‘Plus therefore an additional matching five from the previous generation, not long retired, old enough to be at loose ends, but still young enough to function. Which is who you should be looking at.’
‘Those would be your candidates? The previous generation?’
‘I don’t see who else would qualify.’
‘How many significant countries are there, in that line of work?’
‘Maybe five of us.’
‘Times an average of five eligible candidates in each country is twenty-five shooters in the world. Agreed?’
‘Ballpark.’
‘More than ballpark, actually. Twenty-five happens to be the exact dead-on number of retired elite snipers known to intelligence communities around the world. Do you think their governments keep careful track of them?’
‘I’m sure they do.’
‘And therefore how many of them do you think would turn out to have rock-solid alibis on any random day?’
Given that they would be surveilled very carefully, I said, ‘Twenty?’
‘Twenty-one,’ O’Day said. ‘We’re down to four guys. And that’s the diplomatic problem here. We’re like four guys in a room, all staring at each other. I don’t need that bullet to be American.’
‘One of ours is not accounted for?’
‘Not completely.’
‘Who?’
‘How many snipers that good do you know?’
‘None,’ I said. ‘I don’t hang out with snipers.’
‘How many did you ever know?’
‘One,’ I said. ‘But it’s obviously not him.’
‘And you know this because?’
‘He’s in prison.’
‘And you know this because?’
‘I put him there.’
‘He got a fifteen-year sentence, correct?’
‘As I recall,’ I said.
‘When?’
Socratic. I did the math in my head. A lot of years. A lot of water over the dam. A lot of different places, a lot of different people. I said, ‘Shit.’
O’Day nodded.
‘Sixteen years ago,’ he said. ‘Doesn’t time fly, when you’re having fun?’
‘He’s out?’
‘He’s been out for a year.’
‘Where is he?’
‘Not at home.’
FOUR
JOHN KOTT WAS
the first son of two Czech emigrants who escaped the old Communist regime and settled in Arkansas. He had a kind of wiry Iron Curtain look that blended well with the local hardscrabble youth, and he grew up as one of them. Apart from his name and his cheekbones he could have been a cousin going back hundreds of years. At sixteen he could shoot squirrels out of trees too far away for most folks to see. At seventeen he killed his parents. At least, the county sheriff thought he did. There was no actual proof, but there was plenty of suspicion. None of which seemed to matter much, a year later, to the army recruiter who signed him up.
Unusually for a thin wiry guy he was immensely calm and still. He could drop his heart rate to the low thirties, and he could lie inert for many hours. He had superhuman eyesight. In other words, he was a born sniper. Even the army recognized it. He was sent to a succession of specialist schools, and then he was funnelled straight to Delta. Where he matched his talents with unrelenting hard work and made himself a star, in a shadowy, black-ops kind of a way.
But unusually for a Special Forces soldier the seal between the on-duty part of his head and the off-duty part was not 100 per cent watertight. To drop a guy at a thousand yards needs more than talent and athletic ability. It needs permission, from deep down in the ancient part of the brain, where fundamental inhibitions are either enforced or relaxed. It needs the shooter to really, really, truly believe:
This is OK. This is your enemy. You’re better than him. You’re the best in the world. Anyone who challenges you deserves to die
. Most guys have an off switch. But Kott’s didn’t close all the way.
I met him three weeks after a guy was found with his throat cut, in the weeds behind a faraway bar in Colombia, South America. The dead guy was a U.S. Army sergeant, from the Rangers. The bar was a hangout for a CIA-directed Special Forces unit, who were using it for downtime when they weren’t out in the jungle, shooting cartel members. Which made the suspect pool both very small and completely silent. I was with the 99th MP at the time, and I got the job. Only because the dead guy was American military. A local civilian, the Pentagon would have saved the airfare.
No one talked, but they all said plenty. I knew who had been in the bar, and I made them all describe it, and they all told me some little thing. I built up a picture. One guy was doing this, another guy was doing that. This guy left at eleven, that guy left at midnight. The other guy was sitting next to the first guy, who was drinking rum not beer. And so on and so forth. I got the choreography straight in my head, and I revised it over and over until it ran smooth and coherent.
Except for Kott, who was nothing more than a hole in the air.
No one had said anything much about him. Not where he was sitting, or what he was doing, or who he was talking to. He was more or less completely undescribed. Which could be for a number of reasons, one of which was, just possibly, that although no one in his unit was going to actively rat him out, no one was going to make stuff up for him, either. Some kind of ethics. Or lack of imagination. A wise choice, either way. Invention always unravels. Better to say nothing. As in, just possibly, hypothetically, a long fierce argument with the dead guy might become … nothing. Just a hole in the air.
It was a weak case, involving a lot of circular theory and a star player and a clandestine operation, but to its credit the army looked at it. And quite correctly said we were going nowhere without a confession.
They let me bring Kott in.
Most of asking questions is listening to the answers, and I listened to Kott for a good long time before I concluded that deep down the guy had an arrogant streak as wide as his head. And as hard. He wasn’t making the distinction.
Anyone who challenges you deserves to die
is battlefield bullshit, not a way to live.
But I had known people like that all my life. I was the product of people like that. They want to tell you about it. They want you to understand. They want you to approve. OK, so maybe some stupid temporary pettifogging regulation was technically against them at one point, but they were more important than that. Weren’t they? Right?
I let him talk, and then I backed him up and pretty much made him admit that, yes, at one point he was talking to the dead guy. After which it was downhill all the way. Although an uphill metaphor would be better. The process felt like lighting a fire under a kettle, or pumping a bicycle tyre.
Two hours later he was signing a long and detailed account. The dead guy had called him a pussy, basically. That was the bottom line. Trash talk, that had then gotten completely out of hand. Some response was called for. Some things couldn’t be excused. Could they? Right?
Because he was a star player and it was a clandestine operation they gave him a plea deal. Some variant of murder two for fifteen years. I was fine with it. Because there was no court martial I snuck the extra week in Fiji and met an Australian girl I still remember. I wasn’t about to complain.
O’Day said, ‘We shouldn’t make unexamined assumptions. There’s no evidence he ever even looked at a gun again.’
‘But he’s on the list?’
‘He has to be.’
‘What would be the odds?’
‘One in four, obviously.’
‘Would you put your money on?’
‘I’m not saying he’s our boy. I’m saying we have to face the fact there’s a one-in-four possibility he might be.’
‘Who else is on the list?’
‘One Russian, one Israeli, one Brit.’
I said, ‘Kott’s been in prison fifteen years.’
O’Day nodded and said, ‘Let’s start with what that would do to him.’
Which was another very good question. What exactly would fifteen years in prison do to a sniper? Good shooting is about a lot of different things. Muscle control might suffer. Good shooting is about being soft and hard at the same time. Soft enough to keep tiny jitters out, hard enough to control a violent explosion. General athletic condition might suffer, which was important too, because a low heart rate and good breathing were all part of the deal.
But in the end I said, ‘Eyesight.’
O’Day said, ‘Because?’
‘Everything he’s seen for fifteen years has been pretty close. Walls, basically. Even the exercise yard. His eyes haven’t focused long since he was a young man.’ Which all sounded good to me. I liked the mental image. Kott, gone soft, maybe a little trembly now, wearing glasses, stooping even though he was small to start with.
Then O’Day read out the prison discharge report.
Kott’s heritage was rooted in Czechoslovakia or Arkansas or probably both, but he had mapped his fifteen years of jail time like a mystical sage from the East. He had taken up yoga and meditation. He had worked out very lightly, once a day, to maintain core strength and flexibility, and he had been still for many hours, hardly breathing, all the time with a blank, thousand-yard stare he said he needed to practise.
O’Day said, ‘I asked around. The girls who work here, mostly. They say Kott’s type of yoga is all about stillness and relaxed power. You fade, and fade, and fade, and then bang, you go to the next position. The same with the meditation. Empty your mind. Visualize your success.’
‘You saying he got out of prison better than he went in?’
‘He worked hard for fifteen years. In a very single-minded manner. And after all, a gun is just a metal tool. Success is all about the mind and the body.’
‘How would he get to Paris? Does he have a passport?’
‘Think about the factions. Think about their spending power. A passport is the least of their problems.’
‘Last time I saw him, he was signing the paper. Over sixteen years ago, apparently. I don’t see how I can help you now.’
‘We have to cover all the bases.’
‘Which base could I possibly cover?’
‘You caught him once,’ O’Day said. ‘If needs be, you can catch him again.’
FIVE
SHOEMAKER GOT INVOLVED
at that point, as if the overview was completed, and it was time for the details. A lot hinged on the motive for the attack. Certain factions would never hire an Israeli, which would decrease the odds to one in three, except that apparently the Israeli looked kind of Irish and had a neutral code name. Maybe the factions didn’t know. Which would confuse the issue. But in the end the quest for motive had been abandoned. The State Department’s list of people mad at the French was long. Therefore all four suspects were being treated equally. No profiling was allowed.
I turned to Casey Nice and said, ‘This is still bullshit.’
Once again she said, ‘What part?’
‘Same part. This is way too much. You wouldn’t piss on the French if they were on fire. Yet here you are. You’re reacting like this was Pearl Harbor. Why? What is France going to do to you? Stop sending cheese?’
‘We can’t be seen to drag our feet.’
‘You can’t be seen at all. You’re moving from place to place and hiding behind phoney signs. Which is good. No watcher out of any embassy is going to figure out who you are or what you’re doing. Not even the French Embassy. They can’t know if you’re helping or not. So why bother?’
‘It’s a matter of reputation.’
‘There’s a one-in-four chance a convicted American felon is freelancing somewhere in the world. He wouldn’t be the first and he won’t be the last. Our reputation could stand that kind of tiny hit. Especially because the French guy is still alive. No harm, no foul.’
O’Day stirred and said, ‘We don’t make the policy rules.’
‘The last time you listened to the Congress Abraham Lincoln was in short pants.’
‘But who
do
I listen to?’
I said, ‘The president,’ and stopped.
O’Day said, ‘Everyone’s mad at the French, which is ultimately the same thing as no one’s mad at them. No one had a particular reason to shoot the guy. Not this year. Not more than usual. Therefore right now the smart money says this was an audition. Our boy was making his bones, ahead of a bigger proposition. Which would be who? No one knows, but they’re all betting it’s them. And why wouldn’t they? They’re all the most important person in the world. They’ve got an EU meeting coming up, all the heads of government, and then there’s the G8 and the G20. That’s twenty world leaders right there. Including ours. All posing for a group photograph. Standing still and smiling. On the steps of a public building, probably. They don’t want a guy on the loose who can shoot more than three-quarters of a mile.’
‘So this is politicians covering their ass?’
‘Literally. All over the world.’
‘Including our guy?’
‘Doesn’t matter what he thinks personally. The Secret Service is freaking out enough for both of them.’
‘Hence a private jet for me.’
‘Money no object.’
‘But not just me, right? Please tell me you’re not relying on one guy here.’
O’Day said, ‘We have all the help we need.’
I said, ‘It’s likely not Kott.’
‘It’s definitely not three of them. You want to roll the dice or do the work?’
I didn’t answer that. Shoemaker told me I would be billeted in quarters nearby, and that I was restricted to that part of the base. If questioned either officially or casually I was to say I was a civilian contractor with an expertise in pallet loading. If pressed I was to say I was working with the 47th Logistics on a problem in Turkey. Which made some kind of sense. As soon as I said Turkey, the questioners would assume missiles, and the good guys would back off, and the bad guys would be misinformed. Which in O’Day’s opinion was an outcome devoutly to be desired.
I said, ‘Who’s looking for the other three?’
O’Day said, ‘Their own people, in their own countries.’
‘Not the French in France?’
‘They assume he’s gone home to lay up.’
‘Maybe he’s an ex-pat. A Russian who lives in France. Or an Israeli, or a guy from Great Britain. In an old farmhouse, or a villa by the sea.’
‘They may not have considered that.’
‘Did Kott go to live in France?’