“But you can’t put your finger on any one thing, is that it?”
“Exactly. We go over it and over it and we’re stymied. Every day we get something new and it always fits just right, like a puzzle.”
“Well, let me just caution you that you don’t want to get too overwhelmed by what is, after all, well and truly nothing. I mean the prime craziness of the conspiracy gooney birds is the notion that the less the evidence, the more proof the authorities saw of conspiracy. Less was never less, it was always more. The absence of evidence was seen as more significant than evidence itself.”
“Good point,” Nick conceded. “Still, there’s a thing I want to do. Let me run it by you.”
“Go ahead.”
“A wild card.”
“Hmm,” said the director.
“Meaning somebody from outside our culture, not in our boxes, with our prejudices, who would look at it with a fresh eye.”
“A neutral observer.”
“Actually, someone inclined to disbelieve our explanation. Someone who’d fight us. Someone with an instinct for our weaknesses. Someone who’s very good on guns, particularly the dynamics of shooting, because he’s won a batch of fights with big iron. Someone whose life experience inclines him to revere the marine sniper and who would never make an axiomatic assumption about a marine sniper’s guilt. His mind doesn’t work that way. Then, he was himself a marine sni-”
“Swagger.”
“Yes.”
“Christ, Nick, no doubt he’s quite the operator, but can he be controlled? I mean, we spun his adventures in Bristol to our advantage, no doubt about it, but he was just that far from being out of control. Nick, suppose that fifty he fired at that helicopter had missed and hit a busful of orphan piano prodigies on their way to prayer camp.”
“I’d be a crossing guard in Mississippi,” said Nick.
“And I’d be your supervisor, making twenty-five cents more an hour. Nick-”
“He’s smart,” Nick said. “Almost nobody knows more about this stuff than he does. And he’s honest. He’ll call it as he reads it, no bullshit, no PC, no spin. He’s straight nineteenth-century lawman in that regard.”
“Matt Dillon!” said the director. “Here we go again. You ride him hard, you control him heavy, you have three more days. We need that report sooner, if not faster than sooner.”
8
He beheld the thing itself. It was Carl’s “teaching rifle,” a patiently constructed replica of the Remington M40A1.308 USMC sniper rifle of the nineties. Carl, of course, had done his great shooting in Vietnam with one of the old marine special services target rifles, a heavy-barreled Model 70 in.30-06, and a two-foot-long Unertl 8x scope. But that system was hopelessly outmoded, and as a “teacher” at sniper schools and an adviser to police SWAT teams and a gun show celeb, he’d had to acquire something more up-to-date, and thus in 1997 had purchased 5965321.
It seemed that 5965321 was Swagger’s fate, no matter how he tried to avoid it. Nick had pushed all the right buttons: responsibility to the Corps, responsibility to the sniper program and to sniper culture, the one-in-a-million shot this was a game some assholes were running that only he, Swagger, could see into, the old cowboy thing about setting things right in the world. Against such arguments, “I’m old, I’m tired, I’m used up, I need a nap, my leg hurts” didn’t cut much. So here he was with Carl’s rifle, in the city he hated above all others, surrounded by people of whom he trusted only one.
The rifle: Carl had gotten 5965321 through the PX system at Camp Lejeune, a system which as a retiree he was still allowed to use, writing a check (also recovered) for $345.89, as opposed to a civilian retail of about $700, a very good deal. The agents had found the bill of sale in his papers, and Bob looked at it now: a Remington police rifle, in the model PPS, with a heavy 24-inch barrel and a tuned action. Carl bought it, Carl used it, Carl knew it, Carl loved it, no doubt about that.
Carl also, as sophisticated shooters will, improved it. He’d bought a McMillan Hunter stock, in the sand-and-spinach camo pattern that was state of the art in the nineties, before all this desert digital came in. Either he or a marine armorer buddy had bedded the action to the stock and hung a 1903 leather Springfield sling on it. He bought a Leupold 3.5-10x tactical scope with mil-dots in the reticle for ranging, a good alternative to the Marine Unertl 10xs not commonly available on the open market. He mounted the scope in Badger Ordnance tactical rings on a Badger Picatinny rail bolted and red Loctited to the action. He’d changed out the Remington trigger for a Jewell that gave 5965321 a five-ounce pull without creep or overtravel. He’d fired nothing but match 168-grainers in it and had shot out the original barrel and replaced it with two Hart barrels, keeping a detailed log of each shot fired. A few years ago, realizing that his clients would mostly be law enforcement and that many would be shooting suppressed systems, he’d gone through the ATF/Treasury Department rigamarole to legally purchase an otherwise illegal Class III device, i.e., a suppressor from SureFire, the tac light, laser, and suppressor giant, and had paid the SureFire armorers to machine threads to his new Krieger barrel on which to screw the noise-dampening steel tube. When the trigger was pulled, the gun didn’t go bang, it went ulch or groff or something like that, a lot less loud but more importantly dissipated to other points on the horizon and thus a lot less identifiable as a firearm report. The SureFire armorers were so good that they could mount the can, as suppressors are called, without affecting the accuracy of the weapon, and FBI shooters had already proved the efficacy of the construction: they’d gotten consistent minute-of-angle groups, averaging.675 at a hundred yards, 1.866 at two hundred, and 2.84 at three hundred yards, the scope well zeroed at the hundred-yard marker.
It was a formidable piece of weaponry, easily capable of killing each of the targets that had been fired at during Carl’s last mad week, and given his expertise in the art, the kills were clearly within his capabilities; moreover, the suppressor disguised the origin of the shots and guaranteed his getaway. Ballistics matched, casings matched, fingerprints matched; all the shots were makeable by a man with Carl’s extensive training and field experience, and all the movements seemed within his capacity even as a sixty-eight-year-old man.
The rifle, slightly out of balance because of the eight-inch suppressor, lay on a long table set up in the Major Case working room on the third floor of the J. Edgar Hoover Building in Washington DC. It was part of the melancholy accretion of data by which the agents and technicians had proved that Carl and Carl alone had been responsible for the four murders in the seven-day time line of his killing spree. Their arguments and their evidence were contained in the draft known as “the report,” meant to be issued through PIO as soon as possible, in tandem with the case being officially closed by the Bureau, and the police agencies involved would certainly, even eagerly, follow suit. And that would be that. Swagger had read the report many times, and even though rough and unfinished, it was an extremely convincing document.
In Carl’s home, address given, agents had located a “mission room” in which detailed accounts of the lives of nine “famous” antiwar activists from the late sixties and early seventies, among them “Hanoi Joan” Flanders, Jack Strong and Mitzi Reilly, and, a much lesser presence admittedly, Mitch Greene. Moreover, the number ninety-seven, representing the number of kills it would take for Carl to take over as “number one marine sniper” from the war, was scrawled in thirty-nine separate localities in the room, on scraps of paper, on the wall, though again admittedly, it was difficult to get a convincing handwriting interpretation based only on two numerals.