I, Sniper

Their biggest hit was the bombing of the Pentagon. Actually, it was a three-pound bag of black powder going boom off a primitive clock fuse in a waste can that created more smoke than damage, but it was symbolic, worth more than a thousand bombs detonated at lesser targets. It closed down a concourse for a couple of hours, more because of the insane press coverage than for any actual threat to people or operations, but it made them stars of an even bigger magnitude.

Their career began to turn when they were building a bigger bomb for a bigger target, but this time the boom came in the bedroom, not the Capitol, and both fled, leaving behind a good sister who’d managed to blow herself up. They were hunted and running low on money, and a violent bank robbery may or may not have followed-the FBI said yes, it was them; the Nyackett, Massachusetts, police were split-that left two security guards dead, shot down from behind by a tail gunner. It was a bad career move, whoever did it, because the dead men had children and were nothing but working stiffs, not pigs or oppressors or goons, just two guys, one Irish, one Polish, trying to get by, with large families depending on their three jobs, and the hypocrisy of a movement dedicated to the people that shot down two of the people was not lost on the public. Jack and Mitzi were never formally tied to this event, because the bank surveillance film, recovered by the police, was stolen from a processing lab and never recovered. Otherwise, it was said, they’d be up on capital murder charges and have a one-way to the big chair with all the wires attached, as Massachusetts dispatched its bad ones in those days.

A few years passed; times changed; the war ended, or at least the American part of it. Jack and Mitzi hired a wired lawyer who brokered a deal, and then it came out that in its efforts to apprehend them, the police and federal agencies had broken nearly as many laws as the famous couple had. In the end, rather than expose their own excesses to the public, the various authorities agreed to let it all slip. They were “guilty as hell, free as a bird,” as Jack had proclaimed on the event, and able to rejoin society.

The academy beckoned. Each, with a solid academic background, found employment and ultimately tenure in Chicago higher ed. Jack taught education and achieved a professorship at the University of Illinois Chicago Circle campus; Mitzi, who’d graduated from the University of Michigan law school, came to rest at Northwestern’s law school. The two bought a house in Hyde Park and spent the next years preaching rather than practicing radicalism. It seemed an extraordinary American saga, yet it ended, just like Dillinger’s, in a Chi-town alley in pools of blood.

“Someone,” said Mitch Greene, holding up a copy of that day’s Plain Dealer with its blaring head police, feds hunt clues in protest slayings, “please tell Mark Felt I don’t wanna play anymore.” He got some laughter from the few before him who knew that Mark Felt had been the FBI’s black bag guy long before he became Woodward’s Deep Throat, during the wild years when Mitch Greene was running hard and starring in his own one-man show, “Mitch Greene v. America: the Comedy.” Among its brighter ideas: a wishathon by which America’s kids would will the planes full of soldiers to return to California. And the bit where he petitioned the Disney Company to open a “Vietnamland,” where you could chuck phosphorous grenades into tunnels and animatronic screaming yellow flamers would pop out and perish in the foliage? Wonderful stuff. Alas, more of his audience remained mute, these being the slack-faced, mouth-breathing tattoo and pin exhibits called “the kids” who now made up his crowds in larger and larger percentages. Forget Felt; did they even know who Mitch was? Doubtful. They just knew he wrote Uncle Mitch Explains, a series of lighthearted history essays that preached Mitch’s crazed lefto-tilt version of American history with a great deal of the ex-rad’s charm and wit and had become, astonishingly, consistent best sellers.

So here he was, another town, another gig. The town was Cleveland, the gig was The Gilded Age: Peasants for Dinner Again, Amanda? Rockefeller, Carnegie, Gould, those guys, the usual suspects, the data mined quickly for outrageous anecdotes, the dates at least right courtesy of a long-suffering research assistant (“Mitch, you can’t really say that.” “Oh yeah, watch me.”) Another mild best seller, though it annoyed him the Times BR no longer listed his books in the adult section but only in its monthly kid section.

“Mr. Felt,” he ad-libbed, “please don’t have me killed. I ain’t a-marching anymore.”

Again, the laughter was limited to those few who saw the allusion to the famous Phil Ochs anthem of the sixties protest generation. Still, it was a pretty good crowd for a weeknight in Cleveland, in a nice Borders out in the burbs. He saw faces and books and the blackness of the sheet glass window, and he had a nice hotel room, who knows, maybe he could get laid, judging by the number of women with undyed gray hair knotted into ponytails above their muumuus and their Birkenstocks, and his plane to Houston wasn’t at a brain-dead early morning hour.

But then someone hollered, “Mark Felt is dead.”

Mitch replied, “Tell this guy!” holding up the front page even higher.

That got a good laugh-even most of the kids caught it. He was quick, when he was on the road, to adapt the latest developments into his shtick. His real gift was for stand-up and he’d even tried it for a few years in the eighties, though with not much success. A typically lighthearted op-ed piece in the Daily News had attracted an editor at one of the big, classy midtown houses, and the next thing you know, he was a success again, in his second career, after the first, which consisted of overthrowing the government and stopping the war in Vietnam. The only problem with the writing, he often remarked, not originally, was the paperwork.

Was Mitch Greene funny because he looked funny, or did he look funny because he was funny? Good question, no answer, not even after all these years. He had one of those big faces-big eyes, big nose, big jaw, big bones all the way around, big ears, big Adam’s apple-all of it set off by a big frizz of reddish-gold-turning-to-gray hair, a kind of Chia Pet gone berserk. When he smiled, he had big teeth and a big tongue.

“Anyhow, boys and girls,” he said, “and that includes all you grandpas and grandmas, because if you haven’t checked lately, you still are divided into boys and girls, not that it matters at our-oops, I mean, your age-this psycho thing we have going on now, with some berserk redneck dressed in camouflage and a ‘Bring Back Bush’ bumper sticker on his pickup, is a reminder of one thing: you may want to ignore history, but unfortunately history will not ignore you. Who said that originally? Ten points and I’ll only charge you ten bucks for an autograph.”

“Trotsky,” came the call.

“Give the man a joint,” said Mitch. “Anyhow, to be serious for just a second, we have a nutcase killer playing sniper wannabe shooting down some of my cohorts who gave it up to stop the war in Vietnam all those years ago. You little peasants weren’t even born then, that’s how long ago it was. Anyhow, these folks really gave it up for peace and to bring our boys-your dads-home in one piece. Since you’re all here, you can see it worked. Now some guy is playing get even with the commies, because that’s the way his mind works. No good deed goes unpunished, just like the man says. But history, guys and gals, it could kill you. And until it does, you may as well have a laugh or two at history’s expense, which is why I worked for at least seven, no, maybe as many as eleven days on the book, which gives you a sense of where it started: with the wretched excesses of capital, of men with so much money they couldn’t spend it, and after the fifth mansion, housing lost its charm, so they-”

The bullet hit him in the mouth. It actually flew between his two big sets of choppers and plowed through the rear of the throat to the spine, which it all but vaporized into thin pink mist on the exit. His head did not explode like Jack’s and Mitzi’s, as the cranio-ocular vault had not been compromised with an injection of velocity, energy, and hydraulic pressure. The bullet flew on through and hit a wall. But with the bisection of Mitch’s spine, animal death was instantaneous, though Mitch’s knees hadn’t got the message and they fought to keep him upright, even fought through the collapse of all that weight, so instead of tumbling he sat down and happened to find his chair with a thud, almost as if he’d finally gotten sick of hearing his own voice. No one got it. Attention was also claimed by an oddity of sound-the nearly unspellable sound of something shearing through glass, a kind of grindy, high-pitched scronk that announced that a gossamer of fracture, like a spider’s delicate web, had suddenly been flung across the large front window a hundred feet beyond Mitch at his lectern, and that at its asymmetrical center a small, round, actual hole had been drilled in the glass, which, though grievously damaged, held. As no loud report was registered, no thought of “gun” or “bullet” occurred to anyone for at least three full seconds, just the weird confluence of the bizarre: Mitch sitting down, shutting up, the window going all smeary. Hmm, what could this mean? But then Mitch’s head, still intact, lolled forward and his mouth and nose began to issue blood vomitus in nauseating amounts.

That’s when the jumping, screaming, shouting, hopping, and cell phone photoing began, and soon enough the police-FBI Fellini movie would begin its new run in Cleveland.

2

Politics, everything’s politics. Even murder. There would be a tussle with Chicago PD upcoming; they’d want the glory, and in any case, under normal circumstances, murder was for a local jurisdiction and the FBI held no sway over it. But the FBI would win out as lead agency on the investigation, because of a statute holding that murder for hire when initiated over state lines was in the federal bailiwick. The utter professionalism of the shooting made the murder-for-hire inference inescapable, and thus the Bureau got the prize.

Nick Memphis was still the hot boy in the Bureau because of his triumph a year earlier in an ambitious, violent bank robbery in Bristol, Tennessee, which he’d tracked, penetrated, and taken apart with minimal loss to civilians. He was hovering on the edge of an assistant directorship. So though others lobbied intensively, it did no good and Nick got the agent-in-charge gig for “Task Force Sniper,” once it was declared a major case, Bureau code for “Everybody is watching this one.” Given the high publicity value of the investigation, the hugeness and brightness of the limelight, the grounds for endless speculation and fascination, it might get him the assistant directorship if he wrapped it up fast. He tried not to think of that. That had never been the point. The point had always been to use his talents, his work ethic, his intelligence, his courage to do some good in the world, make it a better place. So he tried to deny how fucking much he wanted that assistant directorship.

His first morning after getting the assignment-it happened the day Jack and Mitzi were taken down and the “pattern” emerged-he spent establishing liaison first with field offices in Chicago and New York (who of course resented suddenly having to report to a DC big shot, even if he was well-known and liked by reputation) and through them with the responding police departments. Since East Hampton’s was small, the Long Islanders were happy to turn administrative control over to the feds, whom they despised less than the New York State Police; that was no problem. Chicago was bitter, but in a little time-Nick’s diplomatic rep was well-known and amply justified-he’d gotten Chicago aboard and set up a working HQ in the Chicago Police Department (as opposed to the FBI’s field office, which ticked off the field office AIC, but that couldn’t be helped) and got down to the bolts and nuts. Evidence recovery teams were dispatched immediately to both localities, some of the Bureau’s best forensic people taken off less urgent cases and reassigned here, firearms specialists invited over from BATF just to contribute what they could to the FBI’s efforts, special agents moved in to monitor the local performance and offer gentle evaluations of what could be done better, what needed to be done over, and what was superb work. By 4 p.m., the feds had all but usurped the Chicagoans in the investigation.

But Nick had a first move to make before he even went to Chicago to take command. Just from press reports, he understood, as a onetime sniper himself, that the shooting was of very high quality, something rarely found in criminal cases. Neither his people in East Hampton nor those in Chicago could confirm exactly where the shots had come from, but the lack of rifle reports noted at each scene suggested they had come from a long way off or that the shooter had used some kind of suppressive device, and that conclusion buttressed the operating assumption: a pro. A bullet recovered from the elbow of Joan Flanders’s personal assistant-it had