“What do you want from me, Sergeant?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” he said. “It makes going back to it hard. Truth is, I never ever stopped thinking about that picture and the fine woman Donny Fenn had waiting for him.”
“That’s why you kept writing?”
“I suppose it is. And you’d just send ’em back, unopened.”
“I knew if I opened them, I was lost.”
“Are you lost now?”
“No, I don’t suppose so. I know where I’m headed. I can’t stop it. Straight into catastrophe, and I don’t even want to stop it.”
He drew her to him. In the kiss there was an extraordinary sense of release. He felt himself sliding away, down a drain, surrounded by warm, urgent, healing liquids. He thought he’d slide until he died. He was also overwhelmed by smoothness. Everything about her was smooth; she was smooth everywhere, he’d never imagined that a person could be so smooth.
The explosion, so long in coming, seemed to build until it could not be held back, and bucked out of him in a series of emptying spasms. He was falling through floors toward solid earth, each one halting him for just a splinter of a second; and then he fell through to another one, and then another. He fell and fell and fell, stunned at the distance of the fall and how far it took him from himself.
“My God,” he said.
“Oh, my God,” she said.
The days passed. She was on the day shift and during it he stayed in the trailer and read what she had brought him from a trip to seven bookstores and every newsstand in Tucson. He told her to get everything. And she did. He read it all, the events of two weeks, then three weeks, then four weeks ago. He read about the Kennedy assassination, about other famous assassinations. He made copious notes and worked steadily, trying to find a line through the material.
When he learned that the hero policeman of New Orleans, Leon Timmons, had been killed in one of those stupid, pointless urban accidents, shot by a mugger during an attempt to prevent a crime, it didn’t surprise him. He just breathed heavily. Timmons had been a link; of course he had to die. These boys were sealing themselves off, leaving no possible leads into their organization. They were pros. This bothered him but it also relieved him; it meant he didn’t have to go back to New Orleans, for now there was nothing in New Orleans. But where would he go? He didn’t yet know.
One night, NBC news did a special on it. He taped it on her VCR, taking notes. He watched it over and over, the diagrams, the interviews, the speculations. But particularly he watched that terrible moment when the bullet came shrieking out of nowhere and seemed to blow the president from his feet, while it had really just been the force of the other man, the archbishop Roberto Lopez, who had gone into him as the bullet opened in him and destroyed his brain.
Bob thought: It was a great shot.
Over twelve hundred yards from that damn church steeple, shooting into a very complicated sight picture, no matter how good his scope, shooting at a downward angle. Lots of problems to solve, and you solved them all.
Oh, my oh my, but you’re a good boy, he thought.
Not but five, maybe six men in the world could hit a shot like that, or have the perfect confidence to risk everything on making it.
Bob realized the shooter was the key.
The whole plan, all the elaborate seduction of himself, the manipulations, the subterfuge, all of it rested only upon the fragile vessel of confidence that this shooter could make that shot.
Hell of a shot, Bob thought.
He thought of the man up there in that steeple behind the louvers just waiting, just gathering himself.
Could I have made that shot? Bob wondered.
He wasn’t sure. It was right at the very edge of what he could do with a rifle. Whoever he was, he was a shooter.
Bob remembered the superb neck-turned .308’s he’d run through his rifle when they were gulling him on in that Accutech thing in Maryland. Those were precision-made rounds. Everything else about “Accutech” was a con, but the rounds were the real thing. Whoever made them knew how to sling a cartridge together for world-class long-range accuracy. It wasn’t something many men knew: it took you into the realm of micromachining, of tolerances so fine most tools wouldn’t register them, of actions worked like the inside of watches, of rifle barrels so polished and perfect they were jewels themselves almost; it was a rarefied part of the shooting world.
Again, only a few dozen men in the world knew it.
And the rifle itself. Where do you get a rifle so tight that you can count on it to send a 200-grain .30 caliber into, say, four inches, from twelve hundred yards? You’re talking about .333 minute of angle at over half a mile. He knew a master gunsmith could build a rifle technically capable of such a thing, if a human could be found to get all that could be gotten out of it. Then he remembered the Model 70 he’d fired at the Accutech place, the last one, late in the day, when he’d fired the exercise that had more or less been the duplicate of Donny’s death with a Model 70 he still yearned for; a rifle with a stock so dense and rigid it felt as if it was manufactured from plastic and an action so slick and a trigger so soft you could breathe on it to make it fire. He remembered: Number 100000. That was such a rifle. There couldn’t be but one or two or three or four out of the millions of Model 70’s that Winchester made that were that fine.
Who would own such a rifle? Then he remembered that somebody told him a man had won a bunch of thousand-yard championships with that rifle.
And as he thought he began to puzzle the one aspect that had so far evaded him, the piece that was somehow wrong.
It was the bullet.
If they were going to hit the archbishop, they’d have to assume the police would recover the bullet. And that the bullet would have the imprint of the bore it had been fired down, as irrevocable as a fingerprint. They couldn’t know the bullet would be mangled; that was a one in a thousand chance.
Why wouldn’t this perturb them? It would screw up their entire plan. When the bullet didn’t match the bore in Bob’s rifle, the whole ruse would collapse. Somehow they’d figured a way to beat it. Somehow he had figured a way to beat it.
The bullet, he thought.
The mystery of the goddamn bullet, just as tantalizing in its way as the famous Kennedy assassination 6.5mm that had passed through one man’s body, another man’s chest and wrist, and yet was undamaged and unmistakably bore the imprint of Lee Harvey Oswald’s bore.
It was as if the two mysteries were mirror opposites of one another, or different sides of one coin.
But they had bullets, he thought. They had bullets from my rifle.
He’d provided them with sixty-four bullets fired from the bore of his rifle, in Maryland.
He sat back.
“Bob?”
“Shhh.”
“Bob, what are—”
He held up a hand to quiet her.
Then it was gone.
“Dammit.”
“What?”
“Oh, I—”
Then he had it. It might be possible. He’d never heard of anyone doing it and there was no reason for anyone to do it, but … yes, it was possible.
You dig a fired .308 bullet out of the sand, scored with the imprint of a bore, but otherwise pristine and possessing the same ballistic integrity as a new bullet. You can reload that .308 bullet into a .300 H & H, Magnum shell, a much longer shell with a much greater powder capacity and therefore a much longer range. You’d have to protect the bullet somehow, and this puzzled him, until he remembered an old technique called paper-patching, by which a fellow could wrap a bullet in wet paper before he loaded it on a shell; the paper would harden and form a sort of protective sheath. The trick was, you had to fire it down a slightly larger bore, maybe a .318. But even that was so simple: rebarrel the rifle with a custom bore, and refire Bob’s bullet down the bore. The paper patching protects the ballistic signature; then burns off in the atmosphere; Bob’s bullet, fired from this other rifle, ar
rives to do its terrible damage.
Oh, you were a smart boy, he thought.
But … if you were so smart, how come I had to bird-dog it out for you? I was your legs, wasn’t I? That was part of it. I wasn’t just there to be used as a dupe but I did the thinking, the seeing, the planning. Why? Why couldn’t you do it? Why couldn’t you go to the sites yourself and see what I saw?
One day he drove to Tucson, and concealed behind his new beard and sunglasses, stopped in a rummy old Gun and Pawn store in the Mexican section of the town. Didn’t even look at the rifles that were on the wall, but went on and found in the back, as usually these places have, a big pile of old gun magazines. Guns & Ammo and Shooting Times, a long though tattered run of The American Rifleman. The mags were of little use to him, being far too full of pictures of new guns. But there was one that was useful: Accuracy Shooting, which was about benchrest shooting, those boring technocrats who worked on rifles so fine they could throw bullets in the same hole all day long. He himself had subscribed since the late seventies. But these were earlier, from the mid-sixties.
Benchresting was the R & D lab of all shooting; if you were at all serious about the game, you had to bank your time at the loading bench and the shooting bench; all other things stemmed from it. If his boy learned his stuff anywhere, he learned it in benchresting. The magazine, he learned, had begun as the newsletter of the first American benchrest shooter’s club, which started up in the early fifties in upstate New York, following on the work of men like Warren Page, Harvey Donaldson and P. O. Ackley in the twenties and thirties. They were loaded with tabular matter, with long and dreary accounts of shooting matches of years ago, obscure names of great shooters and obsolete calibers like the .222½ and the 7 × 61 Sharpe and Hart.
He bought them all and that night he began to read them. When he’d read them all, he found more, and read them too. He haunted the secondhand shops, looking for old copies. When he found them, he read them, looking for something but what it was, he couldn’t say.
I’ll find you, you old bastard, he thought, for he assumed his quarry was old. Only old men could shoot like that, for it’s a dying skill, not practiced by the young much; there was only one younger man who could have made that shot, but he was an illusion. Bob tried to put it out of his mind, because it spoiled things for him.
It’s not T. Solaratov, he said to himself. It’s not. It can’t be.
In the evenings they made love. They made love for hours. Sometimes he felt like a piston that just kept on going.
And finally, several times, after he’d fallen through the last of his floors and lay there as if every atom in his body was at rest, he felt himself yielding to the fatigue. He couldn’t move a thing.
“God,” she said. “You must have saved up all that time at Walden Pond.”
He snorted.
“I seem to be doing okay.”
“I’ll say,” she said.
They lay there, breathing their way back to earth.
The terror of her was that she carried in her the seed of possibility. In her, he saw an alternate life. It occurred to him that he didn’t have to live in solitude, hating the world, and that he didn’t have to give himself to his rifles, like some kind of mad Jesuit. Didn’t have to live in a little trailer off in the misty mountains, and face each visitor with mistrust.
The world was full of things that could be. He had a flash of them together somewhere, just enjoying each other, no complications. Somehow it had to do with water; he saw them at a beach, maybe Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, or maybe outside Biloxi or Galveston or some such; anyway, sand, water, sun, and nothing else in the world.
“What are you thinking of?” she asked. “You almost had a smile on your face. What was it?”
He knew if he told her he was lost. There would be no turning back from the softness. He lay there and the temptation to give in rose and rose in him. He wanted to let it swallow him up. He could feel himself disappearing in the wanting.
“Something from the Marines.”
“That’s a lie,” she said.
“Sure. I was thinking how much I like this. It’s a life I could love. But I have to tell you square-up: maybe it was a mistake. Maybe it costs me too much or gives me too much to hold on to, I have to be able to let go of things. It’s like I’m bargaining; I have to be able to walk away from the deal at any time, elsewise I can never win. I have to be willing to die at any time, or I can’t ever win. Any man in a war will tell you that; you must be willing to give up your life at any chance. If you’re thinking about what’s at home, you lose your edge.”
She looked at him with those gray, calm eyes.
“I was right. I knew. Give me a taste. Then pull away. Go off on your crusade.” She almost laughed. “I wish I could hate you, Bob. You are a true and deep son of a bitch. But hating you would be like hating the weather. No point to it at all.”
“I’m sorry. There was never a better time. It was the best. It was special. Another time or two and I’d never leave.”
“No. That’s a lie. You’d leave. I know your type. You always leave.”
“You’re right,” he said. “I’d leave. I have to.”
She found this one a laugh.
“You are a bastard.”
Bob nodded. Not much passed on his grave face.
“When?”
“I think it has to be tomorrow.”
“So soon?”
“Yeah. It’s time. I’ve got some ideas. I’ve got something of a plan, even.”
“I just never thought it would be so soon.”
“The sooner I leave, the sooner I come back.”
“You’re lying again, Bob. You’re not coming back. You’ll be dead in a week.”
“More than likely,” he said. “It’s a shaky plan. But it’s the only one I could come up with. But first, I’ve got a couple of things to do.”
“And what’re they?” she said, trying to show no pain.
“I’ve got to dig up my cache in the mountains where I’ve got thirty thousand dollars and some guns stashed, so I can pay my own way and defend myself. And then,” he said, “I’ve got to bury my dog.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Shreck never walked through doors; he exploded through them like a grenade, blowing them nearly off their hinges as he blasted through, bent forward, his gait rock-steady and determined.
Dobbler looked up at the noise, and Shreck was already on him, having crossed the ten feet from threshold to desk front in about a half a second and no more than two paces.
“Colonel Shreck, I—”
Feeling rousted as if by a bull on a snap inspection, Dobbler made a clumsy attempt to rise but the stern man motioned him down impatiently.
“I’m running late, Dobbler. I just got in.”
“My God, Colonel, are you all right?”
“Tired. Exhausted.”
“Jet lag? You really should take your shoes off, and walk barefoot on the carpet and—”
“Doctor, I’d asked you to consider Swagger’s disappearance. Can you summarize your thoughts for me?”
“Of course, of course,” said Dobbler, nonplussed; Shreck had never crashed into his office before; almost always, he served at Shreck’s summons.
Dobbler began to babble through his discovery of the strange florist’s bill in Little Rock, his initial dead end when he learned that the florist kept no records, and his latest initiative, which was to ask one of the technonerds in Research to run a computer search through the memory of the FTD databank if he could get into the system, in hopes of locating that elusive destination to which Bob had dispatched his flowers. But halfway through he realized that Shreck wasn’t focusing.
“That’s very promising. But I want some feeling of what’s going on in his head. What’s he going to do?”
“Oh,” said Dobbler, somewhat taken aback at being denied the compliment he expected. “Well, Payne says the FBI has now moved its base of operations to Arkansas.
His home area. They believe he’ll head there.”
“What do you think?”
“Oh, he will,” said Dobbler vaguely.
“Why do you believe that?”
“Because he has to do what we expect, and still beat us.” Dobbler smiled. “That’s really what’s going on now. Bob’s vanity. His desire not merely to survive but to triumph. To punish us for our delusion of superiority. He must now prove to us who is the alpha-male.”
Shreck nodded, intently.
“Suppose the FBI takes him alive. What will he be able to tell them?”
“Ah, I doubt he will be taken alive. He’s in a very volatile state. The pressures on him are incredible. He—”
“But if he is?”
“If he is—it may make him insane. They won’t believe him, of course, the trap is too tight, too well constructed. It may actually destroy his mind. I don’t know if he can function under those circumstances.”
Shreck followed this carefully. Then he said, “All right, good. That’s very helpful.”
“Why, thank you, Colonel Shreck,” said Dobbler, pleased.
“It’s good to have a Harvard man on the staff, Dr. Dobbler. Because I can count on you for consistency. You are full of shit. Always. Completely. That’s a gift, Dobbler.”
Dobbler was stunned.
“I—”
“You stupid asshole, don’t you know a thing about how men’s minds work? Or Swagger’s kind of man? Don’t you see the fucking joke in this? You see, we planned his death, but maybe we gave him his life. We have engaged him. He is back among the living, and he’s got himself a war to fight, and all his skills and talents may be fully deployed. That’s the terrible thing, the longer this goes on, the more he enjoys it, the stronger he gets. And he’ll love it. He should pay us for it. We’re giving him more fun than he’s had since the war.”
It was morning of the last day. She got up at four and made breakfast so that it was ready when he awoke at five. But he wanted to make love—so soon, after last night, and what she had thought would be the last time—so the breakfast waited. It tasted wonderful when they got to it.