Time to Hunt

CHAPTER FIFTY

The snow didn’t last. It melted on the third day after it had fallen, causing floods in the lowlands, closing roads, wrecking bridges, creating mud slides. But on Upper Cedar Creek it was a serene day, with blue skies, eastern zephyrs and creeks full of sparkling water. The pines shed their cloak of snow; the grass began to emerge, green and lush, and seemingly undamaged by the ordeal.

By now the excitement was over. Bonson had departed with a handshake the previous morning, after ensuring that a quickly convened Custer County grand jury found no culpability in the death by misadventure of one Frank Vborny, of Cleveland, Ohio, as the fake identification documents read in the dead sniper’s pocket. Ballistics confirmed that indeed Mr. Vborny had shot and killed two innocent people in the Custer County Idaho Bell substation in Mackay; obviously a berserker, he next attacked a house that was luckily rented out by a gun owner, who was able to defend himself. The gun owner’s name was never published but that was all right, and in Idaho most people took satisfaction from the moral purity of the episode and its subtle endorsement of the great old Second Amendment, a lesson most Westerners felt had been forgotten in the East.

Up in the mountains, the state police had pulled out, the helicopters and all the young men and women had gone back to wherever it was they came from, and there was little sign that they’d been there.

Bob and Julie had a check, in the odd sum of $146,589.07, and had no idea how that exact figure had been selected. It was from the Department of the Treasury, and the invoice banally read, “Consultancy,” with the proper dates listed and his Social Security number.

The last of the security team left, the rifle and recovered Beretta were returned, the foam case with its cargo marked officially as “operational loss,” and Sally had taken Nikki for a walk down to the mailbox on Route 93, when he at last had an opportunity to talk to his wife.

“Well, howdy,” he said.

“Hi,” she said. Doctors had examined her after her ordeal; she was in fine shape, her collarbone knitting properly. She seemed much stronger now, and was able to get about better. Sally would soon be leaving.

“Well, I have some things to say. Care to have a listen?”

“Yes.”

“You know we have some money now. I’d like to git on back to Arizona and restart the business. Joe Lopez says they seem to miss me down there. It was a good business and a good life.”

“It was a good life.”

“I went a little crazy there. I put everybody through a lot. I wasn’t very grown-up about my troubles. That’s all in the past now. And what I learned was how important my family was. I want my family back. That’s the only thing I want. No more adventures, no more screwing around. That’s all finished.”

“It wasn’t your fault,” she said. “It had nothing to do with you. It was all about me. How could I blame you for anything? You saved all—”

“Now, now,” he said. “No need for that. I thought all this out. I just want the old life back. I want you to be my wife, I want my baby girl to be fine, I want to work with the horses and take care of y’all. That’s the best life there is, the only life I’ve ever wanted. I get these bad moods. Or I used to; I hope I’m over that. If I had some ghosts, they ain’t walking out of the cemetery no more. So … well, what do you say? Will you let me come back?”

“I already called the lawyer. He recalled the separation request.”

“That’s great.”

“It’ll be good,” she said. “I think we should use some of that money and go on a nice vacation. We should close up the house here, the house outside of Boise, but then go to some warm island for two weeks. Then we can go back to Arizona. R&R.”

“God, does that sound like a plan to me,” he said with a smile. “There’s only one last little thing. Trig’s mother. She was very helpful and she told me that if I ever learned anything about the way her son died, I should tell her. Tell her the truth. I still feel that obligation. So in a couple of months or so, when all this dies down, when we’re back, I may take a bit of time and head back there to Baltimore.”

“Do you want us to come with you?”

“Oh, it ain’t worth it. I’ll just fly in, rent a car, fly back. It’ll be over quicker ‘n’ you can believe. No sense putting no trouble to it or taking Nikki away from her riding. Hell, I may drive instead of flying, save some money that way.”

He smiled. For just a second she thought there might be something in his eyes, some vagrant thought, some evidence of another idea, another agenda; but no, not a thing could be seen. They were depthless and gray and revealed nothing except the love he felt for her.

Little by little, life for the Swagger family reassembled itself toward some model of normality. Even the big news of a spectacular murder in Russia failed to make much of a stir. Bob just watched a little of it on CNN, saw the burning Jeep Cherokee and the dead man in the back, and when the hysterical analysts came on to explain it all, he changed channels.

Sally stayed until they moved back to Boise, and then Bob drove her to the airport.

“Once again,” she said at the gate, “the great Bob Lee Swagger triumphs. You killed your enemies, you got your wife and family back. Can’t keep a good man down.”

“Sally, I got ’em all fooled but you, don’t I? You see clean through me.”

“Bob, seriously. Pay attention to them this time. I know it’s easy to say, but you have to let the past go. You’re married, you have a wonderful, brave, strong wife and a beautiful little girl. That’s your focus.”

“I know. It will be.”

“There’s no more old business.”

“Is that a question or a statement?”

“Both. If there’s one little thing left, let it go. It doesn’t matter. It can’t matter.”

“There’s nothing left,” he said.

“You are one ornery sumbitch,” she said. “I swear, I don’t know what that woman sees in you.”

“Well, I don’t neither. But she’s pretty smart, so maybe she knows something you and I don’t.”

Sally smiled, and then turned to leave, good friend and soldier to the very end. She winked at him, as if to say, “You are hopeless.”

And he knew he was.

When the cast came off a little later, and Julie was back among the supple, the family flew to St. John, in the U.S. Virgins for two glorious weeks. They rented a villa just outside Cruz Bay on the little island, and each morning took a taxi to the beautiful Trunk Bay beach, where they snorkeled and lay in the sand and watched the time pass ever so slowly as they turned browner and browner. They were a handsome family, the natural aristocrats of nature: the tall, grave man with gray eyes and abundant hair, and his wife, every bit as handsome, her hair a mesh of honey and brown, her cheekbones strong, her lips thin, her eyes powerful. She had been a cheerleader years ago, but she was if anything more beautiful now than ever. And the daughter, a total ball of fire, a complete kamikaze who always had to be called in, who pushed the snorkeling to its maximum, who begged her father to let her scuba or go water- or para-skiing.

“You got plenty of time to break your neck when you’re older,” he told her. “Your old mommy and I can’t keep up with such a thing. You have to give us a break. This is our vacation, too.”

“Oh, Daddy,” she scolded, “you’re such a chicken.”

And when she said that, he did an imitation of a chicken that was clearly based on a little real time in the barnyard, and they all laughed, first at how funny it was but second at the idea that a man of such reserve could at last find some way to let himself go, to be silly. An astonishment.

At night, they went into town and ate at the restaurants there. Bob never had a drink, didn’t seem to want one. It was idyllic, really too good. It reminded Julie just a bit of an R&R she’d had with Donny in Hawaii, just before … well, just before.

And Bob seemed to relax totally too. She’d never seen him so calm, so at ease. The wariness that usually marked his passage in society — a feeling for terrain and threat, a tendency to mark escape routes, to look too carefully at strangers — disappeared. And he never had nightmares. Not once did he awake screaming, drenched in cold sweat, or with the shakes, or with that hurt, hunted look that sometimes came into his eyes. His scars almost seemed to disappear as he grew tanner and tanner, but they were always there, the puckers of piebald flesh that could only be bullet wounds: so many of them. One of the Virgin Islanders stared at them once, then turned to say something to one of his colleagues, in that musical, impenetrable English of theirs, so fast and full of strange rhythms, but Julie heard the word “bombom mon,” which she took to mean “boom-boom man,” which she in turn took to be “gunman.”

But Bob appeared not to notice. He was almost friendly, his natural reserve blurred into something far more open and pleasant to the world. She’d never quite seen him like this.

There was only one night when she awoke and realized he wasn’t in bed with her. She rose, walked through the dark living room, until she found him on the deck, under a tropic night, sitting quietly. Before them was a slope of trees, a hill and then the sea, a serene sheet of glass throwing off tints of moonlight. He sat with utter stillness, staring at a book, as if it had some secret meaning to it.

“What is that?” she asked.

“This? Oh, it’s called Birds of North America by Roger Prentiss Fuller.”

She came over and saw that he was gazing at a section on eagles.

“What are you thinking about?” she asked.

“Oh, nothing. This book has some pretty pictures. Kid who painted them really knew his birds.”

“Bob, it’s so unlike you.”

“I was just curious, that’s all.”

“Eagles?”

“Eagles,” he said.

They returned to Arizona and with the money, Bob was able to upgrade the barn, hire two Mexican assistants, buy a new pickup and reintroduce himself to the Pima County horsey set. In just a little bit of time, they had patients-seven, eight, then ten horses in various states of healing, all ministered to with tender care. His lay-up barn became a thriving concern after a while, mostly on the basis of his own sweat, but also because people trusted him.

Nikki went back to school but she rode every day, English style, and would start showing on the circuit’s junior level the next spring, her coach insisted. Julie resumed working three days a week at the Navajo reservation clinic, helping the strong young braves mend after fights or drinking bouts, helping the rickety children, doing a surprising amount of good in a small compass.

No reporters ever showed; no German TV crews set up in the barnyard; no young men came by to request interviews for their books; no gun show entrepreneurs offered him money to stand at a booth and sell autographs; no writers from the survivalist press wanted to write admiring profiles. He and the war he represented seemed once again to have disappeared. No part of it remained, its wounds healed or at least scarred over.

One night, Bob sat down and wrote a letter to Trig Carter’s mother. He told her he was planning a trip east some time in weeks to come and, as he said, he’d like to stop by and share with her what he had learned about the death of her son.

She wrote back immediately, pleased to hear from him. She suggested a time, and he called her and said that was fine, that’s when she should look for him.

He loaded his new pickup with gear and began the long trip back. He drove up to Tucson, to the veterans cemetery there, and walked the ranks of stones, white in the desert sun, until at last he came to:

Donny M. Fenn

Lance Corporal

U.S.M.C.

1948-1972

Nothing set it apart. There were dozens of other stones from that and other wars, the last years always signifying some violent eddy in American history: 1968, 1952, 1944, 1918. A wind whistled out of the mountains. The day was so bright it hurt his eyes. He had no flowers, nothing to offer the square of dry earth and the stone tablet.

He’d been in so many other cemeteries; this one felt no different at all. He had nothing to say, for so much had been said. He just soaked up the loss of Donny: Donny jumping over the berm, the vibration as the bullet went through him, lifting the dust from his chest; Donny falling, his eyes going blank and sightless, his hand grasping Bob’s arm, the blood in his mouth and foaming obscenely down his nose.

After a while — he had no idea how long — he left, got back in the truck and settled in for a long pull across Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, Oklahoma and on to the East.

The last part of the trip took him to the Virginia suburbs of Washington, DC, where once again he bunked with an old friend who had become the Command Sergeant Major of the United States Marine Corps. As a few months before, he fell in with cronies, both still on active duty or recently retired, men of his own generation and stamp, leathery, sinewy men who bore the career imprint of the Corps. There were a few loud nights at the CSM’s house in the suburbs, the whole thing slightly more celebrative.

It was the next day that he called Mrs. Carter and told her he’d be up the next night. She said she couldn’t wait.

He hung up and waited on the line for the telltale click of a wiretap. He didn’t hear it, but he knew that meant nothing: there were other methods of penetration.

Now, he thought, only this last thing.

CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE

Bob drove carefully through the far reaches of Baltimore County, at sunset. It was as he remembered, the beautiful houses of the rich and propertied, of old families, of the original owners of America — people who rode English. At last he turned down a lane and drove under the overhanging elms until he found Trig’s ancestral home.

He pulled in, once again momentarily humbled by the immensity of the place, its suggestion of stability and propriety and what endured in the world. At last he got out, adjusted his tie and went to the door.

It was September now, turning coolish at night here in the East. The leaves hadn’t yet begun to redden but there was nevertheless a definite edge in the air. Things would change soon: that was the message.

He knocked; the old black butler answered, as before.

He was led through the same halls of antiques, paintings of patriots, exotic plants, dense Oriental rugs, damask curtains, lighting fixtures configured to represent the flicker of candles. Since it was darker, there wasn’t quite the sense of the threadbare that had been so evident his first time out here.

The old man led him into the study, where the woman waited. She stood erect as the mast of a ship — the family had owned shipping once, of course, as well as railroads, oil, coal and more. She was still stern, still rigid, still had that iron-gray uplift to her hair. She was demurely dressed in a conservative suit, and he could see, even more now, that at one time she must have been a great beauty. Now an air of tragic futility attended her. Or maybe it was his imagination. But she’d lost a son and a husband to a war that the husband said was worth fighting and the son said wasn’t. It had broken her family apart, as it had broken apart so many families. No family was immune, that was the lesson: not even this one, so protected by its wealth and property.

“Well, Sergeant Swagger, you look as if you’ve become a movie star.”

“I’ve been working outdoors, ma’am.”

“No, I don’t mean the tan. I have sources still, I believe I told you. There’s some news afoot about your heroics in Idaho, how you disconnected some terrible conspiracy. I’m sure I don’t understand it, but the information has even reached the society of doddering State Department widows.”

“They say we were able to get some good work done, yes, ma’am.”

“Are you congenitally modest, Sergeant? For a man so powerful, you are so unassuming you seem hardly to be there at all.”

“I’m just a polite Southern boy, ma’am.”

“Please sit down. I won’t offer you a drink, since I know you no longer drink. A club soda, a cup of coffee or tea, a soft drink, something like that?”

“No, ma’am, I’m fine.”

They sat across from each other, in the study. One of Trig’s birds observed them; it was a blue mallard.

“Well, then, I know you came here to tell me something. I suppose I’m ready to hear it. Will I need a drink, Sergeant Swagger? A great shot of vodka, perhaps?”

“No, ma’am, I don’t believe so.”

“Well, then, go ahead.”

“Ma’am, I have satisfied myself on this one issue: I don’t believe no way your son would have killed another human being and I don’t believe he killed himself. I think he was duped by a professional Soviet agent — rather, Soviet in those days. Your son was sort of charmed into—”

“What a quaint euphemism. But I have to tell you I’m aware of my son’s homosexual leanings. You believe it was a homosexual thing?”

“I don’t know, ma’am. That’s not my department. I only know the result, that somehow he was snookered into assisting in what was represented as an act of symbolic violence as a way of reenergizing the peace movement. But the Russian operator, he didn’t give a tinker’s dam about the peace movement. He was only interested in your boy’s fame and reputation as a masking device for the mission’s real target, Ralph Goldstein, who was working on satellite topography-reading technologies and seemed on the verge of a breakthrough the Russians felt would put them way behind in the Cold War.”

“It was only about murder, in the end. And some other boy was the target?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“So my poor Trig wasn’t even the star of his own murder?”

“No, ma’am.”

“Well, he’d been the star of so many other things, I don’t suppose it matters.”

“My guess is, he had begun to have doubts; perhaps he even tried to back out, or go to the FBI or something. Possibly there’s some record of his doubts in his missing sketches. But it appears I won’t never see them. He was killed, probably with a judo chop to the back of the neck. That was their specialty in those days. In fact, everybody who saw this agent was killed, at some effort, including another peace demonstrator named Peter Farris, a Marine named Donny Fenn, and later attempts were made on my wife, who had seen the agent with Trig. She was married to Donny Fenn at the time. I believe Ralph Goldstein was killed in the same way. Their bodies were put in the building and it was detonated. It goes down into the books as a violent fool and a math geek. But the books are always wrong. It was something entirely different; kids used by older, smarter, far more ruthless men, then thrown away for a momentary strategic advantage. It was a war, but the cold one, not the hot one.”

“The one we won.”

“I suppose we did.”

“What happened to the Russian?”

“Well, our intelligence people found out a way to turn the information against him. I don’t know much about it, but he’s dead. They had it on CNN. You could see the burned bodies in the back of the Jeep.”

“That nasty boy?”

“That one.”

“And the man who was trying to kill you?”

“Well, he wasn’t trying to kill me. He was trying to kill my wife. He was stopped,” Bob said. “And he ain’t never coming back.”

“Were you responsible?”

Bob just nodded.

“Do you know what you are? Sergeant, you’re a sacred killer. All societies need them. All civilizations need them. It is to the eternal shame and the current damnation of this country that it refuses anymore to acknowledge them and thinks it can get by without respecting them. So let an old bat speak a truth: you are the necessary man. Without you it all goes away.”

Bob said nothing. Speculation on his place in the nature of things was not his style.

The old lady sensed this, and asked for an accounting of the politics of the affair, the details of history. He gave it, succinctly enough.

“Odd, isn’t it? As you’ve explained it, after it’s all counted up and all the accounts are settled, the one party to it all that could be said to benefit is the old Russian communist apparatus. It’s kept them from going under another few years. And who can tell what that’ll mean? The cruel irony of history, I suppose.”

“I wouldn’t know about that, ma’am. They were very happy, the intelligence people, that they were able to stop this fellow Pashin. He was their real target. My wife was his, but he was ours, and we got him first.”

“Well, anyway: you’ve provided a measure of serenity to my life. My son wasn’t a fool; he was overmatched by professionals, who’ve been punished. Justice isn’t much, but it helps the nights go easier.”

“Yes, ma’am. I agree.”

“Sometimes you don’t even get that, so one must be very grateful for what one does get.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Now … I know you weren’t working for me, you were never my employee. But the one power I still have in the world is to satisfy myself through my checkbook. I would very much enjoy getting it out now and writing a nice big, fat one.”

“Thank you,” he said. “That’s not necessary.”

“Are you sure?”

“I am.”

“Soon there’ll be college expenses.”

“Not for a while. We’re doing fine.”

“Oh, I hope I haven’t spoiled things by bringing up money.”

“No, ma’am.”

“Well, then—”

“There is one thing, though.”

“Name it.”

“The painting.”

“The painting?”

“The eagle after the fight. I don’t know a thing about art and I don’t know a thing about birds, but I’d be honored to have that. It has some meaning to me.”

“You felt your breast stir when you saw it?”

“Well, something like that.”

“Then you shall have it. Come with me, Sergeant Swagger.”

She led him forthrightly out of the room, commanded the old butler to get a “torch” — a flashlight — and led Bob in the butler’s uncertain illumination to the studio. Their breaths plumed in the frosty air. She opened the door, found a switch and the birds flashed to life, still and majestic.

“These are worth quite a lot of money to connoisseurs of the macabre, I expect,” she said. “But the eagle … it’s so atypical, and also unsigned. Would you want a certificate of authenticity? It might seem pointless now, but when your daughter goes to school, it could mean the difference between buying one year at Radcliffe or four years.”

“No, ma’am,” he said, walking to the painting. “I just want it for what it is.”

He stood before it, and felt its pain, its distraught, logy mind, its survivor’s despair.

“I wonder how he got so much into it,” she said.

He unscrewed the painting from the easel, where it had been clamped since May of 1971. It was unframed, but the canvas was tacked stoutly to a wood backing.

“I hope you’ll let me pay for the framing,” said the old woman. “That at least I can do.”

“I’ll send you the bill,” he said.

He wrapped the painting carefully in some rags, making certain not to disturb the elegant depth of the crusted pigment, and put the whole package delicately under an arm.

“All set,” he said.

“Sergeant Swagger, again, I can’t thank you enough. You’ve made my dotage appreciably better, to no real gain of your own.”

“Oh, I gained, Mrs. Carter. I gained.”

The team watched him from far off, through night-vision binoculars. It had been a long stakeout until he showed, longer still since he was in there. Where had he been all afternoon? Still, it didn’t matter. Now it was going to happen.

Swagger turned his truck around, pulled out, drove down the lane, and by the time he got back to Falls Road, the number-one van had moved into position, not behind his turn, as amateurs will do, but before it, letting him overtake them, and falling into position from behind that way, without attracting notice.

Swagger pulled around the van, scooted ahead and settled into an unhurried pace.

“Blue One, this is Blue Two,” said the observer into his microphone. “Ah, we have him picked up very nicely, no problems. I have Blue Three behind me, you want to run this by management?”

“Blue Two, management just got here.”

“You stay on him, Blue Two, but don’t rush it,” came the impatient voice any of them knew as Bonson’s. “Play in the other van if you think you’re in danger of being burned. Don’t be too aggressive. Give me an update—”

“Whoa, isn’t this interesting, Blue One. He didn’t do the beltway. He just stayed on Falls Road on the way into Baltimore.”

“Doesn’t that become Eighty-three?” asked Bonson.

“Yes, sir, it does. Goes straight downtown.”

“But his motel is out at B-W.”

“That’s the credit card data. He had something with him, some kind of package. Maybe he’s going to do something with it.”

“Got you, Blue Two, you just stay on him.”

They watched as Bob drove unconsciously into downtown Baltimore on the limited access highway that plunges into that city’s heart. He passed Television Hill with its giant antennae, and the train station, then the Sun, and finally the road drifted off its abutments to street level and became a lesser boulevard called President Street just east of downtown.

“He’s turning left,” said Blue Two. “It’s, uh, Fleet Street.”

“The map says he’s headed towards Fells Point.”

“What the hell is he doing there? Is he starring in a John Waters movie?”

“Cut the joking on the net,” said Bonson. “You stay with him. I’m coming in; be in town very shortly.”

The men knew Bonson and his radio team were in a hangar at B-W Airport, less than twenty minutes south of town this time of night, assuming there was no backup at the tunnel.

Bob turned up Fleet, and the traffic grew a bit thicker. He did not look around. He did not notice either the white or the black vans that had been on him since the country.

He passed through Fells Point, jammed with cars, kids, scum and bars, presumably the shady night town of the city, and kept on driving. Another mile or two and he turned on the diagonal down a beat-up street called Boston.

“Blue One, this is Blue Two. The traffic is thinning out. He’s headed out Boston toward the docks. I’m going to stay on Fleet, run a parallel, and let Blue Three close on him, just to be safe.”

“Read you, Two,” said the observer in the second van.

There was no way Swagger could tell, now that the van which had been closest to him sped away down another road and the unseen secondary vehicle closed the gap, that he was under surveillance. More important, he exhibited nothing in his driving that demonstrated the signature of a surveillee who’d burned his trackers: he didn’t dart in and out of traffic, he didn’t signal right, then turn left, he didn’t turn without signaling. He just drove blandly ahead, intent on his destination.

But once he passed two large apartment buildings on the right, at the harbor’s edge, he began to slow down, as if he were looking for something.

It was a kind of post-industrial zone, with ruined, deserted factories everywhere; oil-holding facilities for offloading by tankers; huge, weedy fields that served no apparent purpose at all but were nevertheless Cyclone-fenced. There was little traffic and almost no pedestrian activity; it was a blasted zone, where humans may have worked during the day, but deserted almost totally at night.

The number-two van was a good three hundred feet behind him when he turned right, down another street — it was called South Clinton Street — that seemed to veer closer to the docks. The van didn’t turn; it went straight, after its observer notified the first vehicle, which had run parallel down Boston, and itself turned right on the street Bob had turned down.

“Two, I have him,” said the observer.

“Cool. I’ll roam a bit, then take up a tail position.”

“That’s good work,” said Bonson, over the net. “We’re going to lose you now. We’re going through the tunnel.”

“I’ll stay on him, Blue One.”

“Catch you when we get out of the tunnel.”

The first van maintained about a four hundred-foot gap between itself and Swagger’s truck, which now coursed down desolate South Clinton Street. Off to the right, a giant naval vessel, under construction, suddenly loomed, gray and arc-lit for drama and security. Bob passed it, passed a bank, a few small working men’s restaurants, then stopped by the side of the road.

“Goddammit,” said Two. “Burned. Goddammit.”

His own driver started to slow, but he was exceedingly professional.

“No, just keep driving. Just drive by him. Don’t eyeball him as you pass him, don’t even think about it; he’ll feel you paying attention. I’m dropping out of sight.”

The driver continued at the same speed, while the observer dropped into the seat well, knowing that a single driver was much less of a giveaway signature for a tail job. And he hit the send button.

“Blue Three, do you read?”

“Yeah, I’m past the Boston-South Clinton Street exchange, just pulled over.”

“Okay, he’s stopped. We’re going to pass him; you come on by and pull off a long way down. He’s on the right. Don’t use your lights. Go to night vision and monitor his moves.”

The lead vehicle sped around the curve, passed several mountains of coal ready for loading on the right.

He pulled off when he was out of sight of the parked man.

“TWO, this is Three. I’m in position and I’ve got him in my night lenses. He’s just sitting there, waiting. I think he’s turned off his engine. No, no, he’s turned off his lights, now he’s pulling ahead, he’s turning in — now I’ve lost him.”

“Okay, he’s gone to ground.”

“Sitrep, people,” came the voice of Bonson, who had just cleared the tunnel and was now on this side of the harbor.

“Sir, he just pulled into a yard or something in the warehouse district down by the docks. Just off Boston. We have him under observation.”

“I’m right at Boston Street here. Do we go east or west off of Ninety-five?”

“You go west. Go about a mile and turn left again, on South Clinton Street. I’m off by the side of the road just around that turn, lights off, left side of the road. Two is on the other side, around the curve. We’re both about a half mile away from where he’s gone to rest.”

“Okay, let’s meet one at a time in two-minute intervals two hundred yards this side, my side, of the location. You go first, Three, then you Two, from the other side, then I’ll join you. Keep your lights on in case he’s looking out. If he saw unlit vehicles, he could go ballistic.”

“Sir, I honestly don’t think he’s seen a damned thing. He was off in his own world. He wasn’t even looking around when he stopped. He’s just looking for some deserted place.”

“We’ll know in a few minutes,” said Bonson, just as his car turned left and pulled in behind one of the vans.

Bob parked to the left of the silent, corrugated-metal building, as far back and out of sight as he could. He paused, waiting. He heard no sounds; there was no night watchman. The place was some kind of grain storage facility, again for loading cargo ships, but no ship floated in the water. He could see the shimmering lights on the flat, calm water, and beyond that the skyline of the city, spangled in illumination. But here, there was nothing except the rush of cars from the tunnel exit nearby, a separate world sealed off by concrete abutments.

He got out, taking the wrapped painting, a powerful flashlight and a heavy pair of wire cutters with him, and headed to the warehouse. It was padlocked. But where the lock was strong, the metal fastener that secured door to wall was not, and the wire cutters made quick work of it. The lock fell, still secure, to the ground, wearing a little necklace of sheared steel. He pulled the door open, stepped into a space that in the darkness appeared to be cut by bins, now mostly empty. The dust of grains — wheat mostly, though he smelled soya beans too — filled the air.

He walked, his shoes echoing on the bricks, until at last he came to the center of the room. He stopped by a pillar and a drain, then turned on the light. The beam skipped across the empty building, finding nothing of interest but more emptiness, dramatic shadows, fire extinguishers, light switches, closets, crates. He went and got a crate, pulled it into the center and set it down. Finally, he set the light on the floor, aimed back toward where he had left the package. It cast a cold white eye on the painting.

He walked over, and leaned into the circle of light.

Slowly, he peeled the rags away, until at last the painting stood exposed. He examined it carefully, saw how the tacks held the canvas to the backing. He took out his Case pocketknife, and very slowly used its blade to scrape at the paint.

It was thick and cracked easily, falling to the ground in chunks and strips. He scraped, destroying the image of the eagle, pulling at the paint, watching it flake in colored chunks downward. In a minute or so, he came to a ridge under the paint, and ran the knife blade along it until he reached a corner. It was the top of a heavy piece of paper, and it had been literally buried under the heavy oil pigmentation of the image.

With the blade, he pried the corner loose enough to get a grip on, set the knife down and very carefully pulled the sheet of paper free. It cracked off the canvas. As he finally freed it, there was a kind of soft, slipping sound: paper, sliding loose, fluting down to land with a rattle on the dirty floor. He set the backing down and bent there in the harsh light to see what secrets he had unlocked.

It was the last few sketches from Trig’s book. Bob began to shuffle through them, finding images of a campus building in Madison, Wisconsin, portraits of people at parties in Washington, crowd scenes of big demonstrations. There was a portrait of Donny. It must have been made about the time he did the scene of Donny and Julie, which Bob had seen in Vietnam. He brought those days vividly to life, and Bob began to feel his passion — and his pain.

CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO

One man had gone ahead and returned with a report.

“He’s in there with a flashlight, reading some pages or something. I can’t figure it out.”

“Okay,” said Bonson. “I think I know what he’s got. Let’s finish this, once and for all.”

The guns came out. The team consisted now of five men besides Bonson. They were large men in crew cuts in their late forties. They were tough-looking, exuding that alpha-male confidence that suggested no difficulty in doing violence if necessary. They looked like large policemen, soldiers, firemen, extremely well developed, extremely competent. They drew the guns from under their jackets, and there was a little ceremony of clicks and snaps, as safeties came off and slides were eased back to check chambers, just in case. Then the suppressors were screwed on.

Bonson led them along the road, into the lot and up to the old grain warehouse. Above, stars pinwheeled and blinked. Water sounds filled the night, the lapping of the tides against ancient docks. From somewhere came a low, steady roar of automobiles. He reached the metal door and through the gap between it and the building proper, he could see Bob in the center of the room, sitting on a crate he’d gotten from somewhere, reading by the light of a flashlight. The painting was on the floor, somehow standing straight, as if on display, and Bob was leaning against a thick pillar that supported the low ceiling. Bonson could see that the image had somehow been destroyed, yielding a large white square in its center.

What is wrong with this picture, he asked himself.

He studied it for a second.

No, nothing. The man is unaware. The man is lost. The man is unprepared. The man is defenseless. The man is the ultimate soft target.

He nodded.

“Okay,” he whispered.

One of the men opened the door and he walked in.

Bob looked up to see them as their lights flashed on him.

“Howdy,” he said.

“Lights,” said Bonson.

One of the men walked away, found an electrical junction and the place leaped into light, which showed the rawness of industrial space, a gravel floor, the air filled with dust and agricultural vapors.

“Hello, Swagger,” said Bonson. “My, my, what’s that?”

“It’s the last sketches from Trig Carter’s book. Real damn interesting,” said Bob, loudly.

“How’d you find it?” “What?”

What was wrong with his ears?

“I said, ‘How did you find it?’”

“When I thought about his last painting, I figured it, pretty close. The reason the painting was so different was his clue: his way of saying to those who came after him, ‘Look this over.’ But no one ever came. Not until me.”

“Nice work,” said Bonson. “What’s in it?”

“What?”

What was wrong with his ears?

“I said, ‘What’s in it?’ ”

“Oh. Just what you’d expect,” said Bob, still a bit loud. “People, places, things he ran into as he began to prepare his symbolic explosion of the math building. A couple of nice drawings of Donny.”

“Trig Carter was a traitor,” said Bonson.

“Yeah?” said Bob mildly. “Do tell.”

“Give it over here,” said Bonson.

“You don’t want to see the drawings, Bonson? They’re pretty damned interesting.”

“We’ll look at them. That’s enough.”

“Oh, it gits better. There’s a nice drawing of this Fitzpatrick. Damn, that boy could draw. It’s Pashin; everybody will be able to tell. That’s quite a find, eh? That’s proof, cold, solid dead-on proof the peace movement was infiltrated by elements of Soviet intelligence.”

“So what?” said Bonson. “That’s all gone and forgotten. It doesn’t matter.”

“Oh, no?” said Bob. “See, there’s someone else in the drawing. Poor Trig must have grown extremely suspicious, so one day, late, right after the big May Day mess, he followed Fitzpatrick. He watched him meet somebody. He did. He watched them deep in conversation. And he recorded it.”

Bob held it up, a folded piece of paper, the lines that were Pashin brilliantly clear.

Bob unfolded the rest of the drawing.

“See, Bonson, here’s the funny part,” said Bob, loudly. “There’s someone else here. It’s you.”

There was a moment of silence. Bonson’s eyes narrowed tightly, and then he relaxed, turned to his team and smiled. He almost had to laugh.

“Who are you, Bonson?” Swagger asked, more quietly now. “Really, I’d like to know. I had some ideas. I just couldn’t make no sense of them. But just tell me. Who are you? What are you? Are you a traitor? Are you a professional Soviet agent masquerading as an American? Are you some kind of cynic playing the sides against each other? Are you in it for the money? Who are you, Bonson?”

“Kill him?” asked one of the men on the team, holding up a suppressed Beretta.

“No,” said Bonson. “No, not yet. I want to see how far he’s gotten.”

“Finally it makes sense,” Bob said. “The great CIA mole. The big one they’ve been hunting all these years. Who makes a better mole than the head mole hunter? Pretty goddamned smart. But what’s the deal? Why did no one ever suspect you?”

He could sense that Bonson wanted to tell him. He had probably never told anyone, had repressed his reality so deep and imposed such discipline on himself that it was almost not real to him, except when it needed to be. But now at last, he had a chance to explain.

“The reason I was never suspected,” he said finally, “was because they recruited me. I never went to them. They offered me a job when I left the Navy, but I said no. I went to law school, I spent three years on Wall Street, they came after me three more times, and I always said no. Finally — God, it took some discipline — finally I said yes.”

“Why did they want you so much?”

“Because of the NIS prosecutions. That was the plan. I sent fifty-seven young men to Vietnam, Marines, naval seaman, even a couple of junior officers. I reported on dozens more that I turned up in the other services, and many of them went, too. There was never a better secret policeman anywhere, one with less mercy and more ambition. They could see how fierce I was. I was so good. I was astonishing. They wanted me so bad it almost killed them, and I played so hard to get it still amazes me. But that was our plan from the beginning.”

His face gleamed with vanity and pride. This was his great triumph, the core of his life, what made him better than other men, his work of art.

“Who are you, Bonson? Who the fuck are you?”

“The only time I ever came out on a wet operation was that one night when that idiot Pashin showed up without a driver’s license. You needed a driver’s license to buy that much ammonium nitrate, even in Virginia! That idiot. GRU begged the committee for help, and I had the best identity running, so I drove down to Leesburg and bought it. I met him in the restaurant to tell him where it was secured. He was a brilliant operator, but in little practical things like that he was stupid.”

“And you were unlucky. Trig the human camera had followed him.”

“I always worried about that. That was my one moment of vulnerability. But now, you’ve taken care of that for me.”

“Who are you?” said Bob. “You have to tell me that.”

“I don’t have to tell you anything. I can kill you and I’m forever secure.”

“In seventy-one, you were the source of deployment intelligence, weren’t you?”

“You bet I was,” said Bonson. “I invented chaos. It was the best professional penetration in history, the way I orchestrated it.”

“You killed the little girl on the bridge, right? Amy Rosenzweig, seventeen. I looked it up. I saw how much trouble it caused.”

“Oh, Swagger, goddamn, you are smart. We picked her up, shot her up and dropped her into the crowd. It was a massive dose of LSD. She never knew what hit her. My friend Bill here” — he indicated a man on his team — “did it. She freaked and went over. God, what a stink it caused; it almost wrecked the credibility of the U.S. government in that one thing. The pressure it caused.”

“Those are your boys, aren’t they, your security team? Which of ’em killed poor Peter Farris?”

The five men in suits arrayed around Bonson glowered at him. They had hard eyes, glittering with pure aggression, and taut, professional faces. Their pistols were in their hands.

“That was Nick.”

“Who got the picture of Donny and my wife?”

“That was Michael. You’d like them, Swagger. They’re all ex-NCOs in the Black Sea Marines and SPETSNAZ. They’ve been with me for a long time.”

“Who blew the building in Wisconsin?”

“That was a team job.”

“And when you were running the mission against Solaratov, you were really running it against PAMYAT. Against Pashin, who was now a nationalist, and if he wins the presidency it sets you guys back even farther. You always knew Pashin was Fitzpatrick, but you had to find a way to get that information to us without compromising your position. You turned everything inside out, so that in the end, the American government was working in the interests of the communist party. The Cold War never ended for you, right?”

“It never will. History runs in cycles. We’re in retreat now, largely underground. But we’ve been underground before. We started underground. We have to eliminate our enemies in Russia. First Russia, then the world, as the great Stalin understood. We’ll be back. This great, rich, fat country of yours is about to explode at the seams; it’ll destroy itself and I’ll help it. I should get the directorship shortly. From there, politics. The very interesting part of my plan is just about to start happening.”

“Who are you?” boomed Bob.

Why was he talking so loud?

“I’ll tell you. But first, you satisfy me: when did you know?”

“I began to suspect at the meeting when the kid wanted to let Solaratov take out Julie and nab him on the way out. That was the smart move; even I knew that. But you said no, you couldn’t do that to me. Fuck you, that was never you. You could send anybody down. I knew that about you from what you done to Donny. So when you say you could never do that, I knew you was lying. You had to stop Solaratov. That was your first mission.”

“Smart,” said Bonson. “Smart, smart, smart.”

“It gets me thinking. In seventy-two, you guys must have been shitting because you let the most important witness to Pashin and Trig get away. You couldn’t track him because a good officer gave him liberty and then he was on his way back to Vietnam. He has to be killed, not only to protect Pashin, but to protect you. So … how do the goddamn Russians know where he is and what he’s doing in Vietnam? How can they target him? That’s a very tough piece of info to come by, and their whole plan turns on it. They had to have someone inside. Someone had to get into naval personnel and figure out where the boy was. Somebody had to target him. Solaratov was only the technician. You was the shooter.”

Bonson stared at him.

“Funny, how when you make the breakthrough, it all kind of swings into shape,” Bob said. “It all makes some kind of sense. Your last mistake: how fast the information got to Moscow, got to higher parties in PAMYAT, to destroy Pashin’s presidential thing. Man, that was fast work. You’re telling me the Agency is that fast? No way. Had to be some inside thing, someone who just had to make a phone call. Damn! And everybody keeps saying, ‘Ain’t it funny the communist party really benefits from all this?’ Yeah, the real joke is, through you, the communist party is running all this. Who are you?”

“You are smart,” said Bonson. “You just weren’t quick enough, were you?”

“Who are you?” repeated Bob.

“You’d never believe this, but I’m history. I’m the future. I’m mankind. I’m hope. I’m the messiah of what must be.”

He smiled again, a pure pilgrim of his own craziness.

“Not even Solaratov believed that shit,” said Bob.

“All right, I’ll tell you,” said Bonson. “And then I’ll kill you. This is a great privilege for you.”

“Who are you?”

“You’d know the original family name, or you could dig it up. It’s in some books. My parents were working-class Americans and fervent members of the American Communist Party. In 1938, the year I was born, they were asked to drop out and go underground for the committee. Of course they agreed. It was the greatest honor they’d ever been paid. So they renounced the party, turned on all their friends and spent the next fifteen years working as couriers, cut-outs, bag men for the atom bomb spies. They serviced the Rosenbergs, Alger Hiss, Klaus Fuchs, the whole brilliant thing we ran in this country. They were heroes. My father was a great man. He was greater than your father, Swagger. He was greater, braver, stronger, tougher, more resilient than your father. He was the best and my mother was a saint.”

Bonson’s eyes shown with tears as he recalled the beauty of his mother.

“You know the rest. NSA decrypts finally gave them away. My father hung himself in a holding tank on Rikers Island. My mother got me out, and then poisoned herself as the agents were coming up the stairs to arrest her. They were heroes of the Soviet Union! They gave it all to the revolution. Someone in the network got me out of the country, and by the following Tuesday I was in Moscow. I was fourteen years old and totally American, a Yankees and Giants fan, with an IQ of 160 and an absolute commitment to bringing down the system that murdered my parents. I was trained for six years. When I reinfiltrated I was already a major in the KGB. I’m now a three-star general. I have more decorations than you’ll ever dream about. I am a hero of the Soviet Union.”

“You’re a psychopath. And there ain’t no Soviet Union,” said Bob.

“Too bad you won’t be around to see how wrong you are.”

The two ancient enemies faced each other in silence.

Finally Bonson said, “All right. That’s enough. Kill him.”

The team raised their pistols. The suppressed 9mm bores looked at Bob. There was complete silence.

“Any last words?” asked Bonson. “Any message for the family?”

“Last words?” said Bob. “Yeah, three of ‘em: front toward enemy.”

He turned his hand over to show them what it held and Bonson realized in an instant why he had been speaking so loudly. Because he was wearing earplugs. He held the M57 electrical firing device, the green plastic clapper with a wire running down to the painting, behind which stood on its silly little set of tripods an M18A1 anti-personnel mine, better known as a Claymore. One or two, the faster, may have tried to fire, but Bob’s reflexes were faster still as he triggered the demolition.

The one and a half pounds of plastic explosive encased in the mine detonated instantly, and a nanosecond later the seven hundred ball bearings, a blizzard of steel, arrived upon them at close to four thousand feet per second. The mine did what the mine was supposed to do: it took them out.

It literally dissolved them: their upper bodies were fragmented in one instant of maximum, total butchery. They exploded as if they’d swallowed grenades and become part of the atmosphere.

As for Bob, he saw none of this. The pillar, as planned, saved his life by blocking the force of the concussion. The earplugs saved his eardrums. But a pound and a half of plastic explosive is no small thing. He felt himself pulled out of his body, and his soul went sailing through the air until it struck something hard, and his mind filled with a bright fog, an incandescent emptiness. He blacked out for a minute or two.

No police arrived. The waterfront is a place of odd noises from unspecified localities: freighters’ horns, the rumble of trucks, backfires and an almost total night-emptiness of human life. The sound of the blast was just another unexplained aural phenomenon in a city full of unexplained aural phenomenon.

When Bob pulled himself out of his fog, he tasted blood. He smelled it too. The blood he tasted was his own: his nose bled and both his ears rang like firebells, despite the plugs. He felt pain. He thought he’d broken his arm, but he hadn’t, although he’d bruised it deeply. He picked himself up, saw flashbulbs prance through the air as his short-circuited optic nerves sputtered ineffectively. He blinked, staggered, sat, pulled himself up, blinked again and then beheld the horror.

The blood he smelled was theirs, and much of it, atomized, still floated in waves in the air, lit by flickering lights. There had been six of them: now there were three legs left standing, though no two belonged to any one of the men. What remained of Ward Bonson, deputy director of the CIA for counter-intelligence, Wall Street lawyer, three-star general in the KGB and a hero of the Soviet Union, was applied to the punctured metal of the wall behind him, mixed completely with the remains of the men who’d served him so ably over the long years. No one would have the heart — or the stomach — to separate them. It was a pure hose job.

Small fires burned everywhere in the smoky space. The sketches had been scattered about. Slowly, Bob gathered them up, then went to the largest of the fires.

He knelt, and one by one fed them into the hungry fire. It gobbled them, and he watched them seized, then curl to delicacy as they were blackened and devoured, then transfigure again into crispy ash, which fragmented and floated away in the hot current.

In the way his mind worked, he thought he saw the souls of those three lost boys, his friend Donny and Donny’s friend Trig and Trig’s victim, Ralph, somehow released to rise and float free, DEROS at last.

He picked up the fingerprinted M57 and dropped it into his pocket for later disposal, his last physical connection to the fate of Bonson and his team. Then he rose and walked out, turning for one last glimpse at the slaughterhouse he had created and the end of all complications of his violent life.

He thought: Sierra-Bravo-Four. Last transmission. Out.

He walked into the night air, sucked in its freshness, headed to his truck and, though he ached and bled, knew it would be best to start the long drive west. It was time to rotate back to the world.