Point of Impact (18 page)

“Shit,” said Sloane again. “I know that guy said it was thirty miles out Parish Five-forty-seven, then left at the dirt road for thirteen miles.”

“I think he was chain pulling,” said Nick. “These old Louisiana cops, you know, they love their pranks.”

“I’m going to report his ass,” said Sloane hotly.

“No, don’t do that. See, he’s got you. You can’t prove it was anything but real and if you make a fuss,
you’re
the one that looks like the ungrateful ass. Listen, my first year in Gumboland, I spent half my nights on wild-goose chases. This is what passes for sport down here. Those guys are sitting in the back room at The Alligator Club right now, laughing themselves sick, I guarantee you. But you did your job, right? That’s the main thing.”

“Christ, Memphis, you’re a walking testimonial to the human power to forgive.”

“It’s so much easier than being a hard guy. Especially in
their
town. Now I get along with them pretty well, because I paid my dues and never complained.”

“Ah, let’s get out of here,” said Till.

“Just think, Till, how silly you’d feel if you’d been parked out here in a million-dollar Electrotek 5400. All dressed up and no place to go.”

Both the Secret Service agents laughed, and then Till said, “No way I’m getting hold of an Electrotek unless I go to work for RamDyne, which I just might do.”

Nick said, “RamDyne?”

“You never heard of RamDyne?”

“No.”

“It’s Fed heaven. You fuck up bad, or you get fucked bad, but you’re good, you know, really
good
, maybe RamDyne gives you a call one night. Then you are on easy street. And you get to do all the stuff the CIA
used
to do. Interesting stuff.”

“Ah,” said Sloane, “it doesn’t even exist. I hear guys talking about it now and then, but I don’t know a single guy who’s ever gotten that kind of nod.”

“But it’s nice to think of the money, isn’t it?” said Till, dreamily.

Bob came over the rise and looked down the wet tarmac to see the trailer a mile ahead, and the car parked next to it. He drew his parka tighter; the wind pushed into and through it. Next to him, Mike poised, taut, his sloppy jowls tightening, a curl of angry low sound slithering out of his throat.

“Easy, boy,” said Bob, trying to rub some softness into the animal’s tension. He stroked the hard neck and the velvety ears and after a second or so, Mike broke contact with the strangers at the trailer and cocked his head, looking at Bob, puzzlement showing in the deep lakes of his eyes.

“There, guy,” Bob said in a low mutter, “it’s all right. They’re friends,” though a sardonic tone crept into the last word.

He had wondered when they’d be in touch. It was a sleety day; the weather had rushed over the Ouachitas; low clouds rolled angrily by; pellets of ice fell diagonally, cutting the skin, collecting in puddles on the road, while the wind sliced through the trees.

Bob shivered, not quite warm, and pressed ahead.

The colonel sat in the car, reading a newspaper. Payne lounged on the fender.

“Howdy, Payne.”

“Hi ya, Bob. Nice dog.”

“Dogs aren’t nice, Payne. They’re either good or they’re bad, meaning either they stick or they cut. Mike sticks.”

Payne just looked at him, something like a smirk on his dark, blunt features. Bob felt the hostility, but it didn’t particularly bother him. Payne didn’t worry Bob a bit.

“How’s the mouth?”

“My old man hit me harder. He didn’t give me no warning either.”

Payne smiled, showing new dentures.

“All right,” said the colonel, stepping out of the car.

Payne immediately stepped back.

“Get inside, Payne. Wait for me.”

“Yes, sir,” said Payne, sliding obediently into the car.

“Hello, Swagger. How are you?”

“Fine,” said Bob.

“Nice dog,” said the colonel.

“He sure is.”

“Some kind of beagle?”

“Beagle and something.”

“Well, anyway. Can we talk?”

“Sure.”

Bob unlocked the gate and Mike ran to his hut like the obedient creature he was. Bob took the colonel inside.

They sat down at Bob’s table and the man pulled out a well-thumbed copy of Bob’s report.

“I don’t mind telling you, this is an excellent piece of work.”

Bob nodded.

“You might be interested in knowing that independently we came to many of the same conclusions. We’ve also had some further information on Solaratov. We think we have a very solid sighting outside of Huarte City in Cuba. Now why would that be significant? The reason is that it’s a swampy region whose weather and proximity to the sea and humidity tendencies almost exactly match New Orleans’s. So they may be prepping the shot down there, rather than, as you guessed, trying to put together a range up here.”

“I see.”

“But we agree that almost certainly they’re going to go for him in New Orleans.”

Bob just nodded.

Then he said, “So are you going to let me be on the rifle that day?”

The colonel looked him in the eye. Bob respected a man who gave you the bad news straight up, no bullshit, no fake sorry.

“No. No way. Forget about it.”

Bob said nothing.

“Higher people have decided. He has to be taken alive, discreetly, and debriefed; he’s a treasure chest of information. It’s more than personalities, it’s politics and policies. It’s duty.”

Bob nodded.

“I know you want a crack at him. We all do. But we have to be professional. We have to see him as an asset. It’s not about justice or anything. It’s about doing what’s necessary.”

“This johnny isn’t going to be so easy to nab clean.”

“We’ll let the FBI and the Secret Service worry about that. They’re pros.”

“So, I’m out, that what you’re saying?”

“You’ve done your part. We
needed
you. And now that time has passed.”

Bob grunted. It was sort of like Vietnam. Thank you and fuck you.

“There’ll be a check.”

“The money isn’t necessary. It was an honor.”

“It’s not a lot. We didn’t want to insult you. It’s a month’s pay at gunnery sergeant rate.”

“Fine. Much appreciated.”

“Swagger, when I walk out this door, that has to be it. It has to be left alone, do you understand?”

“Yes, sir.”

“I’ve taken a chance, a big chance, telling you this much. You’ve learned things no private citizen has ever learned. We have to be able to trust you.”

“Sure,” said Bob.

“Swagger, if you show up in that area with a rifle, if you do something stupid to get at this Solaratov, you could blow the whole thing. You could get yourself killed, you could mess up our whole operation, you could let this bastard get away. We expect your discipline, your best help.”

“Yes, sir.”

“And that means just sitting tight. Do you understand? Can you be professional?”

“I’ve always been a professional, sir.”

There was another curious pause in the conversation. The colonel looked away, clearly troubled. Bob just stared at him, conscious of the slow tick of time, the settling of atoms in the room. He needed a drink. First time in years, he had the extraordinary urge to open a bottle of Tennessee drinking whiskey and float away on its torrents, to drift and bob and see where he ended up
next morning or next week or whatever, in whose bed, in what prison.

Shit.

“But I don’t—”

“What?”

“What secrets can this guy have? He’s a shooter, that’s all. He’s going to kill a great president. Let me be there and I can nab him with a .308 hollowpoint. That’s the nabbing he deserves.”

The colonel looked off.

“I’m going to tell you why we have to take him alive. I’m going to tell you why it’s absolutely imperative that we take him alive. It may turn out that you weren’t the first American he shot and that Donny wasn’t the second.”

“He had an earlier tour in ’Nam?”

“He had an earlier tour, all right. But it wasn’t in ’Nam. We have a very good authenticated sighting of him in Mexico City, Swagger. It’s on film, Mexico City. November eighteenth, 1963. Our people trailed him. They lost him at the airport. There were three flights from Mexico City on November eighteenth, 1963. To Dallas, Texas.”

The colonel held him in his eyes for a long time.

“We’ve been working on this a long, long time, Swagger. We want this boy. We want him so bad. He’s an old dog, and we want him because then we can find the answers to some very interesting questions.”

“I understand,” said Bob. “I was out of line. I apologize.”

“All right,” said the colonel. “For the record my name is Raymond Davis. I’m a senior plans officer in the Central Intelligence Agency, as you have no doubt guessed. This operation is code-named Ginger Dragon, and it involves over three hundred men. Do you understand
that
everything
I’ve told you is absolutely top secret?”

“Yes, sir.”

“We’ll need seasoned spotters, Swagger. Men on scopes who can find Solaratov for us so that we can take him. Nobody’s better on a scope than you.”

“I suppose that’s true.”

“No rifles. Just give us your eyes and your brains. Be on our team. No solo work. You just work with us to take this guy. Pay him back for Donny Fenn that way. Pay him back for all of us. That’s how you nail him, Bob. Can you nail him like that?”

“I’ll nail him,” said Bob.

He had another of his bad, sleepless nights, and woke up swaddled in drenched sheets, his hip aflame, the image of the light gone from Donny’s blank eyes forever strobing in his mind.

Goddamn him
, he thought, thinking of the man hunting him as he had hunted so many others.

He felt greedy for vengeance and he knew it could make him stupid and sloppy, and he wished again he had a way to protect himself, not from
them
, whoever they really were, but from himself, his own greed and self-indulgence.

And then an idea came to him. It was so simple really: it involved a few minutes’ welding, a certain adjustment, and at least from one angle he was protected from their use if they tried to use him in a certain way.

He laughed about it after he was finished. It was such a little thing. He reassembled the Remington .308, wiped it down with Sheath to keep the moisture away, and replaced it in his gun vault. Like to see the look on somebody’s poke when they pulled the trigger on that one!

He slept dreamlessly.

Beneath the Presidential Security Detail and the Site Preparation Team, at the furthest reaches of the security pyramid, was that blur of extra bodies known as “Cooperating Agencies” and it was well within this blur, sitting in an automobile with a cold cup of coffee, a red lapel button and an attitude problem, that Nick Memphis found himself at nine-thirty in the morning on the day of the president’s speech. He was one of several thousand cops, FBI agents, military personnel and the like who had to surrender their weekend because the president, ever mindful that his popularity ratings in the Latino communities, so high after the war, had begun to slip just a bit, and so he had chosen to give the
Freedom Medal to the Salvadoran archbishop Jorge Roberto Lopez.

Nick was by himself, which didn’t please him much; he’d somehow expected more, having kibitzed so valiantly with the Secret Service advance detail over the preceding three weeks, been loyal and obedient as any dog, doing Howdy Duty’s bidding whenever possible and with a smile on his face. But at intense moments all institutions default to turf warfare, and Nick was pained to discover that Secret Service did not want the Bureau anywhere near the zone of its highest visibility and responsibility, so he’d been exiled to a further outpost of the empire of security. Worse, Mickey Sontag, his most recent partner, was sick; so poor Nick had to spend all of game day by himself.

He now sat a good four blocks off the motorcade route and the site of the speech, parked on St. Ann Street in the Quarter, a block or two down from Bourbon’s luridness and the crush of tourism. Around him were old brick residences, all quaint, all pastel, all shuttered. Ahead, in the far distance, he could see the grotesque wrought-iron arch that signified the entrance to Louis Armstrong park on North Rampart, one reason why the White House had chosen the site: access to it, through that gate, was so limited. There were still worries, left over from the Persian Gulf War, about terrorists. The sun above was bright and now and then people would stream by, in hopes of getting a good early location on the president’s motorcade or a good seat for his speech.

Idly, Nick listened to the security network, Channel 21 on his radio unit, as Phil Mueller held the whole thing together from a Secret Service communications center on the roof of the Municipal Auditorium, which was just off the site of the speech.

“Ah, this is Airport, we have Flashlight on the ground and taxiing toward the hangar.”

“Reading you, Airport, this is Base Six.”

Nick recognized Mueller’s authoritarian voice over the radio; he knew that Howdy Duty would be standing right next to him, really there more for public relations, to keep the Bureau’s profile high, than for any meaningful security reasons. Nick tried to generate some feeling for Utey, pro or con. But he couldn’t get himself to hate the guy, even after Tulsa all those years ago. Hate just wasn’t in Nick, not a bit of it.

“All teams in place, we are waiting momentarily for Flashlight to disembark.”

“Thank you, Airport, please confirm when Flashlight is out of plane and motorcade is proceeding.”

“Reading you and roger that, Base Six.”

“Uh, people, Game time coming up, I want to run a last security check, make sure everybody’s on station. So by the numbers, I want you to check in and give me a sitrep.”

One by one the security units checked in, a torrent of radiospeak and bored, commanding voices crackling and soupy over the distorting radio network—all of them, because Mueller was a stickler. That was three helicopter teams, over fifty men spread around on rooftops, maybe seventy-five police units at various intersections on and nearby the motorcade route, all the high-powered lookout posts in the immediate vicinity of the site, and of course the hot dogs of the Presidential Security Detail, many of whom had come ahead and were already in position on site.