Authors: Stephen Hunter
“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.”