Game of Snipers

61

Allah sent him a wonderful day, on the cusp of a wonderful night of deep and restful sleep, untroubled by a visit from his darkest nightmare visitor, the American sniper sent to destroy him and his mission. He awoke to a blue sky, lightly feathered with high cirrus clouds, not much breeze. The air was fresh, even perfumed. The leaves vibrated in the gentle breeze, turning first their dark faces, then their light faces, to him — in effect, shimmering.

At the river that morning, he took his Kestrel readings, came up with a two- to four-mile-per-hour north-northwest breeze, a temperature of sixty-seven degrees, probably to rise a few degrees by midafternoon, and only forty-four percent humidity. The sun was bold, casting sharp shadows, but it would be high in the sky by shooting time and thus would render the image shadeless. The buildings, the grounds, the vegetation, the colors, the lack of activity, the lack of security vehicles or men: all as it should be. On the water, the rills were low.

Praise be to Allah, He who provides.

There was no hurry. He ambled back to the building, halting again for a long, keen observation. Again, nothing, nobody, no cruising police vehicles or plainclothes men in nondescript sedans. No helicopters above, and, with his gifted eyesight, he was sure there were no drones high in the sky.

He entered the lobby boldly, knowing that the TV monitor was down, had always been down. He took the elevator up with a young woman and her two children. Nothing was said, but the mood was calm. The children were well behaved, the mother attentive. They got off on 3, he continued to 6. Hallway empty. He unlocked, entered, and locked again, checked his watch. Time for prayer.

He slipped on his mask, hairnet, and rubber gloves, as always. He went to his prayer rug — a towel — and prostrated himself for seven minutes.

Allah, I beseech Thee, look with favor upon my enterprise today, for it is enacted to Your glory, on Your behalf, for Your war. I give up my life to You, O Allah, and will gladly leave it if that is Your decision. I pray that You make my eye sharp, my hand strong, my heart calm, my finger delicate. In Your interest and according to Your laws I dedicate that which is to come, O Beloved One, and ask as well Your favor on my ancestors and my descendants, for all are a part of this holy moment.

On and on it went, a litany of loyalty, love, and dedication. It poured the lubricant of faith throughout his body so that all processes became easier, slick with grace, beauty, and precision. His mind was narrowing, his breath was smoothing, his fingers were strengthening. Only one thing occupied his mind.

He went to the closet where he had stored a purchase he had made: it was a can of acetone. It would chemically obliterate any traces of himself on the weapon. Using a cotton ball to blot, he assiduously wiped the steel and plastic down, even if the plastic was favored not to preserve fingerprints. He worked at a slow, sure pace, watching the liquid as it spread to a sheen and evaporated, not missing any plausible surface, taking all traces of Juba with it into the ether. The scope, particularly the turrets, demanded special attention, as it could easily retain evidence if not carefully purified, though he had never touched any part of the weapon with his naked fingers.

Next, he drew out several plastic bags. Each contained DNA-carrying microdebris from the actual corpse of Brian Waters — dandruff, flakes of skin, filaments of nostril and head hair — and applied them gradually to the rifle. A piece of tape yielded a thumbprint, and by applying it to the Thunder Beast suppressor — a long tube with chambers and aperture that would dissipate the sound of the shot — then peeling it off, he transferred the image. He applied and then removed another tape — this one for the sake of the trigger finger — around the trigger guard and the trigger itself. In the end, he had rendered the rifle appropriate to the biological reality of his avatar’s presence and his own invisibility.

He did the same to the iPhone, smearing it with the detritus of poor Mr. Waters. A close investigation would reveal nothing except the FirstShot app and the occasional posts of Mr. Waters on his all-but-deserted Facebook page. He checked and saw that certain pages had come to his cue, and he knew exactly the stroke to send them instantly to post on the Dark Web, where they would be found and tracked to this iPhone and to Brian A. Waters. The pages contained superb screeds of hate and blasphemy, which would make the man’s sickness manifest to all and provide the motive for his crime. Brian A. Waters was about to become the most famous man on earth, as well as the most wanted. Too bad he’d been dead for over three months and wouldn’t be around to enjoy all the attention.

Next, he checked his getaway bag. Yes, passport, ID, cash. He knew exactly his escape route, where he would be picked up by Iranian operatives and how he would be smuggled back to Syria.

It was almost over.

He checked his watch.

So little time.

He went to the window in front of the rifle. He had been prepared to cut the glass, use a suction cup to remove the appropriate fragment, shoot through it, then wedge the glass back in place so that no one observing from the outside would know that this room, automatically, was the source of the assassin’s bullet. But a happy surprise had been that the larger pane of glass was flanked on each side by two narrower ones, either of which could be cranked open, revealing a screen, through which fresh air could circulate if the building’s air-conditioning went down. Cranking it open also revealed ample room for shooting, with a perfect vantage on the target. At the last second, he would cut the screen, peel it back, and open a square through which he could shoot. His plan was to fire once as carefully as possible, crank the bolt as quickly as possible, fire nine more rounds, forming a kind of beaten zone, so that the man would take bullet after bullet. He would quickly close the window to obscure the location. The authorities would find the sniper’s nest eventually, but he would be long gone.

Now there was nothing left to do but wait.

It turned out there wasn’t really space in the operations room for Nick and his crew, not with all the bigs who’d crowded in to watch the triumph. Probably that was best for all, as it prevented the bigs from noting the annoyance of the passed-over Nick team, and it prevented the passed-over Nick team from expressing snarky resentment.

At one point, the Director and some otherwise anonymous factotums came up to express gratitude for contributions, creativity, and the success about to arrive, although the leader himself spent more time with Chandler — as what sane man would not — than the others combined. He lurked, breathed, smiled unctuously, closed in too tight and was too fulsome in attention. Such is the expression of power in D.C., and, for her part, she stayed cool and professional and paid no acknowledgment to his interest. When the ceremony was over, the bigs left, and Nick’s people were left alone in their upstairs warren, watching the drama on a closed-circuit TV, where they were free to go as smart-ass as they wanted, though, as it turned out, no one was in any sort of smart-ass mood.

Still, they followed as the parts were carefully layered in. The choppers weren’t airborne yet, but when they were, they would hang in the air about a half mile behind the zone, which was that part of the arc 1,847 yards out in Queens that fronted on the new building over Roosevelt Drive and the East River. The Mogul sub was suiting up in Level IV Kevlar for his shot at glory; Mogul himself would arrive shortly. Teams were locked, loaded, and in place all over, the various Raytheon marvels needed for the intercept in place and tested.

Meanwhile, in Queens, SWAT units had parked during the night on blocks not far from the potential shooting sites — one of twenty-three buildings on the arc — and could get there almost as fast as the choppers. The plan was to hurl them to the newly identified shooter’s building simultaneously with the arrival of the choppers — a classic pincer move.

Swagger had little to say. As much as he hoped it would work, he didn’t believe it would. Juba was too good. Juba was better than he’d ever been. You couldn’t match ordinary brains against his and expect anything good to come of it.

“Cheer up, Bob,” said Nick. “We do this thing, have a couple of days of Mogul love and an open bar, and it’s back to Idaho and the front porch. I’m sure the deer and the antelope have missed you.”

“May I say something?” said Mr. Gold.

“A breakthrough?” asked Nick.

“Not exactly,” he said.

“Well, go ahead anyway.”

“I believe we have made an astute analysis of the evidence, and the plan itself is sound and well staffed, no half measures — and I know, from experience, that half measures are frequently catastrophic.”

“Okay,” said Nick.

“However—”

“Here it comes,” said Neill.

“It does occur to me that in one respect, hard as we have worked, we are all Juba amateurs. We’ve been in the game only a few months.”

“Yes?”

“There is only one Juba professional in the world. We are here only because of her efforts over long years. She has been tracking, imagining, stalking this fellow for over a decade.”

He paused as they all took it in.

Finally, Nick said, “Go on.”

“My thought is, at this late hour perhaps security mandates could be waived and we could reach out to Mrs. McDowell. We could put all we have — our conclusions, the time frame, the immediate anticipation of action in the countersniper plan — before her and ask her for an opinion. Well, not so much about what we plan to do but on our reading of what Juba wants to do. Maybe she’d see something we missed, maybe she’d bring an outside-the-box freshness to it, maybe there are vibrations, memes, motifs, indications, resonances, some sort of clues that we’ve missed to which she’d be sensitive. After all, we have several hours, by my watch, until the event itself is thought to transpire, so there does seem to be just enough time.”

Nick thought it over. It involved logistics, not his strong suit. He turned to Chandler.

“Is this possible?”

“Well,” she said, “I don’t think Mr. Gold means by phone, does he?”

“Face-on-face would be preferred,” said Gold. “That way, we could read her expression as she considers the analysis, which may be more elucidating than anything she might say.”

“She’s where? In the suburbs of Baltimore?”

“In the city itself, northwest Baltimore,” said Swagger. “It’s called Dorsey’s Forge.”

“What aviation assets do we have?” Nick asked Chandler.

“None. They’re all at Quantico, out of play.”

“Maryland State Police has aviation,” said Neill. “At Martin airfield, just north of Baltimore.”

“Chandler, could it work?”

“Maybe get Maryland to pick her up at some park near her home. They get her to our roof inside an hour. That would give us two hours with her to go over the stuff. I think it could be valuable.”

“Swagger?”

“She ain’t no dummy.”

“Neill?”

“Well, if nothing else, it would dispel all those little ‘if only’ doubts we have. It would represent us making every last effort, all the way to game time. No stone left unturned, that sort of thing.”

“Bob, can you call her and see if it’s even possible?”

Swagger took out his phone, punched in the number.

Two rings, three, halfway through a fourth: “Yes?”

“Janet, it’s Swagger.”

“Oh, hello,” she said.

“What’s your situation?”

“I have no situation. I’m about to clean the upstairs bathroom, in an attempt to forestall my daily martini spree another hour.”

“Is there a field, an open space, anywhere near you?”

“There’s a schoolyard two blocks away. Scott Key Elementary School.”

“Hold a second. Oh, better yet, don’t start on the bathroom. Let us do some checking at this end. Put on some comfortable shoes.”

He hung up.

“Okay,” said Nick, picking up a phone.

On-screen, they saw as in the Command Center, somebody came to the Director, and he rose and was led to a phone off camera.

Nick made the pitch.

Some chitchat, maybe the Director consulted with the White House and his staff, but, in the end, the assent was given.

“Okay,” said Nick. “Bob, call her back, read her in, and get her to that schoolyard. Chandler, get me our State Police liaison.”

“Yes, sir.”

“We’ll see what she has to say.”

Finally: the ammunition.

Maybe this is how it begins. You cannot love the rifle if you do not love the ammunition. Something dense, deadly, charismatic in the heft and glint of it. Nothing on earth quite like it.

He had, after all the experimenting and all the lives of chained men perishing at a mile-plus in the wild beauty of Wyoming, settled upon this.

With the tip of his knife, he peeled open the package he had prepared in Wyoming. The ten Kings of Hell spilled out, each 3.681 inches long, slightly front-heavy, somehow oddly dense for volume, a function of the 250 grains of Sierra .338 diameter MatchKing hollow-point boattail bullet inserted and crushed into place by the pressure of Wilson’s .367 seating die.

He loved the cartridges. He loved to build them, to think them, to imagine them, to feel the weight and roll of them in his hand. He’d scrubbed them with acetone in Wyoming and now touched them with rubber-gloved fingers only. Thus, no Juba would be evident to investigators on their ultimate discovery, even if the brass was notoriously adverse to recording the prints of its handlers.

He held each one. Slightly overpressured with 91.2 grains of Hodgdon H1000 smokeless powder that filled each once-fired Hornady tube, to be ignited by a Federal 215M Magnum primer. The shell had been chamfered for smoothness, its burrs and eccentricities milled away. It had been neck-turned so that the grip of brass that secured the bullet was exactly.004 thick all the way around. It had been tested for runout — that is, deviation from the axis — and found to be within the metric of.001, which meant as close to perfect as humanly possible. It had been annealed, a brief heat treatment that made its consistency profound. The bullets themselves had been sharpened in the Whidden die, improving their long-range accuracy. All these boutique touches, which the same investigators would eventually discover, were consistent with the high craftsmanship of a champion shooter like Brian A. Waters. They matched perfectly, both as an object and as a product of a culture, with what would be observed when, weeks from this day, his house was unlocked and subjected to the most intense of forensic examinations. No one looking at the recovered shell could doubt that it had been produced by the man from Albuquerque, about to be revealed to the world as yet another lone gunman on a grassy knoll — well, an apartment — administering hatred via a death that would change the world.

He took the shells and, one by one, loaded them into the Accuracy International ten-shot magazine. As the box filled, the spring tightened and fought him more urgently. He squeezed the last one in only by applying the full pressure of his thumb against the shaft of the brass, after sliding it between the flanges of the mag and urging it back flat against its rear plate.

There! Again, something about a magazine fully loaded. You held it, feeling its density, feeling the pressure of its compressed spring, feeling its urgency to offer its cargo up to the slide of the bolt, which would pluck them, one by one, into the chamber, like a burnt offering of some kind.

He rocked the magazine into place, felt it catch, rotated it upward, felt it lock in place with a satisfying reverberant click. He had only to ram the bolt home, to insert the first of the ten into the chamber, and wait until at last his target came into view, a small human speck in the lens from so far away, who, as he would have to, would go to stillness, not knowing he was setting himself for the shot that would kill him.

Juba checked his watch.

More than an hour to go.

Now to relax, perhaps pray again, perhaps let serenity and will roll through his body, until he became one with the rifle, one with the ammunition, one with the mission.

Something moved in front of him. But it was only a helicopter, a speck in the sky miles away, vectoring in for some kind of rooftop landing in the far, magnificent city across the river.

She tried. You could see her trying. She gave it her all, her belief, her imagination, the intelligence leveraged into her brain by the weight of a mother’s endless grief, all the pain of back alley beatings and rapes, all the subsequent pain in the recovery, all the willed forgetting. She tried.

Still, the message was clear: no sale.

“You don’t have to say a thing,” said Mr. Gold. “I can read your face.”

“It’s magnificent,” she said. “You’re so brilliant, each of you. I sense your intellect in every stroke, in every inference, in every leap. And it makes sense. It follows so logically, one point to another, one clue to the next, all of it coheres, makes policy sense, makes world-historical sense, makes religious sense, even by their standards. As a Moslem, it makes sense to me. As a tourist in Baghdad, it makes sense. As an amateur spy, it makes sense. As a rape victim, as a pauper who’s spent a fortune on the same goal — on all of that — it makes sense. I applaud you.”

“But,” said Mr. Gold, “you do not buy it?”

She smiled, though deep in that smile was the weight of loss, and the whole room read it: Mrs. McDowell regrets to inform you that you are full of shit.

Silence in the room. One of the fluorescents had gone out, so shadows haunted the place. The batch of them faced the woman, who wore no makeup, as she hadn’t had time to put it on, who sat before them in dumpy jeans and a Boys’ Latin T-shirt, her cheap reading glasses slightly askew. Her hair had looked better, as had she. But none of that mattered. Only her reaction mattered.

“Is it a feeling you have?” asked Nick. “Or is it something specific?”

“It’s that I love everything about it except it.” Then she said, “Do all of you love it? Do you have any doubts?”

“I will not let them answer,” said Nick, “because that would give you a frame in which to couch your own objections, and that is of no use to us. What is only of use to us is what you bring to it.”

“I will try to put into words what I feel,” she said. “If you find value in it, that’s well and good. How much time do we have?”

“Don’t worry about that. Time is our concern, not yours. No one here will look at a watch, no one will sigh.”

Swagger realized how professional Nick could be. It must have killed him to say such a thing, for indeed time was clicking away, remorselessly, as it was now 1440, and the thing would happen — or so they reckoned — at 1500. Each second made any kind of response to anything she said more unlikely.

“Do you want a Coke? A cup of coffee?” asked Nick.

“Get the Coke,” said Swagger. “The coffee here sucks.”

Everybody laughed. Maybe that helped a little.

“I’m fine,” she said. Then she said, “His mind doesn’t work like that.”

They waited for an amplification, but nobody said a word to rush her. They found the discipline to let her form her own words in her own time.

“I have been on this guy since he killed my son. That’s over fifteen years. I have learned a little. Not much.”

What had she learned?

“It’s too straightforward. You’ve concluded he wants to kill Mogul. Even if you didn’t want to say it, or were prevented from saying it, your country’s history forced you to think that he wanted to kill Mogul.”

She was right. Maybe Nick had been wrong. Maybe in suppressing that interpretation he had made it all the more inevitable.

“But if he really wanted to kill Mogul,” she said, “you would be all set up to prevent him from killing somebody else. You wouldn’t know it was Mogul. You’d think it was, say — oh, I don’t know — Hillary. There would be indicators all along — hints, subtle suggestions, the whole shadow show — all of it to convince you that it was Hillary. And the shot on Mogul would come as a complete surprise. It would utterly stun you. You’d have invested everything in saving Hillary from a threat that didn’t exist.”

Again, silence. Not a single Hillary joke.

“Think how he did it in Baghdad. The IED detonations drove the marines back to what they thought was safety. But what they thought was safety was the kill box. Lure and distraction: that’s his specialty. He lures you into one situation, twists it against you.”

“We thought we were hunting him,” Bob said. “He was hunting us.”

“Exactly,” she said.

The room went still.

“He’s very tricky. It’s not what you think it is. He’s come up with something else.”

Finally, Nick spoke — but not to her.

“What have we missed? Anybody?”

Swagger said, “All the gun stuff is hard. He will shoot at 1,847 over water in close to fifty-degree humidity with very little wind. He will use a .338 Lapua Magnum of a certain powder load, case preparation, and bullet choice and weight. You can’t argue that away.”

“So what isn’t hard? What is interp, as opposed to fact?”

“Behavior,” said Gold, from his well of ancient experience. “The hardest thing. You count on one thing, another happens. Always.”

“Let’s ID the behavior, then,” said Nick.

“Mogul will show up today at 1500. Juba’s known it. It seems solid. They believed it to be solid enough to plan on,” said Chandler.

“Mogul will address the crowd,” said Neill. “It isn’t planned, it isn’t announced, it’s on paper nowhere, but it’s his behavior: give him a friendly crowd and there he is, screwing Renegade out of attention and getting big pleasure from that, big as life, ready for a bullet.”

“Ready for a bullet,” said Chandler. “Meaning ‘still.’ He has to be still because of Swagger’s time in flight data. Time in flight is not negotiable. It’s the iron law of physics.”

“Stillness,” said Gold. “The young woman is onto something.”

“Go on,” said Nick.

“The time in flight,” continued Mr. Gold, “demands that he must be still. We assume that stillness is a speech near a body of water, and it turns out that Mogul indeed had a long-settled speech planned for that day right at the banks of the East River. Knowing that, anyone could plan backwards from it, could see what a brilliant bodyguard of lies it would make, how perfectly it might cover the real operation at about the same time, but which would turn on another form of stillness.”

“Stillness,” said Nick. “Anybody?”

“Eating?” said Neill.

“Inside a restaurant. Not likely.”

“No joke: going to bathroom?” Bob said.

“Again inside, not available to a long shot from far away across a river.”

“Reviewing stand?” said Neill. “Parade ground. The theater? A movie? I can’t—”

Then Mrs. McDowell said, “My father was one of those go-getters. Never still—anywhere, anytime, any way. Except one place in his life where his stillness used to drive people crazy. I know. I caddied for him. He was putting.”

Allah, Thy servant beseeches Thee again. O Lord of all, it is in Your favor I commit myself and give myself, for life, for death, for fate, for destiny. I smite Thy enemies. I drive them to destruction. I ensure our triumph. I ensure Your mastery over all. I enable their submission and the power of Your will as it becomes not regional but global, as it destroys the Satan that is America, as it ruins this land of decadence and corruption and evil. I evoke in Your name all of those who have died to put me at this spot and make me Your instrument, and, consecrated in their blood, I perform my act. I am humble and contrite before You, knowing that now You shall reach down and infuse Your servant with power, serenity, vision, and brilliance.

It was almost time. He gently shoved the bolt forward, feeling it take one of the cartridges off the stack in the magazine, engaged it, and slid it gently, smoothly, forward into the chamber. He locked the bolt down and, with his finger, touched the safety switch on the right side of the receiver, checking that it was off.

On one of the screens they could see the crowd gathering in New York, the dais beginning to fill. The other showed men in calm control in the Command Center downstairs, as they orchestrated the pieces for the checkmate that nobody watching now believed would never happen.

Nick was on the phone.

“Get me Secret Service, their Command Center. Yes, ASAP, this could be Code Red.”

He waited.

“Jackson, Command” came on the voice at the other end.

“Bill, Nick Memphis over at Hoover, I’m going to put you on speaker for my people, okay?”

“Yeah. But, Nick, shouldn’t you be engaged in the New York op? Aren’t you up there, and—”

“Long story. Politics.”

“In this town? What a surprise!”

“Something just come up. Assuming our bad guy is going to go today, I have to ask, do you have any protectees on a golf course?”

“On a golf course?”

“Yeah, I—”

“That’s mucho classified, bud.”

“Secure line, emergency procedure, maybe go to Code Red on this one. Come on, Bill, give it to me, this is real important.”

“I don’t know how you found out. Nobody’s supposed to know this shit.”

He could see them now. Still too far out, but sharply outlined in the Schmidt & Bender, two figures, next to the golf cart. A good one hundred and fifty from the green. The tall one — too far to make out details, he was an amoeba to the eye, even blown up twenty-five times due to the genius of Germanic glass grinding — addressed the ball, concentrated, and rotated back smoothly to equipoise, paused a second, unleashed a swing.

Through the scope, Juba could not follow the ball, but he could tell from the instant dejection in the tall man’s posture that the shot had not gone well. But instead of relinquishing his club and jumping into the cart for taxi service onward, the man reached into his pocket, took out a second ball, and dropped it on the grass. The same ceremony of addressing, shifting, fidgeting, adjusting and counteradjusting, gathering, squeezing his concentration to an even higher degree, and the silver shaft flashed in the sun, and another slashing stroke was delivered.

This time, success, as the tall man pivoted in follow-through, turned back, putting hand to eyes to shield them from sun, following the ball as it went where it had been directed. He could not contain a bit of leap as the ball must have smacked on the green and rolled toward the hole. Elated, he accepted a handshake from his assistant and got into the cart, which now began its short journey to the green, some 1,847 yards from Juba.

“Whenever he’s in town on a Thursday, he goes to a certain course and has a private round. It’s secure, because it’s on a military post closed to the public, and of course the MPs do a security sweep and close the place down for the afternoon. They close the whole post down, in fact. It’s just our guy and his caddy, for therapy, for escape, for fun. Every Thursday. He carries a bucket of balls, and he’ll hit—”

“Who?” yelled Nick.

“Renegade.”

It made sudden, savage sense. Renegade was beloved by millions, a beacon of racial pride, honor, and integrity, a hero to the left. Dump him with a .338 to the thoracic, and those millions would go insane with rage, especially as it came out the shooter was a white racist who’d just unleashed a ton of vile racist hate speak under his own name — Brian A. Waters — on the Darknet and had escaped, cleanly and mysteriously, as if abetted by some Deep State conspiracy. Would we ever come back from that one?

“Where?” said Nick.

“The golf course at Fort Lesley J. McNair in the southeast, off the Anacostia. About a mile from you.”

“Is there any spot on the course where he’s vulnerable—”

“The eighth green is at the edge of the river, nearly a mile wide at that point. Next to the National War College. I suppose if you knew he was there and you were on the other side of the river and had a high vantage point—”

“He’s there now?”

“He would be. Arrived at one. Usually on the course about three hours on a Thursday afternoon. He’d be just getting to the eighth green about now.”

“Call your detail and get him off the course, and I mean this fucking second.”

“No detail. No iPhone. That’s the point, he enjoys being cut off, so it’s just him and the golf ball. I can get the guys in the clubhouse out there, but I don’t know if they can make it in time.”

“Do it, do it, do it!” said Nick.

He looked up.

“They knew some Saudi billionaire had hired him for a speech. Big dollars. They knew that would keep him in town this day, and since it was Thursday, he’d go to the course. Later, they found out about Mogul’s reaction, and Juba saw how he could run that as cover story.”

“Mrs. McDowell’s helicopter on the roof,” said Swagger. “I need a rifle.”

It turned out the ball hadn’t quite made it to the green. It landed a few feet short, fairway all the way, far from any sand, but a few feet shy of the manicured grass. Good chance to work on the short game.

Hmm… Long putt or short chip? Decisions, decisions.

Why not both?

Do it, thought Juba. The tiny figure stood exactly against the red dot at the center of the scope, the adjustments perfect, everything as it should be, as Allah had willed it.

But he wouldn’t be 1,847, not just yet.

He’d be at about 1,865, a few yards off the edge of the lush green circle that sported its silly little flag, which, incidentally, was limp, testifying to lack of wind.

Do it! he told himself again.

But the target was not at 1,847. Everything was set for 1,847. Another few seconds, a minute perhaps.

The golfer elected to go with a chip. The drill — address, adjust, square up, bear down — all over again. Then a short, clipped backswing — more chop than swing — and he uncoiled, very much under control.

Whatever happened, it was not good.

He laughed — the man was enjoying himself — and waited until his assistant brought another club and another ball.

He dropped the ball to earth.

Address, adjust, square up, bear down, head still and down. No backswing, just a kind of controlled shove, and this time the result was better.

His assistant came to him, and the two men slapped hands.

Renegade walked onto the green.

On the roof, under the thunder of beating rotors, Nick was leaning into the cockpit of the State Police helicopter, screaming at the pilot.

“Stay low, due east, Lieutenant, you’re zeroing in on the National War College at river’s edge, can’t miss it, huge building, like a temple, or a capitol, or something.”

“Yes, sir,” the pilot was saying.

“You have to go beyond to the middle of the river. We’ll be looking at the tallest building in Anacostia with river frontage — say, a mile off the War College. Your copilot is on binocs, I’m on binocs, we’re looking for an upper-story window that’s open. He won’t be hanging out, he’ll be well back. You want to insert yourself between him and his target. We’ll take the shot if we have to, Swagger will counterfire if he gets—”

“Sixth floor,” shouted Bob. “He was sixty-seven feet higher than the target in Wyoming. Each story ten feet. He’ll be on the sixth floor!”

And at that point, Neill spilled onto the roof, rifle in one hand, box of red Hornady ammo in the other. Chandler was just behind.

“It’s Juba’s,” he said. “It was one floor down, so much closer.”

Swagger and Nick ran to the chopper and climbed in, and Neill reached them a second later. He handed the weapon to the sniper.

It was familiar to Swagger, knowing its curves, its feel, its distribution of weight, its easy pointability. He’d used it in Vietnam, Remington’s classic 700, as solid and tight as any assembly line could turn out.

“They haven’t touched it?”

“Not yet,” said Neill.

Swagger rotated into the hatch of the helicopter, going naturally to prone, rolling slightly to the right to pry open the red box of Hornady 6.5 Creedmoor — one was missing, and he knew what had happened to it — and began threading them into the well in the receiver revealed by the pulled-open bolt.

“Time to hunt,” he said, but nobody heard him.

The man walked to the ball on the green, bent to examine it, walked to the pin, bent to examine it — had he never seen one before? — but would not be still. He was mapping his stroke to the most precise degree, he stopped for a brief chat with his assistant, who offered him some sort of counsel, he stepped off the green to squat and peer at the ball in relation to the hole and the course its trajectory had to follow to arrive squarely, then stood up.

It was evidently an important shot, even if he had balls in his pocket and in the golf cart.

But he would not stay still, he would not begin his fatal address of the ball, which would put him in the kill box.

Juba monitored his own breathing, enjoying the fact that he was so calm, that things were progressing so well.

He had a brief flash of what happened after the shots.

Close the window.

Launch the hate pages to the Dark Web.

Make a last quick check that no traces of Juba remained.

Dump the gloves, mask, and cap in the getaway bag.

Slip out the door, which would lock behind him.

Go to the street without hurry or urgency.

Walk due south on Martin Luther King Jr. Drive and look for a black BMW SUV to pick him up.

He came out of his projection and back to the scope.

The golfer finally had come to the ball and was preparing for the putt.

City and river slid by in a blur as the craft ate the distance between the FBI roof and the Anacostia River. Vibration, like a charge of electricity, roared through everything. The wind was a primal reality, bashing at him.

Bob lay prone on the deck of the bird, legs splayed for stability. He hadn’t gone to a shooting position yet because he didn’t want to hold it before he had acquired a target. But the rifle against his shoulder, its barrel projecting outward to the broad bright expanse of reality that was before him, was reassuring.

He wore a headset and throat mic, and now used it to address the pilot, “Lieutenant, if I have to shoot, can you hold her steady?”

“Yes, sir,” came the pilot’s reply. “Give me a second’s notice, and I’ll go to autorotate, which means I cut the engine, tune the blades, and we just sustain ourselves on the rotation without the buzz. I’ve only got about ten seconds, though, before I have to power up.”

“Got it, and great. I’ll sing out.”

The copilot said, “It’s got to be that newer building. The upper floor would get you the vantage.”

“Yeah,” said Nick. “If he’s anywhere, he’s there.”

“Okay, boys,” said the pilot, “I’m laying myself right in his angle on the target. I’m coming around and holding. Find him for the sniper. Find him.”

Now at last.

The man was still. He bent over the ball, addressing it squarely, all his attention focused on it. He did not know that the red dot of Juba’s 5.5×25×56 Schmidt & Bender lay without tremor or remorse upon the center of his body and that Juba’s finger caressed the curve of the trigger, that all systems were perfect, that it was only a matter not of technique but will.

Juba’s focus went to the dot, not the target, and his trigger finger began its microprogress—

And then the image disappeared.

Something blurred and heavy settled between himself and it, and he recognized the shape as a helicopter. His fingers flew to the focus ring, and he dialed the blur to sharpness. And now he recognized the open hatch and, in one corner of it as if from his nightmares, bent and concentrated and unmoving, the American sniper.

“Open window, middle, top floor!” screamed Nick.

“On it,” Bob replied. “Lieutenant, go to auto.”

The bird’s roar ceased, and there was a moment of stillness as the rotors sustained the machine of their own without the assistance of power but purely on the laws of aerodynamics, sucking the strength of the atmosphere through their canted blades. And in that pause Bob went hard to shooting position lock-in, rifle tight, eye centered on scope, finger on trigger, saw the open window and, though darkened, what could only be the silhouette of a man hunched over a rifle.

Without willing it, he fired, even as he read the flash from the other’s muzzle.

He fired. The American sniper fired.

It was too late, of course.

He was where fate and destiny had decreed, in another’s crosshairs, even as that other was in his own. The flashes were simultaneous, even at that range, and the time in flight was as well.

It had to happen. It did. Now, here, today, this minute, this second, this fraction of a second.

He entered the light.

“Bingo!” screamed Nick. “Brains on the ceiling, baby, you nailed his ass. Oh god, what a shot, what a shot, Swagger is the best. Did he shoot? I thought I saw flash. Did he—”

He looked down to see Swagger, face flat on the deck, as if dumped loosely on his rifle, now flattened under him.

“Swagger!” he yelled.

He bent, touched the man’s neck for pulse and found the feeblest excuse for one, a weak pumping. A pool of blood began to roll across the deck, vibrating as the pilot powered on and revved the torque.

“Swagger?”

He pulled him half up, saw the chalk-white face, the unfocused eyes, just the faintest tremor of breath.

“Lieutenant, go to nearest shock trauma, fastest, someplace set up with helicopter pad, fastest. I say again, fastest! Copilot, radio ahead, tell them we have medical emergency incoming, severe gunshot trauma, lung or chest. Get people on roof to get him into surgery. I say again: Emergency! Emergency! Emergency!”

“Roger, FBI, wilco,” came the reply.

Where had it gone? It had vanished — rifle, helicopter, target. Someone was yelling. It was Nick.

“SWAGGER!”

Nick yelled again, from farther out.

“SWAGGER!”

Where had he gone?

“SWAGGER?”

“SWAGGER!”

It was so far away.

“SWAGGER!”

62

Fall came hard, winter harder. Bleak, even savage, months, with harsh winds and blankets of snow that lay across the prairie like the base coat for the end of the world in ice. He saw none of it.

The collarbone wasn’t the problem. It was replaced by titanium, coated in nitride to prevent tissue stain. The bone chips weren’t the problem. They were picked out, one at a time, all two hundred and thirty-one of them, ranging in size from .25 inch to .004 inch, scattered throughout the thoracic cavity. The clavical, hit by the .338 Lapua traveling sideways after having been slowed and deflected by the helicopter’s fuselage, had exploded like a grenade, deflating his left lung, pricking his heart. But that was not the problem. The lung was patched and reinflated, the heart de-pricked.

The problem was the chip of bone shrapnel that had cut into and almost — it was a matter of a few thousandths of an inch — destroyed his aorta. That would have been fatal in a few seconds.

But in minutes they cracked his chest, pried him open like an oyster, and went to work. They delicately removed the intruder and sutured the artery up. It was fourteen hours on the table, with relays of surgeons and nurses, the whole thing a close-run battle of its own, leaving exhausted participants soaked in sweat and limp from fatigue all over the surgery floor. But they were brave and tough and the best, and they saved him in time. Somehow the major vessel eventually healed. Seventy-three-year-old blood highways are not noted for such cooperation, but his nevertheless came through for him.

He sat, he rocked. No horseback riding, but each morning two hours of physical therapy, administered by a no-nonsense young woman from the hospital who saw him merely as a data unit to be manipulated toward certain goals, and who was always behind schedule and always cranky. Not much love flowed between them.

Audrey the Evil gone, he sat, he rocked. Late March. Scabby patches of snow on yellowed prairie grass. No buds yet, just nodules. The smell of wet everywhere. The clouds fat with rain, low and surly, moving remorselessly, a breeze that cut. One color and few variations, all off the murkiest part of the spectrum. It was a landscape designed by Nietzsche to melody composed by Wagner, both men in their deepest depressive phase of their bipolarity. He sat, wrapped in an old Indian blanket, his walker on the porch beside him. He had a thermos of coffee, black as usual, and a nice pair of binoculars in case any animal life decided to acknowledge his existence.

Phone made that god-awful sound and showed the front gate, where a new, expensive, and, hopefully, temporary guard spent the day, chasing off the too-many assholes who had propositions.

“Mr. Swagger, woman here, says she knows you. What is it, ma’am? Yeah, McDowell — a Mrs. McDowell.”

“Yeah, she’s okay.”

He knew she’d come this way as before, unannounced, so that nobody would feel the need to make preparations, and in a cheap rental car, this one in an even more insane shade than the last, some kind of econo Chevy that pushed its underpowered way over the crest and into the yard.

The same old Janet got out, no more chic or polished up than the last time, in jeans and a sweater under some kind of waxed outdoorsy jacket. As usual, running shoes, as if she still had a marathon to run when she’d just finished one.

“Well, hey,” he called.

“Was in the neighborhood,” she said, “thought I’d drop by.”

“Yeah, I’m halfway between the 7-Eleven and the dry cleaners.”

She laughed. “Well, it’s a big neighborhood.”

He didn’t rise; he couldn’t. She bent and hugged him, he nodded toward a chair nearby, and she pulled it over.

“So, how’s the hero?” she asked.

“I don’t know. Ask him, if you can find one. I just pulled a trigger.”

“Knowing he’d be pulling a trigger too.”

“Didn’t think that far ahead.”

They caught up. The news was good, as everyone had prospered. Nick got to retire again, this time as an Assistant Director, a goal finally achieved. Neill and Chandler got promotions, commendations, and Glory Wall photos with Mogul. Mr. Gold was back in the black cube, and even Cohen was respectful — at least for a little while.

“All you got was a bullet,” Janet said.

“I’m a big boy. It’s okay.”

Health notes: his progress, his mood, his day-to-day, his expected recovery rate.

“I’ll be back on the horse in three months. Not sure about the motorcycles. Doctors do not like motorcycles. I’ve recently started working in the shop again — you know, the crazy gun tinkering that I enjoy. Still be a few weeks before I can get behind a rifle. Lucky he nicked me in my left shoulder, not the right.”

“Some nick,” she said.

And finally: the thing itself. Who was behind it, who put up the money? The Iranians facilitated it and supported it, but nobody at the CIA thought it was their sort of operation. They sensed a bigger, smarter state actor, maybe a Putin, drawing on five centuries of Russian intelligence tradecraft. The Chinese? They were that good, so that was a possibility. Or maybe some “friend” who saw the ingredients on the table to take an ally down hard and move to the front of the line. Anyway, a joint Bureau — Agency task force was on it.

“Tell me your thoughts,” she said, “who saw it as a possibility, where it could have come from. Is there anything like it?”

“More than anything, it reminds me of our job on a Japanese admiral in World War Two. We were reading their code. Their guy Yamamoto was on an inspection tour. Our intel guys worked out the route and saw that on one tiny stretch of his flight he would be in range of our fighters. When he got there, the P38s were waiting and jumped him. Remember Pearl Harbor, and all that. Same thing here. Renegade’s in range for the few minutes he’s on the eighth green. Juba knew. Like the P38s, Juba was waiting.”

“And the cover story: New York? Did they just get lucky it was the same time?”

“Not really. They knew Mogul’s personality would compel him to show up Renegade. So they knew something would happen and that they could use it. That’s the kind of thinking the Agency people consider beyond the Iranians.”

She nodded, as if she understood or even cared. But it was clear she didn’t. She’d come for one thing, and, finally, it was all that was left.

“So I really came to ask a question,” she said.

“Figured as much.”

“How should I feel?”

“Pretty good, I’d say. You got him. Seemed impossible, but you got him.”

“I don’t really feel it was me. I had help from the best folks in the world. They believed, and, on that, I could keep going.”

“No, it was you. It all happened because you made it happen. The rest of us did our parts and got the screws tightened up real good, but no Janet, Juba gets away with it. No justice, nothing for Tommy, nothing for Baghdad, nothing for the bus, nothing for the New Mexico gun guy, nothing for the homeless fellows popped at a mile, nothing for a former president and the chaos his death would bring to us. We’re so fragile these days, maybe some kind of civil war. Nothing for the others on down the line that Juba would have put down. All that’s because Janet made it so.”

“Maybe,” said Janet.

“But you don’t feel any better, is that it?”

“Not really. Not where it counts. I’m a mom, that’s all. I’d rather have my son back than all that other stuff, and no matter how much of what someone calls good came from it, the price was too high. That’s how I feel.”

He didn’t say a thing. What was there to say?

“How long will that last?” she said. “That’s my question. You would know. You lost so many over the years.”

“Oh, you can do things. Help veterans, write an inspirational book, and if you make some money — and you should — endow a scholarship, fund a school, contribute, keep Tommy alive that way.”

“Sure,” she said. “Good advice, all of it. But you know it only takes you so far. Bob, tell me the truth. How long does it really last?”

“It lasts forever,” he said.