I, Sniper

25

From the Franklin Park warehouse, they took Mannheim to the Eisenhower and headed east in light, late traffic toward downtown, which loomed ahead like some glittery city of the future, idealized by darkness and dramatic lighting. On either side of the highway, the dreary flats of west Chicago told a different story.

Then Washington left the expressway, taking the South Pulaski exit, heading toward the precinct house on the South Side. He cut diagonally across the grimmer parts of the city, stop-and-go all the way, through old neighborhoods, under the el tracks, down old Chicago boulevards, because like all cops he knew the secret, speedy rivers in the city’s traffic map. Finally he settled on South Kedzie as he found less traffic and gunned toward the South Side, which lay beyond the Adlai Stevenson Expressway ahead.

As they drove through the night streets of Chicago, Bob told Denny Washington the strange and twisted story of Ward Bonson, naval intelligence star, brokerage king, CIA executive, and Russian mole, and how he, Bob, had tracked him through the deaths of Donnie Fenn, his wife’s first husband, and Trig Carter, prince of peace. How it had finally, so many years later, become time to hunt for Donnie and Trig’s killer; how he had tracked Bonson and left him smeared on a wall in a Baltimore warehouse.

“Whoa, Jesus. Man, you are a player. I had no idea you were anything but a broken-down NCO,” said Denny. “That is all right, Jack. Swagger, sniper, operator, counterintel genius, world-class detective, outsmarting the professionals.”

“I ain’t no genius. I just had the motivation. In his way, he killed Donnie. So Donnie didn’t die in the Vietnam war, he died in some spy game that this motherfucker and his clown brothers dreamed up. I tracked down Donnie’s killer and turned him to splatters. Justice don’t come often, but now and then it shows up for a second or two, helped along by a good trigger finger.”

“Okay, Gunny. You tell me now what to do. We’ll get this thing figured out and between the two of us, we’ll run these fucks to earth, I swear. I’m on your team from here on in.”

“You’re a good man, Denny. Few enough of you guys left, sad to say. Nick’s another and they’re trying to ruin him. Anyhow, here’s what I see. This letter,”-still untouched by anything except fingers clothed in rubber gloves, now bagged and marked as Chicago Police evidence exhibit no. 114 and riding inside Bob’s pocket-“is a coded message. It’s an instruction from a Soviet agent, Ward Bonson, to Ozzie Harris, who was either a subagent or some kind of sympathetic freelancer or agent of influence under Bonson’s area of responsibility. I guess they got to know each other in Washington in the late sixties, when both were involved heavily in the antiwar movement, though from different sides. But it turned out they were on the same team. So somehow in 1972, Bonson sends Ozzie this letter, possibly in response to a letter from Harris. I’m guessing it’s the book code, which means it’s indexed to something easy to come by but impossible to penetrate if you don’t have the key. It has to be the New York Stock Exchange results for the date of the letter. They ran in every newspaper in America, and Harris would have no trouble getting them. So we have to find them, and run each of Bonson’s recommended stocks down. Maybe it’s as simple as first letter, maybe it’s a progression of letters, maybe it’s last letter; anyway, it has to be fairly simple. So we decode it. Maybe it refers to this thing, maybe it refers to someone like Jack and Mitzi. Then we’ll see where we are.”

“That’s good,” said Denny, “but we have to keep it in evidence. I’ve already risked chain of custody with it by removing it, but I want to get to the station, log it in to evidence in the minimum amount of time-since we logged out of Unclaimed Property at 11:04, I can get it logged in by midnight; I think that’ll stand up to any court scrutiny-then you can work on it at the police station in the duty room. There’s a computer terminal-”

“I’m sure I can dig up the stock listings from that date somehow, even if I have to buy an old copy of a newspaper-”

“Oh, I’m liking it.”

“Then, if it’s something we can use, I can call Nick and we bring in the Bureau.”

“And if you can’t reach Nick, tell you what. I’m friends with a real good county prosecutor. This is a Chicago homicide, after all. These are Chicago people they gunned down. We’ll run it by Jerry and maybe he’ll take on the case. It sounds like it could go big if it’s played right, and he’d know how to play it right.”

Up ahead, Bob saw the brown mercury vapor light of the entrance to the Stevenson Expressway, a little Jetsons architecture here in the derelict section of Chicago, a construction built of concrete and machine corruption. A green sign pointed to Gary and Indianapolis, but Washington hummed ahead. The car slid under the overpass, then found itself in traffic, and came to another overhead, the ancient trusses and rivets of an el station. Rain had begun to fall lightly, scattering the light points ahead into glittery red-green stars.

“Good thinking,” said Bob.

“Oh, and one other thing,” said Washington, slowing as a light went suddenly to yellow and he knew he wouldn’t make it, while another car suddenly slid by on the left, also halting. “There’s also a possibility-”

The first bullet, passing through windshield, smeared a quicksilver maze of fractures and hit Washington in the eye, destroying it, blowing his head backward and filling the air with arterial spray.