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
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.
CHAPTER TEN
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
