The Third Bullet - Страница 89

He stood, eased forward as the smoke ceased from the two rightmost grenades, and tried to see a target. Nothing. Swagger was somewhere ahead. But Blue Leader saw nothing. This was room-clearing, really, two men squatting as they worked their way through a maze, guns at the ready. Who would see whom first, who would fire first, who would win?

He eased left, then right, feeling the whip of wind, feeling the warmth of the sun. He pushed off his watch cap, ripped off and tossed ears and throat mike for total concentration. He negotiated the avenues between the rocks and brush with care, in that commando crouch, and it happened that, as he edged around a boulder, something flashed in his peripheral and he was on it fast, to see a man withdrawing because he didn’t have a shooting angle, but Blue Leader did and fired, knowing that he’d hit.

He waited.

Nothing.

“Swagger, give it up. I know I hit you. I saw the blood. It’s no good going out like a rat.”

No answer. Was he dead?

He squirmed ahead a few feet and was rewarded with a blood track.

Got him!

Got-

Swagger hit him hard with the crown of his head, a smash that skulled both of them into incomprehensibility, but Swagger, expecting it, got in his follow-up and clocked him harder with the inverted barrel of the old weapon.

Blue Leader went so still that he couldn’t have been faking, but in the next second, he tried to fight his way out of the grog and Swagger was on him. He pressed the muzzle hard into the throat, and with his other hand, he ripped the man’s fighting knife away, unlatched the Velcro on the Wilson and tossed it, pulled and threw the M-6 as hard as he could.

He leaned over the Brit, pressing the blunt Thompson muzzle into the neck. “What’s your rank, troopie?”

“I- What, what are you-”

“Your rank and outfit, goddammit.”

“Major, Royal Marines, 42 Commando.”

“Major, get that bird in here fast. Pop your evac smoke and get these men out of here. One’s dead for sure, maybe another, maybe not. Get them to goddamn emergency in Hartford fast, and save them. That’s your last job as commanding officer.”

“I shot you,” said the major.

“In the fucking hip. I been shot there so many times I didn’t even notice. It bounced off. Now get these guys out of here, save some lives.”

“Why?” said the major. “I don’t get it.”

“I only want one more head on my wall. And it ain’t yours.”

I heard the fight. It was brief, violent, and as such things always are, ugly. Gunfire, shouts, bits of panicked radio-speak, screams, something that sounded like a physical tussle, and then the radio went dead. That silence that follows a disconnect. The airwaves located and destroyed, communication lost.

I shook my head.

He did it, I realized. He’d beaten them somehow.

I hated Swagger even as I loved him. God, was he an operator. Could he have prevailed again, against those odds? The man wouldn’t die. Was he Achilles, dipped in the potion of immortality but for a heel that no archer had found?

A hit of vodka calmed me, and I had to appraise my situation realistically. He could know nothing else. He would be stopped by the firewall of the person I’d become. He’d have to set about finding me. Good luck on that, because Niles Gardner, long dead, had built a perfect identity, and it would withstand any attempt at penetration.

I lay back, watching the sun yield its hold on the day slowly. It stayed light so long now, which had the odd effect of elongating life. I felt like these extra hours were a gift to me; they stood for the fact that I would go on and on and on, that in the end, if through longevity as much as genius, I would prevail.

My phone rang.

What? I reached for it, noting that it was not my cell but my satellite. Richard! Maybe Richard had a report.

I pressed the talk button. “Richard?”

“No, he ain’t here. He’s hiding in the basement.”

“Swagger!” I could tell by his laconic voice, its dryness, its ur-text of Southern cadence, its lack of need to dominate, its irony, its detachment.

“Yes sir. We meet at last,” he said. “By the way, if you want to talk to your commando team, they ain’t here neither. The survivors are in the emergency ward.”

“Dammit, you are a resourceful man,” I said. “Woe unto him who tries to outthink Bob Lee Swagger.”

“I ain’t no genius, Mr. Meachum. I just show up and pay attention.”

“How? I have to know. Tell me my mistake, goddammit.”

“It was that forgery in the Abercrombie files. Had me snookered completely. Then I realized, if Abercrombie sent your cousin a rifle in a new caliber and asked for a story, Lon would have written the story. He had to keep the bargain. Part of his noblesse oblige, or whatever you fancy donkeys call it. But he didn’t write no piece on reloading the.264, and I ought to know, as I read every word he ever wrote.”

Lon! It was Lon’s decency reaching out of the grave to bring me down! I almost had to laugh. That is what I loved about Lon, and that is what betrayed me.

I was speechless. Finally, I realized I had only one question to ask. It was the only one that mattered.

“Why? Why does it matter to you, Swagger? Tell me. Did you love JFK, the myth? Do you wish you’d been a trusted knight of Camelot? Did you have a crush on Jackie? Did the brave little boy and girl at the funeral break your heart? Why, Swagger, why?”

“A young man in service to our country was murdered on November 22, 1963. He was handsome and beloved. Everyone who saw him admired him and trusted his judgment. In all eyes, he was a hero. He was slaughtered in the street without a chance. A bullet blew up his brain. He left a hole in society, children who weep today, everyone who knew him. Possibly you have heard of him.”

“His name was John F. Kennedy.”

“No, it wasn’t. He was not the president of the United States, John F. Kennedy, about whom I give not a shit. The man I speak of was a Dallas police officer named J. D. Tippit, and like my father, he was doing his duty until someone killed him for it. So that is who I am. I am not a national avenger, I am not Captain America, I don’t give a crap about Camelot. I am the dead policeman’s son, and I did what I did to find out who really shot Officer Tippit. I am the dead policeman’s boy.”

“Swagger, you are a bastard. I know you think you’ve won. But you haven’t. You have no idea where I am, who I am, what my circumstances are. Are you going to indict a dead man? Hugh Meachum is dust and ashes scattered across the countryside outside Hartford. He is a beloved hero, and if you try to bring him down, you will unleash unbelievable trouble on yourself. Meanwhile, I will keep going on and on and on, and you have no idea if I’m a mile from you right now or sitting at the North Pole under the nom de guerre S. Claus.”

“Not so fast, Mr. Meachum. Maybe you ain’t as tricky as you think. Your pal Niles Gardner shared your enthusiasm for this Nabokov, the Russian writer. Niles liked cross-language puns, wordplay, games, that sort of thing. He had one other thing in common. Like his hero, he suffered from a condition known as synesthesia. Because of some confusion in the brain pathways, he sees some numbers in color. He saw the number nine in color, red. That’s why he had a pistol on his desk called a Mauser Red Nine. And when he came to cook up the last and best and deepest fake life for his pal and fellow Nabokov lover, Hugh Meachum, he paid a gamesman’s tribute to his connection to Nabokov, to yours, and to Nabokov himself, by using synesthesia as the key. You were born from synesthesia. You’re the child, the son, of the Red Nine, Mr. Meachum.”

“Thin, Swagger. So thin. It tells you nothing.”

“I ain’t done yet. His smartest trick was the code that wasn’t a code. It was what it was, in plain sight if you could see it. You don’t even get it, do you?”

“This is nonsense,” I said. “You’ve gone insane.”

“He hung a name on you that gave it up if you could see it clearly. The name began with I–X, Mr. Meachum. Cross-lingual pun. I–X, from English into Latin. I–X, Mr. Meachum, meaning nine. You are the son of the Red Nine. Your new name is Dimitri Ixovich Spazny. Niles really loaded the Nabokov mayonnaise on this sandwich. The old butterfly catcher would be so impressed.”

Niles! I thought. All these years later, tripping me up with his cleverness.

“When it came time for you to ‘die,’ you slipped into Russia and took up again as Dimitri Ixovich Spazny, of KGB, with all the contacts and the timing exactly right. You even own the gun company that manufactured the nine-millimeter I used in the fight in Moscow. As Yeltsin’s pal and money guy, you also own, what, electricity, newspaper, taxicabs, the Izmaylovskaya mob, radio, the air, most of the water, half of Belgium, three quarters of Hong Kong, and what else?”

“By the time you move on me, I’ll be someone else,” I said, though my heart was hammering in my chest. “You’re not fast enough. Brains are meaningless without speed.”

“Then how come I know you’re wearing tan cargo pants and a green shirt? How come I know you’re resting on a chaise longue, in sunglasses, with a yellow tablet in your hand? How come I know you’re drinking vodka? How come I know you’re on your back porch, looking down across a mile of grass framed on either side by pine forest? How come I know there’s a river a mile off?”