But Nick didn’t respond.
“I can’t think why a guy would
“Maybe the guy had a sweet tooth. Never wanted to be away from the machine.”
“No, it’s the last room you’d take, you got guys dropping quarters or rattling through the ice all night long. It doesn’t make a lot of sense.”
“Nick, he thought he was being followed maybe. So, he wants a room where there’s a lot of action outside in the hallways, figuring it might scare the hitters off. These guys, though –
“Yeah, but – ”
“Hey, Nick, you’re not thinking straight. You’ve seen a dozen of these things, not quite so bloody. It’s a straight drug-trade wipeout, the Colombians or the Peruvians or whatever sending the word out that they are not to be disobeyed or nasty things happen. This guy got caught snitching; went underground; they caught him and whacked his butt good. Okay?”
Nick nodded. Still, it bothered him.
Why me, he thought. Why would this guy call
He emptied the Coke can in one wet, sweet swig.
“Here he is, Mr. Swagger,” said the colonel. “The man who shot Donny Fenn. And who crippled you.”
Bob looked at the face that the colonel had brought to the television screen with the snap of a remote control. He tried to see some special thing there, something that said shooter, something that said sniper. What he saw was a lean hard face, a face that had no nonsense in it. The eyes were slotted and dark, like gun slits; the cheekbones were streamlined knobs; the hair a tight military sheen. There was a streak of the Orient in him in the slight flare of his cheekbones – he looked like a Mongol.
“Solaratov, T. We think that’s his name. But nobody knows what the T stands for.”
Bob just grunted, because he didn’t know what else was available.
“T. Solaratov, as photographed from quite a distance away by an agent code-named Flowerpot in Kabul, Afghanistan, in 1988. Our last picture of him, and our best. He’s fifty-four years old, in peak condition. Runs twelve miles a day. He was in Afghanistan advising Spetsnaz units on sniper deployment. He’s an expert on sniper deployment; he’s hunted men all over the world. Whenever the Soviets needed a shot to be taken, he took it for them. How many men have you killed, Sergeant?”
Bob hated this question. It was nobody’s business; it didn’t matter.
“All right,” said the colonel, “you can be strong and silent. But the official records say eighty-seven and I’d bet you hit lots more. Lots.”
Bob knew what the figure was. He sometimes pretended he didn’t but he knew, exactly.
“We figure Comrade T. Solaratov has sent over three hundred fifty suckers on to a better world. Head shots, mostly, his trademark. No pussy center-of-body shit for this boy.”
Bob grunted. That was serious shooting.
Nick flashed his ID on the woman and in a few seconds, he was led in to see Mr. Hillary Dwight, vice president, the Coca-Cola Bottling Company of New Orleans, in charge of vending sales. Mr. Dwight was a florid man in a white tropical suit who perhaps drank so much pure Coke that it had affected his ample waistline. But he had a monk’s shrewd, devotional eyes and an office so neat it spoke of a tidy, precision-oriented mind.
“So what is it I can do for you, Mr. Memphis?” he asked. “I hope one of my drivers hasn’t gone and done something wrong. Those boys have access to all sorts of institutions and, frankly, the quality of personnel just isn’t quite what it once was.”
“No, sir,” said Nick. “No, it’s just a little mystery I’m trying to get a handle on. We have a fellow who got himself killed in a motel room out near the airport – ”
“Good heavens,” said Dwight.
“But before he got killed, he specifically asked for the room near the Coke machines. You have two Coke machines just outside and Pepsi-Cola has two. There was also a Handy-Candy Dispensing Machine for candy bars and nuts and the like. Now, what are the properties of a Coke machine that might make a man who suspects he’s being trailed by killers seek out their presence? Or am I barking up a wrong tree entirely?”
“Hmmm.” Dwight’s plump face knitted up densely with the process of thought.
“What was the motel?”
Nick told him.
He stood, spun to face a desktop computer terminal and tickety-ticked in some instructions. Nick watched as obediently, in electro-yellow, the program rose before him. The fat man studied it.
“Well now, Mr. Memphis, you see we’re in the process of replacing our Vendo-Dyne 1500 series with the more advanced Vendo-Dyne 1800. You’ve seen them. They talk to you. You can put dollar bills into them and get change. A very sophisticated piece of machinery. And powerful, too.”
Nick nodded, enjoying the arcana of Coke Culture. That was one of the many things about his job he liked so much: it took you into new worlds all the time.
“Ah, yes. Yes, we’d just serviced that place and, yes-siree, we’d replaced the fifteen hundreds with eighteen hundreds just last month. A great advantage is size. The eighteen hundreds hold two thousand cans while the fifteen hundreds only hold five hundred. Means we don’t have to service them nearly as much, and we can pass the savings on to the consumer.”
Nick remembered. Fifty cents a can.
“So what does that tell us?” he asked, remembering the glossy, blinding brilliance of the new Coke machine in the hallway.
“Well, sir, one of the properties of the eighteen hundred happens to be its field generation.”
Nick waited on the explanation.
“The eighteen hundred really encompasses a small computer chip and it needs power to run it. So it generates an electromagnetic field. We had two of them there? Well, they were putting out a blanket of electromagnetic pulse, that means.”
Nick shook his head, cursing his own stupidity.
“I don’t get it,” he said.
Mr. Dwight smiled, and then explained.
“All right, Swagger, here’s what we’ve been able to turn up on the guy. T. Solaratov, according to an Israeli team that went after the fucker and almost nailed him when he was instructing Fatah in sniper techniques in the camps of the Bekka Valley in the mid-seventies – our best source of information on him, I might add, and a damned shame for all of us that as close as they got, they weren’t able, quite, to get their man. When he was eighteen, in the Soviet Naval Marines, his shooting abilities were first discovered and cultivated. In the years 1954 to 1959, he absolutely ruled the Eastern Bloc shooting matches. He was an extraordinary target marksman. We believe he got his first kills, however, in Hungary, in 1956; both Nicholas Humml and Pavel Upranye,-Hungarian nationalists arguing for further resistance to the Soviet troops, were dispatched from long distance by Moisen-Nagant bullets at rallies. No trace was ever found of their killer.
“By 1960 – after certain exploits in the Congo – he had obtained a commission and been selected out of the Soviet Naval Marines for an even higher elite, the Spetsnaz, the Soviet special forces. He more or less retired from competitive target shooting in 1962. Then, he disappeared, except for the occasional sightings and some other rumored guest appearances.
“And in 1972, when a gunnery sergeant named Bob Lee Swagger bounced Number Three Battalion of the Fifth People’s Shock Infantry in the An Loc Valley, killing thirty-six men over a heroic two-day encounter and thus saving the lives of twelve Green Berets and a hundred indig troops on an eavesdropping mission up near the Cambo border, the NVC freak and send to Moscow for a pro. So Comrade Solaratov arrives. He’s searching for one guy. You. It takes him a week to infiltrate in, but he can’t get closer than fourteen hundred yards. He studies you, living and
