Point Of Impact

into two pieces – and Jack lived to fight another day. But he hated that moment because he had pissed and shat in his pants as he went to his knees, knowing he was finished and too weak to do anything.

“Hey, Corporal, you’d best git yourself a pair of diapers,” his A-team leader had said to him after the firefight, and the whole goddamn team erupted in laughter. That’s what he hated the most, the fury of the humiliation. And that’s when he swore he’d never carry a handgun again and he’d never humiliate himself again.

But now Swagger had humiliated him twice.

That’s all right, Payne had told himself. I’ll get me another shot at you and this time I’ll put two, three, maybe all six double-oughts into you, motherfucker. Some of these kids on the team think you’re some kind of bull-goose macho motherfucker, some kind of super-cracker, a Dixie boy full of piss and leather; not me, Swagger. Double- ought cut you down to your rightful size real good.

Then Jack snickered, remembering.

I already started having my fun with you. I killed your fucking dog.

A thousand leads, a thousand nothings. The man had just vanished. Nick, now more a glorified clerk than an actual federal investigating officer, sat in the office for twelve hours at a stretch and watched every single lead dissolve into wisps, every report fizzle, every trace turn up counterfeit.

The other men didn’t like to be seen talking to Nick. They’d deny it, of course, but he noticed that when he joined a knot of kibitzers on the rare down minutes, one by one the guys would peel off and he’d be stuck facing a blank wall. Only Sally Ellion always said hi because she was too pretty and popular to run any danger of career contamination. She once even told him she was sorry he was having troubles.

“I’m sure it wasn’t your fault,” she said.

“I’m sure it was,” he replied.

“I heard that you might be going to another office.”

“Yeah. Well, not for a while, not until this thing gets done. They need bodies now. Somebody’s got to wash out the damned coffee cups. But I’ll probably be heading out. Maybe not such a bad thing. New Orleans hasn’t really worked out. I’ll get a start somewhere else.”

“I know you’ll do well, Nick,” she said, “wherever you go.”

He smiled; she was a nice girl.

Meanwhile the office pool was running odds of eight to one that Bob was dead; no man could disappear so completely from the largest federal manhunt in history, leaving no traces at all. Especially a man who, as reports developed, hadn’t a friend in the world, had no network of allies, no organization, no peers. The complete and absolute loner.

But meanwhile Nick clerked and cleaned for the first-stringers, bearing his humiliation with as much dignity as he could muster; and maybe it was while he was washing out the coffee pot that he had his bright idea.

Don’t do this, he said to himself.

You are in deep enough trouble already.

Man, they are going to eighty-six your ass out of here if they catch you.

And it’s so unlike you to do anything at all contrary to official policy.

But…it was such a good idea.

And like all good ideas, it was simple.

He couldn’t stop thinking about the man he’d found cut to pieces in the motel three months before the Roberto Lopez shooting. It struck him as something more than coincidental that the man was Salvadoran, as Wally Deaver had told him, even if his credentials and the Bureau ID’d him as an Eduardo Lachine of Panama City, Panama. But one man had seen Lanzman. That was Deaver, in Boston, back when he’d been a DEA agent at the Bush drug summit in Cartagena, Colombia, in 1990.

Why not fax Wally a morgue ID of the stiff? And that way find out if…

He tried to think of what it would mean if a Salvadoran secret agent had been murdered in New Orleans a few months before the assassination of a Salvadoran archbishop unloved by his own country’s regime. But it gave him a headache, and he went back to work.

The general leaned forward, proposing a toast, his white teeth gleaming, his eyes radiant with joy.

“To our friend, Colonel Raymond Shreck. A very great man. A truly wonderful man!”

He raised his glass, which was filled with an expensive wine.

The general was a sleek, smiling man named Esteban Garcia de Rujijo, and at thirty-eight, through great ferocity in a multitude of hardfought campaigns, he had become the commanding officer of the Fourth Battalion (Air-Ranger), First Brigade, First Division (“Atlacatl”) of the Salvadoran Army. His unit was nicknamed Los Gatos Negros, or Panther Battalion, for their jet-black berets.

“Thank you, sir,” said Shreck, in Spanish.

Shreck, eyes hooded, wore his old uniform with Ranger tabs, Special Forces MACV lightning patch, his Corcoran jump boots glossy black, the trousers bloused into them. He carried his green beret under his epaulet. The uniform still fit perfectly and its creases were razors. The Combat Infantry Badge dominated a chestful of ribbons, including the Distinguished Service Cross and the Purple Heart and the Silver Star with two Oak Leaf Clusters, all of which were his.

Shreck and the general – and a third man – sat at a dinner table in a large museum of a house, on two thousand prime acres in the hills just north of the seaport city of Acajutla, in northern El Salvador. The house was not the general’s, at least not yet. It belonged to another man also named de Rujijo – the general’s father. It had been owned by the de Rujijos since the Spanish had conquered the region in 1655.

The third man, who was sitting next to Colonel Shreck, was a small, merry, elderly gentleman named Hugh Meachum, formerly of the Central Intelligence Agency’s Directorate of Plans and, since his rude retirement from the Agency in 1962, a fellow at the Buddings Institute of Foreign Policy in Washington, D.C. If the general was el gato negro, then Hugh Meachum, a connoisseur of pipes and wines and ironies, was el gorrion, the sparrow.

“The general is very pleased with you, Raymond,” said Meachum. “He should be. You certainly saved his bacon.”

“Yes, bacon,” said the general, who had been educated first at El Salvador’s National Military Institute, and then at the National War College in Washington, D.C., and the Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas.

“It is not an easy thing to kill a priest,” said the general. “Not even a communist priest.”

“The general believes that Archbishop Roberto Lopez was a communist,” said Meachum. “He truly does.”

Shreck knew this was the sort of thing that amused Meachum. Meachum often privately marveled at the sheer barbarity of these people. They were capable of anything, and it took a great deal of skillful handling to prevent them from going hog wild. They were capable of killing in the thousands. The general had killed in the thousands.

“A most excellent operation,” said the general. “Muy excelente. The world thinks that a crazy American tries to shoot the president of the United States and accidentally hits this pious bystander. And nobody knows it’s really justice reaching out to kill a communist priest.”

He had a pockmarked face and a dark mustache. He was dressed in evening clothes, including a red plaid cummerbund. He wore a high-polish stainless steel Colt 10mm Delta Elite in a shoulder holster. Shreck had noticed its ivory grips when the general had bent to pour the wine.

“It was an expensive operation,” Shreck said.

“Cheap, whatever the cost.”

“And oh-so-very necessary,” said Hugh Meachum. “That archbishop was going to get the Panther Battalion investigation opened again. And he had the president’s ear, too. And how very, very embarrassing for many people that would have been.”

“It was wonderful,” said the general. “Tell me, though, Colonel Shreck. The great shot that brought this communist priest down. A great shot, no?”

“A great shot, yes,” said Shreck.

“Who do you have who could make such a shot? What a shot! It is truly an amazing shot.”