistol shot, and Bob went to a knee to take up the two-hand supported and put two fast ones into the rising man close to fifty yards away, and missed once, seeing a puff flick off the earth next to Ginger, who, though shuddering upon the strike of the second round, evidently a low lung shot, still got his M4 up. He fired at Bob but Bob was not there, having rolled like a crazy man to the right. Ginger’s nine-round burst tore up a smoky stitch of dust and grassy fragments and cactus shrapnel in the space where Bob had been.

Ginger, bleeding badly, tracked the gun right through the glowworm incandescence of the Eotech sight and brought the gun right to bear on what of Bob he could see or sense, even while rising to his feet. A normal man would have yielded to collapse by this time, but Ginger was all bristly, insane beast, a charging boar, a crazed wildebeest, a here-comes-death buffalo, and would not check out without vengeance, and he willed himself to fire again.

Bob had by this time gone further to prone for the calming influence of the ground in support of his arms, though he was so deep in the loam, he could only see Ginger’s upper third. A fleet of 5.56s rocketed overhead, inches from ending it forever, but he didn’t flinch as most will do but instead fired twice again, the front sight bold and sharp as death in the notch of the rear, and was sure the bullets had gone home. But Ginger didn’t show any ill health and fired another burst, which tore up the ground in ragged spurts as it vectored toward Bob, seeking him.

And then Ginger was down.

Clearly Chuck had finished what Bob couldn’t, putting a .308 home from his perch on the hill, not a head shot but the heartbreaker, and the big Irishman slid sideways, face slack as a misbegotten moon, and toppled, though as he fell his finger tightened on his trigger and he emptied the 5.56s into the turf just before him, setting off spasms of geysering dust. Then it was quiet.

Except for the sound of Anto’s departing ATV.

Bob came around, saw the nude man at full throttle, bent as low as he could get, more than two hundred yards out, and he fired from prone, aiming high, dumping what remained of his own mag, but the distance was too far for a handgun, Anto was too deft in zigzagging the little bike, and when he achieved slide lock-back, Bob knew he hadn’t hit him.

He jumped up madly, gesturing to Chuck, pointing with one wild arm while he screamed—probably the sound didn’t reach Chuck—“Kill him, kill him!”

Chuck took his time setting up the shot, but as far as he was from Bob, he was even further from Anto, who was almost to the crest and had the bold man’s luck with him, for he veered just as Chuck fired, and Bob saw the bullet punch up a gout of shredded vegetation just as Anto disappeared.

Fuck, he thought. That bastard made it out alive.

It’s not over. I didn’t get him.

He turned, shedding himself finally of the heavy ghillie, dropped the spent clip and thrust in a new one, released the slide to jab forward with a clack!, dropped the hammer, and replaced the Sig in its shoulder holster. Then he picked up his as-yet-unfired rifle and headed up the crest to meet up with Chuck, only to see that Chuck was roaring down to him on his own ATV.

They met in another two hundred yards.

“Great shooting, Sniper,” Bob said, clapping the other man on the arm. “Jesus, you got three of them and all I did was put bullets in the ground.”

“Sorry I couldn’t take that fourth guy. Do we go after him?”

“No, he’s picking up a rifle and some pants just now. Nothing he’d like more than to see us crossing a field. Take me to my own ATV.”

He jumped on behind Chuck and they headed back up the slope, followed a creek down the gap in the ridge, down into an arroyo, and finally to a little glade where Bob had left his vehicle.

Anto had been hit by one of Bob’s long pistol shots but not badly. It was a burning groove in his left arm above elbow, below biceps, and it oozed the red stuff and hurt like bloody hell. He looked at it without interest. He’d been hit enough times to know this was nothing.

Then he concentrated on the fact that he was alone. That fooking bastard had done them all, the great boys of Basra and SAS sniper element blue, with over three hundred kills among them, to say nothing of all the other jobs for king and country in places that still couldn’t be divulged.

Black Irish grief collapsed upon him, a nude man with serious sun poisoning in bright light in the middle of the savage, featureless high plains. He went to the bag and reached through the crap that filled it out until he found his amphetamines, and he gulped six of them. Get me concentration back, me energy, numb me out from the pain, that’s what I’ve got to do.

Then he climbed aboard the bike, oriented himself, and began a big curl around the eastern rim of the valley to a certain designated tree, where the boys had left him kit and rifle.

He knew exactly where Swagger was going next, and he’d play his own self’s little trick on the fellow and be the one getting there first this time.

Swagger reached into his cargo pocket.

“Here it is,” he said to Chuck. “I want you out of here fast, before Anto gets geared up. You go hard west for an hour; don’t stop for anything. Then you call your buddy with the chopper and bring him in to you. Have him fly you to the Indian Rapids airfield—there should be some kind of airline terminal there—go to the American Eagle desk, and tell whoever’s there you have something for Mr. Memphis. Either he will take the package, or he’ll get someone to take the package.”

“And then?”

“And then get a beer with your pilot. Wait for my call. If it doesn’t come, then get another beer and drink it for me, and remember me for a few years. Tell my wife I died snipered up all the way.”

“Come on, Gunny. Come with me. We’ll both give ’em the package, we’ll both get the beer, followed by a steak. Then we’ll start in on the hard stuff. How much bourbon can a town called Indian Rapids have, anyway? We’ll drink it all and wake up in three days. The feds can pick up that last Irishman. He’s not going anywhere for a while.”

“No, he is. And I know where. And I’m going too.”

“Then let me come along. This time I’ll be the bait and you can do the shooting.”

“No, Chuck, that film has to reach the FBI, and the sooner the better. Constable will hear about this shit somehow, and once that happens, he’ll bolt. With his dough, he’ll be long gone before the feds can pick him up. That’s why you’ve got to get the film to them. So I want Anto Grogan after me, not you. Long as I’m alive, he’ll come after me.”

“Christ, Gunny. You’re going to set yourself up for this motherfucker, aren’t you? You’re going to gull him into taking the shot and pray that he misses, and then you’ll shoot back. With that scope on top, he isn’t going to miss. You think you can get a killing shot off from seven hundred yards with 168 grains of lead in your chest, while you’re bleeding out? It doesn’t have to happen. You don’t have to be the last man to die in a long-ago lost war. You call me up and invite me on this little war party and now I have to leave before the end and I don’t get to cover the hero but have to just let him sit out there on his lonesome? That ain’t no bargain, Gunny.”

“For me it’s the best bargain. I lost my spotter, Chuck. I couldn’t bring him back from the war. So you have to get out of here now, and fast. Only two things count. Getting the film to the FBI and getting Chuck home in time for his daughter’s graduation. Go, Chuck. DEROS, Chuck. Now.”

“You goddamned Marine Corps bad-ass gunnery sergeant retired. Jesus, you are all old-fashioned man, that’s all I can say. I thought you guys had all died off, but dammit, you’re too salty to die.”

“Go on, get out of here, Lance Corporal.”

Chuck clapped Swagger on the shoulder and gunned up his ATV and headed west.

50

Texas Red celebrated his success with a very fine buffalo steak—low in fats, low in sodium, low in calories—and a 2001 Château Sociando-Mallet, served in his motor home by Chin, his chef. It was still midafternoon: he hadn’t breakfasted because he hated to shoot on a full stomach, and so his first order of business after finishing his four events—four more tomorrow and four on Sunday—was to eat. His second order of business was business: calls to stockbrokers, vice presidents, PR folks, and so forth, pleased to note he was recovering from the meltdown well enough. He noted with pleasure no incoming from either Bill Fedders in DC or by satellite from the Irishmen at his main ranch.

That done, he summoned the ever-plain Ms. Jantz and had her take dictation for an hour, then got his daily blow job, surprisingly intense for a non-Viagrafied event. The shooting had gotten juices all astir in a way that was unusual. Then he dismissed her, with the admonition, “Get me Clell.”

Clell appeared shortly thereafter, all rangy gun pro, with the big hands, the smoothness of encoded neural pathways, the data bank beyond measure.

“So,” he said, “no bullshit. Critique. Forget I’m paying you three times what you charge. Give me the truth, as if I’m a little punk trying to hang out with the great Clell Rush.”

“Yes sir.”

“Yes, Tom.”

“Yes, Tom. First thing is, congrats. You shot well today. Dynamite. I think you’ve beaten the grip slippage that seems to screw you up sometimes. You were hard and tight and the gun stayed set. Even on the exchange, when you holstered the righthand piece and cross-drew from the left holster, even that was tight. It was a good chance to screw up, and happily, you evaded it.”

“I’m liking what I’m hearing. Sure you’re not just trying to pick up a bonus?”

“It ain’t just suck-up, Tom. Look at the standings. You’re number four. You’ve never been that high in the standings at this point before. Last year, as I recall, you’s about number fifteen. There’s no way of coming back from fifteen. You’re still in the hunt.”

“How about rifle and shotgun?”

“You plan to save handgun mistakes on rifle and shotgun, and that’s fine, but I thought you ran too hard on the rifle. That’s a sophisticated motion, throwing the lever but not so hard you pull the muzzle out of control, keeping that left hand in good command, closing up and touching off, then throwing even while you’re moving to the next target. You done well, I’m not saying that, but I thought you’s a little overexcited. It was the first event, you had adrenaline, so you brought it off. Don’t know how tomorrow will be, or the next day, if you don’t drop back into second gear, particularly on the last few rounds.”

“Good advice,” said Tom.

“As for the shotgun, maybe the same thing, but since there’s only four reloads, it’s not likely you’ll turn to fumblethumbs that quickly. Though by the time you get to shotgun, your hands are tired from all the shooting you’ve just completed. But your fingers are so happy when they’re on the shotguns, even a trumpet gun like the ninety-seven, I don’t think that’s going to be your problem.”

“Hmm, I’ve got a problem? I thought you were telling me how damn good I was.”

“Well, it’s a problem most men have. Called pride. It goeth before a tumble, or so the book says.”

“I’m listening.”

“I feel you pushing too hard. It almost means too much to you. I’m worried that late, tired, your hands all beat to hell, you’ll face a challenge where you need your best. And you won’t be able to find it, Texas Red. Because you are a man of accomplishment, you cannot conceive of failure. Yet even the Kid hisself failed; he went out unarmed, and along come Pat Garrett and put a jujube of lead into his gut. The Kid was proud; in his pride he got away from his greatness, and his greatness was doing all them little things right, like always sitting with his back to the wall and forswearing that fourth drink, because it was the fourth one that slowed him, and always carrying a gun. That night in Fort Sumner, he’s feeling so Kid, so invulnerable, he gets cocky, he gets sloppy, and he can’t conceive of a man coming into his own space and facing him. He’s unarmed, except for a butcher knife. He steps into his bedroom, quien está? he asks, who’s there, he knows someone’s there, he’s holding that knife, and it’s still in him to make it through the night, all he has to do is be the Kid and lunge, and he lives till two and twenty. But his mind freezes, and old Pat, slower, grumpier, used up, old Pat gets big iron whipped out fast and puts a forty-four into him. And down goes the Kid.”

“You see that in me?”

“You ain’t no Kid, Mr. Constable, not by a long shot. But I’m worried there’ll come a time when you think you is. And as the Kid found out, thinking you’re the Kid can get a man killed.”

51

There wasn’t much point in stealth, not at this point. No reason to wear the ghillie. He even poured some water from his bottle and washed the paint off, so that he’d get through this last on his own face, not the jungle’s.

He steered a wide circle on his ATV and came into Lone Tree Valley from the west, wondering if Anto was already there. Anto, driven by anger and fear and vengeance, had to take a more direct route, which was in length about four miles; this more circuitous journey was almost seven. Coming over the crest, he saw the lone tree itself, surprisingly dense for fall, its leaves vibrating in the low wind and, as they did, seeming to shimmer as first the dull and then the bright side showed itself to the sun.

He rumbled down the slope, acknowledging the featurelessness of the place. It was all epic space in a shallow bowl of undulating grass, capped by the frosty marble of the western clouds against the bluest blue of all. No animal life was visible, and the push of wind filled the air with the sound of air and the stalks of grass leaning against each other.

He drove to the tree but left the ATV well short of it. He got off, feeling the Sig bang under his left arm, holding the 7-mil Ultra Mag in his right. It was Chuck’s, a hunting rifle for knocking down big animals at long ranges with a cartridge case the size of a cigar, something new cooked up more by the marketing department than the true ballisticians. The industry needed new products. This one was a lulu: kicked like a mule, but it shot fast and flat as anything on the planet, and when it arrived, it had excess power. Chuck said he’d hit an antelope at over five hundred yards, and the poor thing had cartwheeled, it was slapped with such energy.

He squatted, going into a sniper’s stillness, flat out in the open, though in shade, maybe a little to the east of the tree. He presented his back to Anto. He pulled his khaki hat down over his sunglassed eyes.

What would happen next would all come down to character: Anto’s. A true sniper would creep close, take and make the shot. That was duty, that was mission, that was job, even to a merc. He thought of that merc poem: “followed their mercenary calling, took their wages, and are dead.” Which war? Oh, yeah, the first big one. The boys who stopped the Germans for pay. And for professionalism: no vanity, no wasted motion, no ceremony, no self-celebration, no self-pity.

But Anto? Anto had that manic streak in him, that desperate need for approval and attention. His personality might be too big for standard military and then even for a genius outfit like 22 SAS. Maybe it was a death wish. Take the fall from grace in Basra: he’d had to have seen it coming, read the signs, and had plenty of time to back down or readjust—that’s the way the military worked, after all—but he insisted on his way with the aggressive interrogations and the ever-climbing kill count. So the Brits ultimately destroyed him, and you could blame them for their unwillingness to sustain the man who was, ever so distastefully, winning the war, but that was the way of the modern world, and of general staffs and politicians with the guts of puppies. Still, you had to blame Anto too, since a more modest professional, committed to his cause, would have found a way to keep operating, only under a lower profile. Not Anto. He wanted somehow to burn at the stake and give interviews from the flames.

Bob sat and sat and then, finally, Anto spoke through the radio.

“You bastard, you killed me mates!” said the Irishman, and the connect was loud and clear.

Anto cursed and ranted and vented a bit. When he stopped to catch his breath, Bob said, “You left out the part about them set up to kill me. We only shot men about to shoot us. You decided to put them in place; it’s on you, Colour Sergeant, not me.”

“You’re a bastard,” Anto said.

“But Anto still wants the film. Anto has to get the film.”

Anto said nothing for a while.

Finally he asked, “You didn’t send it out with that other fellow?”

“Nope,” said Bob. “Because Bob still wants the money. Bob has to get the money.”

“You’re as mercenary as himself,” said Anto. “When all the flags been put away, and all the speeches done, and all the warriors locked up in mental homes, the only thing left is the money, no?”

“The only thing left is the money.”

“Ha,” said Anto, enjoying his little jest.

“Where are you?” asked Swagger.

“I’m still at the goddamned site of the atrocity. I had to bury me boys proper. You think I’d leave ’em for the jackals?”

Bob knew he had left them for the jackals.

“Where are you? I’ll bring you the money, now I’m confident shooter number two ain’t lurking.”

“Then you know he’s long gone.”

“He broke a crest and I got glass on him. He didn’t have the film, did he?”

“No. He’s an old friend. He did his job. I didn’t want you picking him off, I wanted him out of here. And I wanted it as it should be, you and me.”

“Right and proper,” said Anto.

“You set a course on your GPS roughly radial one-thirty-four east, for four miles. That will put you on the rim of another valley, called Lone Tree. When you look over the rim, you’ll see the tree. There’s only one. I’ll be under it, rifle ready. You radio me, notify me of your position. You’re still naked, by the way?”

“I am not,” said Anto. “Have some bloody decency.”

“When you get to the rim, you’re naked. You’re naked and unarmed all the way in and I’m watching you all the way in. You get here, you pull up fifty yards out, and this time you’re not ten feet from your bike, you’re a hundred feet.”

“You’re so smart; that was a big mistake, Sniper. I got to it in a second, and off in another.”

“Easier with the late Ginger there to cover for you. But yeah, sure, I made a stupid mistake. I’m old, do it all the time. This time, you go flat spread-eagled in the grass. I’ll take the money.”

“And leave the film.”

“No.”

“Bastard.”

“I’ll take the film and I’ll go out to the east. You’ll see a tree on the horizon at roughly one-twenty-two from the lone tree. I’ll leave the film there. By the time you get there, I’m long gone.”

“And suppose there’s no film?”

“You think I want you dogging me? I’m as sick of this shit as you. I want my dough and I want a vacation. I’ll disappear and be in contact in two or three months while I set up the big exchange. Take it or leave it.”

Anto paused.

Then he said, “Okay, I’ll be taking it.”

“Buzz me then when you’re on the rim, though I’ll probably see you first.”

The radio went silent.

Now it was waiting time. How long? Maybe an hour. No, it couldn’t be an hour. Swagger knew Anto was close. Now was the question of character: shoot or chatter? Smart or stupid? Professional or self-indulgent?

Can I make the shot from here? Anto wondered.

He was at the rim, in a good prone, almost directly behind the position Swagger had taken. He could see the man crouched down, working his binocs in the wrong direction but not too intensely. The poor sod thought he had at least an hour before the play resumed. He had no idea he was sitting on the bloody bull’s-eye.

Anto was in a good shooting position. He was relaxed, the Accuracy International .308, on its bipod, solid into the earth. As a kind of prelim, he drew it to him, took up almost exactly the position from which he’d fire, though keeping his finger indexed along its green plastic stock, put the complex iSniper reticle on Bob’s blue-shirted back, and fired—fired the range-finding function, that is.

He read the answer on the screen: 927.

He’d made 927-yard shots before, and many longer. But he’d missed a few too. He waited for the target acquisition solution to run through the chip-driven computer and got his instructions: nine down, three to the right.

He went back to scope, counting out the nine hashmarks notched on the central vertical axis, then the three to the right. There it was. A tiny reticle, about the size of the + on a word-processing program, lay athwart the prick of blue just barely recognizable as a man at this range, despite the 15X magnification.

He felt his muscles begin to tighten, his tremors to cease, his breathing to shallow out; he felt the soft curve of the trigger, and then it began to slide almost of its own desire.

B-R-A-S-S, the from-time-immemorial shooter’s mantra.

Breathe.

Relax.

Aim.

Slack.

Squeeze.

He didn’t fire.

Nine-twenty-seven was way too far out there. A puff of wind, even a twitch by Swagger after the bullet was launched—its time in flight at this range would be over a second—would compute to a miss, and then he’d be in a duel at over nine hundred yards with a man who was still maybe the best, or second- or third-best in the world. No percentage in that.

He’d shoot from five hundred.

Five hundred would minimize wind, minimize trajectory, minimize time in flight. From five hundred he could make the shot on iron sights; with the iSniper911 he could make it a hundred times out of a hundred, in one second if need be.

Next question: How long will it take to low-crawl over the 427 yards to his shooting position? The answer was close to an hour, and none of it much fun, unless you liked crawling, and almost no one did. He sure didn’t. Also, everything in him said, Get it done. Finish it. You have the advantage, press it.

He looked at Bob all that way off, steadily gazing at the wrong horizon.

I could walk up to him and shoot him behind the ear with me Browning.

Well, probably I could not. But I could walk five hundred yards and quite possibly he’d never see me, looking as he is to the east, convinced as he is that I’m still miles away, bouncing naked across the plains.

He rose. He felt liberated. He did a rifle check for about the thousandth time, opening the bolt to see the glint of the Black Hills 168-grain Sierra match HPBT cartridge nested snugly just where it should be, repressed the bolt to lock up, then touched the safety, making triple certain it was off so he could fire the fast one if needed. He looped his forearm through the cinch of the sling, tightened it so that it tugged against his arm and body and left just enough play so that, when he dropped to prone or sitting, it would be held firm against him and, by virtue of the position, against the solidity of earth itself. With his right hand, he performed a battery check on the iSniper911, reassuring himself he was all fired up with power to spare.

That done, he adjusted his boonie cap, his tear-shaped Wiley X shooting glasses, and began the big walk toward Bob Lee Swagger.

Swagger waited, still as a rock. Some living thing finally came, a white moth, flitting in this and that direction. Eventually it moved off.

He felt ticks of sweat running down his face from under his hat. His ears, encased in the radio pads, itched. His breathing came shallowly. He yearned to turn, to see if the Irishman was there, but the longer he waited, the closer Anto got, and the closer he got, the easier the shot that took him down would be. If he was stuck shooting it out at nine hundred yards, he’d lose. Anto’s technology trumped his more powerful rifle. He wouldn’t have time to lase the range, figure the clicks, crank the scope, assume the position. Anto would kill him. He’d have to guess at the range, and that wasn’t a talent he had, as some did. So if he guessed wrong, read the wind wrong, so easy to do at the extended ranges, Anto would kill him.

Tick tock, tick tock, tick tock, the big clock in his head spun its second hand, draining time from the world, while somewhere people laughed and drank and flirted and fucked and dug ditches or wrote poetry or flew planes. He was a sniper. He sat still, waiting to take or receive the shot. It was what he did. He’d snipered-up young and really lived his whole life that way, taking on the responsibility of doing the state’s dirtiest work and coming back tainted with the smell of murder about him. That was it, that was the way it went. You chose it, asshole. It—what was the goddamned word?—expressed you. Count yourself lucky, blankethead. You got to do what you was born to do. How many can—

“Boyo,” Anto said over the radio.

“I don’t see you.”

“Maybe you’re looking in the wrong direction, Sniper.”

He stood up, began to scan the far horizon.

“See me yet? Maybe look behind you.”

He did. Anto stood, fully dressed at some indeterminate spot in the slope of the featureless plain. He held his rifle cocked against his hip, supported in one hand, the radio earphones and microphone obscuring his face, his shades tight to eyes, his boonie cap low on his brow. He looked like war or death.

“Surprised, mate? Thought you’d see a naked man on a bike putt-putting his way to you and hoping that you showed mercy and knowing you wouldn’t, Sniper?”

Bob was silent.

“Cat’s got his tongue, does it now? We’re in a new game, mate. Here it is. I’m walking at you. You can sit there or not. I was you, I’d walk to me; lessens the range. When you think you got the shot, my advice is, take it. But on that move I take mine. Seeing as how my tech is better than yours, Sniper, I’ve a funny feeling I’m going to be faster and better. This is the beachball game we once played, only we’re the beachballs.”

“You’re a sick motherfucker,” said Bob.

Anto laughed.

“You could surrender. You could toss rifle one way, bolt the second, and handgun still another. Then I’ll have you strip naked and assume the position. Who knows, once I get in there and get the film, I may let you live. I’ll shoot both kneecaps to pulp so I’ll know you’ll never track me, and maybe I’ll blind you so you won’t be scoping me, but you’ll have some kind of life. How’s that for an offer, Sniper?”

Bob threw his radio headphones and mike away.

Anto held all the cards and knew it. His ego thrilled at the sheer theater of the moment he had so shrewdly engineered. He was the best. He’d outthought Swagger, he’d nailed the Nailer, and he’d leave the sniper sniped and the jackals would tussle over his bones. He walked toward his target. It was like High Noon at six hundred yards, snipers in a face-off, approaching each other on the emptiness of prairie until they knew they couldn’t miss, and then it just came down to who was faster on his gear, and Anto knew he was faster.

The wind pressed against his face, and the uppers had him radiating concentration and sense of self, even if, absentmindedly, he felt the sun on his exposed back of neck.

Swagger was oddly quiet. He didn’t move a step. He was just waiting. The fool. The closer he got, the less chance of missing he’d have. It was as if he’d given up already and was just waiting for the dispatch.

Anto guessed, 550? No, maybe closer, maybe 530. I am so close, I am, to my 500, oh, this is the pinnacle, the highest, the best.

And then an odd thing. He noted it first on his face, a difference, and then on his bare arms, another difference. What was it?

The wind. For some damned reason it had dropped to zero.

That was a present from God. That was also a message. God was saying, Anto, dear boy—for some reason God had always been English to Anto—here’s a gift. A still moment. It will only last a bit, but take it, old chap, as my endorsement of you and my thanks for all the mullahs and their camel buggers you’ve sent over.

Now, he thought.

With a fluidity that seemed odd given his bulk but was in fact greased by countless thousands of repetitions until burned into muscle memory, Anto dropped to one knee, the other leg bent stoutly in support underneath him, simultaneously bringing the rifle to his shoulder, feeling the adjusted sling put exactly the right pressure to tighten the whole construction into a perfect support structure, while his finger flew to the iSniper unit, hit the button, and the little genius inside worked the numbers, solved distance and humidity and atmospheric density and what little whiffs of wind might remain, and came back almost instantly with the information 534, 5 down, 1 right, and as his hand closed around the grip and he tugged it back solid as an anvil into the pocket of his shoulder, even as his trigger finger found and began to press the soft curve of that lever, his elbow solid on his planted leg two inches behind the knee in a bone-to-bone lockup, he tracked the hashmarks on the vertical axis properly down, then right and—

He saw that Swagger was still upright but that he was in the standing shooting position, elbow out, head perfectly steady, knees locked like steel bolts, but before he could even process that information, he saw the bright spurt of muzzle flash—

Swagger watched him come, holding steady, feeling the wind lick a little at his face, then go away. He had adjusted his stance slightly and was standing bladed to the approaching man, still such a long way out, though enlarging steadily as he came. He tried to shake his mind free of the past and not put any thought into Carl, with his brains blown out in his underwear, going underground in the rain as witnessed by seven people, or Denny Washington, that good man, his head blown open so that he’d never return to his wife and daughters. He wanted the past to go away but it wouldn’t and then it did, and a mercy came to him, as it came to all snipers great and small, who put themselves not at the point of the spear but way out there beyond it, lonesome and duty-driven but also—what was that word again, goddamnit—expressing themselves, and he felt a wave of peace and from that a confidence rocketing skyward as the palsy fell from his limbs and the pressure from his heart and he wound down in his mind until he was nothing but rifle.

He saw Anto pause, even if Anto himself didn’t feel the pause, and he knew that this was the moment, and he drew the rifle up to him and tight, but not cinched because a stander doesn’t cinch, since he’s linked to nothing solid but instead holds the beauty thing in a light command, as if it’s alive in his hands. The reticle was there before him exactly as his heart seemed to stop pumping and the universe itself froze between instants, and the crosshairs exactly trapped the man far off, who was now himself moving into a kneeling position, and without his telling it to, his trigger finger decided, the rifle somehow was fired by it, and Bob held the head still—it takes years to learn this—in follow-through and held the trigger squished flat back, and waited as the scope came down from its hop, neither hearing report nor feeling recoil.

—somewhere in his mind howisthispossible? seemed to emerge at light speed as the question of the day, and the next thing Anto’d been hit by a shovel and sent pinwheeling through the air.

He landed in a stunned jumble, blinking, thinking to get back to the rifle, but he didn’t see the rifle. He felt no pain at all but his body was somehow not right, and he looked and saw that his left arm had been split away from his body at the root. It hung grotesquely and rivers of blood rushed in black, ceaseless torrent from the astonishing tear that progressed from clavicle down deep into chest. He rolled, instinctively, to his still-whole side, with the inborn mandate in his brain to crawl to safety but, with only one arm to pull him along, made no progress at all, and he tucked his boots up close to his ruptured torso, rolling sideways to the final fetal position.

How the fuck did he make that shot? he wondered as he died.

Swagger got out his cell and punched a key in his menu.

In a bit, Chuck McKenzie answered.

“Gunny? You’re okay?”

“I seem to be. Don’t see no blood. Let me give you my coordinates.”

He looked at his GPS and read them off.

“We’re leaving right now.”

“Did you give that package—”

“Yep. It’s gone now. The jet took off an hour ago. How are you?”

“Tired. I’m too old for this shit.”

“That last Irishman?”

“What’s the Irish word for toast?”

“I think it’s toast,” said Chuck.

When that was done, Bob put in a call to Nick.

“The package is on the way.”

“I know. And we are all set up here. I’ve got a film restoration team to supervise the process, but they’re sure we can get good clear images off it without damage. I’ve got search warrant teams laid on in three states to hit Constable’s headquarters after we get warrants and subpoenas, and I’ve got a team in Chicago to take possession of the hard drive of Jack Strong’s office computer and the safe in Strong’s office. And I’ve got the Cook County state’s attorney people here; they can issue warrants and we can serve them. I’ve got a guy from the Nyackett, Massachusetts, prosecutor’s office to issue his warrant. If this is everything you say it is, we’ll be all legaled up sometime tomorrow and pick him up at a speech he’s going to give tomorrow night in Seattle.”

“Cool,” said Bob.

“You don’t sound excited.”

“I’m just tired as hell,” said Bob. “Are you sending people here to the ranch?”

“Yes.”

“Make sure to hit the security team headquarters. That’s where his sniper team was based. They all had laptops and were very professional. I’m sure there’s a lot of stuff there, and if you track back to wherever they lived privately, there’s even more.”

“Got it.”

“And you should send some people out into the wilderness area. I’ll give you the coordinates tomorrow. There’s some bodies to be bagged and pickled. Long story.”

“Jesus Christ. No wonder you’re tired. Get some sleep. Then get in here by—this is Saturday—by, say Tuesday?”

“Sure. Out.”

Bob rested a while but then gathered up his rifle and dragged his weariness to the ATV. He climbed on and gunned it to life and covered the yardage to Anto.

There lay his foe. The 150-grain Scirocco would be banned in land warfare because of course the point that kept it so accurate was only black polycarbonate and meant for streamline and accuracy, but it hid a hollow point and a lethally blossoming design. When it struck flesh, the polycarbonate tip was driven back into the bullet body itself, and that dynamic intrusion, plus the self-destructing design of the bullet, caused the missile, traveling through flesh at about 2,500 feet per second, to open like a flower, its petals yawing wide. They yawed, they sawed. They went through meat like a butcher’s keenest blade, opening a temporary cavity on the power of velocity that was the size of a football. Even when, by the elasticity of the flesh, that cavity closed up some, it closed up on organs that had been gelatinized, literally turned to viscosity. At the same time, the bullet’s impact shattered bone and sundered skin along predictable fault lines, which is how the splitting effect came to be.

Anto lay curled up on his right side, his left body half so damaged it made no anatomical sense. It didn’t even look real.

You stupid Irish bastard, Bob thought, remembering the long evenings at the Mustang Bar in Wyoming and what a happy time that had been. So much talent, so much guts, so much charm, and you end up in the high grass with your body blown in two, and for nothing but some rich asshole’s benefit, and he’s going down too.

By this time, the helicopter Chuck had hired was closing in. He raised a hand, not that it was necessary, as he stood out on the slope in a vastness of nothing. The chopper, a familiar old Huey, set down a hundred yards away, flattening the grass, lifting small stones and a haze of prairie dust, seeming inappropriate in a place otherwise so still. Its racket drowned all sound and made chatter impossible. Chuck ran over and gave Bob a nice thump on the shoulder, grabbed the gear, including the ghillie and his own Remington Sendero, while Bob carried Anto’s AI. They made it to the chopper, tumbled in, but not before Bob pulled his friend close and whispered, “Man, do I need to change my goddamned diapers.”

52

Washington DC, like any cosmopolitan city, has wife restaurants and mistress restaurants. If you’re with your spouse, your partner for life, your better half, your ball and chain, the mother of your children, and you have a hankering for steak, then you go to Morton’s, subdued and swanky at the corner of Connecticut and K, right in the center of lobbyland. It’s wonderful, it’s tasteful, it’s perfect, it’s dull. If, however, you’re with your “mentee,” your walking, talking, quivering fountain of youth, your single-evening Viagra-consumption record, your “niece,” your lambchop, and the next Mrs. Whoeveryouare, then it’s off to the Palm, on Nineteenth, for your slab of protein.

The Palm has swagger, bravado, a New York gangster dive ambience. The waiters all look like they made their bones in Newark in ’67, with those walnutty faces, thick pomades of rich Mediterranean hair, and little khaki waiter’s coats, with all kinds of odd bric-a-brac pinned across the belly. The place is dark and, even in the decreed absence of cigarettes and cigars, still feels smoky; the walls are festooned with somebody’s dim idea of celebrity caricature (unrecognizable); the potatoes look like they could be called the myocardial infarction facilitation kit—pancakes fried in diesel grease, possibly?—and the meat is stark, primordial, and bleeding.

Thus on his one mistress dinner night of the month (his wife of thirty-five years and mother of his four children was so understanding), Bill Fedders sat with current flame Jessica Delph, in his usual booth on the left side of the dim room, sipping a powerful vodka martini while admiring the young woman’s aquiline features, drawn-back blond hair, and hooded eyes. God, she was beautiful! Too bad he was going to dump her soon.

“Jessie, when I look at you, I wonder why you haven’t given your heart away to some twenty-five-year-old linebacker.”

“Possibly it’s because all the linebackers in this town are Redskins, that is, losers,” she said, with a smile that concealed the fact that she had in fact given her heart away—and some other goodies, as well—to a thirty-one-year-old stockbroker, because she didn’t want to have that conversation until Bill had gotten her, as promised early in the relationship, a job with a really fine lobbying shop.

“I love a gal who knows that she’s as beautiful as she is smart and as smart as she is beautiful,” he said. It was a treasured line, but he didn’t think he’d used it on this one, and besides it didn’t matter, because he knew about the stockbroker.

“So are we celebrating something, Bill?” she asked.

“Actually, we’re in mourning.”

“Ohhh, death. I hate it when that happens.”

“It’s not death, just massive frontal trauma, a coma, the patient in the oxygen tent out like a light, but I think it’ll come out of it.”

“It?”

“Not a person, a campaign. My oldest and dearest client had me running a campaign to hurry a certain federal policy toward implementation.”

“Details boring or classified?”

“Details unnecessary. Long story shortened: I had a young guy on the team, he seemed so promising, and I let him develop something on his own and it proved to be a hoax. A fraud. He was caught. Disaster.”

“You let him go?”

“He wasn’t really in my employ. I was helping him in his career. Anyhow, he’s been placed on probation, as I understand it, and now he’s covering New Jersey sewer commissions.”

“Bummer.”

“Indeed. I do think we’ll be okay. It’s just that Monday I have to make a phone call I’m not looking forward to. But it’ll work out, I’m sure, just not quite as quickly as we had hoped. But that’s why I’m a little down for now.”

“Poor guy,” she said, reaching across the table to touch his hand. “Jessie will try to make you feel better.”

“Excellent. Now let’s order and—”

But a shadow fell across the table.

Bill looked up and was surprised to see Nick Memphis of the FBI. He almost did a double take.

“Nick, I—”

“Bill, imagine running into you here. Gosh, what a surprise.”

Was that mockery in his voice?

“Uh, Jessica, may I present Nick Memphis, Special Agent, Federal Bureau of Investigation. Nick, this is Jessica Delph, a friend of mine.”

Nick bowed.

“Ms. Delph, a pleasure,” he said.

Then he turned to Bill and smilingly said, “Bill, you know, I think it would be a good idea if you gave Ms. Delph carfare and sent her home. I think it’s going to be a long evening.”

Bill swallowed, dammit, and looked for the joke in the agent’s face but saw no humor.

“Ms. Delph, sorry, but I think your evening with Bill here is over.”

“Bill, is anything the matter?”

“Uhhh,” Bill stumbled, at a loss for words for the first time in his life. Then he said, “I don’t know. Is anything the matter, Nick?”

“Well, Bill, that depends on how well you do over the next few minutes as we have our little chat. I’m trying desperately to find out why I shouldn’t touch this button on my pager and stand back as our crack apprehension team—this is five guys who were all tackles or guards at Nebraska—come through that door in full SWAT gear, guns drawn, and throw you to the ground, mace you, slam on the cuffs, and drag you out by your ears, your Allen Edmonds shoes dragging in the sawdust. Imagine how quickly that would get all over town. We don’t want that, do we?”

Bill had no desire to find out if Nick was bluffing.

“Jessie, here’s a twenty, honey. I’ll call tomorrow.”

Quickly, she scurried out, and Nick slipped in.

Bill took a sip of his martini, then another, and ate the olive.

“Am I allowed to order another?”

“Sure.”

“And you’re not drinking, I’m guessing.”

“You got that right.”

Bill gestured Vito Corleone over and sent for another vodka martini.

“Okay, Nick, I’m all yours.”

“I want to know why I shouldn’t arrest you on seven counts of aiding and abetting a felony crime, namely murder, the first-degree kind.”

Bill’s lower jaw not merely hit the table top but fell clean through the floor to the wine cellar beneath. When he got his breath back and his jaw reinserted in its hinges, he spoke with a weak, phlegm-choked voice.

“I—I—”

It was not much of an argument.

“We recovered a 1971 bank camera film of a robbery in Nyackett, Massachusetts. It clearly shows the young Thomas T. Constable shooting and killing two security guards from behind.”

“I—Uh—Are you joking?”

“Not at all. Then we recovered very solid information linking him to four Irish contractors—professional snipers—who murdered Joan Flanders, Jack Strong, Mitzi Reilly, Mitch Greene, and Carl Hitchcock, and I’m betting we can pin the murder of a Chicago cop named Dennis Washington on him too. Tomorrow when we serve warrants, we’ll have a lot more evidence. Now, Bill, here’s where we are. You are either part of the solution or part of the problem. My bet is that you’ll want to get ahead of this thing, because you know if you don’t, it’ll crush you. You’ll do very hard time in a very bad joint.”

“Nick, I knew nothing—”

“Save that for your own lawyer. I don’t have time. Mr. Fedders, either you come with me tonight and start making like a tweety-bird, or you are looking at a grim end to a very pleasant life. Somehow I don’t think Ms. Delph is going to make the long trip to Marion every Sunday to hear your sad stories of gang rape. And maybe Mrs. Fedders won’t either.”

Bill threw down his martini, signaled Vito for another one.

Then he turned to Nick and gave him a solemn, sincere look, rather fatherly, one of his most persuasive tools, and in his rich mahogany voice, he said, “Nick, you’re asking me to turn on a man who’s supported me my whole life. Because of Tom Constable’s belief in me, I wear fine shoes—Aldens, not Allen Edmonds—and suits, am married to a beautiful, understanding woman, have four extraordinary children, well educated and prospering in their careers, and as you can see, I do still get out on the town once in a while, old dog that I am. All because of Tom. I make over five million dollars a year, have a fine estate in Potomac, a beautiful house in Naples, and another on the Eastern Shore, right near Dick Cheney’s. I have horses, Perazzi shotguns; I have a two handicap and am noted as one of the best poker and bridge players in town. Everyone returns my calls. All that because of the generosity, the support, the belief, even the love of Tom Constable, whom you now accuse of horrific crimes. And you say to me, will you betray this man? Will you turn on this man? Will you do harm to this great American?”

“That’s the sixty-four-year-in-prison question.”

“Well, Nick, I can answer you very quickly, in words of one syllable: of course I will. In a second. In half a second. And have I got stuff to give you. Now let’s get out of here. I hope you’ve got stenographers and typists ready, because it’s going to be a very long night.”

53

Two hours later they sat in a diner across from Indian Rapids’s only motel, an Econo Lodge, showered and changed into clothes they’d bought in the town’s only store, a beat-up old joint featuring everything from guns to butter. The two men were eating nothing great but a lot of it.

“Didn’t know I was so hungry,” said Bob.

“I can tell you’re gassed. Best get some sleep now. I think you’ve got an advanced case of what I’d call combat stress syndrome.”

“Umph,” said Bob. “Maybe so. Felt better. Called my wife, told her I’d be home in a few days. She wasn’t real sure who I was, and when I finally got her to remember me, she told me my daughters are all grown up and married and have kids.”

“You need to chill for a long, calm year.”

“I wish. Maybe later. I have to go to DC one last time on Tuesday to get this thing straightened out. Then I want to stop in Chicago. I have a gun that belongs to a police officer that I’d like to give to his widow.”

“No rest for the weary,” said Chuck. Then he said, “Look, Bob, nobody’s going to say this, so you’re stuck with me and I’m not any kind of speech maker. Too bad for you. But you wouldn’t let ’em do that to Carl Hitchcock, and by extension to us, the snipers, the mankillers, the bastards way out there with a rifle that never make it into the history books even if they make it back to their own lines. So sniper to sniper, the only thing I can say is—hell, I don’t know—Gee, Roy Rogers, you made all the little buckeroos happy.”

Swagger smiled. That was good enough for him. Then he suddenly felt a wave of fatigue. Time to go.

“Brother Chuck, I’ve got to crash.”

“Got it.”

“You’ll wake me in the morning and we’ll figure out where to go and what to do next.”

“Good.”

“See you then.”

“Gunny, one last thing. I won’t sleep. How in hell did you make that shot? You were what, six hundred yards out, with a mil-dot, and he had that supercomputer-driven thing. But you beat him and put him down before he even got a shot off. How? For God’s sake, that was the greatest shot I ever heard of.”

“Oh, that,” said Bob, as if that were something like picking up a sock. “He thought he was hunting me, but I was hunting him. I knew if it came to Lone Tree, the shooting would be fast and far and it’d be a one-round war. I spent a night in Lone Tree before you came in and even before I went in. I walked it, I studied it on the maps, I tried to learn it good. I figured out where he’d start in if he came on a beeline from the first valley, ’cause he knew where the games would be played. That was the whole point. From there, I tried to figure where he’d shoot from. I discovered that there was a spot he’d move through, either on foot or low crawl, where there wasn’t no wind. That’s because you can’t hardly see it, but about two hundred yards to the right, there’s a knoll, about twenty foot tall, a natural windbreak. So if Anto’s coming down that slope, when he gets to that dead spot, that’s where he’ll shoot. Any sniper would. Why fight the wind at the muzzle if you don’t have to? I lased the range from the spot back to the tree. It was five hundred thirty-seven yards. When I got your rifle, I zeroed it to point of aim, dead bang center, no holdover, right at five thirty-seven. Then I just watched, and when he felt the wind stop, he halted, just for an instant, to process it; then he went to shoot. But I was maybe a half second ahead of him, and I put it on the money, though a little to the right. I was five inches off my center chest hold. Blew his arm out at the root. Wasn’t pretty, but then little in this game is.

“Now, you know what? I’m going to drink some goddamned whiskey tonight, with Chuck McKenzie, Chuck-Chuck-Chuckity-Chuck, the great marine sniper, my friend, the fella who shot three Irish gooney birds off my ass and saved my worthless drunk’s life three times in three seconds. Can you stay up with the old guy, Chuckity-Chuck, you goddamned sniping mankiller, you?”

“Gunny, I will drink to your mankilling ways and my own, and to all the snipers, and we will have ourselves a toot!”

54

Nick’s apprehension plan was brilliant, and he cleared a major obstacle that Sunday morning, after a long night with his team listening to the confessions and accusations of Bob Fedders, by obtaining a federal warrant against Thomas T. Constable for murder by way of hired hitmen who crossed state lines to execute their crimes. That made it a legal federal pinch, and even if that charge ultimately proved hard to make in court—much of the information, in the form of e-mails in various laptops, had yet to be collected—it would stand until Massachusetts authorities were able to file murder charges against Constable for the 1971 killings, of which photographic evidence now existed.

Given that arrest warrant, Nick was also able to get his search warrants, which were eight in number: three for Constable offices in New York, Atlanta, and Los Angeles; one for the ranch property in Wyoming (especially the security team headquarters); one for Constable himself, including any possessions with which he might be traveling; one for the hard drive on Jack Strong’s computer; one for all e-mails exchanged prior to the murders of Jack and Mitzi between Bill and Tom; and finally one for all properties belonging to the late Jack Strong and Mitzi Reilly.

All this had to be delicately coordinated, as all agreed that Constable had revealed himself a borderline sociopath given to violence and flight, and with his enormous resources he would have plenty of places to flee to, including homes in Costa Rica, the South of France, Switzerland, the moors of Scotland, and Bali. It was further thought that the governments of Cuba, Venezuela, China, Libya, and Indonesia would give him refuge if necessary. Therefore, all the searches were timed for 7 p.m., at which time Constable would be on the ground and ideally on the runway from his flight to Seattle to address the annual Amazon.com employees banquet. An FBI apprehension team was laid on, heavily armed, not because they expected trouble from Constable’s three Graywolf bodyguards, who were after all sworn to obey civil law as a condition for their firearms permits, but Constable himself; who knew, who could predict how he might act when confronted and cornered? He might prefer a gun battle as a way of suicide by cop. Nick wanted him in custody with no difficulty, quietly and carefully before he realized the totality of the charges against him. Nick sure didn’t want him shooting up the Amazon.com banquet; that would be a bad career move of epic proportions.

Like all brilliant plans, it began brilliantly, and like all brilliant plans, it failed brilliantly. Someone in the New York office got mixed up on time and thought the 7 p.m. jump-off was western time; to compound this error, it turned out that the New York AIC misunderstood the concept of time zones and thought that 7 p.m. in Seattle was 3 p.m. in New York.

“Oh, Christ,” said Nick when he got the news. Heads would have to roll on this one, but that was for later. Now a real problem: would Constable hear? If he heard, he could bolt. If he got to his jet, he could head to Costa Rica or wherever, and what would the Bureau do then?

“Hmm,” said Ron Fields, with his usual subtlety and political acumen, “I think I’d launch some F-18s, intercept over water, go to air-to-air, and do the shoot-down where it’ll do the least damage.”

“Thanks, Ron. Helpful as usual,” Nick said grumpily, even though everyone else had laughed. “Okay, we go. We go now, we make the arrest wherever he is, before he gets word. Where is he?”

That’s when it occurred to brilliant Nick that he’d made a brilliant mistake himself. He had purposely turned down the option of locating Constable and tailing him, because such a move, to a paranoid like Constable, might spook him into early flight. And the Seattle date was so solid that of all options, the Seattle airport takedown, well staffed, well planned by top tactical people, seemed absolutely the best.

“Where is he?” he asked again.

“We could do an NRO satellite interception of his cell phone notifications,” said the ever-bright Starling.

“We need his number.”

“Fedders would have it.”

But Fedders was in a safe house in Roanoke, Virginia, and Bureau policy was never to call, because you never knew who was listening in, and if Constable somehow got away, Fedders’s life would be at risk, to say the least. His security was not only mandated by regulation but paramount to Task Force Sniper’s enterprise.

“Oh, shit,” said Nick, sitting back.

“Nick, we can get FAA, we can find out the flight plan of his Gulfstream, and we can move an apprehension team there ASAP.”

“Good. Get going on it, Starling. I’ll call the director and get his authorization to assemble apprehension teams at all field offices so that when we find out, we can move them fast.”

Nick looked at his watch. It was now well after three. He felt like he was going to have a heart attack. All the shit they’d gone through and now it was beginning to topple—

“Wait a second,” he said.

He took out his cell and called a number.

The phone on the other end rang and rang and rang.

“Swagger.”

“Hey. How do you feel?”

“Better. Did some drinking last night, nothing much, I’m happy to say. Had a good time with a good pal. Is something up?”

“I’m afraid so. The good news is I’ve got a fed indictment on Constable, I’ve got search teams ready to—well, I told you all that.”

“Yep.”

“Okay, short version. We fucked up somewhere along the line and one of the search teams jumped early. It’s possible—it would depend on who, if anybody, was staffing that New York office—the upshot is that it’s possible someone could notify Constable that he was the subject of a federal operation. You know the guy has access to a jet. He could bolt overseas, we might never get him. He’d just end up more famous and admired by the world’s assholes than he is now.”

“Yeah,” said Bob.

“So we need to bust him now, not in four hours when I had it set. But we’ve lost contact. We don’t know where he is. I’ve got people tracking his plane; I may violate a regulation by calling someone I shouldn’t to get his cell phone number so we can satellite-locate on him. I’m thinking . . . I don’t know, just a shot: you were on his property, whatever, maybe you overheard something that would give us a tip.”

“Well,” said Bob, “I can give you a general location.”

“Great! Oh, great!” said Nick.

“Yeah,” said Bob. “He’s in Colorado—”

“Alert Denver!” Nick shouted to his people.

“And he’s, um, he’s somewhere between, I would say, now this is just a guess, a rough one, one-sixty, one-sixty-five feet from me right now.”

“What?”

“Yep. And here’s the funny thing. He’s dressed like a cowboy. And here’s another funny thing. So am I.”

55

Last stage, the Mendozas. The hard one. Oh, he was so close. He now sat in second, because Marshall Tilghman had screwed up his reload in the Buffalo Gulch thing, and Two-Gun Jack had had a couple of misfires—his own handloads!—on the last stage, Ambush on the Overland.

So only Tequila Dawn stood between Texas Red and the seniors championship. Tequila had been at this a long time, had won championships in other divisions, had even quit for a while and licensed his name for use on holsters, an Uberti Colt clone, boots, run a cowboy action shooting camp, but had finally come back to the game. He was good, but like Red, he was old, and he made the old-guy mistakes that Red had heretofore avoided, like dropping a cartridge in reloading or missing a target and having to come back to it, breaking his rhythm. That’s why Red, so much slower, was still close. But now they were at Tequila’s best event—straight pure pistolero artistry—and Red’s worst one: the Mendozas.

Five into five Mendozas, shift guns, five into five more; then move through the saloon doors, reloading one, then the other gun as you went, and in fifty feet or so, you were in a corral where ten more Mendozas waited. Sure were a lot of Mendoza boys; well, maybe some weren’t brothers but cousins or in-laws or something. And of course by the rules of political correctness, they were no longer identified as Mendozas, as that might be considered disrespectful to Latino Americans, more and more of whom were coming to the cowboy action world. They were just bad guys, but since the stage was a classic and had been around a long time, most people still called it by its original and now memory-holed name.

He was in the standby circle, alone, gathering. His hands felt good, and he’d only raised one cut—the front sight of his left gun had nicked and drawn a little blood—but no bandages were allowed in cowboy action, as there hadn’t been bandages in Deadwood in 1883. But the cut wasn’t deep and only hurt a bit when a drop of salty sweat fell into it. He wiggled his fingers, occasionally bent forward to stretch out his calves and thighs, or reached overhead with one hand to touch the other shoulder, stretching bi- and triceps. He tried not to pay any attention to Tequila. It was best if he didn’t know. He didn’t want to watch and psych himself out of his best per—

Tequila’s first gun rang a quick staccato, and each shot banged home with a clang as the plate fell. Then came the switch of guns; it was fast, and again the five shots were fast but—he missed one! The agonizing seconds ticked by as Tequila reloaded one round, spun the cylinder, and fired, taking down the last target. Then he was on the run, reloading each gun as he went. He got to the corral, and Red heard the shots, lickety-split, each completed by the Gong Show sound of the plate struck at six hundred feet per second by a large lump of lead and—God, he missed another. Quickly the old gunslinger finished the string and decided to reload and fire rather than accept a ten-second penalty for a missed target, and he probably got the reload in and the shot off (clang!) in seven seconds.

Oh God, thought Red, I have a chance. I just can’t miss a target. Slow, calm, collected, the gun reset just right. It’s there. It’s for me. I can do it.

He took a deep breath, trying to keep himself calm as he stepped into the loading area. He showed guns empty to the range officer running the stage, then, one at a time, slipped the cartridges in—one, skip one, four more—then cocked and gently lowered the hammer, keeping the muzzle downrange. Did it twice.

Turned to face the reset plates.

“Do you understand the course, shooter?”

“I do.”

“Are you ready, shooter?”

“Yes.”

“All right then—”

“Mr. Constable! Mr. Constable!”

Aghhhh! There went his concentration. It was Susan Jantz, his secretary. What could she want? Aghh, he could get disqualified.

He turned and saw the range officer trying to push her gently back to the cordoned crowd area. But Susan was persistent, slipped by him, and raced to her boss with his cell phone.

“What on earth—”

“You have to take this call.”

“Shooter,” said the range officer, “I’m going to have to call a ‘spirit of game’ infraction if you don’t—”

Red put the phone to his ear.

“Constable.”

“Mr. Constable, you don’t know me. My name is Randall Jeffords. I’m an accountant in your New York office.”

“Why the hell are y—”

“Sir, I came in to catch up and the place was being torn apart by federal agents. I asked, and they wouldn’t say, but there were some cops with them, and one of them said—I know you won’t believe this—felony murder one. I just can’t believe it. Against you, sir. I’ve been trying for hours to get your number. I thought you ought to know.”

“You did the right thing,” Texas Red said, clicking the cell closed.

He had a moment of disbelief, of stunned nothingness. His

first cogent thought: where the fuck is Bill Fedders? He’s supposed to be wired into that system. I’m supposed to know in advance when—

But quickly enough he saw the pointlessness of that line of inquiry. He realized a decision had just been made for him; he had to instantly accept its reality and deal with it first and fastest. There was but one answer: he had to get clear of the country, now. Nothing else mattered. From Costa Rica, he could sort things out, but the deal now was to avoid custody—the circus, the humiliation—and to see what they knew and didn’t.

“Okay,” he said to his number one bodyguard, who had by this time bullied his way forward, violating the rules, and stood waiting near him, “we’ve got to get out of here. Call the plane, tell them we’ll be there in ten minutes.”

“Yes sir.”

“Thanks, Susan, you’re the best,” he said to his loyal secretary and daily sex servant.

He started to walk off the event stage.

“Shooter, you cannot leave without showing empty, you cannot leave, I will DQ you if you do not immediately return to the loading area and make your weapons safe.”

Tom turned.

“Fuck you,” he said, and walked off.

“DQ! DQ! Shooter is DQed!” shouted the range officer but made no step forward as the three beefy guards closed in behind Texas Red and the crowd parted in the thrust of the armed man and his armed bodyguards as they headed down the main street of the town of Cold Water, through the corridor of stunned competitors and fans.

And then a tall gunman stepped into the empty street ahead of him, raising one hand.

“A cowboy!” said Nick. “What the hell are you talking about?”

“It’s the Cold Water Cowboy Action Shoot, Cold Water, Colorado. I saw something on CNN about it this morning and realized I’d heard the Irishmen talk about the boss being off playing cowboy. So being Sherlock Holmes, I put one and one together and came up with Cold Water. It was only a hundred miles from where we was. I had my pal Chuck drive me hell-for-leather over here, but since it was a gun crowd and I wanted to fit in, we stopped off. Chuck’s an ex-lawman; he could buy a gun without no wait. We picked up a nice used Colt in a pawnshop. At a gas station I bought a hat, and when I got here, I picked up a holster and some black powder forty-fours. I wanted to see this guy face to face.”

“You haven’t called him out or something insane like that?”

“Of course not. I only look stupid. I just wanted to see him. He don’t know nothing about me.”

“Boy, was that ever the right decision. I am one lucky little federal flunky today. Just a second.”

Bob waited as he assumed Nick was shouting orders to his

people to get the information to the closest field office to Cold Water, Colorado, and get a SWAT team gunned up and on the way by helicopter.

Nick came back, sounding breathless.

“Okay,” he said, “I’ve gotten Denver. They’re on the way. They were on the runway because of an earlier alert. I’m told it’ll be less than half an hour. Just stand by and—”

“Oh, shit,” said Bob. “Something’s going on. He’s up there to shoot but all of a sudden his gal comes over, hands him a phone. He talks real urgent into it. Now he’s breaking away, his mob of boys. They’re getting out of town, Nick. He’s going to his plane.”

“Oh, Christ,” said Nick. “How many?”

“It’s him, three bodyguards, heavy guys. I don’t see no guns but I’m guessing they’re carrying.”

“Oh, shit,” said Nick.

“I can stop them,” said Bob.

“Oh, God,” said Nick, as if envisioning details of a terrible shootout in a huge crowded area, dozens dead, the whole thing a complete fuck-up, his career, just saved, trashed beyond redemption.

But then he thought, I rode this far with the gunman. Might as well go all the way.

“Okay,” he said, “use your best judgment. If you think following them is the way to go, then—”

“You better give me some kind of verbal authorization to shoot damn quick, ’cause they’s a hundred feet away and coming toward me.”

He heard Nick whisper to others, “Witness this and record it,” then he said loudly, “Do it. Take him down.”

It took a second for the situation to dawn on the crowd, but then they all seemed to get it at once. Two gunslingers facing each other in a western town under a blaze of sun, shooting for blood. They backed off—not away, but off, cordoning themselves along the streets of Cold Water, witnesses to that which had not been seen for real in a century. Nobody was going to get them to look away.

“Kill him,” said Texas Red to his bodyguard.

“Sir,” said the man, “I am a bonded employee of Graywolf Security, and I am not empowered to open fire unless fired upon. I cannot engage unknown civilians, particularly in a crowded area. I have no idea who this guy is.”

“Who are you?” yelled Red.

He saw the man start to answer, but someone else from the crowd yelled, “He’s an Arizona Ranger,” for some odd reason.

A moment of silence creaked by, then the bodyguard said, “Possible law enforcement agent. Cannot engage. Graywolf rules.” He stepped away from Texas Red and led his colleagues to the sidelines. They wanted to watch too. That left Clell Rush.

“Don’t do this, Red,” Clell said quietly. “He’s got a big iron on his hip.”

Red looked, recognized from the top view exactly what he himself was carrying, only his Colt wore the gunfighter’s 4¾ inch barrel, while the Arizona Ranger’s iron was indeed big; it was the 7½ inch model, which gave him a lot of metal to clear from leather.

In an instant, something ticked off in Red, or was he back to being Tom? Whatever, something flashed vaingloriously before his eyes. He imagined himself killing this “Arizona Ranger” in a fair gunfight—who, after all, could stay up with him?—then making the getaway. He knew that by the twisted currents loose in

American culture, such an act would make him not merely famous but legendary. It would take away the onus of the murders he’d committed or ordered, all of which could be called cowardly.

Facing and slaying an enemy old-style, in the oldest of Old West styles, as captured on a thousand cell phone videos, would make him perversely admired. He was a bastard, but he was a brave bastard, they’d say.

“I warn you,” he called to the Ranger, “these guns are loaded.”

His adversary cracked a dry smile.

“Mine too,” he said. “Never saw no use for an unloaded gun.”

It was quiet. How could it not be? Of all the audiences in the world, this was the one that appreciated the ceremony of the gunfight more than any other and had worshipped its warriors like the old gods. And all were in the garb, some slightly theatricalized, of the 1880s, so as a tableau, it looked as if it belonged captured in the sepia of the best photo Matthew Brady ever took or in Remington’s or Russell’s brushstrokes. Everyone understood the dynamism, the thunder, the flash and pain that was about to be released for real.

The two men began the slow walk toward each other, by now oblivious to crowd and setting. Their boots sloughed dust; their neckerchiefs were tight. One wore red and one wore blue. Texas Red slipped out of the stylish black leather vest he was wearing, in case its tightness proved an impediment. He set his white hat lower on his eyes, to shade the sun.

The stranger wore jeans and a denim shirt; he was a rhapsody in worn blue. His handkerchief was black; his hat was crushed and bent, and you’d have thought it was one of those ridiculous Richard Petty imitation hats that gas stations sold, but of course a man so elegant and brave would never wear such a thing. His gun was in a Galco Texas Ranger rig, heavily figured with floral motifs, on an equally figured belt, which also supported a row of twenty more robin’s-egg-big .44 cartridges. But all present, having seen Red shoot, thought this handsome stranger was about to meet his death.

There was forty feet between them when they came to make their play. No words, no smiles, just dead-faced gunfighter’s harshly focused concentration, eyes slitted, mouths tight and grim, no visible breathing, no visible emotion, and as if on silent agreement they went to leather.

Red was fast and loose and strong, and the truckload of adrenaline in his bloodstream turned his gunhand into a blur as it flew to grip, thumb to hammer, driven by an ideal unspooling in his mind, as if from the myth-pure western that no man had made, the one where the hands flash and the guns jackhammer a bolt of flame and a blast of smoke and it’s the other man who’s spavined to the ground, oozing blood and sorrow. That did not happen.

The Ranger’s hand abandoned time and physics as it seemed to pass into invisibility, and in the next nanosecond, when it returned to the known universe, it had somehow already oriented the old revolver, cocked it, busted cap with spurt of muzzle flame and white cannonade of rocketing gas, and launched a fat .44 on its track across space.

Red had not cleared leather before the bullet fairly ripped, hit, mutilated, and exited. He went down hard, kicking up a puff of dust, which the wind took, just as it took the gunsmoke of the Ranger’s speedier Colt. Red curled as he fell, gun flying away in a twisted angle, the sound of the shot lost to all, so intent were all in the essence of the age-old drama.

The moment was utter antique. Not a single thing spoke of later times that any man or woman or child could see. The white smoke and dust, teased to action by the relentless wind, seemed to lie over all for just a second, glazing and blurring all surfaces, suggesting again that this was ancient times.

But then the applause broke out. Well, who could blame them? And the chants, “Ran-ger, Ran-ger, Ran-ger!”

One might think, how terrible to cheer a mankilling, no matter the circumstances. However, it became instantly clear that Texas Red may have been fairly ripped by the bullet’s progress, but he was not dead by a long shot. Instead the Ranger had brought off that trope of fifties cowboy TV—shooting the gun out of the hand, as Gene and Roy and Hoppy had done countless times, so that the bad guys gripped their sore mitts and shook them as if experiencing something akin to bees in the bat.

Red rolled, screaming for help, and it then became obvious what was different about this particular variation on the theme: the Ranger had not quite shot the gun out of his hand but had shot the hand out from his gun. The bullet had struck him in the wrist bone and deflected downward, knocking the gun this way and three fingers of his right hand that way. The mangled paw now spurted a crimson jet unseen in fifties tube time.

The Ranger slipped his gun back into its holster and walked to the fallen man. Texas Red gripped his destroyed hand as if with finger pressure he could stop the blood flow, but as his eyes came up to his victor, he tried to slither backward, caught in a vise of fear. The man waited until at last eye contact was made.

“I don’t know who you are,” Red said, squinting into a sun that turned his opponent to a black silhouette.

“Oh yes you do. I am the sniper.”

Then he turned and walked clear, hearing someone scream, “Get him a doctor,” but before that was accomplished, the whole nineteenth-century illusion was devastated by an updraft of dust, a sudden density of shadow that announced a helicopter was settling out of the sky, right there in Cold Water. It was the FBI apprehension team, and as the bird settled, its rotors beat up a mighty wind, filling the air with a hurricane of dust, driving folks this way and that. The Arizona Ranger seemed to disappear in the drifting grit just as mysteriously as he had arrived.

56

The Constable revelations rocked the nation, as might be imagined, and the story of the trials and the sentencing, the appeals, the retrials, and an account of the whole surrealistic Fellini movie that came in its wake—the television shows, the circus of sensational journalism, blogism, essayism, talking headism, and schadenfreudeism—is best left for elsewhere.

For those involved, however, the trials and interviews and think pieces et al were really signifiers of nothing. It was just the assholes in the world catching up to what the people on the point of the spear had already done in their names. All that media crap wasn’t much for real endings. But there were real endings, possibly too many to choose from.

One came after the first trial and halfway through the second, when in all the ruckus, Nick Memphis found Special Agent Ron Fields sitting in the Nyackett, Massachusetts, courthouse cafeteria, waiting to testify. He had not been able to catch the fellow alone since the day it all went down.

“Hi ya,” he said, slipping in across from the big guy.

“Hi, Nick,” Fields said. “You got my note. Thanks for the commendation. It looks like I will get the sniper program,” Fields said.

“I hope so,” said Nick. “You deserve it.”

“Ah, Nick,” said Fields with his sloppy grin, “I’m just a dumbbell gunfighter and gofer. I’m best suited for Quantico and teaching SWAT. That Starling, she’s the bright one. She’ll be a star.”

“I bet you’re right on that one,” Nick said. “I wrote her up too.”

“Great.”

“But I’m glad you mentioned her. I wanted to ask you something.”

“Sure, Nick. But don’t expect subtlety. I’m the grind-it-up type.”

“You know what they’re saying?”

“Hmm,” said Fields. “Well, I’ve heard some stuff.”

“As I understand the story, it goes something like this. There’s this young special agent who’s pissed at the hosing her boss is getting in the press. And guess what, the fiancé of this young agent happens to work for a certain outfit located in Langley, V-A. He’s in photo intelligence. Anyhow, when this agent’s boss is in trouble and everyone’s calling him a crook, she and boyfriend come to the rescue. Boyfriend uses agency tech to dummy up a photo; this is, of course, after both put their heads together and figure out what a certain great newspaper knows nothing about. But first, they snitch a document out of an unguarded file, retype it on their own processor and replace it. Then they pass a reporter a document typed on the same word processor, and for a while, it looks as if the reporter has got a real scoop on his hands. Well, I’m telling the story all wrong, out of sequence, but you can figure it out, I’ll bet. The famous newspaper goes to press with its picture and gets slaughtered. Just gets massacred. Pretty damn funny, if you ask me. And the campaign the newspaper was running curls up and dies, and old Nick goes back to work, same as it ever was, and we even end up putting a bad guy away and who knows what might have happened if the guy in charge didn’t have this naive faith in some outlier named Bob Lee Swagger. Boy, would we be in a different world, I’ll tell you.”

“I’ve heard that story, yeah,” said Fields. “As I said, she’s a smart one. And that reputation should help her in her career. People look at her and say, don’t mess with Starling. It’s a ticket up.”

“It is. And try as I might, I can’t see that a crime has been committed. I mean other than misuse of government resources, but that’s not my bailiwick. If someone chooses to play a prank on a newspaper, what crime has been committed?”

“I can’t think of one either, Nick.”

“So, I’m going to let that drop. That’s my decision. But I look at Fields and I think, I’ll run it by him, just get his take on it; he’s a salty old dog.”

“The salty old dog says, sometimes it’s best to let things drop.”

Nick smiled.

“Then it’s dropped. She’ll be a star. You get Sniper SWAT at Quantico. Maybe I get assistant director.”

“If there’s any justice—”

“And the important thing is the bad guys go down or away. Let’s not forget that.”

“Never forget that. It makes me feel all warm and fuzzy.”

“Cool,” said Nick, rising. “Okay, that’s a big help. I’ll let you concentrate on your testimony now. I’ve got to get back to DC and—Oh,” he said, “one other thing.”

“Sure, Nick.”

“How do you suppose she got it down?”

Fields smiled but his eyes showed bafflement.

“What’re you—”

“You know, my picture. The fake photo used info from a real picture. It was hanging on my glory wall. Sally and I in Hawaii on vacation, about four years ago. They needed a real photo so their computers could transfer and manipulate the information. That’s why it seemed familiar.”

“Gee, I hadn’t thought of that,” said Fields. “I mean, I guess she just wandered into your office one day and slipped it off the wall.”

“I suppose,” said Nick. “But she’s only five-two. She can’t reach any higher than six feet, much less manipulate something. That photo was in the top row, close to seven feet off the ground. And my office has a glass wall. So she’d have to do it in plain sight of the office, and she’d have to move a chair over to get up to it, and she’d have to have another photo to hang in its place, and all that would take time and anyone would notice it.”

“I guess she did it after hours.”

“But she’s only an SA. Special agents aren’t allowed in after hours unless they’re with an assistant special agent in charge; of course an ASAIC can come in anytime.”

“Huh,” said Fields. “Interesting. So you’re saying—”

“I’m not saying anything. The facts are saying that if someone took down that pic and replaced it with something else, it was done after hours, meaning by an ASAIC or higher, six-two or taller. Know anybody like that? Oh, and he’d have to be familiar with that wall.”

“Maybe she—”

“Maybe. But I did some checking. It’s interesting, yeah, her fiancé’s a CIA guy and might have had access to that lab. But did you know there’s a guy on Taskforce Sniper who partnered up early with a guy named Jerry Lally? Five years, a few gunfights, that sort of thing. And of course Jerry took a leave of absence, went back to school, got a master’s in chem and a PhD in physics and came back to work science for us. He’s now head of our photo interp. And let’s not forget that although CIA has the best photo lab in Washington, we have the second-best photo lab in Washington. Really, not one floor and a hundred feet from our office. And whoever did this little thing, he really knew our building forward and back, much better, I’m guessing, than a new special agent. No, this guy’d be an old salty dog.”

“Pretty interesting,” said Fields.

“And see, here’s the funny thing. Everybody thinks this guy is a big, lovable, loyal lunkhead, but if you look at his tests, his IQ maxes out, as do all his other tests. See, everybody thinks he’s a jovial door kicker, but maybe he’s the smartest of them all, smarter than his own boss, because he figures getting known as an egghead isn’t going to get him Sniper at Quantico.”

“Nick, you have some imagination. You ought to write a book.”

“Nah,” said Nick. “Nobody’d believe it. As I say, it’s dropped now.”

Then a bailiff came and called Fields as next to testify, and he rose, and Nick reached out to shake his hand and said, “You are the best, big guy, the very best,” and Fields smiled and was off.

Here’s another possible ending: a notice that appeared on page A-2 of a recent issue of the Times in the Corrections Box.

On October 29 of last year, a photograph appeared on page one of this newspaper purporting to show a federal agent in the company of executives from a firearms company attempting to land a federal contract with the agent’s employer, the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The Times has since learned that the photo was a fraud and its publication was in violation of the newspaper’s own code of professional ethics. The Times regrets the error.

Still another ending could have been the marriage of Bill Fedders to Jessica Delph, who was younger than his youngest child. Bill had quite a run on the strength of his multiple testimonies against Tom Constable and emerged as some kind of media hero. He was also smart enough to make phone calls to a half dozen or so representatives and senators at his earliest convenience and warn them ahead of the curve that Constable was going down hard and that they ought to begin this second to distance themselves from the sordid spectacle. All were grateful, all did favors in return, and Bill prospered beyond belief. He finally decided that, for some reason or other, it was time to retire the first wife and be seen about town with the trophy more than once a month. It just shows that in Washington, you can’t keep a bad man down. Perhaps God will punish him by giving him a few more children.

But maybe the best ending was the reinterment of the marine sniper Gny. Sgt. Carl Hitchcock (Ret.) in the consecrated ground of the USMC Cemetery at Camp Lejeune, North Carolina. Unlike his first interment, it didn’t take place in a heavy rain and it wasn’t sparsely attended. In fact, among the two-thousand-odd attendees, almost the entire shooting community turned out, from writers like Ayoob and Bane and Huntington and Taffin to editors like Brennan and Venola and Hutchcroft and Keefe; to the sniper researchers Peter Senich and Maj. John L. Plaster; to shooters like Tubb and Leatham and Enos and Wigger; to dozens of aging grunts who made it back from ’Nam because of Carl and the few men like him; to some of those men themselves, such as Chuck McKenzie and the other great marine sniper who never sought fame or recognition, Chuck Mawhinney, likewise the Army sniper Bert Waldron, even the widows of posthumous Medal of Honor winners the Delta snipers Randy Shugart and Gary Gordan; to gun rights authors and advocates like Cates and Gottlieb and Kopel and LaPierre; to SWAT sharpshooters from all over the nation; to the FBI team of Task Force Sniper, who in the end labored so hard and risked so much to bring this moment to life; to Marine officers and NCOs from the commandant on down; and finally to ordinary people who happened to be lovers of courage. And because reality is often trite and doesn’t acknowledge that thing the intellectuals call “the pathetic fallacy,” it followed that the sun was bright, the leaves green, the wind fragrant, and not a dry eye remained, no matter how battered and grizzled the warrior, especially when the ceremony closed down and that last, mournful note of taps hung in the air. It was sad, it was sad, it was so sad, but at the same time it was, for all of them, a happy time.

There was one other difference between this ceremony and the first one.

Swagger was not there.

And where was he?

It is known that after a week of depositions and debriefings in Washington, he took a train to Chicago and presented Detective Sergeant Dennis Washington’s widow with her husband’s firearm. It was all he could do after missing the funeral. He and Susanna and the three girls had a good time together and it was kind of all right but not nearly as good as it would have been if the big guy was there. They all promised to keep in touch.

Then, all presumed, he retired to his place in Idaho. But no one knows for sure, because he stopped answering his phones.

After all, he is the sniper. You’re not supposed to know where he is.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

To begin with, two confessions of literary license: There is no such thing, yet, as iSniper911. I’m anticipating developments by a few years, as all the components exist and have been proven in the field, but no one has figured out quite how to pack them into one instrument, at least as I write now. Perhaps as you read that next step will have been taken.

Second, I am aware that the FBI’s marksmen’s rifles are built by H-S Precision; I chose to attribute them to Remington because it saved me the effort of explaining to readers who and what H-S was and because Big Green, as Remington is known, has provided the world with such weapons for 25 years, through its brilliantly engineered 700 bolt action.

On to thanks: Gary Goldberg, of course, was my majordomo throughout the writing of the book. If I had to know how a Garmin GPS worked or where the possessions of the intestate are taken in Cook County, Gary was the go-to guy. Through Gary, I reached the following: Amy Jo Lyons, Special Agent in Charge of the Baltimore office of the FBI; Jennifer Haggerty of the Cook County Public Administrator’s Office; John Stephens, for technical information on photo forgeries; Dr. John Matthews, founder of SureFire LLC, the great flashlight manufacturers, for information on modern suppressors; and Lew Merletti, former Director of the U.S. Secret Service, for fast, accurate feedback on equipment and tactics. I’m grateful to all and of course all errors of fact and judgment are mine and mine alone.

My readers’ circle provided helpful ideas and suggestions: Jay Carr, the former great film critic of the Boston Globe; Lenne Miller, my solid good friend since 1966; Bill Smart, late of the Washington Post, now of Montana, for info on Cowboy Action; John Bainbridge for skillful proofreading; Roger Troup, a great gun guy; and in L.A., my good friend Jeff Weber.

Kathy Lally, now of the Washington Post and the editor who invented me at the Baltimore Sun, introduced me to her cousin, the Irish actor Mick Lally, for a long discussion of the Irish accent in Dublin. Hmm, I think some drinking was done.

Weyman Swagger, now in ill health, for unflagging enthusiasm; and also, thanks for the use of the name, guy.

My wife, the journalist Jean Marbella, who rolls her eyes when the books on arcane subjects begin to pile up in the bedroom and announce the arrival of a new Swagger adventure, but hangs in through it all. Hey, at least they weren’t swords this time!

Otto Penzler provided me with le mot juste at le moment juste.

Michael Bane, for his enthusiasm and support via his great blog.

The professional researcher Dan Starer who set me up with Special Agent Royden R. Rice of the Chicago office of the FBI.

In the professional realm, my agent Esther Newberg, my publisher David Rosenthal, and my editor Colin Fox stood foursquare behind me all the way through this one. That makes it so much

easier.

And of course the great Marty Robbins, for providing the Ur-text to Chapter 55.

And for the record: I love Turner Classic Movies!

Table of Contents

COVER

Contents

The 47th SAMURAI

ALSO BY STEPHEN HUNTER

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Epigraph

1 : ISLAND

2 : THE SCYTHE

3 : THE BLOCKHOUSE

4 : A REQUEST

5 : THE OLD BREED

6 : THE BIG WHITE HOUSE

7 : NARITA

8 : THE YANOS

9 : NII OF SHINSENGUMI

10 : BLACK RUST

11 : STEEL

12 : SAKE

13 : KONDO ISAMI

14 : RUINS

15 : TOSHIRO

16 : KIRISUTE GOMEN

17 : INO

18 : THE SHOGUN

19 : DR. OTOWA

20 : THE YOUNG MEN

21 : THE COP

22 : YAKIBA

23 : THE TOKYO FLASH

24 : THE EIGHT CUTS

25 : THE FLOATING WORLD

26 : KATA

27 : THE SAMURAI

28 : DRAGONS

29 : THE SHRINE

30 : SWORD OF LIFE

31 : BATTLE

32 : KONDO

33 : ORDERS

34 : THE TAKING

35 : FACE-TO-FACE

36 : THE WHITE ROOM

37 : STRATEGY

38 : NII'S DREAMS

39 : THE KENDO CHAMPION

40 : THE BIG SHOTS

41 : THE STAGING

42 : MOON OF HELL

43 : CHUSHINGURA

44 : EDO JUSTICE

45 : STEEL TO STEEL

46 : OFFICE POLITICS

47 : NOTO

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

NIGHT OF THUNDER

ALSO BY STEPHEN HUNTER

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Epigraph

PART I : PRELIMS

ONE

TWO

THREE

FOUR

FIVE

SIX

SEVEN

EIGHT

NINE

TEN

ELEVEN

TWELVE

THIRTEEN

FOURTEEN

FIFTEEN

SIXTEEN

SEVENTEEN

EIGHTEEN

NINETEEN

TWENTY

TWENTY-ONE

TWENTY-TWO

TWENTY-THREE

TWENTY-FOUR

TWENTY-FIVE

PART II : RACE DAY

TWENTY-SIX

TWENTY-SEVEN

TWENTY-EIGHT

TWENTY-NINE

THIRTY

THIRTY-ONE

THIRTY-TWO

THIRTY-THREE

THIRTY-FOUR

THIRTY-FIVE

THIRTY-SIX

THIRTY-SEVEN

THIRTY-EIGHT

PART III : LAST LAP

THIRTY-NINE

FORTY

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I, SNIPER

ALSO BY STEPHEN HUNTER

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Epigraph

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

15

16

17

18

19

20

21

22

23

24

6

26

27

28

29

30

31

32

33

34

35

36

37

38

39

40

41

42

43

44

45

46

47

48

49

50

51

52

53

54

55

56

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS