he will go through your underwear, your collection of dirties, he will read all the squalid details of your failed marriages, Richard. Where is the phone secured?”
“It’s in a book safe in the basement shop. It’s in Bugliosi’s
“That’s the guy, Richard. You make me so proud.”
We started getting responses from the operation almost immediately. Pings, blips, echoes, readings, whatever you want to call them. Swagger was on my trail, and it was impressive. It wasn’t just his courage and his skill with a rifle that made him a standout. By some queer mutation, he had been given a superb mind for analysis and deduction. It is strange how genius occasionally shows up in a single generation, then vanishes. Yet as impressive as his skill and determination turned out to be, they didn’t answer the one question that most intrigued me. Why?
I suppose he needed a mission, and this was the one that came along. He was the type who couldn’t live without a mission. There was also the issue of grief: he had lots, beginning with his father, then moving on to his spotter, Donnie Fenn (he was married to Donnie’s widow, Jen), and finally, an Agency officer named Susan Okada, killed in his most recent foray into our world, which ended with a missile detonating in the Rose Garden. Was grief driving him?
Or was it something else? Could it be a love of Kennedy? Was he a JFK groupie whose world had been shattered at Lon’s shot heard ’round the world? Was he in love with Jackie, with Camelot, with the children, John- John and Caroline? Did he see himself as their avenger? It seemed unlikely to me that a man so relentlessly pragmatic would have a soft core, particularly in devotion to something he had never experienced himself but only read about and saw on TV as an American teenager. I remained baffled.
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
