Eighth-floor conference room, Zombieland
The zombies were hungry. Pink-faced, blue-suited, white-shirted, red-tied—they sat around the conference room table, champing their jaws, screaming for flesh, starved for protein to be washed down by blood.
They were the creatures Bob had always hated. So far away from it, so sure, so absolute, so magnificent, so clean of fingernail: who could not hate them? If you lived behind wires and sandbags, and shit in a hole and got shot at a lot, it was mandatory to hate zombies—not these particular ones but zombies as a class. Yet where would the world be without its zombies?
“All right, Nick,” said the head zombie, “who, what is, and why should we care about a Brian A. Waters of Albuquerque, New Mexico, who has no record and no footprint, and, by all accounts, is a pleasant, accomplished, well-respected fellow?”
“Mr. Gold, would you speak to that?” Nick said, then checked for zombies who had trouble keeping up. “Swagger found Brian Waters, but Mr. Gold identified him as only a theoretical possibility, so Swagger worked off that, isn’t that right, Bob?”
“Completely,” said Bob.
Gold was not a zombie. Somehow being an Israeli meant you could never be a zombie. Swagger wasn’t sure by what principle this was, but it was a principle nevertheless, perhaps having to do with all the shit they’d been through, their tenuous grasp of survival, and perhaps most of all the subtle intensity that underlay the Israeli faces, as opposed to the theatricality of these American intelligence and enforcement executives.
“Gentlemen,” said Gold, “it has to do, eschatologically, with the different meanings of terror in the Middle East and here in the West. In the Middle East, terror is force. It is about killing lots of people as efficiently as possible. In the West, terror is metaphor. This is a feature of asymmetrical warfare at its purest. It is not the act itself, tragic though it may be, but the resonance of that act in the public imagination. The West cannot be destroyed through numbers; it must be destroyed through its imagination. Its capacity to fight will not be eliminated, but its will to fight can be, and that is the object.
“Thus, this operation against the United States, extravagantly budgeted, extravagantly planned, extravagantly slow in gestation, is not merely about killing a certain high-value target. It is about subverting via its brutal didacticism. It means to be ‘a Big Event,’ in the way the assassination of John F. Kennedy was a Big Event. It means to resonate for decades, to haunt and cripple and dispirit. In order to do that, its execution is not enough. It must have arrived caparisoned in legend, and it must reveal a perpetrator of legendary proportions.”
“A patsy, is that what you mean?” asked zombie 4.
“Exactly,” said Gold.
“How does Mossad see it accomplishing this goal?”
“It’s not merely that the sniper kills. It’s that the blame is put upon a certain figure, and that figure must have status and meaning of disturbing weight.”
“And that would be Brian A. Waters.”
“Exactly. He cannot be a piece of unimpressive trash like Lee Harvey Oswald or James Earl Ray. His meaning must be immediately accessible. The press must uncover—or think that it is uncovering—a paper trail of meaning. What that meaning will be, we don’t know yet.”
“Sounds like they want to do Dallas again.”
“But better. This time, controlled, managed, brilliantly syncopated. These people are very clever, and in Juba the Sniper they have found the ideal instrument of their will. And in the unfortunate Mr. Waters, they have found the ideal vessel.”
“Agent Chandler?” said Nick.
“He is, or was, forty-two years old,” said the perfect one, “born in Corpus Christi, Texas, with a superior technical education at Texas Western University and a master’s in petroleum geology from Rice University. Four years working for Phillips in the Geology Department, fast promotion, excellent reputation. In 2004, he resigned, though he was next in line to take over the division, and opened his own survey-and-development company. Fabulously successful, and in six years he sold it for seventeen million dollars. Never married, no kids obviously, a man of extreme intelligence, self-discipline, and drive. Well, I should say, he did marry. He married a rifle.
“His obsession is long-range precision shooting, and he bought land enough in New Mexico for a mile-long range, as well as a collection of rifles capable of accuracy at that distance. He’s spent the last eight years on an odyssey to put five holes in a bull’s-eye a mile away. It’s been done by about fifty men, Mr. Waters hopes to be the fifty-first.
“He has no vices, no politics, no angers, no hatreds, has never said a bad thing about anybody on earth that we can find. But he is an isolate. Being entirely alone with his obsession, he is perfect prey for men who would use him. And we feel he has been used.”
“Do you believe he is dead?”
“Yes, sir. Well, dead in reality. That death is not known. To his few friends and neighbors, he’s simply disappeared, but he disappears a lot. He travels all over the world to shooting matches, he hunts in Africa and Asia and New Zealand, he goes to conferences. His friends are elite shooters, the world over, who share his obsession and speak his language.”
“What is his current official status?”
“He—or somebody with access to his email—has announced to his friends that he’s going on a hunting trip in Southeast Asia and will be incommunicado for several months. We have checked with every known outfitter, and he is not on any trip docket. He has applied for no visas or hunting permits in any Southeast Asian country. His house is closed and locked, a lawn service attends to the yard once a week, prepaid via the Internet. He has vanished, but without any alarm being raised. That is why our hope for his survival is so low. It would be so much easier for them to kill him, help themselves to his life, and use him as an avatar to their purpose under a false flag. So he is being kept alive—well, not physically, but by reputation and counterfeit footprint.”
“Is there any evidence or is this just a working assumption?”
“Well, sir, no physical trace—that is, face-to-face, eyewitness accounts—have been documented with him in several months. Physically, he seems to have vanished from the earth.”
Nick continued, “We believe that a part of this operation is to implicate him as the perpetrator of whatever crime it is that Juba the Sniper means to accomplish. A ‘legend,’ as those of you with intelligence experience will recognize, will be or is being created, and a paper trail will be uncovered, skillfully counterfeited by the best covert people in the world, to suggest that he did this, he did that, he believed this, he believed that. All of that information will play in a certain way to create a certain meaning—certain ramifications. That is why we must stop this thing.”
“Since we seem to know he’s being used, it seems like we can quickly counter any—”
“May I?” said Gold. “Nothing is known these days. All fact is conditional. Modern media allows any interested party to influence millions of people. Who brays the loudest or frames the most skillfully or feeds prejudices the most earnestly is the most believed. False news—particularly if it is backed with credible journalistic sources, as uncovered by reporters who believe they’re doing God’s work. We will be telling another version of a story, and who’s to say ours is better than theirs?”
“Where are you now?”
Nick ran through it: the guise of looking for Juba as a triple murderer and the boy as a felony assault perp in Detroit, which enabled circulation to all law enforcement agencies, as well as maximum social network and media exposure. The penetration of long-range shooting culture to obtain any hints of unusual activity that might have indicated preparation for the shot Juba was to take. The monitoring of criminal enterprises—cartels, more traditional mobs, gangs, crews, paramilitary organizations—for indicators of unusual activity in support of such an operation. The use of satellite technology to discover shooting-range layouts on private property that might also support Juba’s enterprise. The hunt for traces of “Brian Waters,” for provocative statements and clues meant to establish his legend but which might lead to their creators. Finally, the alerting of all field office SWAT teams for high readiness so that apprehension or interdiction could commence immediately upon acquisition of a breakthrough in the hunt.
“Counterterrorism is in on this?”
“Yes,” said zombie number 9, who happened to be Ward Taylor, division chief and Nick’s pal and ally. “Assistant Director Memphis has been extremely solicitous of our participation. No turf wars from Nick, I’m happy to report.”
“Good, I like that,” said zombie number 1. “Now, Memphis, CIA liaison?”
“No, sir.”
“They won’t be happy.”
“I suppose you could say, ‘Too many crooks spoil the broth’”—a little laughter at Nick’s pun—“but there’s more: CIA involvement doesn’t complicate matters by two but rather to an exponential degree. Their agenda can be so murky that even they don’t know what it is, and it can vary, week by week, or even office by office or cubicle by cubicle. It’s not that I don’t trust them—it’s that I don’t trust them. When the time comes, we’ll be happy to go to them.”
“What about Secret Service? If the target should turn out to be Executive Branch—”
“That’s when we’d come to them. At this point, to alert them to the possibility is simply to set up leaks.”
Zombie number 1 nodded. “Your next move?”
“I want to put a clandestine forensics team on the ground in Albuquerque. I don’t want our mobile lab units and three hundred technicians showing up at the closed-down Waters house. I need to get a good workup on what is missing from his house, I want to know if there are any forensic discoveries that could lead us another step—prints of any sort, DNA, who knows whatever clues. But I don’t want them to know we’ve picked up on this. If they do, they’ll take steps to cover further footprints, they’ll enter a higher state of vigilance, and they may alter their plans. We want them confident that they’ve evaded for now, which will give us time to track them down, then we’ll jump.”
“Mr. Swagger, you’ve been hunted. You’re also a rifleman of great skill and experience. Where is Juba now? Mentally, psychologically?”
“He’s happy as he’s ever been. He’s made his getaway, he’s got his rifle, he’s working with it, which for a man like Juba is not a duty but an obsession. A pleasure. He’s a sniper with a target, and a sense of importance and contribution, according to the tenets of his faith. He’s one happy boy.”
“Your job is to make him unhappy,” said a zombie.
“Swagger’s a sniper,” said Nick. “Unhappiness is his business.”