Marty and examined the unopened case and was on the road out of the place. The reason was that coming in, he’d be wary, he’d have a tiny worry that it was an ambush, and all his senses would be extra-sharp. He’d be volatile, prickly, at high combat readiness. He might be armed. If Richard was with him, that could tangle things as well. So we’d let him come in, and once he saw the package and realized its significance and gamed out what it explained and what it made possible and examined it closely (without opening), and looked at Marty’s X-rays of it, once he’d swallowed that, he’d be far more relaxed and at the same time distracted. His mind would be going a hundred miles an hour; he’d be in a mode of triumph because he’d found the leverage at last to prove the conspiracy, get the case reopened, and loose the dogs of law enforcement on Hugh Meachum and begin the international manhunt that would shake that villain out of the trees, no matter where the trees were.
The hit would go down a quarter of a mile out of Marty’s rambling wreck of a house, on a dirt road with a 33 -degree angle and no maneuverability due to the dense trees and sharp angles on either side. If he should escape – doubtful, given the firepower – there was only one way to run, and that was up a low Connecticut foothill where the trees gave out. He’d find himself on Robert Jordan’s hilltop in Spain – no, Jordan was at the bridge, not the hilltop, who was at the hilltop? – anyway, that person’s hilltop in Spain, unarmed, with only a few low stones as the four best operators in the world moved in. El Sordo, by the way, was the fellow on the hilltop. El Sordo didn’t make it off of his, and neither would Swagger.
The firepower and accessories (someone, possibly Anna Wintour, said: “It’s all about the accessories”): the boys had decided to go with deep ghillie camouflage and to infiltrate the property two days in advance. There’d be no movement on the place the day before, and to any observer, casual or professional, no sign, no trace, no indication of penetration. If they had to move quickly, the boys would shuck the ghillies and revert to digital- camouflage battle tunics and trousers. Faces would be blackened or painted green-brown (for some reason, these commando types love the touch of the painted face!). Hatwear: either the ubiquitous black wool watch cap or a suitably dappled boonie cap. Fashion is so important to high-end commandos, and I wanted mine to be up to Ms. Wintour’s standards.
As for the guns, the boys would each have as primary ambush weapon the MK48 light machine gun that had happily mowed its way across Iraq. This superb piece of combat engineering was ultra-reliable, even in the sand, and spat out its deliveries at a rate of about seven hundred rounds a minute of 7.62 mm ammunition. It was beloved by high-speed operators. The ammo, slung underneath the gun body in a hundred-round belt rolled into a canvas-wrapped container, would be standard military ball, for penetrating the body of the auto. Anybody inside that vehicle would be Bonnie-and-Clyded in the first few seconds. If, by some odd trick, Swagger survived the initial hose-down and headed up the hill, the fellows would dump their MK48s and default to the latest AR platform, the M-6 IC from LWRC on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, accessorized with Eotech hologram sights, LaRue flexible 3X magnifiers, and at least ten H-K mags with twenty-nine rounds of Black Hills 77-grain hollowpoint. And of course – nothing is too good for my boys – each would carry a Wilson CQB .45 ACP and a Randall knife. I know all this because I saw the invoices, and it added up to Pretty Penny no. 2,318,314. Too bad these fellows couldn’t have been deployed against a meaningful national target instead of my need to get another hundred or so blow jobs from Shizuka before the reaper came calling on me, but there you have it.
As far as the extract was concerned, I would have a helicopter in orbit on the outskirts of the estate. One of the pilot’s duties was to monitor law enforcement channels, to see if the gunfire attracted any undue attention. If squad cars were dispatched from the state police barracks, he’d notify the ground team, swoop in, and evac. If not, he’d wait until they’d policed the killing ground, removing and disposing of the brass and the body and that load. Finally, I’d made disposition that he had FLIR aboard, forward-looking infrared technology, so that if, by a one-in- a-million chance, Swagger got into the brush, the chopper could nose him out via his heat signature and direct the kill team to him, again in a few minutes.
Meanwhile, back in the real world, the process ground slowly on. Swagger leaped at the rifle lure, as I anticipated, but insisted that he first establish the provenance, and Marty skillfully guided him to the Abercrombie & Fitch records in Rutherford, which we had penetrated and into which we had inserted a superb forgery establishing ownership. When Swagger saw that, he would be hooked through the gills! He would insist on being allowed to examine it, and a date would be set for his trip to Connecticut. That was it. No big deal. Swagger was so provoked by the rifle case that all other precautions were irrelevant. That was the whole point of the multimillion- dollar operation, and it was accomplished in a split second, as an afterthought.
I had him.
PART IV
CHAPTER 22
Richard made all the arrangements. Bob met him at Dallas/Fort Worth International a week later, and the two flew direct to Boston, then caught an American Eagle puddle jumper to Hartford, where Richard had booked two rooms in the airport Marriott. Dinner in a local steak house.
At eight the next morning, Richard picked Bob up in a blue rental Ford Focus, and they set out for the two- hour drive west through the rolling Connecticut countryside for the arrival at Marty’s estate in Litchfield County, west of Warren.
“Beautiful country,” said Richard. “Reminds me of the Cotswolds, in England.”
“Never been there,” said Bob. “But beautiful it is. And you don’t see any shacks or rusted-out cars on cement blocks or run-down places like you do in the South. The American South or any south.”
The trees, the houses, the farms, the towns: all mature. Mostly white, wooden clapboard, impeccably serviced, shutters boldly painted a primary color, all well scrubbed by people for whom maintenance was an obsession. They took care of stuff, these people. Flowers beautiful, hedges trimmed, all towns, big or small, boasting a civic hall, a hotel, a park, a church. It felt like some kind of ancient land as imagined by Disney. Every other building seemed to have been built in some far-off place called the eighteenth century, and laws of Enlightenment rationality were still in control.
Swagger ate it up. It was in his genes, it lit his imagination, it was the way things should be, a military duty ethos fused seamlessly with daily life. He was also scanning for air cover – a shadowing chopper or some other sign that Nick had violated the agreement and laid in backup too close; he’d wondered if the next little Revolutionary War burg would conceal gunmen with body armor and RPGs.
“You seem tense, Jack.”
“I can’t stop looking over my shoulder. I told you, I’ve had a price on my head, and once you’ve been hunted, you never fully relax.”
“Jack, it’s a beautiful day in a beautiful part of America, and you are part of one of the most exciting historical-intellectual developments of our time, which, I should add, will probably have a tremendous financial upside. You should just enjoy the ride in.”
“You are so right, Richard. Man, I wish I had it in me to click the off switch and go to take-it-easy. I just want to look at this rifle case, get the business deal set, and get to work.”
Onward they went, passing through Warren, passing more rich Yankee farmland and forest, finding the hills on the rise, and feeling the gentle slope as the car climbed several hundred feet into the hills.
“There it is,” said Richard. A rusty green sign at a rusty gate sunk in faded concrete abutments with pretensions of grace announced “Adams Glen,” and Richard slowed and took the turn.
The road ran through thick trees on hillside, with slope above and below the dirt of the track. Dust flew in two tire contrails behind them, smearing the pristine beauty of the azure, windless, cloudless day, but on either side, the world seemed green, dense, and hushed. Bending over, looking through the windshield, Swagger could see the hill rising, buried in forest the whole way, to a rounded peak another four hundred or so feet up. Cubed
