The black cube, sixth floor
The present
He looked at the crime scene pictures, or at least the ones taken outside the bus. Three bodies inert on pavement or curb. The bus windshield a smear of cracked glass, supernovas of fracture. Fragments glittered all over the bus’s hood and the street.
He did not look at the shots from the interior of the bus. What was the point?
“And you want to interview this guy?” he said. “See, if it was me—and what do I know, I’m just an Arkansas hick—I’d cut off his face and feed it to the pigs.”
“Alas,” said Cohen, “we’re a little Jewish country. No pigs.”
“Dogs, then,” said Swagger.
“Commendable enthusiasm,” said Gold. “But Juba’s secrets are more important than his life. Who can he identify? What is he working on? Who gives him orders, who supplies the logistics, the egress and exit. Who’s in planning, who in execution, who is liaison? Which unknown state actors are influencing him? What has he heard of other operations? Perhaps most important, what is the source of their considerable funding?”
“Do you have a photo of him? What about DNA? Without those, he could be anybody that looks like anybody else named Mohamed.”
“No picture,” said Cohen. “No DNA. However, we have one good right-hand thumbprint. We believe it belongs to him, as it was taken from a shell casing found at the massacre. He would not allow anyone else to load his weapon. Prints don’t usually show up on weapons or ammunition, but this shell had a slight sheen of oil on it, and so it registered. Perhaps an error committed under the pressure of expediency.”
“By the way, did the plan work? Did he stop the treaty?”
“No, he didn’t. Your Agency people were very fleet of foot that day, and even before all the first responders were on scene, your president was on the phone to our prime minister, begging him not to let this thing get out of hand. So instead of a massacre-of-the-innocents sensation, we prevailed on our press corps—more obliging than yours—to report it as a shooting in a suburb. No casualty figures were released, no speeches were given, no funerals were open to press and television. The dead were mourned in private. Rumors went wild, of course, but there are always rumors. And in the end, your State Department got its deal, and everyone pretended the world was a little safer. We realize that it goes that way, sometimes. I concur with Cohen, for the first time, on this one. We are just a little Jewish country. What can we do?”
“I vote for the dogs,” said Swagger. “Anyhow, now what? Do you have enough? If so, how fast can you move? Who needs to give the go code? Is it just this room, or do you have to go to politicians who will decide on a dozen factors you have no control over?”
“No doubt other opinions will be sought.”
“Meanwhile, a guy like this gets antsy. He knows how many people are interested in him. He knows no place is secure forever. Look at bin Laden. Thought he had it made in the shade until Santa and his reindeer dropped by on a midnight clear. I’m tight with some of those guys. Osama had so much SEAL lead in him, they didn’t even have to weight him down when they chucked him overboard. Juba knows that. He will be ready to jump. His go bag is packed.”
“We are aware,” said Gold.
“And we just sit here?”
“We do.”
“Are you waiting for electronic intel? Have you zeroed that area and are scanning for clues?”
“Yes, but it’s less illuminating than you might think.”
“So what is happening? Or do you consider it rude to ask?”
“Ask Cohen,” said Gold.
“Mr. Cohen?”
Cohen said nothing.
“Cohen enjoys playing things out slowly. He gets more attention that way.”
“Please, Mr. Cohen,” said Bob. “I’m seventy-two. I may die before you get it out, if you don’t hurry.”
“Fair enough. The square mile containing the town of Iria in southern Syria has to be looked at not by us but by satellites. Ours is called TecSAR. It’s very modern, I’m told. Its product will be flashed back to this building and examined by experts. They will debate like rabbis. They will come up with what looks promising to them. Drones will be dispatched to follow up on the promising areas. Lower-level, longer overhead, more precise cameras. They will return, their film will be developed, and that will be examined by the same experts to see what is what.”
“When will all this happen?” said Bob.
“It happened yesterday,” said Cohen.
It took a while for him to adjust his eyes. The room was dark, hushed, pristine, and without personality, full of cut-rate office furniture in the style of the ’50s, and so air-conditioned it was like a meat locker. Cohen and Gold and a more somber man, who said nothing, sat around the table, waiting patiently as Bob examined the twenty-by-twenty-inch sheaves of photo paper placed before him, sometimes using the jeweler’s loupe provided. He had trouble manipulating the awkwardly large sheets before him.
“You can’t do this on a screen?” he asked. “And click on sections you want to look at closely? Like in the movies?”
“We haven’t caught up with the movies, that’s on next year’s budget. Then again, that has been the case with budgets for the last ten years. Always something happens.”
“Okay,” he said. “I’ll try my best.”
At first, it was just patches of light and dark, slashed by white streaks, occasionally with some kind of nubbin on the streak. There were, as well, dark smears of some kind of textured fabric, and occasionally a cluster of squares, some larger than others. It was abstract. A compass embossed on each photo established true north, and a rubric underneath issued data on time, altitude, position by longitude and latitude, as well as other information he didn’t understand.
“The drones are quite helpful,” said Gold. “They fly too high to be visible with the naked eye—even Juba’s—but their camerawork is quite detailed. Time over target: six hours. Two drones on-site, ever since the TecSAR pictures looked interesting. This stuff is a few hours old. Perhaps our friend Sergeant Swagger might bring something to it our interpreters don’t understand.”
Bob went through the photos again, beginning to make sense of them. The streaks were road, the patches were field, the dark smears were hills covered by forest, the squares were farmhouses, the smaller squares compound outbuildings, the straight lines fences demarking patches of field. In time, he settled on two. He went over each carefully and finally discarded one of them.
“This one,” he said to the men at the table, indicating the remaining photograph.
Cohen looked at it. “A-4511, seven miles northeast of Iria, two miles off what passes as a main highway in southern Syria.”
“Why that, Sergeant Swagger?”
“I’m looking for shooting ranges. This guy has to shoot, a lot, each day. He’s very disciplined, very detail-driven. He has to have access to at least three hundred yards of open space, never less, maybe a lot more. The sun will be important too. He will, if possible, orient north-south or south-north. The other two wasted hours lost to the brightness of sunset and sunrise. And wind. It’s so helpful if there’s shelter. A stormy day, a windy ruckus—that can take a day from him, a day he can’t afford. I see all that here.”
“Please proceed.”
“Another thing. The standard equipment of a range. He’ll want a bench, or at least some kind of concrete pad, to go prone off the bipod. And at the far end, he’ll want a berm—a roll of land, maybe just bulldozed dirt—against which to place his target. He’ll want to see and analyze his misses, make adjustments. He has to see where the bullet hits relative to the target; that’s why the target has to be surrounded by stuff that’ll go puff. And then the target itself. I’m betting he’s shooting at steel, which goes clang on each hit. He doesn’t want to break concentration after a string and go to his spotting scope and track his hits with pad and pencil. Maybe they’d have a TV hookup or something computer-driven, but I’m guessing that’s unlikely way out here. So I’m thinking steel. Looking at the south border of this whatever-it-is, I see a structure. Can’t bring it up high enough for clear resolution, but it could be a jerry-built frame, exactly the sort you’d need to hang a chunk of steel plate . . . Can you get more resolution?”
“Perhaps later. Please proceed.”
“At the other end, it’s smooth, as if flattened out. Not paved, but someone had gone over it with a grader, scoured the grass away, rolled the dirt smooth. Just a little patch, but it orients nicely on the presumed target.”
“Not much space there,” said Gold.
“He doesn’t need much. We think of shooting ranges as broad plains, but that’s only for armies, cops, or hunters, for unit- or community-scale shooting exercises. This is one man. He needs a line, nothing on the lateral. So if you’re looking for a field, you’ll never find it. You have to look for a passageway or a lane. Because there are no regulations here, it will make no difference to him if he shoots over a road or even some houses. He’s too good to whack some wandering peasant wheat farmer. On the other hand, accidents do happen, but it’s not something he’s concerned about. Again, get me some more resolution and I’ll tell you if I see indentations from prone shooting or indications of a portable shooting bench being wheeled in. Can’t tell from this altitude. If you want to be certain, send the drones in lower or with bigger cameras.”
“Anything else? Temperature, humidity, rotation of earth, sunspots?”
“Not really. This ain’t benchrest, where you try for a group of five in the same hole. He’s shooting at men, has to hit them in the thoracic cavity, heart, lungs, spine, spleen, so his kill zone is about eighteen inches by eighteen. That’s all the combat accuracy he needs.”
“Night shooting? Will he use night vision?”
“Not at longer ranges. That stuff can clarify to maybe two hundred yards maximum. Fine for sniper work in a city, but not the kind of reach-out hit he wants for this. And that worries me. A lot.”
“Why is that?”
“He’s teaching himself to hit from way out. Beyond security service worry zones. Really, beyond infantry ranges. He’s not training for battle but for assassination. It seems in this last operation, the one in Dubai, that he was out farther than he’d ever been. He’s teaching himself how to hit the long ones off the cold barrel. I have to tell you, that’s way outstanding stuff. The long shots in Afghanistan came at the end of a sequence, where the shooter was either able to walk his rounds in unnoticed or had already zeroed in on that spot the day before. Juba can’t afford to walk rounds in against high-value targets; he’d give up his position and get return fire in a second. Choppers, SWAT, the whole security apparatus, silencer or no. So he’s got to train himself to the cold barrel. That’s another advantage of the dirt backdrop.”
The comment was met by the sound of men breathing.
Finally, Cohen: “Again, you go with this one? No second thoughts, no doubts, no little suspicions?”
Bob put his finger on A-4511.
“Here’s your huckleberry. It’s got all the necessary components I just described. As I said, you can see at the southern end where someone has chewed up a furrow with a backhoe or something to chart the bullet strikes against the raw dirt. Do you have distance? I’d guess close to a thousand yards.”
“About right,” said Cohen. “Ten twenty-seven, to be exact.”
“If you know so fast, that means you’ve had your photo hotshots on it, and this is the one they went for too. They’ve given you all the numbers.”
“Sergeant Swagger is no fool,” said Cohen. “He misses no nuance. Continue, then.”
“A thousand yards. Very long shot, by combat standards, but not so much anymore for sniping. The great shots in Afghanistan are much farther, well over a thousand, even over a mile. A couple of things to look for: if he’s teaching himself to go this far, he’ll need a better rifle. The ballistics on the Dragon 7.62 round drop way off, and, yep, you might get some hits from over a thousand, but you’ll get a lot more misses. He’s right at the distance limits on the Dragon. So he’ll upgrade the hardware.”
The somber old man whispered something to Cohen, who nodded, then turned to Swagger.
“Our Director is a man of few words,” he said, “and I am a man of many. So he turns to me to blabber for him. He said: ‘Add it up.’ What he means is, given all that you have learned from the photos, what is your read on the situation? Can you project a scenario in which all this information comes into play?”
“Sure. He’s a long way from being retired. If it were my call, I’d say he’s in this location with this setup for a specific purpose. He’s preparing for a job. It’s a big one too, because look at the assets they’ve invested in it. They scoured the country and found exactly the place where he’d be safe, they went to great trouble to keep it secret, and we tumbled on it only because of Mrs. McDowell—”
“God bless Mrs. McDowell,” said Cohen.
“Look,” said Swagger, “maybe I’m out of place here, it’s your country, but what I’m getting seems sort of undeniable. He is getting ready for something. He’s either going operational or onto another step in his training before he goes operational. That means at any second he could disappear. It’s your business, not mine. But if I was you, I’d chopper in the tough boys and hit this motherfucker tomorrow. Payback for lots of bad shit, yes—but, more important, you make sure there’s no more bad shit down the road. I’d go tomorrow.”
“Why tomorrow, Sergeant Swagger?” said Cohen. Do you think us miracle workers? We couldn’t possibly hit him tomorrow.”
“So when can you go?” said Swagger.
The Director spoke for the first time.
“What about,” he said, “in two hours?”