The Third Bullet (60 page)

Nevertheless, he was a formidable opponent. And he was getting closer and closer. Could he win? I honestly didn’t see how, as I knew who he was, and there was an impenetrable wall between who I had been and who I was now. Even if he determined, as he was sure to do, that Hugh’s death was fiction, I had removed all traces from my records of who I might become. Anybody who knew me then was dead; only their children survived, and we of the Agency did not, as a rule, share with our children.

I knew this: he had to return to Texas.

The satellite phone rang at 5:55 p.m. my time.

“Yes?”

“He’s back in Dallas.”

“Richard, he approached you?”

“Out of nowhere. Like nothing had happened. I was sitting in McDonald’s a few minutes ago, eating my usual Egg McMuffin, and suddenly—there he was.”

Richard continued with his report, the upshot being that Swagger was back in town, as I had anticipated, and was playing Richard again.

“How did you leave it?” I asked after hearing the nuts and bolts of what had happened to Brophy, where his researches had taken him, where he wanted to go now.

“I’m going to look into the possibilities he’s interested in. He wants me to be discreet, because of the value of his ‘intellectual property.’ He’s afraid of a claim jumper or someone beating him to the punch. So he’ll contact me in a couple of days.”

“Do you know where he’s staying?”

“No. He made a joke about that. If I don’t know where he’s staying and I’m captured and tortured, I can’t give him up. Ha, ha. Not funny, in
my opinion, but I laughed anyhow. He said it’s better if he finds me than the other way around. Just protecting his intellectual property.”

“Excellent, Richard. Do go ahead and help him. Don’t mention Marty Adams until you’ve gotten him what he wants. Don’t force it; it’s an afterthought, not a main point. If he doesn’t respond, don’t mention it again. He’s paying attention, even if he pretends he’s not. He’s mentally recording everything you say and will spend hours going over it. He’ll look into Marty, sniff, paw, howl a little, head up one trail, come back, circle around, and return. If he senses you’re trying to force him in a direction, he’ll be suspicious of you.”

“Sir, are you the type who kills people if they fail?”

“No, Richard. You will be tortured exhaustively, but not killed.”

“Thank you, sir.”

I will spare us all the tedium of close reporting on the game. I will say only that its one amusement was the image of Richard, a fat lake trout with two hooks in his jaw, being played by two expert anglers. Poor Richard, trying to please me and trying to please the mysterious, slippery Brophy, with his far-seeing eye and almost supernatural gift for anticipation.

On the fourth meet, I felt that Richard was confident enough to work the Adams angle and authorized him to do so. He reported that Swagger reacted with indignity, even anger, but in the end seemed to warm to the idea of a collaboration. His final instructions: “Hold off a bit. Let me look into this guy. I’m not a writer, I’m an engineer. Maybe he could help me, I could help him. But goddammit, don’t tell him no more about me!”

He checked into Marty through the auspices of the FBI. Our computer wizards determined that another deep data search was done on Marty Adams, and circumspect inquiries were made in the publishing world and the high-end gun-sales world and so forth and so on, and we knew that they’d come back positive, since we had interceded before any stain on Marty’s honor could be recorded (just barely; he’d left many unsatisfied customers, so it was only a matter of time).

In week four, we got the news: our two fictions would meet. Jack Brophy and Marty Adams, each not who they said they were, each with a different agenda, but each eager to continue the charade.

It seemed to go well. Marty, as anticipated and confirmed by Richard, was a blowhard autodidact, and he bored both Richard and Swagger out of their socks with his various pontifications. In the end, Swagger/Brophy was intrigued enough to agree to another meeting. Clearly, his interest had been snagged, particularly by the mysterious “thing” that Marty had promised would tie a ribbon around the case.

The wait. I am required to show that my craft discipline hasn’t eroded over the years. It wasn’t easy, but enough was happening to keep me busy, and for nights, I had Viagra, Shizuka, and forties musicals and melodrama. The Israelis, monitoring through their various cyber-penetrations, reported a more thorough hunt for Marty Adams particulars and now a network of field interviews by anonymous young men. Even Marty Adams’s agent was interviewed, seemingly on another matter, but the well-trained investigator managed to divert focus to Marty and spent most of the time unearthing details on him.

I realized the time was appropriate to initiate the tactical phase. The famous Meachum luck provided that Marty’s inheritance included an estate in western Connecticut, the last remaining relic of the fortune that his father lost trying to sell high-quality .22 target pistols to a country gone mad on fast draw and mock combat shooting in the fifties and sixties. The place, about a hundred miles outside Hartford, was hard against a scut of mountains in the low northeastern configuration, hills with trees to anybody who’s seen real mountains. On the property was a decaying house, and Marty’s taxes were in arrears, so we paid them off (ouch!) to preclude municipal interest. It wasn’t gated or fenced or up to modern security requirements, but it was remote from neighbors, and Marty retired there to write and shoot often enough that gunshots didn’t necessarily cause the police to drop by. It was also nice that he had
a Class III license, so the sound of full automatic weapons, if heard, was not another police signal.

I had an engineering firm discreetly map the place, as I had an aerial photographer record its nuances from his Cessna. This documentation I provided my shooters in New Mexico. I asked them to prepare a plan from the documents, then to journey up there one at a time, infiltrate the property, and spend a few days exploring it and learning the land. They were all equipped with digital cameras for close-ups on the cover-versus-concealment issue, for the angles of fire, for whatever other tactical concerns came up.

The plan was sound. The goal was to get him under all four guns, run them hard to empty, and take him out in one decisive assault. Marty and Richard, if there, might fall in the fusillade. I decided that was an acceptable price to pay, although I never told them that, as I never told Marty about the incursions on his property and my plans for the final moments. He would survive or not, depending on his luck. But he was strictly collateral.

There was some debate as to timing. I ultimately decided on hitting him after he’d had his conversation with Marty and examined the unopened case and was on the road out of the place. The reason was that coming in, he’d be wary, he’d have a tiny worry that it was an ambush, and all his senses would be extra-sharp. He’d be volatile, prickly, at high combat readiness. He might be armed. If Richard was with him, that could tangle things as well. So we’d let him come in, and once he saw the package and realized its significance and gamed out what it explained and what it made possible and examined it closely (without opening), and looked at Marty’s X-rays of it, once he’d swallowed that, he’d be far more relaxed and at the same time distracted. His mind would be going a hundred miles an hour; he’d be in a mode of triumph because he’d found the leverage at last to prove the conspiracy, get the case reopened, and loose the dogs of law enforcement on Hugh Meachum and begin the international manhunt that would shake that villain out of the trees, no matter where the trees were.

The hit would go down a quarter of a mile out of Marty’s rambling wreck of a house, on a dirt road with a 33-degree angle and no maneuverability due to the dense trees and sharp angles on either side. If he should escape—doubtful, given the firepower—there was only one way to run, and that was up a low Connecticut foothill where the trees gave out. He’d find himself on Robert Jordan’s hilltop in Spain—no, Jordan was at the bridge, not the hilltop, who was at the hilltop?—anyway, that person’s hilltop in Spain, unarmed, with only a few low stones as the four best operators in the world moved in. El Sordo, by the way, was the fellow on the hilltop. El Sordo didn’t make it off of his, and neither would Swagger.

The firepower and accessories (someone, possibly Anna Wintour, said: “It’s all about the accessories”): the boys had decided to go with deep ghillie camouflage and to infiltrate the property two days in advance. There’d be no movement on the place the day before, and to any observer, casual or professional, no sign, no trace, no indication of penetration. If they had to move quickly, the boys would shuck the ghillies and revert to digital-camouflage battle tunics and trousers. Faces would be blackened or painted green-brown (for some reason, these commando types love the touch of the painted face!). Hatwear: either the ubiquitous black wool watch cap or a suitably dappled boonie cap. Fashion is so important to high-end commandos, and I wanted mine to be up to Ms. Wintour’s standards.

As for the guns, the boys would each have as primary ambush weapon the MK48 light machine gun that had happily mowed its way across Iraq. This superb piece of combat engineering was ultra-reliable, even in the sand, and spat out its deliveries at a rate of about seven hundred rounds a minute of 7.62 mm ammunition. It was beloved by high-speed operators. The ammo, slung underneath the gun body in a hundred-round belt rolled into a canvas-wrapped container, would be standard military ball, for penetrating the body of the auto. Anybody inside that vehicle would be Bonnie-and-Clyded in the first few seconds. If, by some odd trick, Swagger survived the initial hose-down and headed up the hill, the
fellows would dump their MK48s and default to the latest AR platform, the M-6 IC from LWRC on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, accessorized with Eotech hologram sights, LaRue flexible 3X magnifiers, and at least ten H-K mags with twenty-nine rounds of Black Hills 77-grain hollowpoint. And of course—nothing is too good for my boys—each would carry a Wilson CQB .45 ACP and a Randall knife. I know all this because I saw the invoices, and it added up to Pretty Penny no. 2,318,314. Too bad these fellows couldn’t have been deployed against a meaningful national target instead of my need to get another hundred or so blow jobs from Shizuka before the reaper came calling on me, but there you have it.

As far as the extract was concerned, I would have a helicopter in orbit on the outskirts of the estate. One of the pilot’s duties was to monitor law enforcement channels, to see if the gunfire attracted any undue attention. If squad cars were dispatched from the state police barracks, he’d notify the ground team, swoop in, and evac. If not, he’d wait until they’d policed the killing ground, removing and disposing of the brass and the body and that load. Finally, I’d made disposition that he had FLIR aboard, forward-looking infrared technology, so that if, by a one-in-a-million chance, Swagger got into the brush, the chopper could nose him out via his heat signature and direct the kill team to him, again in a few minutes.

Meanwhile, back in the real world, the process ground slowly on. Swagger leaped at the rifle lure, as I anticipated, but insisted that he first establish the provenance, and Marty skillfully guided him to the Abercrombie & Fitch records in Rutherford, which we had penetrated and into which we had inserted a superb forgery establishing ownership. When Swagger saw that, he would be hooked through the gills! He would insist on being allowed to examine it, and a date would be set for his trip to Connecticut. That was it. No big deal. Swagger was so provoked by the rifle case that all other precautions were irrelevant. That was the whole point of the multimillion-dollar operation, and it was accomplished in a split second, as an afterthought.

I had him.

“Telling me I got to beware”

R
ichard made all the arrangements. Bob met him at Dallas/Fort Worth International a week later, and the two flew direct to Boston, then caught an American Eagle puddle jumper to Hartford, where Richard had booked two rooms in the airport Marriott. Dinner in a local steak house.