and win the Pulitzer Prize and write a best seller, all in 350 pages.
He obeyed.
“This is a little melodramatic, isn’t it?”
“Look, pal, I don’t need snark. I know you people like wisecracks, but stow the fucking wisecracks and be dead literal and we will get along a lot better. This isn’t a fucking movie.”
“I understand.”
“Throw the tape recorder in the front seat.”
“I-”
“Throw the tape recorder in the front seat.”
Banjax threw the tape recorder in the front seat.
“Now throw the other tape recorder in the front seat.”
“Hey, I-”
“Throw the
Banjax threw the other tape recorder in the front seat.
“I may have to prove this meeting took place, you know.”
“I didn’t turn ’ em off. I ’ll return ’ em if I conclude you’re straight and that I didn’t give something away I didn’t mean to give away.”
“Okay. Sensible. Now what have you got for me? And who are you?”
“Who I am is not relevant. I may be this, I may be that. I may be a courier or a controller or a rogue. You will never know. But I have a gift for you, as I said I did. It’s amazing how successful you’re about to be on my generosity.”
“I’m sure you’re getting something out of it. Nothing’s free in this town.”
“Hmm, fast learner,” the spy guy said. Then, with a kind of practiced insouciance, as if he’d done this many times, he tossed a manila envelope over the seat to the rear, and it landed exactly in the space next to Banjax. Banjax noted the man was wearing gloves.
“Okay,” he said. “Should I open?”
“Not here. What you have is Xeroxes of internal FN documents, from their South Carolina headquarters, recording their courtship of, their involvement with, their bribes to, their payoffs to, and finally their comments on Nick Memphis, FBI.”
“How the hell-”
“We’re good. We’re not amateurs. You are not dealing with self-dramatizing whistle-blowers who are trying to get a segment on
“How can I authenticate? I have to authenticate.”
“That’s your problem. Our mole didn’t have time to get affidavits.”
“Well, there’s a time thing here. I-”
“Jesus. Let’s see, you might use Freedom of Information to get FN’s original cover letter to the FBI seeking submission paperwork for the sniper rifle contract trials. Then run a typefont comparison. Or I’ll tell you what, since time is a factor, find someone in the Bureau to leak those documents to you to shortcut the FOI process. You pick ’em, not us; that’s your guarantee of integrity. Run the typefont comparison. If you get a match, you’ve proven that the FN official submission and the internal memorandum came from the same printer.”
“There’s only one printer in South Carolina?”
“In the FN USA headquarters, yeah. How big do you think it is? We’re talking a gun company, not IBM.”
“Okay,” said Banjax, who had no picture in his mind for a thing called a “gun company.”
“So you’ve made your guy. Hello, Mr. Pulitzer Prize. Why, good morning, Miss Senior Editor, Big New York Publisher. Do you know who I’m talking about?”
“Yes, I know. Woodward’s-”
“David is a smart boy.”
“You said you had a photo.”
“I do. But it’s not in the package.”
“Why not? If you’ve got it-”
“I want you to authenticate this thing first. Then you contact me by, hmm, I don’t know, wearing an orange toilet seat around your neck to work one day. That’ll be a spy-type tip-off.”
“I’m out of orange toilet seats. Will pink do?”
“Wear a hat one day. Guys your age never wear hats. It can be a baseball cap, a stocking cap, I don’t care, a Sherlock Holmes cap. Wear it, we’ll note it, and you’ll get the photo by courier that afternoon, your bureau. If you’re not an idiot, you’ll figure out that the photo has to be vetted by top photo professionals, to make sure it’s legit. Can your failing newspaper afford that?”
“If I can get it before they turn the bureau into a bowling alley, yes.”
“Otherwise it goes to Drudge.”
“I hear you.”
“David, fast, fast, fast now. We can work fast. Can you dead-tree folks stay with us?”
“Yes, I can.”
“Good. Now take your tape recorders-no lookee, see?-and get out of here. Go stand in the corner while I drive away. No peeking. And welcome to the big leagues, Woodstein.”
30
Swagger awoke from ugly dreams with a start. The phone was ringing. Not his cell phone, the room phone. He blinked, trying to remember. Oh, yeah, Indianapolis. Near the Notre Dame campus, for its theoretical richness in wired coffeehouses. An Econo Lodge; it looked like the best room in Nowheresville, decorated in a nice shade of babyshit brown.
He stared at the ringing monster on the nightstand. This was not good. If it had been his cell, it could have been anybody, but if it was this phone, it meant someone was already on him. On the other hand, maybe it was housekeeping. He looked at his watch, saw that it was almost eleven. He’d sacked out here at 3 a.m. after a dreary bus ride.
He picked up the phone.
“Yeah.”
“Bob?”
It was Nick.
“You figured out where I am.”
“We are the FBI, you know. We do this kind of thing for a living.”
“I-”
“No, you just listen to me. In words of two syllables, what the fuck is going on? I have some big gunfight in Chicago with a dead officer, two dead gangbangers, and a missing witness thought by many to be an FBI undercover. That sounds like a Bob Lee Swagger operation. I have the Chicago cops, I have the Cook County prosecutors, I have my own Chicago field office all screaming bloody hell at me, and of course I have my own director furious at me because he warned me Swagger couldn’t be controlled and I assured him I could control Swagger and then I assured him I’d sent you home to rock on the porch. Oh, and I have the
“I sure wouldn’t want to be in your shoes,” said Bob. “Can’t help with the papers. Never read ’em. I get my news from Fox.”
“I need you in. I can have Indiana state troopers at that motel in ten minutes if it’s an issue of security. I need you cooperating with the Chicago people, playing by all the rules. Maybe, just maybe, we can make fleeing the scene of a crime go away. And when we get all that straightened out, then maybe we can see where we are on the sniper. Oh, and I need Denny Washington’s Sig back. For his widow.”
“I will personally return it to her when this is over. Right now, I may need it, even if it’s only got four rounds left. Maybe I can put ’em where they’ll do some good.”
“Swagger, listen to me.”
“Nick, if I go to Chicago I’m stuck there for weeks. I have to move fast. These people now know I’m on to them, and they will go back over their tracks and wipe everything out and I’ll be left with nothing but suspicions. And when it all dies down, they’ll come to Idaho, and just like Joan Flanders, they’ll put a little cross on me from a long way out and put a 168er dead bang center into me.”
“Chicago thinks this was a gang hit on Denny Washington, who had busted several Latin Kings leaders on big murder ones over the past few years. He was a very good cop and he did them a lot of damage. So they targeted him and took him out. The shooters were Kings; you just happened to be in the car.”
“No way,” said Bob. “That’s how it was supposed to look, but the signature of this outfit is that it sets up its hits inside fraudulent narratives, which you guys get roped into every goddamn time. But tell me, did you see the piece? It was a submachine gun-”
“Bob, it’s a mob town from way back. That doesn’t prove a thing. Every Italian restaurant in the greater metro area probably has a Thompson hidden in the wine cellar.”
“This was no Thompson. It was a suppressed Swedish K, an agency favorite in the ’Nam. I had an SOG tour, I saw the cowboys with them all over the place. That’s a rare piece of spook hardware, probably aren’t two hundred of them in the world, put together in the late sixties by company armorers at Tan Son Nhut. You don’t get a subgun like that from the wine cellar or the local machine gun store. You have got to be wired into spookworld to pry one free, ex-spook, some kind of mercenary,
