Time to Hunt (55 page)

He watched him; the young man accepted the attentions he had earned somewhat passively and seemed not to respond to them with a great deal of enthusiasm. He accepted the embraces of colleagues and professors and administrators, but after a while—surprisingly quickly, as a matter of fact—he was alone. He took off his cap and hung his gown over his-arm to reveal a nondescript, almost shabby suit, and began to leave. He had, in fact, the look of a loner, the boy who’s ever so rarely at the center but prefers to blur through the margins of any situation, is uncomfortable with eye contact or attempts at intimacy, and will lose himself readily enough in the arcane, be it quantum physics, Dungeons & Dragons or sniper warfare. It was a quality of melancholy. Bob intercepted him.

“Say there,” he said, “just wanted to tell you that was a damned nice little talk you gave there.”

The boy was not so mature that he didn’t appreciate a compliment, so an unguarded smile crossed his face.

“Thanks,” he said.

“What’s next for you?”

“Oh, the prize thing is an automatic year at Oxford as a research fellow. I leave for England tomorrow. Very exciting. They have a good department, lots of provocative
people. I’m looking forward to it. Say—excuse me, I didn’t catch your name.”

“Swagger,” Bob said.

“Oh, well, it’s nice to talk to you, Mr. Swagger. I’ve, uh, got to be going now. Thanks again, I—”

“Actually, it’s not just coincidence, me running into you. It took some digging to find you.”

The young man’s eyes narrowed with hostility.

“I don’t give interviews if this is some press thing. I have nothing to say.”

“Well, see, the funny thing is, I ain’t here about you. I’m here about your dad.”

The boy nodded, swallowed involuntarily.

“My father’s been dead since 1971.”

“I know that,” said Bob.

“What is this? Are you a cop or anything?”

“Not at all.”

“A writer? Listen, I’m sorry, the last two times I gave interviews to writers, they didn’t even
use
the stuff, so why should I waste my—”

“No, I ain’t a writer. Fact is, I pretty much hate writers. They always get it wrong. I never encountered a profession that got more wrong than being a writer. Anyhow, I’m just a former Marine. And your dad’s death is mixed up in some business that just won’t go away.”

“More on the great Trig Carter, eh? The great Trig Carter, hero of the left, who sacrificed his life to stop the war in Vietnam? Everybody remembers him. There’ll probably be a movie one of these days. This fucking country, how can they worship a prick like him? He was a killer. He blew my father to little pieces, and crushed him under a hundred tons of rubble. And nobody gives a fuck. They think Trig is the big hero, the victim, the martyr, because he came from a long line of Protestant swine and sold out to anybody that would have him.”

But then his bitterness vanished.

“Look, this isn’t doing any good. I never knew my father;

I was less than a year old when he was killed. What difference does it make?”

“Well,” said Swagger, “maybe it still makes a little. See, I was struck by the same thing as I looked into this. There ain’t nothing about your father nowhere. Excuse my grammar, I never had a fancy education.”

“Overrated, believe me.”

“I do believe you on that one. Anyhow, he’s the mystery man in this affair. Nobody wants to know, nobody’s interested.”

“Why is this of interest to you? Who cares?”

“I care. Maybe your father wasn’t the poor guy in the wrong place at the wrong time, like everybody says. Maybe he was more important than people think. That’s a possibility I’m looking at. And maybe the folks who pulled the strings are still around. And maybe I’m interested in looking into this and maybe I’m the only man who cares about your dad—”

“My mother was a saint, by the way. She taught, tutored, worked like hell to give me the chances I had. She died my freshman year at Harvard.”

“I’m very sorry. You were a lucky young man, though, who had parents who cared and sacrificed.”

“Yes, I was. So you think—you have some conspiracy theory about my father? Do you have a radio show or something?”

“No, sir. I’m not in this for the money. I’m just a Marine trying to get some old business straightened out. Believe it or not, it connects with the death of still another member of that generation, a boy who died in Vietnam. That was another great loss for his family and our country.”

“Who are you?”

“I was with that boy when he died. May seventh, 1972. He bled out in my arms. This is something I been working on a long time.”

“Urn,” said the boy.

“Look, I know you’re busy. You must be. But I was
hoping you’d have a cup of coffee with me. I’d like to talk about your dad. I want to know about him.”

“He was quite a guy,” the boy said. “Or so I hear.” He looked at his watch. “Hell, why not? I have nothing else to do.”

B
onson was debriefing the team in the Rossyln safe house. It was not a happy time.

“I
warned
you he was good. You people were supposed to be the best. What the hell went on?”

“He
was
good. He was professional. He read us, burned us and turned us when it suited him,” came the answer. “Sometimes people are just too good and they can do that to you. That’s all.”

“All right, let’s go through it again, very carefully.”

For what seemed the tenth time, the team narrated their one day of adventures with Bob Lee Swagger, where he’d been, what they’d learned, how indifferent to them he seemed, how swiftly and effectively he had slipped them.

Bonson listened carefully.

“Usually there’s a moment,” one of the ex-FBI agents said, “when you can tell you’ve been burned. There was nothing like that this time. He just disappeared.”

“I figure he made it out back, cut through the neighborhood behind us and called a cab from another little shopping center about a mile away. Or maybe he went up to the roof and waited until nightfall and slipped away.”

“You didn’t see him interact with anybody?”

“Nobody.”

“He had no contacts?”

“He made those phone calls.”

“We did get that, sir.”

The agents had written down the numbers of the phone booths and through them tracked the destinations of the calls, which turned out to be the American embassy in London, first the general number, and the next day the office of the Marine NCOIC of the embassy guard.

“We could have inquiries made.”

“No, no, I know what he was asking about. He’s very smart, this guy. He looks like Clint Eastwood and talks like Gomer Pyle and yet he’s got a natural gift for this sort of thing. He’s very—”

It was at this time an earnest young man entered the room.

“Commander Bonson,” he said, “Sierra-Bravo-Four is on the phone.”

Bonson looked about himself, stunned, then took the phone and waited for the switchboard to route it to him.

“Bonson.”

“Sierra-Bravo-Four here,” he heard Swagger’s voice.

“Where the hell are you?”

“You didn’t tell me about the baby-sitters.”

“It’s for your own good.”

“I work alone. I made that clear, Bonson.”

“We don’t do it that way anymore. You have to come in. You have to come under control. It’s the only way I can help you.”

“I need some questions answered.”

“Where are you? I can have you picked up in an hour.”

There was a pause.

“I’m outside, asshole.”

“What?”

“I said, I’m outside, with a cellular I picked up at the Kmart a few minutes ago.”

“How did—”

There was a clang as something hit the window.

“I just threw a rock at your window, asshole. Good thing it wasn’t an RPG; you wouldn’t last long in a war, asshole. I rented another car and followed the baby-sitters you had staking out
my
car back to your place. Now, let me in and let’s start talking.”

S
wagger came in, past the team whom he had so adroitly outmanaged.

“All right, people, get out of here. I’ll talk to him.”

“Do you need security, Commander?” said an ex-state cop, correctly reading the anger in Bob’s body.

“No. He’ll see reason. He knows this isn’t a pissing contest between him and this team, right, Swagger?”

“You just answer my questions and we’ll see what’s what.”

The men and women he had vanquished slid out of the room and then Bonson took him into another one, neatly set up as an operational HQ with computer terminals and phone banks. A few technicians worked the consoles.

“Okay, everybody on break,” Bonson called.

They too left. Bob and Bonson sat down on a beat-up sofa.

“I got the name of your Russian.”

“All right,” said Bonson.

“His name was Robert Fitzpatrick; he was affiliated with GRU, according to the Brits. But they don’t have nothing on him, what he was up to.”

“Swagger, good. Damn, you are an operator. I’m impressed. So what did you do with this? Where did you go?”

“You’ll find out when I put it all together, which I ain’t done yet, but I have some ideas. What have y’all got on this guy? I need to find out who he was or is, what became of him, what this is all about. He had the Brits buffaloed. They only found out he was operating in their country after he was long gone.”

“Fitzpatrick,” said Bonson. “Fitzpatrick was a recruiter. That was his specialty. He was one of those seductive, smooth presences who just gulled people into doing what he wanted, and they never, ever knew he was persuading them. You see, that’s what’s interesting about him. I don’t think Trig was his only project. I think he may have recruited others, and whatever his business with Trig was, it wasn’t the main reason he came to the United States.”

“What was he doing?”

“He was recruiting a mole.”

“Man,” said Bob, “this shit is getting fucked up. Secret-agent crap, like some paperback novel. I do not want to be a part of this shit. My mind don’t work that way.”

“Nevertheless, that was his great gift, his special talent. We know a little more about him than the Brits—and the timing works out right.”

“What do you mean?”

“For the past twenty years, the Agency has been in a curious down cycle. It seems to have had an enormous fund of bad luck. Every once in a while we smoke somebody out. In the early eighties, there was a guy named Yost Ver Steeg. A little later there was Robert Howard. Early in the nineties, we finally caught onto Aldrich Ames. And we think, well, that’s it, we’re clean at last. But somehow it never quite pans out that way. It never does. We’re always a little behind, a little slow, a little off. They’re always a little ahead of us. Even after the breakup, they’ve stayed strangely ahead of us. I’m convinced he’s here. I can
feel
him. I can
smell
him. He’s someone you’d never believe, someone totally secure. He’s not in it for the money; he’s not so active he’s obvious. But he’s here, I know it, goddammit, and I will catch him. And I know this goddamn ‘Fitzpatrick’ recruited him in the year 1971 when he was in this country. And, goddammit, I just missed him that year. I was a couple of hours slow, because your pal Fenn wouldn’t roll over for me.”

“So what happened to Fitzpatrick?”

“Disappeared. Gone. We have no idea. He was never serviced out of an embassy, never had a cut-out, any of the classic ploys of the craft. We never cut into his phone network. He was entirely a singleton. We don’t know who serviced him. We don’t even know what he looks like. We never got a photo. But it is provocative that suddenly all this is active again. Why would that be? Your picture goes in the paper and suddenly they’re out to kill you?”

“But my picture has been in the paper before. It’s
been on the cover of
Time
and
Newsweek
. They couldn’t miss that. So what’s different this time?”

“That’s a great question, Sergeant. I can’t answer it. I even have a team of analysts working on it back at Langley and so far they have come up with nothing. It makes no sense. And to make it more complicated, Fitzpatrick may not even be working for the Russians, or for the old Soviet communist regime, which is still there, believe me. He may be working against it now. It’s a tough call, I’ll tell you, but I guarantee it’s simple underneath. Mole. Penetration of the Agency. The notification of your existence, something coming active over there, your elimination to prevent—what? I don’t know.”

Something didn’t quite add up. There was some little thing here that didn’t connect.

“You look puzzled,” said Bonson.

“I can’t figure it out,” said Bob. “I’m getting a little alarm. Don’t know what it is. Something you said—”

Photograph
.

“You don’t know what Fitzpatrick looks like?”

“No. No photos. That’s how good he was.”

What is wrong?

“Why aren’t there any photos?”

“We never got close enough. We were never there. We were always behind him. It took too long, I told you. I was trying to set up a—”

Photograph
.

“There is a photograph.”

“I don’t—”

“The FBI has a photograph. The FBI was
there.”

“We’re not on the same page. The FBI was
where?”

“At the farm. The farm in Germantown in 1971. Trig had told Donny where it was. My wife went out there with Donny the night he was trying to decide whether or not to give up Crowe. He was looking for Trig for guidance. She saw Fitzpatrick. She said the FBI was there, and when she and Donny left, they got their picture. They were on the hill above the farm. They were about to bust Trig.”

“The FBI was not there. The FBI was back in Washington with Lieutenant Commander Bonson trying to figure out where the hell everybody had gone to.”

“There were agents there. They got a picture of Donny and Julie leaving the farm. She told me that less than a week ago.”

“It wasn’t the FBI.”

“Could it have been some other security agency, moving in on Trig, unaware of the—”