“His fine, dead hand may be involved in this, yes, wouldn’t surprise me a bit. Run into your new buddy Bill Fedders recently?”
“No sir, but if he shows up in the men’s room, I won’t be surprised.”
“Okay, Nick, good job, tough case, now bust it for me or put it to sleep, okay?”
“My best, sir.”
“Oh, and Nick, I’m told you owe Phil Price in PIO a callback.”
“Just been busy, sir.”
“Well, make an old fool like me happy and call him, will you?”
17
Now what?
Now nothing.
Now the rest of your life.
You did everything for Carl Hitchcock, for the United States Marine Corps and its medieval notions of honor and duty, despite what you said to Chuck McKenzie. If you owed him and that ever-smaller membership of the generation of men who’d put scopes on things and killed them in the Land of Bad Things, you’ve paid that debt. You turned up significant new information, new leads, turned it over, and now the professionals will run it to ground. If it turned out Tom Constable had hired Anto Grogan of Graywolf to kill his wife because she’d slept with Johnny Carson or Warren Whateverthatguy’s name was, then that would come out. Or maybe Mitzi Reilly had hired Anto Grogan to kill her husband and Anto got carried away. Or maybe someone in South America hired Graywolf to kill Mitch Greene because they didn’t like his young adult books. Or maybe-
Or maybe whatever.
Swagger sat way out in the weird, isolated departure terminal at Dulles. It was a strange, glassed-in island of mall commerce in the middle of an airfield. Great aircraft rolled by out the windows, but in here was nothing but TGIFs and Benettons and Starbucks as far as the eye could see. His flight to Boise was in another hour, but he always got to these places early because the metal ball-and-socket joint meant rigamarole in security as often as not. Here it had not. So he sat at the gate area on a terrible plastic chair, waiting for the flight to be called, watching the place fill up, ignoring the persistent pain in the hip where the ball-and-socket construction had taken a full-power cut a few years back and the flesh never healed quite right, tried not to look too enviously at a bar down the way, with its rows and rows of ever- beckoning bottles, then ordered himself not to imagine the pleasure it offered, and waited for time to pass so that the old man could get back to his rocking chair and watch the weather chemistry manufacture clouds the size of castles and more complicated structures over the blue-green meadow that fell back for miles until it broke apart on a sawtooth snarl of mountains.
I’ll count my money, see what to do with that nice bonus check. I’ll read a book or a gun magazine. I’ll think about building a tactical rifle in something weirdly off- center and interesting like.260 Remington, 6.5 Creedmoor, or Grendel or XC. I’ll hit the Dillon for a day and crank out a thousand.45 ACP 200-grainers. Then I’ll count my money again and be nice to my wife, whom I don’t deserve, and maybe help my younger daughter with her homework, though it’s rapidly reaching a level I don’t understand, because Miko has turned out to be sublimely smart and even at seven is attracting attention, not only for her unbelievable test scores but for her medal- winning riding ability. Then I’ll call my daughter Nikki and see how she likes that big paper where she now works.
You couldn’t have a better life. Did anyone? Land, daughters, love, guns, a little money, a sense of having done what you could to bring boys home alive, settle old business, stand for something even when the lead or the blades were flying. That was okay, that was a life, it was the best but-
But he couldn’t leave it alone.
It wasn’t enough to wait for that big joker Ron Fields and that girl they called Starling and that Walter Jacobs and even Nick himself to figure it out and bring it off. It wasn’t that he was better than they were, or smarter, it was just… what? Vanity, craziness, old-guy bullshit, he just thought he should be there, doing what had to be done, contributing.
Leave it alone.
I can’t.
Subversive thoughts kept churning up from his unconscious. There was a ramification, exiled almost purposefully from the FBI’s perspective. The FBI would not impose meanings; it would follow clues. They had new clues, new persons of interest, and they would methodically follow that course, letting meanings emerge. They had the resources for such an approach.
He, Swagger, had no resources. Thus such a broad-front approach was ruled out. He had to rely on intuition and strike in terms of specific interpretations. He had to have a working theory and had therefore to examine, test, or abandon that working theory.
Thus he was where he was, stuck with a buzz in his head that would not go away. And that was: if Carl Hitchcock’s irrational motive was not behind the killings, if Carl was in fact the setup with the phony motive, then the motive was rational. It meant to get something: money, revenge, threat elimination, satisfaction, something real. Therefore the killings were coldly plotted and executed by extremely high-end operators, based on a brilliant conception, brought off with near-perfection. No amateurs had been involved; it was elite-unit, state-level craft.
If that were so, then there was but one starting point: the target could not have been Joan Flanders, movie star and radical and ex-wife to T. T. Constable. Joan’s point in the proceedings was to unleash, as a function of her complex and well-chronicled life, her litany of “interesting” husbands, a chafe of covering information. Her murder would automatically flood the investigation with possibility, too much possibility, too much attention, too much information, all of which would hopelessly bog, clot, and overwhelm any investigation while at the same time pressurizing it for fast solution.
Therefore, sitting in the Dulles terminal in the middle of sunny Virginia, Swagger committed to his first principle: this is not about Joan Flanders. She is camouflage. This is about one of the others. It is about Jack Strong and Mitzi Reilly or it is about Mitch Greene, and from what he knew, it was probably not about Mitch Greene, who was, after all, a comedian. So he committed to his second principle: it was about Jack Strong and Mitzi Reilly.
But even that was a daunting task. They too, though on a smaller scale, had lived extraordinary lives, much chronicled, much documented. Political lives, social lives, intellectual lives, professional lives, writing lives, teaching lives (endless students, twenty-five years’ worth of students alone!). How on earth could anyone investigate them-that is, anyone short of an FBI task force with its nearly unlimited manpower?
He had to limit it. Limit it. How do you limit it? How do you find one thing to focus on, the right thing to focus on? What’s your principle of operation?
His head ached. He really wanted that drink. And who did he think he was? The feds in time would get to Jack and Mitzi, and they’d do their usual thorough, patient, professional examination, and if there was something to be found, they would find it. Maybe not this week or this year or…
What was different about Jack and Mitzi? Really, from a technical point of view, only one thing: Joan and Mitch had been killed in public. Their deaths became immediately the property of dozens of witnesses, then the law enforcement staffs, and then the maggots of the press. They were immediately public deaths.
But Jack and Mitzi had been slain in an alley and lay undisturbed for almost an hour. Well, there were easy explanations: they were, in fact, vulnerable and accessible in that moment when they were pulling out of their garage and the shooting team, in that van in the next block with only a bit of door opening, was itself well protected and generally impervious to discovery. Hmm, on the other hand, Hyde Park was notoriously well policed by a more than capable University of Chicago police force, and the lack of street traffic, the lack of public hubbub, could itself turn quickly enough into a deficit; there’d be no crowd cover for the escape route. It was, or rather it could be seen as a somewhat fragile operation, a chancy enough thing, the greatest dare of the operation. That put it out of the modus operandi to a significant degree. So it was… provocative.
What would be the meaning of that kind of kill? What did it permit? What advantages would it generate and to what ends, and why would those ends be worth what might easily become a risk?
He sat crunched in concentration. He didn’t notice that they’d called the Boise flight. He didn’t even hear his name being called by the gate attendant. He was a lanky man in jeans, a polo shirt, an outdoorsy coat, and a Razorbacks baseball hat, sitting there, his scuffed Nocona boots announcing to the world he was a cowboy of sorts, but his face taut and distant.
He missed the plane.
He felt he had something, almost.
He could feel it there, and even as he struggled to articulate it, it went away.
And then he had it.
Another problem: over the last years, he’d used the personnel department of the United States Marine Corps as his private intelligence agency. When he’d needed a contact or an expert, he’d called an old colleague and they’d dug up, quickly, a name for him that always fit a specific category. They got him in the game fast.
But that was changing. His generation was all but gone; new men came and took things over and they had no living memory of Bob the Nailer and were not by nature inclined to help him. So he had to do some thinking and some calling before he was finally able to set up the right linkage: a retired NCO in Personnel who was friendly with a current NCO in Personnel who would do the favor for the friend of the friend.
But finally, close to six, he got a name, a number, the sufficient in-between calls had been made, and he was talking to his man.
“First Sergeant Jackson.”
“First Sergeant, I’m Swagger, Gunnery Sergeant retired, I think Bill Martens may have-”
“Sure, sure, Gunny. After I got Bill’s e-mail, I ran you, and you were some marine, I’ll say. You were the best. Before my time, but the best.”
“Son, I was before everyone’s time.”
First Sergeant Jackson laughed.
“What can I do for you?”
“It’s this. I’m looking into Carl Hitchcock’s last week and death-”
“Gunny, this ain’t some crazy T. T. Constable did it thing like I’m seeing on the Internet, is it?”
“No, and I don’t think aliens took over Carl’s brain neither. No, I’m just trying to get a grip on it.”
“I’d love it if Carl turned out to be innocent. So would all of us. But I don’t see how.”
“I don’t see how either, but I told some folks I’d give it my best shot. Semper Fi, gung ho, ding how, and all that good shit. So here’s where I am: I’m thinking a lot
