Zombieland
Swagger went on the raid, just as he had gone on the raid in southern Syria with the Israeli commandos. But unlike that episode, this one was strictly routine.
The house and property of Brian A. Waters were deserted. The Bureau team entered from overland, a mile away, after midnight, using night vision. No problems. A law enforcement–affiliated locksmith cracked the door easily, pointing out to Swagger that it had been cracked before, as evidenced by the toolmarks on the lock. That meshed perfectly with the assumed scenario.
Two gifted dogs quickly searched for explosives and drugs and found none. Once inside, the investigators used their infrared to discover that Brian Waters was systematic, neat, organized, thorough. His books, CDs, and DVDs, for example, lay on shelves in perfect, parade-like dress, alphabetized. There were books on American history, books on marksmanship, riflery, the history of the rifle, company histories, anything about the gun. There was no porn, nothing at all of a salubrious nature. This was a man dedicated to and caring for one thing: rifle accuracy. To that end, he had no family, though pictures of his nephews—towheaded boys frolicking in a backyard—were arranged perfectly on a shelf in the living room. They lent a certain human dimension—a little anyway—to a room otherwise without character and style. He seemed to have no tastes or eccentricities. It could have been a rental, for all the home furnishings revealed. Only his framed NRA Life Membership and certificate proving he’d gone Distingushed Expert–Rifle suggested an ego. These hung in perfect symmetry over his bed.
The killers—ISIS, the Iranian Ministry of Intelligence, ex–CIA contractors gone rogue, cartelistas?—had probably put a .22 bullet, suppressed, into his brain as he slept. No signs of a struggle, no signs of anything being neatened up after a struggle. The agents took his pillowcases for analysis, hoping to uncover microscopic traces of blood from the shot.
The shop could have been a museum. Again, the neatness was spooky, and it indicated why Brian Waters had never brought a woman into his life: no human being could live up to his standards of precision. Swagger noted that his many yellow boxes containing L.E. Wilson neck sizers and bullet seaters were arranged in ascending order by calibration, beginning with the humble .222 Remington, America’s first dedicated varmint cartridge, and working up to the gigantic .458 Lott elephant bouncer. But again, his neatness had tripped up his murderers and fooled them into leaving behind traces of their presence; when they’d plucked out the .338 Lapua Magnum boxes, they’d been smart enough not to leave a gap by pushing the remaining boxes together to hide the missing ones. However, they’d done so sloppily, so that the row was slightly out of whack, the boxes not perfectly dressed on one another. Waters, Swagger already knew, would never have done such a thing.
The locksmith cracked the gun safe without much trouble, and Swagger examined the firearms that had captured Waters’s imagination. He seemed to have a nice collection of vintage 1911 target pistols, as upgraded by the armorers attached to each service’s marksmanship units: from army, marines, navy, and coast guard. He had other .45s from masters of the bull’s-eye craft like Jim Stroh, Armand Swenson, Bob Pachmayr, and Jim Clark, on up to modern masters of the craft of building a handgun that could put five into an inch at fifty yards, offhand.
The long guns were equally to the point. He liked sniper rifles, and had one each of the chosen weapons of Our Boys since War 1: a Springfield, a Winchester Model 70 with Unertl, an M1D, a Remington M40 from ’Nam that Swagger knew well, and an M14 with Leupold 10× scope, which the army folks had chosen. Not quite so comprehensively, he had variations of other countries’ War 2 choices: an Enfield .303 No. 4(T), as sniperfied by the geniuses at Holland & Holland for the Brits; a Mauser 98 with a Hensoldt scope on a claw mount and with SS runes on its receiver, making it not Wehrmacht but genuinely Nazi. He even had a Barrett .50, looking like an M16 after years of pumping iron, which had proved so useful in Afghanistan, and when it delivered, it landed with such force that the guy on the other end usually pinwheeled through the air, he had so much energy loosed against his poor bones. But, of course, no Accuracy International, in .338 Lapua Magnum. And, of course, there was a slot empty near the front of the gun safe’s rack, where presumably that rifle, his current number one and his match gun and the font of his recent dedication, his intensity, his high-IQ brain, and his quiet passion, had lain.
But all in all, the event had to be categorized as confirmation, not progress. It strongly suggested incursion, murder, careful looting, without leaving a trace. It was a quality intelligence operation. Whoever had done it this time had done it before, or something similar, and they’d left little to track, nothing to go on, no next step.
Annoying?
Yes, because he’d thought it would take them somewhere instead of nowhere, and it left them with nothing new to do except to monitor reports on the whereabouts of the missing criminal and his little buddy Jared Akim, presumably under the aegis of some masterful criminal organization. But nothing specific emerged, and none of the divisions responsible for monitoring such organizations reported anything untoward, any hints of maximum preparation—vibrations of extra effort or deep planning—occurring within their precincts. It was very frustrating, until it wasn’t.
Jeff Neill, the Cyber Division guru, came to call. He was in the paper-distribution network and saw everything Swagger, Memphis, and the others did, only a bit later.
“Okay,” he said, “I want to run something by you.”
“Let’s hear it,” said Swagger.
The younger man laid two photos on the desk. They were taken using infrared illumination at the Waters house the night of the search. Bob looked and saw only what should have been there, which was the interior of a closet stacked neatly with packaging.
“This guy was ultra-organized,” said Neill. “He didn’t just save stuff, he catalogued it and stored it alphabetically so that he could access it in seconds. He’d be the rare individual who always sends in the warranty card on the first day.”
“That’s him.”
“So this is stuff he bought this year—he’s probably got the other years saved in a storage unit somewhere. Or, rather, the packaging from it.”
“Okay . . .”
“Look closely.”
Bob looked. He saw a few gun shipment boxes; as for convenience, Waters had a Federal Firearms License, an FFL, and a license for Curios & Relics, both of which enabled him to receive firearms at home by common carrier. There was no evidence he operated at the retail level with his purchases, as he was strictly a shooter and a collector. He just had to enter them in a book for the occasional ATF examiners, who must have treated him like a pal, as he offered no threat and kept transparent, perfect records. Bob saw packaging that was probably left over from his last big-ticket get, the Accuracy International. He saw supporting implements, plus other mundane things, such as a box for a new Cuisinart, a new speaker for his nifty hi-fi system, book packages from Amazon—quite a bit of stuff from Amazon, in fact, as Amazon was the perfect abettor for such a lifestyle.
“Am I supposed to notice something?” Bob said.
Neill put his finger on a slim piece of packaging lodged neatly between two larger pieces, almost indistinguishable. But part of the overlapping cover art was visible on the edge, and Neill had identified it.
“If I’m not mistaken, that’s the world-famous apple with a bite taken out of it. The corporate pictogram for the world’s largest computer outfit.”
Bob squinted. Yep, there it was: a bitten apple, a little leaf up top.
“That’s the package the iPhone comes in. I would know because I’ve just picked up my X and spent an hour or so programming it.”
Swagger carried an iPhone 3, or something Cro-Magnon like that, and wouldn’t have noted such a thing in a million years.
“Okay,” he said, “I’m with you. But where is this going?”
“Well, it fits, doesn’t it? A tech and engineering guy like this, he’d have the latest variation of iPhone, just as, upstairs, he’s got the latest variation of desktop system—he’s always upgrading everything. He’s probably got an X on order, it just hasn’t come in yet.”
“So?”
“We got into his desktop system and found nothing much of interest, other than that after a certain date, when he told his few friends he was going hunting, it hadn’t been accessed.”
“Okay.”
“So he’s got the 8. Now they’ve got the 8. They’d have to take it, because he’d no doubt downloaded his ballistic app into it, I’m guessing FirstShot. Anyone smart enough to use the rifle at highest capacity would know that that’s the best. Anyone taking the rifle would take the iPhone and use it to set up his really long shots. Juba would have to have it.”
Bob nodded. Seemed right so far.
“Here’s the issue. The later iPhones—the 8 and the X—are really a bitch to crack if you don’t have the code. Those fuckers at Apple are smart, you can bet on it. One of the things they’re selling is security. When one comes up in a case—say, recovered in a drug raid—we can’t even crack it. It has to go off to one of three or four high-tech computer labs, where the engineers can diddle with it for weeks before they can finally get in. And I’m guessing next that Waters was the kind of guy who shut down every night before he went to bed. So if they plugged him and they need to get in, how do they do it?”
“You don’t think they’d take him?”
“No, because if he’s alive, all sorts of complexities are added to what is already too complex. Security, support, interrogation, the fact that they would assume someone like this tough-ass, high-IQ Texas oil engineer wasn’t going to give up his secrets easily, which generates another major headache and more drama for them. No, they’d probably cap him and trust they could crack it by their own devices.”
“Could they?”
“As I said, there’s a handful of labs that could do the work. But they’re not going to a lab.”
“Of course not.”
“So they’d go into crime world. And, as it turns out, there are about three guys in that world capable of cracking a late-gen iPhone. They don’t hang out in small towns like Toad Lick, Mississippi. One’s in Boston; one’s in Seattle, obviously; and one’s in Dallas. We know all of ’em, have for years. Sometimes they help us so that we will leave them alone. Putting them in the slammer is of no use at all. Plus, we get tips from them on stuff they hear.”
“You’re guessing it was the Dallas guy.”
“I’m guessing he was paid a pretty penny for his work. So we bust him, work him over hard. We leverage him. He can tell us who paid him, what he did, what was on there, whatever. Again, I’d do it real low-profile, bust him on another charge, never move him out of Dallas, maybe just pick him up privately and take him to a parking garage, someplace anonymous, no drama, nothing to cause any ripples in the water. Maybe he leads us to whoever’s funding this thing, and we can track them to the source.”
“It’s two things,” said Bob. “It’s our best lead and it’s our only lead. Let’s go to Nick.”