“You warned me that I had to have something real, not something that was my opinion. This is as real as it gets. Strong and TomC discussed an object which Strong had come up with that gave Strong leverage over TomC. Strong wanted dough, lots of it, tons of it. He wanted a new life in Switzerland, Armani suits, all that fine bullshit. He thought Tom would be oh so happy to give it to him. All this, by the way, was happening in the last few weeks before the killings.”
She was writing it all down.
“That will prove that TomC had a motive to eliminate Jack and Mitzi, while hiding it behind the camouflage story of old man Carl having gone nuts.”
“That’s fine, but without formally verified evidence, we couldn’t get a search warrant to impound. It has to be legal, don’t you see? That’s not legal.”
“It is true, however.”
“Unfortunately, there is a difference. I’ll try to figure some way to justify it.”
“Yes ma’am, I knew you would. Then there’s the boys he hired to make all this happen. I know where they are.”
“Then you have to give them to us.”
“If I do, them boys are gone so fast you won’t see the blur. They’s professionals, the very best operators in the world, way above all your pay grades down there. You’ll never git ’em. Nope, if I give you them, I’m letting them git away, scot-free. A lot of people died on account of this and I mean to see the ancient law enforced the ancient way.”
“Swagger, where are you?”
“Remember, I said same deal with you as with Nick. If I jumped, you’d know it.”
“Swagger, I don’t like the sound of that.”
She swore she could hear the old man laugh from whatever twisted arroyo or stunted tree he now hid himself within and had an image of him in torchlight, gleaming with blades and rifles and bandoliers of ammunition and Molotov cocktails, some kind of coonskin cap on his head, a tommy gun in his left hand and a Winchester in his right, all frontier 24/7.
“Well, young lady, this is my courtesy call. Here’s the news: I’m jumping.”
35
Swagger snapped the folder shut and slipped it into the cargo pants. Then he went back to his Leicas and 15X’ed what lay at the bottom of the hill before him.
It was not Tom Constable’s big, beautiful Wind River ranch house. That imposing structure, to all appearances manned only by a skeleton crew with its master somewhere else, lay a mile to the west, a strange accumulation of turrets and arbors and roofline nooks and crannies next to the most beautiful streambed in Wyoming, beneath the mountains and the wide blue sky.
This was the security compound. Tom wouldn’t live way out here without a small army of protection; it wasn’t his way. So Swagger reasoned: whatever he got off the Strongs, that’s where it’ll be. That’s where I have to go.
He was unarmed. This wasn’t a murder raid, even if the fucking New York Times had essentially decreed him a murderer yesterday. No sir. You could kick the door down way past midnight with an M4 and twenty magazines and try to kill all these boys flat, cold out, and what would it get you? A lot of return fire once they figured out what was going on, a running gunfight on the way out, blood loss, and bleeding out in a ditch. You’d never recover what it was that was at the heart of this thing. You might shoot the right shooters, but in the dark and the mayhem, who could tell?
No, the way you took this unit down was you got what they were here protecting. You got that and you made off. That got their attention. They had to get it back; that was why they existed, and if they didn’t get it back, it wasn’t just failure, it was something worse, some professional shame that only the best can feel, some place beyond shame. So they came looking for you somewhere out there-out there lay behind Bob, and it was the largest parcel of privately owned land in America, a wonderland of mountains and gulches and high meadows and glades and forests and mesas and canyons-you got them out there, hunting you, and like many a man before, they discovered you were hunting them. But to play that game the way Bob had set it up, he had to get the goddamned thing, and he didn’t even know what it was, much less where it was. Probably in a safe. And how do you get the safe open? Maybe if you asked politely, they’d oblige.
He eyed the building, whose details were vanishing in the setting sun. It was the old ranch house, refurbished for this duty. Its barn was a garage that housed four jeeps and a dozen wheeled off-road buggies, ATVs. The house itself was an old piece of prairie design, familiar from a thousand and ten westerns, rewired, rewindowed, redoored, remade as a modern security vault. Bob saw cameras everywhere, and a network of lights, and some kind of bar code entry mechanism, and alarm circuits at all the windows, all seemingly high tech, maybe higher tech, maybe nowhere-near highest tech. Men-none of them Graywolf commandos, but all of them tough-looking townie cowpokes-hung about, all armed not with the ubiquitous M4s but with Ruger Mini-14s, which looked a little more ranchlike in the hands of boys in jeans and boots and hats. There was a regular patrol rotation, and every hour, three vehicles left to run perimeter; there was another complement of two after dark and one during daylight that staffed the entry gate, which was miles away. There was a big kitchen and a day room, and that was the downstairs. Who knew what was in the basement? Upstairs were sleeping quarters for the night shift. People came and went by a utility route that led off to the right and into an arroyo, because the grand people in the big house didn’t want to be troubled by the sight of Johnny Lunchbucket showing up for work every morning.
Swagger had picked a zigzag approach, meaning a long night’s crawl in the bulk of a ghillie suit. His entry point was the basement window, southeast corner. The building wasn’t properly speaking patrolled or guarded, except by the presence of those living within. There seemed no steady, regular surveillance, no pattern of lights. He could pick out no motion detectors or Doppler radar screens. Security developmentwise, it was mid tech, definitely late twentieth century. Constable had laid out the bucks for it fifteen years ago, and that was that; maybe an upgrade was on his to-do list but he hadn’t gotten to it yet.
The problem was the window. Kick it in? Noise, alarm. Cut the wires? Probably couldn’t reach ’em. Set some sort of diversionary element-a charge, a fire, an alarm? Get too many cowboys awakened. Pick the lock? He had picked locks before and knew how to do it, and this lock was probably pretty easy; it was just wired.
No, the only way was to cut a hole in the glass, reach in, and cut the wire, then get through the lock.
Then he’d slide in and see what was what. He had no weapons, but he had five smoke grenades and five flashbang munitions, all of which would create considerable confusion if necessary. Here was the official version of the plan, the one he had to convince himself he’d believe in, the one they’d try to beat him away from, and he knew, if he gave it up, it was the first step toward losing this one. The idea seemed to be to find “it,” booby-trap the place with smokers and flashbangs, disable most of the vehicles-not exactly high tech, he’d just pierce each tire with an icepick-and disappear with one. By the time they got the vehicles up and running, he’d be long gone and they’d have to call in the big boys, the trackers and the snipers, the Graywolf pros, to hunt him down.
But he knew that hope was a dream. The reality: this’ll be a bad one.
There’s going to be a lot of pain ahead, getting through this one.
You’re going to pay for this one.
Then he thought, man, I am too old for this shit. I do not need this shit. I saw the six-zero a few years back and I ought to be rocking this way, then that, not putting gunk on my face and slithering in a suit that looks like a bush downhill a thousand yards to try to get in and out and away and gone, but instead probably getting my ass kicked hard and long until I ain’t hardly human no more.