Time to Hunt Part 43

It took several seconds before he made the next connection.

"Which sketchbook?" he asked.

"Why, Trig was an artist, Mr. Swagger. He had a sketchbook with him always. It was a kind of visual diary. He kept one everywhere. He kept one at Oxford. He kept one here, during his last days. I still have it."

Bob nodded.

"Has anybody seen it?"

"No."

"Mrs. Carter, could-"

"Of course," the old lady said. "I've been waiting all these years for someone to look at it."

CHAPTER T THIRTY-EIGHT.

The thing was dirty. Thick and motheaten, it had the softness of old parchment, but also of filth: the lead of pencil and the dust of charcoal lay thick on every page. To touch it was to come away with stained fingertips. That gave it an air of tremendous intimacy: the last will and testament or, worse, a reliquary of Saint Trig the Martyr. Bob felt somehow blasphemed as he peered into it, pausing to mark the dates on the upper right hand of the cover: "Oxford, 1970-T. C. Carter III."

But it had this other thing. It was familiar. Why was it familiar? He looked at the creamy stock and realized that it was in this book Trig had drawn his picture of Donny and Julie, then ripped it out to give to Donny. Bob had seen it in Vietnam. The strange sense of a ghost chilled him.

He turned the first pages. Birds. The boy had drawn birds originally. The first several pages were lovely, lively with English sparrows, rooks, small, undistinguished flyers, nothing with plumage or glory to it. But you could tell he had the gift. He could make a single spidery line sing, he could capture the blur of flight or the patience of a tiny, instinct-driven brain sedate in its fragile skull as the creature merely perched, conceiving no yesterday or tomorrow. He caught the ordinariness of birds quite extraordinarily.

But soon his horizons expanded, as if he were awaking from a long sleep. He began to notice things. The drawings became extremely casual little blots of density where out of nothing Trig would suddenly decide to record "View from the loo," and do an exquisite little picture of the alley out back of his digs, the dilapidated brickiness of it, the far, lofty towers of the university in the distance; or, "Mr. Jenson, seen in a pub," and Mr. Jenson would throb to life, with veins and carbuncles and a hairy forest in his nose. Or: "Thames, at the point, the boathouses," and there it would be, the broad river, green in suggestion, the smaller river branching off, the incredible greenness of it all, the willows weeping into the water, the high, bright English sun suffusing the whole scene, although it was a miniature in black pencil, dashed off in a second. Still, Bob could feel it, taste it, whatever, even if he didn't quite know what it was.

Trig was losing himself in the legendary beauty of Oxford in the spring. Who could blame him? He drew lanes, parks, buildings that looked like old castles, pubs, rivers, English fields, as if he were tasting the world for the first time.

But then it all went away. The vacation was over. At first Bob squinted. He could not understand as he turned to the new page; the images had a near abstraction to them, but then they gradually emerged from the fury of the pa.s.sion-smeared charcoal. It was the girl, the child, reduced to shape, running out of the flames of her village, which had just been splashed in American fire. Bob remembered seeing it: the war's most famous, most searing image, the child naked and exposed to the fierce world, her face a mask of shock and numbness yet achingly alive. She was shamelessly naked, but modesty meant nothing, for one could see the cottage-cheesey streaks where the napalm had burned her, as it had incinerated her family behind her. Even a man whose life has been saved by napalm had a sickening response to that image: Why? he wondered now, all the years later. Why? She was just a child. We didn't fight it right, that was our G.o.dd.a.m.n problem.

He put the book down, looked off into the long darkness. The black dogs were outside now, ready to pounce. He needed a drink. His head hurt. His throat was dry. Around him, in the empty studio, the birds danced and perched. The eagle fixed him with its panicked glare.

When will this s.h.i.+t be over? he wondered and went back to the sketchbook.

Trig too had had some kind of powerful emotional reaction. He'd given himself over to flesh. The next few pages were husky boys, working-cla.s.s studs, their muscles taut, their b.u.t.ts prominent, their fingers naturally curled inward by the density of their forearms. There was even one drawing of a large, uncirc.u.msized p.e.n.i.s.

Bob felt humiliated, intrusive, awkward. He couldn't concentrate on the drawings and rushed forward, skipping several pages. At last the season of s.e.x was over; the images changed to something more n.o.ble. Trig seemed stricken with admiration for a certain heroic figure, a lone man sculling on the river. He drew him obsessively for a period of weeks: an older man, Herculean in his pa.s.sions, his muscles agleam but in a nons.e.xual way, just an older athlete, a charisma merchant.

Was this Fitzpatrick, or some other lost love? Who would know, who could tell? There wasn't even a portrait of the face by which the man could be recognized. But the pictures had somehow lost their originality, become standard. The hero had arrived, from a Western, or out of the Knights of the Round Table, or something. Bob could feel the force of Trig's belief in this man.

The drawings went on, as the weeks pa.s.sed, and as Trig's excitement mounted. He was actually happy now, happier than he'd been. The explosion became a new motif in his doodling; it took him but a few tries, and suddenly he got quite good at capturing the violence, the sheer liberation of anarchistic energy a blast unleashed, and its beauty, the way the clouds unfurled from the detonation's center like the opening of a flower. But that was all: there was no horror in his work, no fear that any man who's been around an explosion feels. It was all theory and beauty to Trig.

The final drawing was of a s.h.i.+ny new TR-6.

Bob closed the book and held it up to the light and saw a kind of gap running along the spine of the book suggesting that something was missing. He reopened it and looked carefully and saw that, very carefully, the last few pages had been sliced out.

He left the studio and walked back to the big house, where the old lady nursed a scotch in the study.

"Would you care for a drink, Mr. Swagger?"

"A soda. Nothing else."

"Oh, I see."

She poured him the soda.

"Well, Sergeant Swagger. What do you think?"

"He was a wonderful artist," Bob said. "Can't ask for more, can you?"

"No, you can't. I made a mistake just then, didn't I?"

"Yes, ma'am."

"I called you sergeant. You never told me your rank."

"No, ma'am."

"I still know a fool or two in State. After you called me, I called a man. Just before you arrived, he called back. You were a hero. You were a great warrior. You were everything that my son could never understand."

"I did my job, somehow."

"No, you did more than your job. I heard about it. You stopped a battalion. One man. They say it may never have been done in history, what you did. Amazing."

"There was another Marine there. Everybody forgets that. I couldn't have done it without him. It was his fight as much as mine."

"Still, it was your aggressiveness, your bravery, your willingness to kill, to take on the mantel of the killer for your country. Is it difficult to live with?"

"I killed a boy that day with a knife. Now and then I think of that with sorrow."

"I'm so sorry. Your heroism aside, nothing good came of that war, did it?"

"My heroism included, nothing good came of that war."

"So tell me; why did my son die? You of all men might know."

"I'm no expert in these matters. It ain't my department. But it looks to me like he was picked up by a pro. Someone who knew his weaknesses, had studied him, who knew of his troubles with his father and played on them. He's in the drawings as a heroic rower. I can feel Trig's love for him. He may be this Fitzpatrick. Trig was different different, you said. When he came back?"

"Yes. Excited, committed, energetic. Troubled."

"He had to finish that painting?"

"Yes. Is there a message in the painting?"

"I don't know. I don't understand it either."

"But you think he was innocent of murder? That would be so important to me."

"Innocent of first-degree murder, yes, I do. The death of that man may have been unintended. If so, it would have been second-degree murder, or some form of manslaughter. I won't lie to you. He may be guilty of that."

"I appreciate the honesty. Trig will have to face his own consequences. But at least someone believes he wasn't a murderer and an idiot."

"I don't know what was really going on yet. I can't figure what it was about, why it happened, what the point was. It seemed to have no point, not then, not now, and what's happening to me would then have no point. Maybe I'm completely wrong about all this and am just off on a wild goose chase, because I'm under a lot of pressure. But tell me ... are you aware that the last few pages in the sketchbook are missing? The American pages?" "No. I had no idea."

"Do you have any idea where they might be?"

"No."

"Is it possible they're here?"

"You're free to look. But if they were here, I think I would have found them."

"Possibly. Did he have a place, a favorite spot around here?"

"He loved to bird-watch at a spot in Harford County. Out near Havre de Grace, overlooking the Susquehanna. I could show you on a map. For some reason that was a spot especially alive with birds, even the occasional Baltimore oriole."

"Could you show me on the map?"

"Yes. Do you think the pages are there?"

"I think I'd better look, that's all I know."

Bob drove through the failing light across Baltimore County, then north up 1-95 until he pa.s.sed into Harford County and turned off on a road that led him to Havre de Grace, a little town on the great river that eventually formed the Chesapeake Bay.

He didn't know what he was looking for, but there was always a chance. If Trig ripped those sketches out, he probably wanted to destroy them. But there was just a shred of the other possibility: that he learned something that scared him, that he saw something he didn't understand, that he had begun to see through Robert Fitzpatrick. He was frightened, he didn't know what to do. He came here to paint; because of some pa.s.sionate psychological, stress-induced oddness or other, he had to finish the painting of a bird. He did, then he decided to remove the late sketches and hide them. He could have hid them anywhere, sure-but his mind worked a certain way, it was organized, pure, concise, it dealt frontally with problems and came up with frontal solutions. So: hide the sketches. Hide them in a place away from the house, for surely investigators will come to the house. Hide them where I will never forget and where someone tracking me sympathetically could find them. Yes, my "spot." My place. Where I go to relax, to chill, to cool down, to watch the birds gliding in and out across the flat, silent water. It made a species of sense: he could have driven to this upcoming spot, wrapped the sketches in plastic or screwed them into a jar, hid them somehow, buried them, planted them under a rock, in a cave.

Trig, after all, had traveled the wilderness on his birding quests. He'd been to South America, to Africa, all across the remote parts of the United States, its deserts, its mountains. So he knew field craft; he was adroit in the out-of-doors, not some helpless idiot. His mother even said so: he was competent competent, he got things done, he handled them.

So what am I looking for?

A mark, a possible triangulation of marks, something. Bob tried to think it through, and reminded himself that such a sign, if it had been cut into the bark of a tree, say, would have been distorted horizontally in twenty-odd years' growth. It would be wide, not high, as trees grow from the top.

He drove for a time along the river's edge. It was a huge flat pan of water here, though back beyond the town the land rose to form bluffs and he could see huge bridges spanning them. A train crossed one, an orange bullet headed toward New York. Beyond that was a superhighway.

At last he came to the site Trig's mother had designated on the map, and he knew immediately he would have no luck. He saw not geese and ducks but golden arches, and where a glade by the river had once been, uniquely attractive to birds the region over, now a McDonald's stood. A clown waved at him from behind the bright bands of gla.s.s that marked the restaurant. He was hungry, he parked, walked around a few minutes, and realized it was hopeless. That site was forever gone, and whatever secrets it may or may not have concealed, they had been plowed under in the process of making the world safe for beef.

He went in, had a couple of burgers and an order of fries and a c.o.ke, then went back to his car to begin the long drive to his motel room near the airport, during which time he hoped to settle the puzzlement of his next move.

It was here that he noticed the same black Pathfinder that had preceded him up 1-95. But it peeled off, to be replaced by a Chevy Nova, teal and rusty, and then, three exits down, when it disappeared, by a FedEx truck.

He was being followed, full-press, by a d.a.m.ned good team.

CHAPTER T THIRTY-NINE.

Bonson financed the operation out of a black fund he and three other senior executives had access to, because he didn't want it going through regular departmental vetting procedures, not until he knew where it was leading and what it might uncover. He operated this way frequently; it was always better to begin low-profile and let the thing develop slowly, undistored by the pressures of expectation.

He picked his team with great care too, drawing on a tempo manpower pool of extremely experienced people who were kept on retainer for just such ad hoc, high-deniability missions. He ended up with three ex-FBI agents, two former state policemen, a former Baltimore policewoman and a surprisingly good surveillance expert cas.h.i.+ered by the Internal Revenue Service.

"Okay," he told them in the safe house in Rosslyn, Virginia, the agency maintained as a staging area for emergency ops, "don't kid yourself. This guy is very, very experienced. He has been in gunfights and battles his whole life. He operated as a recon team leader for SOG for a long year up near and inside Cambodia in sixty-seven. He was an immensely heroic sniper who may be the only man in history to have stopped a battalion by himself, in seventy-two. If you look at the dossier I've distributed, you see that he's been involved in dust-ups ever since then: some business in New Orleans in ninety-two and then, two years ago, he spent some time in his hometown in Arkansas and the state death-by-shooting rate skyrocketed. This is a very, very salty, competent individual. He is strictly at the top of the pyramid.

"So let me repeat: your job is to monitor him, to report his activities, to tap into his discoveries, but that is all. I want this understood. This is not an apprehension; it's no kind of wet work. Is that clear?"

The team nodded, but there were questions.

"Commander, do you want his lines tapped?"

Bonson hesitated. That would be helpful. But it was illegal without a court order and you never knew how these things would end up playing out. His career was his most important possession.

"No. Nothing illegal. This isn't the old days."

"We might be able to make a nice acoustic penetration on him in the old lady's place."

"If you can get that, fine. If not, that's okay, too."

"If he burns us, do we disengage?"

"No, you go to backups. That's why I want six cars, not the usual four. You stay in radio contact. I'll be monitoring in the control van. Each hour I'm going to broadcast a frequency change, to cut down on the possibility of him countermonitoring us."

The team understood immediately how unusual this was. Under normal circ.u.mstances, no executive at Bonson's level would serve as case officer on an operation. It was like a brigadier general taking over a platoon.

"Are we armed?"

"No, you are not armed. If you should unexpectedly encounter him, if he should make you and turn you out, you go into immediate deniability. You deny everything; you all have fake IDs. If you have to, you go to jail without compromising operational security. I do not want him knowing he's being watched."

Notes were taken, procedures written down. Bonson discussed call signs, probable routes he'd take to the old woman's house north of Baltimore, that sort of thing. But then- "One last thing: this man claims he is also being hunted by a former Russian sniper. I tend to believe him, though his record would incline him toward paranoia. But we have to take the sniper as a real, not an imaginary threat. So let's a.s.sume that sniper has no idea where he is and thinks he's still in Idaho. But he's an enormously resourceful man. If the Russian is farther ahead of the game than I have even begun to suspect, and you encounter him, you fall back and contact me immediately and, if no other option exists, you may have to move aggressively. You may have to risk your lives to save Swagger, in that eventuality."

"Jesus Christ."

"Swagger knows something. Or he has the power to figure it out. He's a key, somehow, to something very deep and troubling. He cannot be lost. He still has work to do for his country. He doesn't know it yet, but he's still got a mission."

"Commander, could you tell us what this is about?"

"The past. Old men's dreams, young men's deaths. The spy that never was but is again. Ladies and gentlemen, we're on a mole hunt. We're after the one that got away."

In Boise, Solaratov's first move was to call the hospital, asking to speak to Mrs. Swagger. Mrs. Swagger had checked out of the hospital two days earlier. Where had she gone and in whose care had she been left? The hospital operator wasn't permitted to release such information. What was her doctor's name? Again, no answer.

Late that afternoon, Solaratov parked his rented car in a national park that provided access to the Sawtooth National Forest, and, outfitted as any hiker, began the seventeen-mile trek along the ridgeline that ultimately left national property and deposited him nine hundred yards above Swagger's ranch house. He set up a good spotting position, well hidden from casual hikers, of whom there were likely to be none, and equally invisible from the meadows and pastures that stretched beneath him. He settled in to wait.