Point of Impact

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

They pulled up outside the house. It was a quiet twilight in Syracuse, New York. Nick wore a suit, a white shirt, a tie, all recently purchased from Bob’s cache of nearly thirty thousand dollars that he wore in a moneybelt. Bob had bought a suit and tie, too – he looked almost civilized.

Nick turned and faced the house, and took a swallow.

“Oh, my,” Nick suddenly said. “We are finally here.”

This was the hardest thing, and it had placed a large ball of ice in his stomach.

Bob just chewed on a toothpick, looked ahead through the windshield of the rented Buick.

“Got to do it, Memphis.”

Nick exhaled four or six lungsful of air, just kept blowing the stuff off as the melancholy crept through him.

“I cross this line, I may never get back.”

“You don’t cross this line, they may kill you on the wrong side of it.”

“Doesn’t help much,” said Nick. “Not the way I was raised.”

The line was the felony line. It had haunted him since Bob had laid the plan before him; but it was the only way.

“This is it?”

“Yeah, ’fraid so. No other way to get what we want and get it fast. Look at it this way. These bad boys from this RamDyne outfit probably going to blow you out of your socks in a day or two anyway, what difference does it make then?”

Bob smiled at him again.

“Okay,” said Nick. He knew that so far in his adventures he’d done nothing illegal, though he’d stretched the elasticity of the law considerably. This was different. He was about to represent himself as a Federal agent, when he no longer was one. It violated Federal Code 28-02.4, and it carried three to five, though if he ever went over on it, he knew he’d be out in six months maximum, unless somebody was really mad at him. But he also knew he’d never work his side of the street again.

“Okay,” said Nick again. “Let’s do it. And to hell with Howdy Duty.”

“This is your duty,” said Bob.

They knocked on the door and a little girl answered. Nick took out his identification.

“Hi,” he said. “My name is Nicholas Memphis and I’m a special agent of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. May I see your daddy, please, honey?”

She ducked in and in a few seconds a grave, thin man in a cardigan appeared.

“Yes?” he asked, running a hand through his hair.

“Mr. Porter, I’m Nicholas Memphis, special agent of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. My associate, Special Agent Fencl.”

“Sir,” nodded Bob.

“Have I – ”

“No, no, sir,” said Nick fast. “But if our information is correct, it’s from this address that you edit and collate and send out Accuracy Shooting, the newsletter of benchrest shooting?”

Porter swallowed.

“Uh, yes, that’s correct. I’m an insurance executive but I’ve been benchresting fifteen years. I inherited the editorship ten years ago. A labor of love, really. I lose time and money on it. But I’ve gotten some good friends out of it and had lots of fun.”

“Yes, sir. We understand.”

“Mr. Porter,” said Bob, “we’re looking for a man who may be involved in several shootings.”

“Oh, God – ” said Porter.

“And our information suggests that he was at one time one of the leading benchresters in the country.”

“Oh, no,” said Porter. “Benchresters aren’t like that. We’re not talking about, you know, survivalists, AK-47’s, that sort of thing. These are just tinkerers who love to play with their completely useless rifles and loads and shoot tiny groups. Gosh, they just sit there and shoot and cuss, that’s all. It’s the most boring thing you ever saw. It’s enormously challenging to do, but to watch it it’s – ”

“Our information is pretty good, Mr. Porter. You know, there’s always one or two in any group who can give it a bad name.”

“God, it’s so harmless,” Porter said. “I’d hate to have the damn newspapers to get ahold of something like this and say, you know, that benchresting was training for sniping or some such – ”

“Mr. Porter, the last thing we’d ever do is talk to the press, you can be sure of that. What we’d like to do is examine your subscription list. This is an older man, he was active in benchrest shooting back in the late fifties, and we believe that if he’s a subscriber, he’d almost certainly have been one for a long time. As we understand it, the publication began as a shooting club newsletter right back in the early sixties?”

“That’s right. You’re looking for a name?”

“No, sir, almost certainly he’s living under a pseudonym. But we have several other characteristics, and if we get a set of names from you, we can compare them to other lists and look for correspondences. We can assure you your information will be held in strictest confidence.”

“And I suppose if I said no, you’d get a subpoena.”

“Mr. Porter,” said Nick, “this is a friendly visit, not a hostile one. If you’d like to call a family lawyer and have him come over and advise you, that would be fine. We can wait.”

“No, no,” said Porter. “No, come on in. Would you guys like some coffee?”

“Thank you, no, sir,” said Nick.

Porter led them through pleasant rooms until at last they reached his study, where an IBM PC and an Epson printer stood on the desk. The room was heavily lined with shelves, and Nick recognized many standard texts of ballistics, many reloading manuals, but also Crime and Punishment, Portnoy’s Complaint and The Great War and Modern Memory, all books he’d planned on reading sometime. On one wall hung a series of the typescript covers of Accuracy Shooting.

“I went to the computer two years ago,” Porter said. “It was getting to be too damn much with the paste-up. I can do each issue in one operation now. And I’ve got loads of volunteer help. And my wife helps with the typing. It’s great fun, we’ve loved every second of it.”

“Yes, sir,” said Nick. Bob hung back, letting Nick do the talking. Great, Nick thought, I’m in so deep now there’s no way of ever getting out.

“Now, I have twenty-seven-thousand-five-hundred-odd subscribers, Mr. Memphis. Do you want me to print out a whole list or something?”

“Sir, is there any way you can break it down by chronology? That is, early subscribers, that sort of thing. First subscribers. We’re quite convinced that our man would have found out about you early and been one of the first subscribers.”

“Hmmm,” said Porter. “You know, I don’t think I could run a program to shake it out that way; I’ve set the whole thing up to run alphabetically. Whenever I get a new subscriber, I add him to the list and the thing just inserts it where it should be.”

“I see.”

“How did you get your subscribers, Mr. Porter?” asked Bob.

“Well, I’ve taken out classified ads in SGN and in the slick gun mags. And of course there’s a subscription form in every copy of the magazine.”

“No, I mean originally. When it was first started. That first year, what was that, 1964? How’d they start it off?”

“Well, as I understand it, it was started informally as a newsletter of match results. And now and then a small technical article. The men were all driven to communicate what they were working on. And people who were just interested in the sport or the experiments or what have you began to ask to get on the mailing list. And I think they first started selling subscriptions, yes, it was 1964, after the newsletter became an actual magazine.”

“Those first subscription requests. Say, the first thousand. Any idea what became of them?”

“Oh, Lord. Did I throw them away? I got all that stuff from old Milt Omahundro who used to put it out. God, I – No, I think I’ve got some old cartons out in the garage.”

“Could we see them?”

“Sure. This way.”

And he led them out into the garage, where against one wall a pile of cardboard boxes stood.

“Oh, Lord, I just don’t – ”

“Mr. Porter,” said Bob. “Tell you what. If you get me some coffee like you offered before this young man said no, I’d be happy to go through those boxes for you. And I’ll make damn sure it’s as neat when we leave as it is now. Fair enough?”

“Well, that’s the best offer I’ve had in weeks,” said Porter.

Bob and Nick got busy, and it was Bob who worked the hardest. Taking off his coat and folding it neatly, he threw himself against the task with that same thorough intensity that always numbed Nick. He’d pause to take a sip of the coffee now and then, but mainly he just plunged ahead.

He’d make a good cop, thought Nick, who had never been outworked before.

It was in the last box and it was Bob who found them: the first thousand or so subscription forms to Accuracy Shooting, now yellowed with age. Many were simply letters that had had checks enclosed and still bore the imprint of a paper clip or the punctures of a staple; some were index cards or postcards. Only a few were forms. It was a box of old memories crumbling into dust. Hard to look at it and think that something so utterly banal – a box of forgotten letters and forms – might hold a key to something so monstrous as the shooting of Archbishop Roberto Lopez in New Orleans.

“I’ll be,” said Porter. “That takes me back awhile. I’d forgotten all about those. Didn’t even know I still had them.”

“Sir,” said Nick, “what we’d like to do is write you out a receipt for this material, then return it to you when we’ve completed our investigation.”

“Oh, I don’t know. If I’d have found them, I might have thrown them out myself. Why don’t you just take the damned things and if you lose them, so much the better.”

“Yes, sir, but I’d be happy to write out the receipt.”

“No, you just go on and go. I’ve got work to do.”

The next day, Shreck drove alone down through Virginia and into North Carolina, following complicated directions. There, in the shadows of the Blue Ridge Mountains, just over the state line, he turned down a private road for perhaps a mile until he came to an electronic gate. He got out of the car and pressed the buzzer on an intercom system.

“Yes?” came the voice.

“My name is Shreck,” he said.

“All right,” came the voice.

The door slid open, and Shreck got in and drove for another two hundred yards. Sitting in the shadow of a six-hundred-foot hill was a handsome ranch house, rambling, bright, and open. Shreck had always lived in apartments, almost monastically: but he had a moment of awe when he saw the spread – it was beautiful, and if he ever had a place, this is the sort of place he’d have. Whoever this guy was, he had money. He parked and got out. A cement ramp led up to double doors. The house had no steps.

Shreck walked up the ramp, found the door open.

“I’m in the shop,” came the call over the loudspeaker.

Shreck walked through the house, through its wide doors, past the sun deck. Out back he could see the rifle range, the white targets lodged against the base of the hill.

At last he reached the rear of the house, and stepped through another wide door. A man who looked ten years older than he was sat curled in a wheelchair and was very carefully turning a single brass shell in his hand as he worked it with some kind of metalworking tool, a keylike handle that embraced a brass cartridge case locked in a vise.

“Hello, Colonel Shreck.”

“Hello, Mr. Scott.”

Lon Scott wore his gray hair short and neat above the long face and aquiline profile of a blue blood. His eyes were dark and ropes of veins showed along the muscled ridges of his forearms and hands. But his body was horribly twisted, the spine bent like a bow, his dead legs awkwardly spindled beneath him. He couldn’t exercise his body, so it had acquired a packing of fat, and his stomach bulged under his belt. Once beautiful, he was now grotesque.

Shreck tried to let nothing show on his face, but he knew a trace of horror had crept into his eyes; and he knew Scott noticed.

“Not very pretty, is it? That’s what a bullet in the spine can do to a healthy growing boy, Colonel. Turn him into a geranium.”

“I’m sorry, sir. I just – ”

“Don’t worry. I can handle it. Now, my friend Hugh Meachum said you had some bad news for me. Let’s have it, Colonel. You don’t look like the sort of man who pulls his punches.”

“Yes, sir,” said Shreck. “It’s a loose end. A detail that won’t go away. New Orleans. The man we were using as our asset.”

“The Marine?”

“Yes. He was supposed to be dealt with; by some freak he survived a point-blank chest shot. Must have missed his heart by a hair. And now he’s back, teamed up with an FBI agent.”

“This Marine. A good man?”

“The very best.”

“As good as you are? I understand you’re quite the warrior.”

“Better.”

“But you have a plan?”

“That’s correct. It’s our feeling that he’d be unusually responsive to something from shooting culture. For example, he may have identified the rifle of yours that he used in Maryland. It’s our idea to put an ad in The Shotgun News for a book of some sort, a privately printed volume as is common in the culture, on famous target rifles or shooters or some such, and if he sees it, he’d want to approach the author. And we nail him.”

“Why do you need my permission?”

“Well, sir, in this business, we find that as close as we can come to the authentic when we fabricate, the better off we are. We can’t just make stuff up. We’ve got to build a legend that he can verify himself from other sources. This is a very careful man. And that’s why we need…well, information as well as permission.”

Lon Scott nodded.

“My past? My family? That sort of thing?”

“Yes, sir.”

Scott seemed to have a funny moment here; it was an odd shiver, something between a shudder and a snort. As if he almost laughed or almost choked.

“My father,” he finally said. “My poor old father.”

“Yes, sir.”

“I see,” said Scott, following intently.

“There are alternatives,” said the colonel, who had now, with much effort, mastered the blank look in the face of Lon’s infirmity. “We can hope to ride this out while Swagger and this FBI agent peck away at us. Our tracks have been hidden well, but…but they’ve consistently surprised us. Eventually, they just might stumble onto something, and possibly by that time it would be too late. My theory of war has always been aggressive offensive operations. I was once called a meat grinder. But I believe you ultimately spare lives by responding aggressively.”

Lon listened raptly, only stopping momentarily to hawk up a wad of brackish phlegm from somewhere in his throat to dribble it into a spittoon that the colonel had not until then noticed.

“There are risks, of course. The first is that we must feed him your name. I understand your privacy is important to you.”

“My name has not been in public print since I stopped bench resting in the early sixties. I’m sure I’m forgotten now. It frightens me, of course. It’s such a small thing…but of course it opens up the faint possibility of inquiries that might lead to associations and linkages…well, who knows? Pandora’s box. These things take on a life of their own.”

“Yes, sir. It’s just that I feel there’s no other way. Swagger would see through everything else. He’d nibble us to death for years. We’d be stuck. We must eliminate him, or everything will be gone.”

Scott sighed. Melancholy seemed to overtake him, too.

“My, my, my,” he finally said. “After all these years.”

“Yes, sir.”

“And I suppose if this man isn’t stopped, he puts Hugh at risk as well.”

“Yes, sir,” said Colonel Shreck.

“Well, I owe Hugh a considerable debt, Colonel Shreck. He’s a great man. How long have you known him?”

“Since 1961, sir, when we were training the Bay of Pigs invasion force in Guatemala. He’s watched over my career ever since.”

“That’s Hugh. He takes responsibility. He cares. He lets you become what your talents allow. Without him, I’d have lost myself in my bitterness. I made a deal with Hugh Meachum and it’s paid dividends to both of us. I’m with you. Whatever you say, whatever you require. I’m yours.”

“Yes, sir. Thank you, sir. As I say, Mr. Scott, your name, your family, his – ”

“Well, you know, you’ve certainly hit the jackpot there. My father was a famous man, a celebrity back in the thirties. The story of what he accomplished with the Tenth Black King and what it led to…well, it would make a great American book. And in the shooting world, his name even to this day is instantly recognizable. Yes, I’ll get you some things that you’ll find helpful.”

“Thank you.”

“But I want something from you in return.”

“Yes, sir?”

“I want in all the way. If I’m bait, then let him come to me. To me here. We’ll go all the way. I’ll do my part. This place is perfect; remote, access to a mountain, everything you need. Your boys can drive him up Bone Hill.” He gestured over his shoulder and Shreck could see the Blue Ridge foothill out back, its flanks covered in scrubby vegetation, its knob bald. “That’s where he’ll die, atop Bone Hill.”

This was exactly what Shreck had been playing for. Once again, the great Lon Scott had hit the bull’s-eye.

“That’ll make it much easier, sir,” Shreck said.

“Now what?” asked Nick. “We’ve got over a thousand names here. One of them may be phony, the pseudonym of a man who disappeared himself close to thirty years ago. How are the two of us going to winnow them down?”

“He can change a name, Memphis. He can change an address, an appearance, a way of talking. One thing he can’t fake. He can’t fake legs.”

Memphis looked at him. Bob crouched in the half-dark of the motel room, his face lost in shadow.

Nick had to admit it; yes, it was very neatly thought out, elegant perhaps. But he had to take it a further step.

“Is there some kind of register of handicapped persons I don’t know about? I mean, we can’t call a thousand men whose addresses from thirty years ago we have and ask them if they’re paralyzed?”

“There is. We break it down by state, get a list for each state. Then you call each state’s Department of Motor Vehicles. You call and you find out who on the list has a handicapped license plate. State computers ought to be able to shake it out real fast.”

“Damn!” shouted Nick. “Goddamn right, yes, yes. Then, in fifty phone calls we’ve winnowed the thousand down to just a few. How many can there be? And we can check them out.”

“That’s it, Pork. I’d bet a dollar against tomorrow one of those men will be Lon Scott. Be nice to find out how come he’s been hiding all these years, and how it was his famous rifle ended up in the hands of an outfit that kills important people for a living.”

Nick began calling the next morning in a rented loft space in downtown Syracuse, near the university, as soon as the phone company got the phones hooked up. Using his federal identification code number, which authenticated him to the supervisory personnel, he was able to begin the computer searches in six states in a couple of hours. But it was exhausting, excruciating work and Nick was astonished to find in himself something he’d never allowed before – dreaminess.

He saw himself on the road, he saw himself somewhat like Bob: free, beholden to nobody. It occurred to him: Could I invent my own life instead of allowing the Bureau to invent it for me? He’d been a man of many masters and eager to do their bidding; now he considered that he could be his own master.

Meanwhile Bob took the calls that came back on the other line.

“Agent Fencl, FBI,” he’d say, trying to subdue his Arkansas twang. “Yes, sir, but Agent Memphis is on another line. May I take your information please? I’ll see that it reaches him. Yes, ma’am. Yes, could you spell that please? Yes, and is there an address? Thank you very much, you’ve been very helpful.”

It took three days. In the end, they had seven names – that is, seven men who were among the first thousand subscribers to Accuracy Shooting and who had been issued handicapped license plates by their state department of motor vehicles sometime between 1964 and today.

“Wow,” said Nick. “All that work for seven names. Now, if I were in the damned Bureau, all’s I’d have to do is call up the offices in the states of these guys, and have them check them all out. I’d get reports back in thirty minutes. But I suppose our next move is to individually check these seven guys out?”

“Yep. Of course I don’t know what the original Lon Scott looked like. But I do know that he dropped out of sight in 1963 and hasn’t been heard from since. So seems to me, one thing we ought to find out is how old these boys are, and we can reject anybody who wasn’t at least in his twenties in 1962; and we can reject anybody who wasn’t already crippled in 1962. Maybe that’ll get it down some.”

“No, wait a minute,” said Nick. “No, we’re going at this wrong. Look, think about it this way. The guy we’re looking for, the real Lon Scott, has one distinguishing characteristic – that is, he has a new identity. Now, the classical way in which you build a new identity is to take over the identity of a child who was born on or about the same time you were but who died in the next few years. See, nobody ever correlates birth certificates with death certificates. So you get the name of a child who died a few years after he was born from a graveyard or an old newspaper obituary; then you write to the state department of birth registration and say you’re him and you get a copy of his birth certificate. Then you use that as the basis of the new identity. Right?”

It was right. Bob nodded, for the first time looking almost as if impressed.

“Go on,” he finally said.

“So we call the counties in which the seven names reside, we call the death certificate registries, and we find which of the seven has died. And if we find one of those to be the case, then we know that somebody’s resurrected the name to use as the basis for the new identity. And wouldn’t that be our man?”

Bob looked at him long and hard.

Then he said, “You finally said something worth listening to, though you explained half to death. Now get busy.”

“The ad runs today,” said Dobbler, “in the ‘Books and Magazines’ section of The Shotgun News, just a few lines. Here’s the copy.”

He handed it to Shreck.

ART SCOTT: AMERICAN SHOOTER. The true story of the fabled marksman of the thirties who won the National Thousand Yard Match four times in the thirties and forties and twice more in the fifties with his famous TENTH BLACK KING Model 70.300 H & H Magnum. Complete with pictures drawn from family archives and load data. Postpaid, $49.50, or order from James Thomas Albright, P.O. Box 511, Newtsville, N.C. 28777, 704-555-0967; Visa, MasterCard.

“It doesn’t even mention Lon Scott,” said Shreck.

“It can’t. Too obvious. It has to be subtle! If it’s obvious, he’ll smell a trap and never come close. He’s made the connection to the Tenth Black King, I guarantee you! You can’t force these things!”

He almost shouted, forgetting to whom he was talking.

Shreck just took a pace back.

“How do we know he’ll spot it?” he asked.

“We trust him. He might not find it right away. But as he travels he’ll talk to people who will have seen it. He will find it, that I guarantee you. And he’ll obey the instructions in the ad.”

The phone number reached, through several blind linkages, an answering machine in RamDyne headquarters.

“The message they hear simply tells them to leave Visa or MasterCard numbers, and to give their addresses,” said Dobbler. “So they leave their voices on the tape. Now this is very important. You see, we have the taped interrogations of both Memphis and Swagger, Memphis recorded in the interrogation in the swamp and Swagger during your discussions with him back in Maryland. So we’ve made a voice scan and reduced their voices to an electronic signature, which is in turn coded into a computer. Every call we get is automatically filtered through the computer and it is instantaneously checked against the vocal signatures. When we get a match, it lets us know.”

“And then…”

“And then we reel him in. Slowly. Ever so slowly, trusting our instincts and our reading of Swagger’s character. We reel him in and destroy him. It’s like hunting a predator with bait. The bait is the research…or it’s his illusion that he can get out of this and somehow clear himself.”

Shreck nodded.

“It is clever,” he conceded.

Dobbler looked at Shreck and realized that for the first time, he wasn’t frightened of him.

For almost a week there were so many times they were close that it made them almost half-crazy. They spent the days on the phone in the Syracuse loft, and after the close of business hours in the last of the western states, they’d come out and go for a walk, get something to eat, just stretch and decompress. They made an odd couple: the tall, thin middle-aged man who had a way of holding himself in; the thicker, friendlier younger man, hair blond and thatchy, eyes brown and warm, whose gentle bulk hid considerable strength. They almost never talked as they walked and ate. They seemed comfortable in the silence.

Then one night, Bob asked about the chair.

“What’s it do to a person? The chair.”

At first Nick thought he was asking about the electric chair, and thought somehow in his FBI career Nick had seen an execution or two. But then he realized Bob meant to touch on something he’d said at Colonel O’Brien’s. Chair. Wheelchair.

“Ah. It sucks. I think I hated it more than she did. Because it was my damn failure, my damn guilt. Sometimes at night, I’d lie there listening to her breathe. You could see the damn thing in the moonlight. It was like it was laughing at you.”

“Suppose you were in it? Suppose your own daddy had put you there, and then blown the top of his head off in grief. What would that do to you?”

“I don’t know,” said Nick.

“Well, dammit, think about it. Give me an answer. I have to know why this bird did what he did.”

“Hell, bitterness, I suppose. It could cripple you so bad you’d hate the world. That didn’t happen to her, of course; she was too special and decent. But to someone else? I suppose it could easily lead you to guns, to feel the power in them that your body was deprived of. The gun could complete a paraplegic. It could make him very, very dangerous. But there are so many killers in this world who aren’t crippled. What’s so special about one that is?”

Bob just looked at him, rather sadly.

“You still don’t get it, do you, Pork?”

“Get what?”

“Come on, we’d best be heading back. More phone calls tomorrow.”

But as the time passed, the chance of the great breakthrough seemed to recede. All the calls had been made, sometimes two and three times. In ever widening circles, they’d tried to match death certificates against the seven names, patiently hunting through counties and then states. Somehow, however, the connection seemed to evaporate as they drew near to it.

“Suppose we’ll just have to drive out and find each of these damn guys and eyeball ’em and go from there,” Bob said. He was looking at the current issue of The Shotgun News, which he’d just picked up on a newsstand, as he did every other week, irritating Nick no end. It was such a dirty little rag, full of close print and murky black and white pictures of surplus guns. “The rag,” Bob called it with a snort of joyful contempt. It didn’t even have stories – just pages and pages of gun deals.

“You know, I’m really beginning to wonder if pursuing Annex B might not be a more reasonable course at this point. Working with Sally Ellion, there still might be a way to get into the Bureau’s computer bank. She’s very smart. She likes me. I think – ”

“You just want to nail that nice young gal, Pork, why don’t you admit it?”

“No, she’s a nice girl, I just – ”

The phone rang.

“Agent Memphis.”

“Mr. Memphis. I’m Susan Jeremiah, in the Clark County, North Carolina, registrar’s office?”

“Oh, yes, right, I remember. I talked to you some days ago. About the seven names – ”

“That’s right.”

“And you couldn’t help?”

“No sir. But I got to thinking on it. One of those names on that list was a James Thomas Albright. And there was no James Thomas Albright on my list of deaths for the years 1935 through 1945.”

“No. That’s what you told me – ”

“But I got to thinking there was an Albright. A Robert Parrish Albright, who died when he was two in 1938, right here in Clark County.”

“I see,” said Nick.

“The names being so similar. I just got curious and couldn’t stop thinking about it. So I went and checked our names registration. You know, with a valid birth certificate, you can petition the court to change your name legally.”

“Of course.”

“And I was stunned to discover that in June of 1963, a Robert Parrish Albright of this county petitioned the court to change his name to James Thomas Albright. The request was granted, and nobody had ever bothered to check the changed name against the death certificates. No one knew that the real Robert Parrish Albright had died in 1938.”

Nick swallowed. He felt as if he’d just looked behind a veil someone had very carefully put in place years back. For him it was one of those queer, powerful moments when an investigation, out of so many loose threads and blind paths and false leads, suddenly connected into something. A small, powerful jolt blasted through him.

“Thank you, Mrs. Jeremiah. Thank you so much.” And then he turned to Bob, trying to seem laconic.

“I found him,” he said.

“Oh, yeah,” said Bob, yawning. “James T. Albright of North Carolina. Hey, I found him too.” He held up The Shotgun News. “The dumb bastard wrote a book!”

The suspense was murderous: all those phone calls from all over the United States. It shouldn’t have amazed Dobbler that there were so many of them but it did.

“Hello, my name is Walter Murbach of Sherman Oaks, California. I am very interested in the book about the Tenth Black King. My Visa card number is…”

There were dozens like that, and in a week or two the dozens permutated into hundreds. Over 350 calls were received, all of them earnest, none of them, according to vocal signature, Bob or Nick Memphis.

“I don’t think it’s working,” said Shreck.

“It will work,” said Dobbler. “I know Bob. Bob has been my project for close to a year. I know him. This is the only way.”

Shreck grunted, displeased.

And so they waited. And so another day passed and another, and Dobbler was at home in his apartment, paging through back issues of The American Rifleman, when the phone call came.

“Dobbler.”

“Dr. Dobbler, it’s the phone watch operations officer. We think we’ve got a positive ID on a phone call we received approximately seven minutes ago. The computer analysis makes it an almost perfect match to Memphis.”

“What name did he leave?”

“Ah…he left the name Special Agent Nicholas Memphis, Federal Bureau of Investigation.”

Yes, this is Special Agent Nicholas Memphis, Federal Bureau of Investigation, calling for Mr. Albright. We have reason to seek an interview with Lon Scott, who was the son of Art Scott, and wonder if Mr. Albright has any information pertaining to his whereabouts. The number is four-four-two, three-one-two, three-oh-eight-oh. I should add that refusal to cooperate could be actionable under federal statute.

Nick’s voice spun itself out of the tape recorder.

“Congratulations,” said Shreck. “Now give me some sense of how we play it.”

“Thank you, Colonel,” Dobbler said, secretly very pleased. “Now, um, as to operating principles. There’s only one, and I can’t press it too forcefully. At no point until the ultimate moment must we seem aggressive. Bob is abnormally attuned to aggression; he lives in Condition Yellow, never completely at rest, always scanning the horizon for clues. His radar never goes down. And when he senses threat, it sets his bells off; nothing must be forced. No one must stare. Nothing must be elongated. No hints of trap must be given. We must operate totally without self-consciousness. Now. Who’s going to call him?”

“You are,” said Shreck.

The phone rang.

“Oh, my,” said Nick.

“Answer it,” said Bob.

“Oh, my,” said Nick again. It had been almost a week since they’d made the initial call.

“Go on,” said Bob.

“Agent Memphis,” Nick said, picking up the phone.

“Yes, this is James Albright. I was told to call you in a phone message last week. I only played the tape today. I – What’s this all about?”

“Yes, thank you for getting back to me,” said Nick as officiously as possible. “It’s come to our attention that you’ve published a book about Art Scott, the target shooter?”

“Yes. I knew Art years back. I saw him shoot one of his last championships. He was a wonderful – ”

“We have reason to suspect that a rifle owned by Mr. Scott’s son Lon may have been used in a serious Federal crime – ”

“The Tenth Black King? Do you know where it is?”

“Ah,” said Nick, a little taken aback, “no, no, we hoped you might know where it is?”

“I wish I did. That rifle would be worth tens of thousands of dollars today.”

“Well, we’re trying to locate Lon Scott, who seems to have vanished thirty years ago.”

“Now there’s a mystery for you. Wish I could help you.”

“Hmmm. Yes. Your ad says you have some of Art Scott’s personal effects – ”

“I have all his shooter’s notebooks, his notes on reloading, the results of his experiments, many of his medals and ribbons. But nothing personal – well, a couple of diaries which I never paid much attention to.”

“I see. Mr. Albright, it’s imperative that we locate either Lon Scott or his remains. It’s my thought that in his father’s effects there might be information useful to us. Perhaps I could send a team down and examine the materials.”

“That’s all you want? Hell, why didn’t you say so. Sure, come on down. Be happy to let you see the stuff.”

“Thank you very much.”

The man on the other end gave him directions and Nick said he’d see him in two days, Thursday, at nine-thirty. Mr. Albright said that was okay by him, he wasn’t going anywhere.

“Not bad,” said the Colonel.

“Did I slather on the old-boy business too heavily?” Dobbler wanted to know.

“No,” said the Colonel, his shrewd eyes narrowed in concentration. “You brought the family in, then backed out of it. You established your distance from ‘Lon Scott.’ What they think they’re getting is another step in the link, and not the final step. Now all we have to do is wait. They’re coming in.”

The waiting was hardest on Payne, man of action. Thus, without orders, he seconded himself to central Virginia and the RamDyne training facility. The men of Panther Battalion, his old compadres under arms, had arrived on its thousands of acres to prepare their assault on Fortress Bob.

There he watched as the lean young troopers worked on the assault plan. He watched them deploy, having moved off their mock helicopters, move up the hill that was a close duplicate of Bone Hill under heavy automatic weapons suppressive fire, and assault its summit, where Bob would be alone with no weapon other than the Colt automatic he was known to favor.

Even Brigadier General de Rujijo had come along on this mission.

“Is it not too much, Sergento?” he asked Payne. “This is one man, no?”

It was a logical question. With a base of full automatic suppressive fire, plus the fire and movement elements pouring out lead as they progressed upwards, Payne had calculated that over ten thousand bullets would be hurled at the summit in less than two minutes. For one man?

“He must be el grande hombre,” said de Rujijo.

“He ain’t that big a deal,” Payne said. “My boys could smoke him.” But still, he took great pleasure in the display. The bullets, soaring raucously upwards and blasting against the summit, had literally torn it to shreds. There was no place to hide or survive on that mean ground; it was the land of the sucking chest wound and the exit hole six times as large as the entrance.

The plan was simple. Three platoons from the counterinsurgency company of Panther Battalion – close to 120 men, all heavily armed with Israeli Galil assault rifles in 5.56mm – were to be deployed at a small deserted airfield some two miles from Lon Scott’s house, their presence completely unknown to the target, and no hints of it allowed to surface. When Bob made his approach, whosoever was playing Lon – not yet determined – would activate a signal simply by removing his hand from the wheelchair grip and thereby allowing a photocell to be stimulated by the light, no buttons to push, no anything. The four choppers with eight men apiece would be airborne in seconds and deploy for the assault within two minutes; four minutes later the choppers would return with the second load of men, then repeat until all 120 men were on site. The debarked troops, as well as the men from RamDyne’s own Action Unit, would converge on the house frontally. Bob, upon seeing the extent of the trap, would almost certainly depart the back, by the pool and the rifle range and discover only Bone Hill, six hundred feet of scrubby pine, gulches, washouts and switchbacks, up top of which was a bare knob. The sniper would almost certainly choose to climb it. Up he’d go, until there was no place to go.