The records of the great Abercrombie amp; Fitch seventh-floor gun room were a mess, a disgrace, a disaster. Evidently, when the new owners acquired the corporation after its 1977 bankruptcy, they knew the future lay in jeans for kids, not Westley Richards.577 Nitro Expresses for Nobel Prize-winning writers. This trove was part of the property they acquired, along with the long-term lease on the warehouse facility in suburban Jersey. That lease had ten years to run, so no idea toward disposition was necessary until that time.
The vast room of ruin and confusion afforded one pleasure to Swagger, and that was escape from the enigma that was synesthesia, which he had learned was a freakish affliction-ability? gift? curse? — in the brain by which cues mix and produce something called “responses in differing modalities.” Most commonly, it meant that a letter or a number, for some odd reason, appeared not as it was objectively but in a peculiar color. So to Niles Gardner, the number 9 was red, the number 4 was blue, the number 6 was green. If he saw a headline in a newspaper, “Most pro careers last 9 years, study finds,” he would see the numeral in the color his mind told him was there, not the smudgy black of newsrag ink.
Swagger had made one further connection, but not to Hugh; it went down in the chain of linkages, not up, and anyway, what the fuck did this have to do with anything? No idea. Not even a whisper. It seemed another dead end, and the discomfort of it, like an undigested clot of food in his stomach, created great anxiety.
So the files, in their chaos, represented relief from that anguish. They were real, occupied space, could be manipulated, and were on a medium with which he was familiar, that is, paper. He happily confronted them.
Many other researchers had already pillaged the room, notably, Hemingway and Roosevelt biographers. That perhaps was why Bob found no documents for the great writer or president: all filched, sitting in files in Princeton or the University of Illinois or someplace. There were few pickings for other great men, though Bob did find an invoice for the.38 Colt Detective Special that Charles Lindbergh carried through every day of the Bruno Hauptmann trial. But that was a random, rare find.
As Marty had promised, the files had more or less imploded, collapsing into themselves like one of those buildings brought down with a minimum of strategically planted explosives so that it seems to disappear into a hole full of rubble. The bound books of firearms sales, required by the ATF since 1938, were casually distributed through the mess. Some of the shipping invoices were filed in boxes, some of which were labeled by years, some of which weren’t; other clumps of invoices lay here and there on the damp cement floor of the corrugated tin structure that from the outside was just another cottage-industry headquarters and manufacturing joint in a seemingly endless complex out by I-95. No one was on-site; Swagger had to pick the keys up at the real estate management company in downtown Rutherford after instructions and permission from corporate headquarters in Oklahoma City, under Marty’s good auspices through the intervention of Tom Browner, whoever he was. Swagger had been smart enough to bring a can of Kroil to lube locks that had grown stiff and unaccustomed to the penetration of keys. Now he crouched on sore knees, trolling in the disaster under bad light, in the acrid odor of metal that corrugated tin gives off.
It unfolded before him, a cavalcade of American high-end sporting rifle and shotgun life. Big-game guns, elegant British shotguns for upland birds, the occasional accidental invoice for a rare, expensive sort of fishing tackle (fishing tackle had dominated the firm’s eighth floor, a floor above the guns, and on the roof there was an artificial casting pond for the trout-fishing swells to try out their technique). That it was a vanished world meant little to Swagger by this time, though at the early going, he felt a twinge of something when he came across a shipping order for three boxes of Kynoch.470 Nitro Express to an “R. Ruark” of “Honey Badger Farm,” RR 32, Kingston, S.C. Mostly, it was long-forgotten members of the bourgeois moneyed set ordering ammunition, mundane guns for domestic hunting, and the like. Despite the gun room’s fancy clientele and worldwide fame-that was marketing-its bread and butter lay in servicing the nonfamous dentists, lawyers, doctors, auto-dealership owners, and cotter-pin and plastic glass manufacturers of the unphotographed, unsentimentalized American small-town elite, many from the South and the West.
There was no other way to proceed than this straight-ahead plunge through stuff. Chronology, compartmentalization, geography, brand-name, all the retail categories by which a large mass of documents could be organized were pretty much shot. So many had gone through, grabbed their treasure, and left without repacking the boxes, much less resetting them on the shelves, that methodology seemed useless. He’d spent three hours going through the boxes tipped sideways on the floor, to no effect. He’d examined clumps aisle by aisle, trying to find such elemental regulators as year, manufacturer, destination. No effect. It was a maze of random paperwork, abandoned, most of it facedown, goddammit, on the cold concrete floor. He’d moved on to the boxes on the shelves. So far, to no effect. Just to make it more unendurable, the fluorescent light in this sector of the warehouse flickered on and off, making visibility more difficult. Why hadn’t he brought a flashlight? Or better yet, to free up both hands, one of those lights you wore on your head, so he could see clearly what was before him.
It bothered him immensely that outside, four really good FBI operators lounged, going on coffee and doughnut energy, as his bodyguard team in the crowded parking lot, putting out the message to all observers, Do not fuck around here. Didn’t these highly trained guys have better things to do than guard him and suck down caffeine and calories? Shouldn’t they be busting cribs in lower Manhattan, freeing sex slaves in Chinatown brothels, or serving high-risk warrants on button men on the Lower East Side? Nah. They just lounged in their Cherokee, joking and smoking and talking sports.
Finally, he was finished, six hours and two bruised knees and an oncoming cold later. Nothing. Not a goddamn thing. It was like synesthesia all over again. Under better circumstances, he could have brought a team, they could have indexed and sorted as they went along, and when they were finished, they would have bucked up the mess considerably and restored some sense of coherency to the chaos. Not this time, which had represented a once-over-lightly approach, in hopes that something would turn up on the surface. It hadn’t. Time to let the feds get back to busting chops and him to his life on the assassination beat.
It wasn’t the last unit of shelving, but nearly so. Three boxes lay on their sides, placed knee-high on the second-to-last unit. They’d been ripped open, some material removed, some stuffed back in, some left on the floor. He bent and brought his eyes up close to examine the labels on the boxes.
Whoa, mama.
What have we here?
One read:
MANAGER’S CORRESPONDENCE
June 1958-August 1969 (Harris)
He moved the box to the best light, pulled the lid off, and found himself looking at approximately three hundred carbons, stuffed in indiscriminately, clearly having been looted for Hemingwayania and restored haphazardly. They were roughly chronological, though when a clump had been pulled out, it had been stuffed back in at the easiest point, which was toward the end of the carton. It was so tight, each piece had to be pulled out delicately one at a time.
He glanced at his watch-4:15. Too much time already wasted.
Do it, he ordered himself.
He found it at 5:18.
July 23, 1960
Lon Scott
Scott’s Run
RR 224
Clintonsburg, Va.
Dear Lon,
Hope this finds you in good health. The last time I saw you, you still looked like you could crack the Harvard line for a first down just about any time you wanted. Hope you’re as chipper now.
Anyhow, you’ll be getting three packages from us in the upcoming weeks. Or if not from us, at least under our power of suggestion. You’ve probably heard that New Haven is introducing a new model in a new caliber in the fall. The rifle is called “The Westerner,” and it’s in the new belted.264 Winchester Magnum. The cartridge was developed with a lot of conversation from retail-rare for New Haven, I know! — and has terrific potential. It’s designed as a flat-shooting plains cartridge, perfect antelope or mulie medicine, meant for those long tries over the flat prairies or across the valley. It delivers about 1,680 pounds of muzzle energy at 300 yards, off an estimated drop of only 7 inches (200-yard zero). Muzzle velocity, in the factory load, will be about 3,000 feet per second. We heard from too many hunters who failed to connect at over 250 yards because they underestimated the drop in their.270 or.30-06s and hit nothing but dirt 50 feet in front of the target. Dirt, as you know, makes a pretty poor trophy.
Put a nice Unertl or Bausch amp; Lomb tube up top, and you’ve got a super hunting machine! To us, at least, it looks like a real winner, and believe me, the industry needs a winner! It fills a definite niche.
You’ll get one of the first.264 Westerners off the production line. I’ve asked them to select a nice piece of wood. Hard to believe anything coming from Big W with figure in the wood, but miracles do happen! Play with it as long as you want. If you want to return it, no problem; if you want to keep it, I’ll get you a wholesale invoice, and you can send a check at your leisure.
That’s the first surprise. The second two are also as per our suggestion, with New Haven’s heavy hand behind the tiller, so to speak. Roy Huntington will be sending you a set of his new.264 Winchester Magnum dies, and Bruce Hodgdon will be sending you a five-pound canister of their H4831, which looks like it should get even more range, velocity, and muzzle energy and less falloff when fully developed.
Naturally, what we’re looking for somewhere down the road is a column in your Guns amp; Ammo “Reloading” column, on finding the full potential in the new offering. I think if you play with loads and the Sierra or Nosler Partition.264 140-grain bullet, you’ll be impressed with what can be done.
By the way, Lon, this is a definite exclusive. We’re not sending similar kits to Warren or Jack. It’s yours and yours alone, because we know that Lon Scott has the market clout to launch a major success, where the others don’t. You can’t get Jack to shut up about his pet.270 anyway!
Sorry to send you off to the railway station for so many pickups, but I think you’ll find it was worth the effort.
Best,
Charlie
Charles Harris
Manager, Gun Department
Abercrombie amp; Fitch
Madison Avenue
New York, N.Y.
CWH: mlb
“Maybe we ought to switch to Starbucks,” said Nick. “This stuff is beginning to taste like swamp water.”
“I think I saw a snake in mine,” said Bob, putting down his cup of Seattle’s Best. Around them hummed suburban Dallas mall life, all of it at hyper-speed and lubricated by smiles, unction, and beauty in the paneled English Department milieu of the joint, with its fancy frappo, cappo, and whatever-else-cino machines, its pastry cabinets groaning with frilly sugared bombs. Mainly, it was moms in here, with the odd lonely salesguy on break; the servers all looked about twelve.
“Okay,” said Nick. “Let’s get to it. First off, I got a good team into Richard’s while he was having his Friday-night steak. They did the house top to bottom, came up with nothing. These guys can find anything. Plus, I’ve had a wire team on Richard, not every second of every day but enough to get a fair picture. Van parked down the way, different camouflage. Again, goddammit, nothing. No microwave transmissions to satellites, nothing. A little suspicious, if you ask me. He’s too clean.”
“Absence of evidence is not evidence,” Bob said.
“Hmm, where have I heard that before? Okay, that’s from my end. Now tell me about yours.”
Bob didn’t mention synesthesia, Sir Francis Galton, or colored numbers. He didn’t have enough. “I found a letter in New Jersey. It establishes that, yeah, Lon was sent a.264 Win Mag in 1960, first year of production. So the gun in the case could be his. No serial numbers, unfortunately, but it checks out as far as it can.”
“You think it’s legit?”
“That’s my feeling,” said Bob. “I spent another hour there. Obviously, I’m not a scientific document expert. But the paper was the same weight and shade as the others in the file, even accounting for aging. Typewriter was the same font, perfect to the slight darkness in the center of the small ‘e.’ The format was in accordance with other letters from Charlie Harris, including those to Jack O’Connor at Outdoor Life and Warren Page at Field amp; Stream. The diction felt right for about 1960. The shipping reference is right; he said ‘trips to the railway station.’ That’s because guns and powder couldn’t be shipped by common carrier in those days, meaning they couldn’t be delivered. You had to go to the Railway Express office at the train station and sign for the packages. And, Charlie Harris was the manager of the gun room. I found references to him all through the literature of the time. He sold Hemingway a batch of guns.”
Nick considered. “I don’t like it. All that may be true, but it’s within the reach of professional high-end forgers.”
“Maybe, but because that’s so it doesn’t mean this is forged.”
“Too bad you didn’t bring it with you.”
“I wanted to preserve the box, for comparison purposes. And I thought to go the lab route would take too much time. If and when, we can subpoena for it. I stashed it carefully in that mess.”
“I don’t like it, Bob. If it means you go alone to that estate, out of our swift-response zone, you could be dead and buried before we get choppers in. Help is minutes away when you need it in seconds.”
“I don’t like it either. But it seems to me we have to keep going on this line or cut bait.”
“What about we bust Marty and Richard for attempted fraud and third-degree ’em. As you say, they’re not tough guys; you know they’ll fold. Meanwhile, we give that letter the full nine yards in our doc lab. Marty and Richard roll over, we go to the next link up the chain, and he rolls over. If the letter’s forged, our forgery guys will know who did it, and we round him up and bang his head against the bars. He squeals. That’s how you bring a crime lord down.”
“Yeah, but a crime lord has property, a place in the community, investments, family, all of which make him more or less stuck in place. If Hugh’s alive, he has none of that, that we can find. We have no idea where in the world he is. He can disengage in a second, and he’s clever enough to have designed break-offs in his network so he can disappear from our reach instantly. We pick up Marty and Richard, he’s gone for good. Then next year or the year after, I catch a.338 Lapua in the ear while I’m riding spring fence, and that’s the end of that. We’re close. I know we’re close. Nobody has been this close. I feel him.”
“What are you getting?”
“It has to be Hugh. He’s old, cagey, smart. He’s been in the game a long time. He knows what he’s doing. He’s no psycho; everything is rational, objective-driven. He’s subtle, he’s witty; in a funny way, he’s honorable. We left his kids alone, he’s left my family alone. I don’t know why, but I trust him for that. Like his cousin Lon, he’s a decent man, except for the few seconds when he killed the thirty-fifth president of the United States.”
“It’s your ass, so it’s your call.”
“Then I go.”
“I’ll have people close by, chopper teams, observation-”
“No, uh-uh. If Hugh has people, they’ll see it and hit eject hard, and that means he’ll hit eject. It only works if I go in alone, unobserved, no teams, no air cover, no radio nets, no backup. If I need help, I’ll call the state cops.”
“Swagger, still crazy after all these years.”
“I’m not saying I’m not scared or that I think this is wise. I am, it’s not. I just don’t see any other way.”
“That’s what they said about Iwo Jima.”
“We won Iwo Jima. Look, here’s my plan. I’ll call Richard, tell him about the letter, have him contact Marty, and set up a date for next week. Then. . I go on vacation.”
“Do you have a time-share or something? A condo in Florida?”
“No. But I have to get away. By myself, somewhere quiet. I’ll pick it at the airport. I have a lot to think about.”
“You seem to have done a lot of thinking already.”
“Not enough. I have crap in my head that I can’t figure. There’s something called synesthesia involved, which reflects a mind glitch that sees certain letters or numbers in color. Niles was a synesthete, as they’re called.”
“What does that have to do with anything?”
“So was Nabokov. He saw letters in color. Niles had a connection to Nabokov through synesthesia, and I think that’s why he used it to construct his bogus ID for Hugh. It was an expression of his and Hugh’s love of Nabokov, and it represented the kind of cleverness Nabokov used. Niles saw nine as red. I’m guessing the fake name that Niles gave Hugh all those years ago reflects a color or a number, probably a variation on red or nine. I’m trying to work that angle.”
“It’s thin,” said Nick. “I mean, even knowing that it’s a color or a number, a red or a nine for some reason, what use is that without a suspect pool?”
“Oh, I’ve got a suspect pool,” said Bob. “It includes everyone currently alive on the planet Earth.”
“Good,” said Nick. “That’s encouraging.”
“Then there’s something about the Charlie Harris letter. Don’t know, but I’m getting a buzz. Everything’s perfect, as I told you, but I get this buzz. Got to figure that.”
“The Swagger buzz. Admissible in all state courts. I have complete confidence that you’ll get your man.”
“I’m sure I will too. After all, Humbert got Clare Quilty at the end.”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
“Another manhunt story. I’ll tell you later.”
Swagger!
It clawed me from unconsciousness. I awoke, as before, in a cold sweat, enfeebled, aged, overmatched. I tried to sort it out before my heart exploded and aneurism did finish me. I had directed Richard to work with a police artist to prepare a likeness of the “Jack Brophy” who had shown, possibly killed my driver, then disappeared in Dallas, and it took until that night, but. . could it be Swagger? No. Impossible. The odds were too distant. But I’d seen long odds cash in enough times not to see it as a possibility. I grabbed the drawing from my desk and bore down on it.
I had seen him, of course-that day in 1993 at the preliminary court hearing in New Orleans. I had sat behind the prosecutor’s table in gray herringbone and red bow tie. I looked like ol’ Perfesser Flibberty-Gibberty out of a Frank Capra movie, very much the Ivy paragon of diffident and eccentric genius. That was my style then, hopelessly tweedy of appearance, of mind.
I remembered: lanky, jeans, boots, some sort of cowboy jacket. For all my efforts, I couldn’t get a face. I had impressions, not images. I saw that stretched-out body, not accustomed to sitting, unsure how to arrange those legs. Wary-the word “wary” keeps coming to mind. He seemed to be watching everything evenly, without remarking, holding his cards tight to his chest, always calm, a kind of easy grace to his actions. It was easy to project that temper into a sniper, who’d need wariness, a gift for observation, patience, and could have nothing of the showy, boastful, immodest, or psychopathic about him. The work was too dangerous for show; it demanded contradictory gifts, the precision for equipment maintenance and the patience for detailed preparation, but also the imagination to project into space an enemy’s movement and predict where he might be; and beneath it all, the stubbornness to keep the imagination from inventing demons and letting panic take hold. Many men can be brave in batches, where sacrifice and support are the group norms; being brave on your own, out in Indian country, for hours and hours-that’s a trick.
So now, at 4:19 a.m., I looked at the likeness and racked my memory. Were they the same man?
I felt like Laurence Olivier’s Crassus in Spartacus, who learns with amazement that he’s seen Spartacus fight but can’t remember the details. I stared frantically at the rendering, trying to resolve it. Finally, I faxed it back through the layers of administration between me and the facilitators of my orders and required that the artist do his best to render the same face minus the twenty-odd years. I thought that might help. I also ordered the issue expedited.
The new version came the next day, and it did the trick.
There was no doubt: Bob Lee Swagger was hunting me, and if history was any guide, I wouldn’t survive that distinction.
Now I tried to imagine the fantastical circumstances that would bring him back in quest of me. How had it happened? What were the links, the whimsies, the chance connections that put him on my trail again, twenty years later, when I thought I was out of it? I couldn’t run an investigation for the simple reason that it would soon reveal itself to him, he would then know I knew, and the game would become infinitely more complicated. The first rule of my war against him was to prevent him from knowing I knew his identity. I did resolve that when it was over and I had him dead and buried, I would solve the mystery. It was that fascinating to me.
The first step was hard thinking: what could he know? Not what did he know, but what could he know, as a maximum? That would be our parameter for action. I had to apply the tenets of the New Criticism to my interpretation of his mind, to ruthlessly obliterate wishful thinking, daydreams, sentimentality about his nobility and heroics, his capacity for Hemingway’s classic grace under pressure, and think of him purely as an enemy who needed to be destroyed. I realized that he would come upon the “dead” Hugh Meachum sooner or later. He’d track me through Hugh.
Was there much on Hugh Meachum available? No; I’d been smart. No family pix, no glory wall, that Washington vanity, behind my desk, nothing written for the record. Moreover, the Buddings Institute of Foreign Policy, the feeble cover for me and many of my colleagues in Clandestine, was long gone and had left no records. A genius might tease out some information by tracking through real estate records to determine that the funding that staffed (if barely) the suite in the National Press Building for many years originated in Agency coffers, but I didn’t think that was the sort of work Swagger was capable of.
Then there was Agency culture; would he try to find survivors of Clandestine, men like me in their eighties, in hopes of turning up a memory of Hugh Meachum, poor old long-dead Hugh? Possibly they’d talk after a lifetime of being coached not to.
All that didn’t matter in the long run. Even if he discovered that Hugh had survived his own funeral, my new identity was secure; he would never know, and he could never locate me, while it was a matter of time before I located him. I had to like my odds in this fight.
I made decisions. Richard in Dallas had to stay put. It was probable that “Brophy” would try to contact him again, since he was the one possible link to me, whom he presumed was still alive. Brophy/Swagger wouldn’t be sure whether our man was an agent or simply someone we kept under observation and piggybacked our ops off of, so he’d be sly about it. But when it happened, the Dallas operative was to notify us immediately. He would be given a special number by which he would directly contact the unit I meant to set up. They would be able to hit the ground running, the object being to kill Swagger.
I knew I’d have to put together a first-rate kill team, preferably men with special-ops experience, SWAT or Delta, that level, at any rate, and I’d have to equip them with the latest toys, because those boys would as soon work with cool toys as make millions of dollars. I’d have to put a jet at their disposal, have all documents at the ready, so that they could be anywhere in the world in twenty-four hours.
The same unit would have an intelligence component too, the best people, well experienced, savvy manhunters; my mind turned to the Israelis, the world’s best at this sort of thing. They would be charged with running as discreet an investigation as possible into Swagger: what had he done the past twenty years, where did he live, how did he support himself, what were his operating patterns, his preferred methods of travel and communication, his ties to a logistics base (did he have access to sophisticated documents, photos, forgeries?), what were his technical capacities, who were his allies, his relatives, his children, how was he vulnerable, whom would he die for, whom would he kill for? If possible, I wanted to leave family out of it; if he was married and had kids, I hoped I had the strength of character to keep them off the board. After all, he had not come after mine and was not interested, as far as I had any knowledge, in my three sons or their wives and children. That was how I hoped to keep it.
I went back to bed, humming with excitement. I have to say, it was good to be back in the game. Retirement, even in a style of haute billionaire decadence, didn’t appeal to me that much. This was going to be fun.
Within a month, I was set up. My intelligence team was headed by Colonel —, formerly of Mossad, with a reputation for prying Arab terrorists out of the gutters of casbahs all over the Middle East. He was assisted by Captain — and Sergeant —, also Israeli manhunters, specialists in seeing tracks where there were none, reading signs, making brilliant deductions, and with the patience of hawks high in the air, planning and executing the best in assassinations. Their specialty was the helicopter-wire-driven missile hit, and they could put a bird through any window in the world if they had to. It took a pretty penny to dissuade them from their duty stations in the Tel Aviv defense complex and relocate them to a command bunker I had prepared. Fortunately, I had several pretty pennies at my disposal.
I secured a landing site and training ground in New Mexico and there located my kill team. These were magnificent men. Two were ex-SEALs, one ex-Special Forces. All had survived, even flourished, during much time in both war zones. They were under the leadership of a major from 42 Commando Royal Marines, where he’d run a close-combat troop. He had more combat time than the others combined. The Brit was one of those tough guys who, by reputation, would not stop coming; he had been shot in the head, laughed it off, and killed the fanatic who shot him. Who was the real fanatic? I leave it to you. All commanded another pretty penny, but all-I personally vetted them-had sterling reputations. They spent their mornings in brutal physical workouts to keep themselves in top shape, and in the afternoon, they worked on devious tactical live-fire exercises. They were probably the best close-quarter battle unit in the world, and they loved the unlimited ammunition budget even more than the ample pennies I deposited into their accounts on a regular basis.
Close by them, in a rather too nice condo in Albuquerque, I had my forgery unit. This was basically a man-wife team who had provided product to all the major Western intelligence agencies. They cost a fortune too, and I must say, they were the only ones I resented, because while the killers were shooting and practicing jiujitsu or Bruce Lee kung fu or whatever, and the hunters were locked in cyberspace, penetrating databases, monitoring police reports, and accessing satellite data, Mr. and Mrs. Jones, as I called them, spent their time on the golf course or in the malls, living a grand old life at my expense. Such loafers! That’s the price of talent. I knew that I could send them a BlackBerry alert, and within eight hours, they could produce identification documents, passports, top-secret clearances, the whole gamut of access media that would get my killers in anywhere in the world, except perhaps North Korea, and I bet they could do North Korea in sixteen hours. Meanwhile, they shopped and golfed.
We waited, we waited, we waited, life went on, pleasant but more expensive than before; I encouraged the government to up the budget for and the manpower of the special battalion responsible for security in my neck of the woods, and still we waited and waited. I spent five thousand dollars a day on ammunition, I lived at the end of an umbilical cord to my communications, and finally. .
Moscow!
Do you need details? I am too weary to note them now, and besides, what difference does it make? Final score: S amp;S: 5, the Izzie boys: 0.
But I knew: the real hunt was just beginning.