In a bit, Chuck McKenzie answered.
“Gunny? You’re okay?”
“I seem to be. Don’t see no blood. Let me give you my coordinates.”
He looked at his GPS and read them off.
“We’re leaving right now.”
“Did you give that package-”
“Yep. It’s gone now. The jet took off an hour ago. How are you?”
“Tired. I’m too old for this shit.”
“That last Irishman?”
“What’s the Irish word for toast?”
“I think it’s toast,” said Chuck.
When that was done, Bob put in a call to Nick.
“The package is on the way.”
“I know. And we are all set up here. I’ve got a film restoration team to supervise the process, but they’re sure we can get good clear images off it without damage. I’ve got search warrant teams laid on in three states to hit Constable’s headquarters after we get warrants and subpoenas, and I’ve got a team in Chicago to take possession of the hard drive of Jack Strong’s office computer and the safe in Strong’s office. And I’ve got the Cook County state’s attorney people here; they can issue warrants and we can serve them. I’ve got a guy from the Nyackett, Massachusetts, prosecutor’s office to issue his warrant. If this is everything you say it is, we’ll be all legaled up sometime tomorrow and pick him up at a speech he’s going to give tomorrow night in Seattle.”
“Cool,” said Bob.
“You don’t sound excited.”
“I’m just tired as hell,” said Bob. “Are you sending people here to the ranch?”
“Yes.”
“Make sure to hit the security team headquarters. That’s where his sniper team was based. They all had laptops and were very professional. I’m sure there’s a lot of stuff there, and if you track back to wherever they lived privately, there’s even more.”
“Got it.”
“And you should send some people out into the wilderness area. I’ll give you the coordinates tomorrow. There’s some bodies to be bagged and pickled. Long story.”
“Jesus Christ. No wonder you’re tired. Get some sleep. Then get in here by-this is Saturday-by, say Tuesday?”
“Sure. Out.”
Bob rested a while but then gathered up his rifle and dragged his weariness to the ATV. He climbed on and gunned it to life and covered the yardage to Anto.
There lay his foe. The 150-grain Scirocco would be banned in land warfare because of course the point that kept it so accurate was only black polycarbonate and meant for streamline and accuracy, but it hid a hollow point and a lethally blossoming design. When it struck flesh, the polycarbonate tip was driven back into the bullet body itself, and that dynamic intrusion, plus the self-destructing design of the bullet, caused the missile, traveling through flesh at about 2,500 feet per second, to open like a flower, its petals yawing wide. They yawed, they sawed. They went through meat like a butcher’s keenest blade, opening a temporary cavity on the power of velocity that was the size of a football. Even when, by the elasticity of the flesh, that cavity closed up some, it closed up on organs that had been gelatinized, literally turned to viscosity. At the same time, the bullet’s impact shattered bone and sundered skin along predictable fault lines, which is how the splitting effect came to be.
Anto lay curled up on his right side, his left body half so damaged it made no anatomical sense. It didn’t even look real.
You stupid Irish bastard, Bob thought, remembering the long evenings at the Mustang Bar in Wyoming and what a happy time that had been. So much talent, so much guts, so much charm, and you end up in the high grass with your body blown in two, and for nothing but some rich asshole’s benefit, and he’s going down too.
By this time, the helicopter Chuck had hired was closing in. He raised a hand, not that it was necessary, as he stood out on the slope in a vastness of nothing. The chopper, a familiar old Huey, set down a hundred yards away, flattening the grass, lifting small stones and a haze of prairie dust, seeming inappropriate in a place otherwise so still. Its racket drowned all sound and made chatter impossible. Chuck ran over and gave Bob a nice thump on the shoulder, grabbed the gear, including the ghillie and his own Remington Sendero, while Bob carried Anto’s AI. They made it to the chopper, tumbled in, but not before Bob pulled his friend close and whispered, “Man, do I need to change my goddamned diapers.”
52
Washington DC, like any cosmopolitan city, has wife restaurants and mistress restaurants. If you’re with your spouse, your partner for life, your better half, your ball and chain, the mother of your children, and you have a hankering for steak, then you go to Morton’s, subdued and swanky at the corner of Connecticut and K, right in the center of lobbyland. It’s wonderful, it’s tasteful, it’s perfect, it’s dull. If, however, you’re with your “mentee,” your walking, talking, quivering fountain of youth, your single-evening Viagra-consumption record, your “niece,” your lambchop, and the next Mrs. Whoeveryouare, then it’s off to the Palm, on Nineteenth, for your slab of protein.
The Palm has swagger, bravado, a New York gangster dive ambience. The waiters all look like they made their bones in Newark in ’67, with those walnutty faces, thick pomades of rich Mediterranean hair, and little khaki waiter’s coats, with all kinds of odd bric-a-brac pinned across the belly. The place is dark and, even in the decreed absence of cigarettes and cigars, still feels smoky; the walls are festooned with somebody’s dim idea of celebrity caricature (unrecognizable); the potatoes look like they could be called the myocardial infarction facilitation kit-pancakes fried in diesel grease, possibly?-and the meat is stark, primordial, and bleeding.
Thus on his one mistress dinner night of the month (his wife of thirty-five years and mother of his four children was so understanding), Bill Fedders sat with current flame Jessica Delph, in his usual booth on the left side of the dim room, sipping a powerful vodka martini while admiring the young woman’s aquiline features, drawn-back blond hair, and hooded eyes. God, she was beautiful! Too bad he was going to dump her soon.
“Jessie, when I look at you, I wonder why you haven’t given your heart away to some twenty-five-year-old linebacker.”
“Possibly it’s because all the linebackers in this town are Redskins, that is, losers,” she said, with a smile that concealed the fact that she had in fact given her heart away-and some other goodies, as well-to a thirty-one-year-old stockbroker, because she didn’t want to have that conversation until Bill had gotten her, as promised early in the relationship, a job with a really fine lobbying shop.
“I love a gal who knows that she’s as beautiful as she is smart and as smart as she is beautiful,” he said. It was a treasured line, but he didn’t think he’d used it on this one, and besides it didn’t matter, because he knew about the stockbroker.
“So are we celebrating something, Bill?” she asked.
“Actually, we’re in mourning.”
“Ohhh, death. I hate it when that happens.”
“It’s not death, just massive frontal trauma, a coma, the patient in the oxygen tent out like a light, but I think it’ll come out of it.”
“It?”
“Not a person, a campaign. My oldest and dearest client had me running a campaign to hurry a certain federal policy toward implementation.”
“Details boring or classified?”
“Details unnecessary. Long story shortened: I had a young guy on the team, he seemed so promising, and I let him develop something on his own and it proved to be a hoax. A fraud. He was caught. Disaster.”
“You let him go?”
“He wasn’t really in my employ. I was helping him in his career. Anyhow, he’s been placed on probation, as I understand it, and now he’s covering New Jersey sewer commissions.”
“Bummer.”
“Indeed. I do think we’ll be okay. It’s just that Monday I have to make a phone call I’m not looking forward to. But it’ll work out, I’m sure, just not quite as quickly as we had hoped. But that’s why I’m a little down for now.”