Point of Impact (15 page)

And so, when Nick picked Howard D. Utey up at the New Orleans airport, it wasn’t a particularly tense or awkward thing. They both understood.

Howard stood on the curb outside the American terminal and waved when he saw Nick in the gray government
Ford. He even had a little smile as he ducked to come in, tossing his bag in the backseat.

“Hi, Nick. Boy, you’re looking great. Still keeping that hair, huh?”

“That’s right, Howard. It just won’t fall out, I don’t know why.”

“Nick, I was sorry to hear about Myra. Was she in any pain at the end?”

“No. She’d been in a coma for a long time. She just stopped breathing. It wasn’t a hard end. She had a hard life but she had an easy end.”

“Well, thank God for small and tender mercies.”

“I know, Howard,” said Nick, dully, concentrating on not calling him Howdy, though it occasionally happened, and Utey, who knew his nickname well, always pretended not to notice.

Howdy Duty was quite a small man, actually, small and ferrety, but not stupid or slow. He had simply given himself totally to the Bureau, and had set about to rise with the patience and the fury of a poor boy. He managed it with certain political gifts, to be sure; but also by working as hard as it was possible to work.

“They still call me ‘Howdy Duty,’ Nick?”

“I’m afraid they do, Howard,” said Nick as they drove in from the airport.

“Well, that’s all right, as long as it’s behind my back, and as long as I never hear that it’s gotten to Secret Service, Nick. That I would have to regard as an act of treachery, not to me personally, but to the Bureau as a whole. You know, everybody here likes you, Nick—everybody
everywhere
likes you, that’s one of your gifts—and it’d do everybody a lot of good if you’d pass that information around. I know that informally passed information is sometimes more efficiently communicated than office memos. Fair enough?”

“Yes, Howard,” said Nick. That was Howard. He established
the rules and played by them—unless it suited his purposes to change them.

“Now, Nick, a lot of what we’ll be doing in the next few weeks is liaison, which again is why it’s great to have you on the team. You have a wonderful gift for getting along with people. Don’t think it hasn’t been noticed. And you’ll need all your affability, all right? All of it. Every bit.”

“Sure, Howard. So what’m I going to be doing? I heard the pres—”

“That’s right, Nick. On March first, the president will be flying down from Washington in the morning for a speech and presentation in downtown New Orleans. He’s going to be giving Archbishop Jorge Roberto Lopez the Freedom Medal—you know, the Archbishop of Salvador who won the Nobel Peace Prize?”

Nick knew, of course. Archbishop Roberto Lopez was a validated Great Man, the heir to the martyred Archbishop Oscar Romero; he had worked tirelessly at getting the two sides in that bitter war, exacerbated so terribly of late by the Panther Battalion massacre, to talk.

Nick remembered the news footage: Bishop Roberto Lopez walking among the dead children by the riverbank in his humble black cloth with a humble silver cross about his neck, his eyes wracked with tears behind the wire-frame glasses. A poet, an expert on medieval Latin alchemy, a complete apolitical, who had the love in his heart to tell NBC, “I do not hate the men who did this. I love them and I forgive them. To hate them and to demand their punishment is to guarantee that such horror will be perpetuated.”

“The president’s popularity has slipped a bit since the war, Nick. I think he wants to get on the Bishop Roberto Lopez bandwagon. It certainly won’t do him any harm.”

“Maybe he just admires the guy,” said Nick. “A lot of people do.”

“Anyway, I know you’re not aware of this down here, you know”—he meant, Nick knew, at
your
level—“but recently relations between the Bureau and the Secret Service have not been very friendly. In Chicago three months ago, we ran into a problem of intersecting investigations—counterfeit money drew Treasury in and we were working it from an organized crime standpoint, and somehow we never knew the other was there. An arrest sequence got confused and one of our people shot one of theirs. Didn’t kill him, and they say he’ll probably be on his feet in six months or so, but it left bad feelings.”

Nick shook his head. It sure as hell must have. No one really liked working with the Secret Service, particularly on security details, where the guys in the sunglasses were absolute pricks, and by informal fiat took command of any situation. Feelings always were rubbed raw; no ten-year Bureau man liked being told what to do by a twenty-three-year-old boy in shades with an earpiece, a lapel pin, and an Uzi in a briefcase. And yet that’s the way it always happened.

“It’s the same drill, Nick, you know it. Secret Service will provide the manpower and the close-up security; they’ll run their own security investigations; but we’re there to back them up, to run interference with the locals with them, and to handle any investigative work that won’t fit into their time frames.”

To be their gofers, Nick thought bleakly.

“Now the director is adamant,” Howdy continued. “We’ve got some fence-mending to do. And that’s our job. Fence-mending. You and I, Nick, we are the fence menders. Through you, I’ll be turning over the resources of our New Orleans office to Secret Service; in turn, we’re to be granted a bit of security authority ourselves
and indeed, we’ll be part of the operation on the day Flashlight arrives. It’s a good chance, Nick; it’s something I thought you’d enjoy, and if it goes well, I’ll certainly mention you prominently in the reports. You’ll have a great deal of latitude too; the freedom to do what best you can do. Who knows? Things can change. This might just get you out of your rut.”

“Sure, Howard. I appreciate the chance.”

But Nick knew Howard would be on him like a cheap cologne; that was Howard’s way, that was the Bureau’s way; it had happened in Tulsa; it was happening now.

“So, Nick, you’ve got a clean desk? You’re ready to swing away? Hap Fencl said you’d come to me with nothing hanging over you. Is that right?”

“More or less. I’ve got this one little thing going, a murder that was probably facilitated by some high-tech military equipment. You know, it’s funny, the guy was also Salva—”

“Don’t we turn here?”

They had just sailed by a sign that pointed to downtown off a left-hand turn.

“Huh?”

“I’m staying at the Hilton. Weren’t we supposed to turn here?”

“Oh, uh, no, Howard, not that way. That’d get you there. But this time of day, it’s faster to stay on Sixty-one, then cut over to Ninety. See?”

“Oh, all right. It’s your town. But I would have turned there,” Howdy Duty said. He didn’t mean to sound displeased, Nick thought; but he did anyway.

In each of the four cities, he presented the same phenomenon: a tall, lanky man in boots and a blue denim shirt, pressed and buttoned to the top. He wore a down-filled field coat, suede Tony Lamas and his black, wide Stetson but in Baltimore he felt out of place with the hat and left it in his room.

In each city he checked into a middle-range downtown hotel after taking a cab in from the airport; he ate modestly and never drank and when he wasn’t in his room, studying his maps, he discreetly toured the shooting sites, taking notes, walking off the distances, watching the fall of the light and the way the shadow angles changed as the sun moved across the sky; feeling the temperature, the push of the prevailing winds, looking at the traffic patterns
in and out, at the theaters or stages where the president would be speaking when the shot was to be fired; he walked endlessly around the buildings, into their lobbies, but he never pressed his luck, and made no attempt to get into places where he was not permitted. His only eccentricity most people mistook for an elaborate camera. In fact, it was a Barr & Stroud prismatic optical rangefinder, with two lenses eighty centimeters apart. It enabled him to measure distances with unerring accuracy.

In each city, he learned things no map or guidebook could tell him. He discovered small discrepancies in the elevation grids of the Cincinnati hills, not much, but just enough to throw a shooter off. He’d be higher than he thought he was and his bullet’s trajectory therefore more subject to the pull of gravity.

In Baltimore, he noted the persistence of wind off the harbor; he’d never associated Baltimore with wind at all and the information irritated him. The guidebooks never said a damned thing about it, but the gulls hanging like helicopter gunships over a burning village told the story. He imagined a bullet riding those winds, drifting this way and that in their grasp, perhaps true to its aim, perhaps not.

In Washington, he saw the trees. The shot indicated in the picture of the Soviet shooting mock-up would have to pass through trees. Admittedly, this time of year the visibility was fairly good. But Bob thought the problem was a bullet-deflecting sprig of limb; it would be like firing through a labyrinth, and even the smallest of obstructions could send a heavy-caliber bullet moving at close to three thousand feet per second spinning off in the craziest ways.

Then, too, in Washington the shooting platforms were exceedingly iffy; Justice was closest but the angle into
the back lawn of the White House was extreme, and if he were shooting from there—about 450 yards—T. Solaratov would have a quarter profile as a target, always the hardest angle into major body structures, a devilishly hard shot, though Bob had dropped a few that way. Almost a full mile out, from the Department of Agriculture, the sniper would have a much wider target, and presumably a much stabler one, as bodies don’t move laterally during speeches nearly so much as they moved up and back. Still … shooting through trees a mile out from atop a government building—this said nothing of the extraordinary deception operation that would have to be mounted to get him in and out—seemed the longest of long shots, purely from a technical point of view.

New Orleans was a Southern city, which he appreciated; the air was balmy, the breezes mild. Of all the cities, he liked it the best, and quickly found that only a sliver of it was the fabled block or so of Bourbon Street where all the movies were filmed. The place itself had a sleepy, nondescript way to it and the black people still carried themselves with that elegant dignity that is only possible in the true South.

But the problem with New Orleans was the air, which was heavy with the tang of salt water and the acrid, dense musk that miles of mushy swamp produced. It was almost a jungle climate, and though it could be shot through with accuracy—Bob had done it, after all—it produced the sort of accuracy warpage that would have to be planned for and practiced in. This was most interesting; if they were going to go for a .50 caliber shot a mile out in New Orleans, it occurred to Bob that they’d almost have to build themselves a mile of range here, because each swampy ecosystem has its own peculiar climate, depending on the density of the salt water, the
gassiness of the swamp, the prevailing winds. You couldn’t prep a New Orleans shot in Iraq or even Russia, except in its most inconsequential aspects; you’d have to do it over a period of days in a period of weather conditions to see what hob the moisture would play on the bullet.

Might be interesting to check out, he thought.

His travels finished after ten long days on the road, Bob flew back to Arkansas and returned to his trailer. Again, it was as he left it, unentered; again, Mike’s slobbery love greeted him and he took some time to work with the dog, to pet him and make him feel wanted, to rub those velvety ears. You didn’t want to spoil a creature with too much attention, but Mike had such need it moved Bob. It was the longest time he’d ever been away from the dog; the dumb love poured up to him from the eyes and the hot breath. Its paws were flung upon him as Mike went nuts in bliss.

“Hey, boy, your old man’s back,” he said, again surprising himself with a kind of laugh. Truth was, he felt pretty damned good. He’d been in The World, tested himself against it, and come back in one piece, not destroyed. The work was fascinating and what he’d found pleased him; he was eager to get on with the next bit.

He went to the icebox, found some chili frozen in a square like a brick, and set it to warming on the stove; then he showered quickly, changed into clean jeans and shirt and boots. Then he took Mike for a good four-mile walk. By the time he was back, the stuff was hot and red, as he liked it. He ate it quickly and economically, with large glasses of iced tea, only momentarily missing the beer that had once been his chief sensual pleasure with hot food.

Then, though tired, he felt nourished. He went over to a typewriter that had been in the family since his
grandfather was sheriff of Polk County back in the twenties, and began very slowly and carefully to write.

Bob always surprised people with his literacy; they expected an ex-Marine gunnery sergeant from Arkansas to be a complete fool when it came to letters, not knowing, say, capitals from small letters, or what a paragraph was about, or the difference between a period and a colon or the meaning of that great puzzler, the apostrophe. But he knew all that; more, he knew he had a small, quiet gift for expressing himself clearly and it always pleased him to do so. And he did so now.

He wrote a twenty-two-page document explaining his analysis of the four shooting sites and his prediction of T. Solaratov’s preferences. He knew, of course, where he’d shoot from himself; it scared him a little, because he saw how easy it would be, how in spite of all the advances since 1963, how despite the extent to which everyone had entered the era of maximum paranoia and security, it was still nearly impossible to stop a man with a rifle and the will and the skill to use it.

It was not an eloquent document, but it was direct, after the military fashion.