Hospital, recovery
He came to once in the ambulance, alone, except that his brain felt as if it had nails hammered into it. It was not pleasant, and he decided to lie back and, somewhere between the lying and the backward part, he went to black again.
The next time he awoke, it was a hospital room. Nick was there, but so were the nails.
“Welcome to the world,” said Nick.
“Ahh,” said Bob, “not sure I want to be here.”
“No, the news is not good, but I expect you’re man enough to take it.”
“Chandler?”
“She made it. Broken ribs, but the vest saved her.”
“Thank God,” said Swagger. “Tell her to sit the next one out. You’re her boss.”
“You try and tell an American woman anything these days, let me know how you do.”
He lay back, and didn’t slide under. Meanwhile, a drip passed something medicinal into his veins, his vision was somewhat lazy in its mission to put edges on things, the smell of hospitals was its own special ordeal. A nurse leaned in to perform vital life-giving tasks, the last of which was holding a cup up for a long drink of water.
“Juba?” asked Bob after the last gulp.
Nick’s expression told enough, but as a stickler for details, he then provided them.
“He got into a parking lot, hot-wired a car, and got out of town. Where, we have no idea. The report on the car didn’t come in till last night—”
“It’s the next day already?”
“Afraid so.”
“Christ.”
“Anyhow, we haven’t located it yet, though now there’s an APB out.”
“That won’t help. He’ll dump it—he’s already dumped it—and pick up another. He’ll always be a car ahead of the APBs.”
“No doubt. Smart operator.”
“And fast. I never saw anybody so fast. He put that leg into me at light’s speed. So give me the score.”
“Not as bad as it could be. No police KIA, four wounded, not including you and Chandler. Four bad-guy KIA, including their NCO, who blew his own brains out rather than be taken. Six surrenders. Counterterrorism Division people are all over them, but since they were hired by a cutout in Mexico, and handled by cutouts all the way through, there’s not going to be much. Universal soldiers, Mexican variation. Special Forces, good operators; as long as someone pays their life insurance, they’ll shut up and wait for a chance to break. Also, some guy who’s a glass expert, cut the window for Juba’s shot. He doesn’t know anything either.”
Bob nodded.
Then he said, “Anyhow, when do I get out of here?”
“There’s some recovery time up ahead. You’ve sustained a heavy concussion and skull fracture. They say not for a week.”
“By then, Juba could have whacked—”
“Not your department. Your department is, tell the artist what this guy looks like. You’re the only one who’s seen him who’s still alive and not afraid to talk.”
“Jesus, Nick, it was just for a split second before he whacked me out.”
“You’re a trained observer. When you put your mind to it, you’ll be surprised what you can recover.”
“I’ll try.”
“There is no ‘try,’” said Nick. “There is only ‘do.’”
But there was no do. There was only try.
“I admit, it’s not much,” said Swagger.
A square-faced, rather generic Arab stared back at him from a universe of deft charcoal strokes. Whatever subtle nuance of geometry, weight distribution, underlying musculature, bone slope, and eye radiance that make a face a face was not there. Nothing was there.
He was still abed after three long days of working with a very decent guy billed as the best police artist in the world, but it came to only this.
“He looks like a cross between Saddam Hussein and Dr. Zhivago,” said Swagger.
“You mean Omar Sharif, the Egyptian actor,” said Nick. “Well, it does have a certain standardized, even idealized, quality to it. We’ll put it out, but if it draws in over seventy-five thousand suspects, we’ll know it’s not really working.”
“He’s not a face. He’s motion. He’s speed, grace, battle talent, remorseless will. The face is nothing.”
The door opened, and Mr. Gold appeared. He looked tired because during all the time since Juba’s escape, he’d been sitting in the temporary FBI working room in the Wichita Hilton, going through reports, looking for patterns, reading the transcripts of interviews with the captured shooters and the glazier, trying to infer from the grade Z material something grade A. Again, plenty of try, no do.
He shook Swagger’s hand.
“You have survived again,” he said.
“Dying is above my pay grade,” said Bob.
“The bravery is just this side of insanity,” said Gold. “No man on earth would have launched himself at this fellow without a weapon.”
“If it was about heroism,” said Nick, “we’d win every fight.”
“While you’re here, Mr. Gold, I’d like to run my take on the shooting by you. Maybe you’ll see something I missed.”
“Doubtful. But please proceed.”
“I have been thinking about his shot, because I never made one so good. Nobody has, not even Craig Harrison, the long-distance champion of Afghanistan. Hitting a dime at three hundred ain’t the deal, so it wasn’t just marksmanship. It was, I don’t know . . . They didn’t teach no words for what I mean in 1964, which was my last brush with formal education.”
“‘Spatial imagination’?” asked Nick.
Bob chewed it over.
“Sort of, but not quite. What I mean is, the understanding in a flash of the forces at play and understanding how they must go a certain way, anticipating that, being ahead of it, and putting the shot where the target is going to go, not where it is.”
“Magic?” said Nick.
“‘Dynamic projection,’” said Gold.
“Yeah, yeah, that’s the bull’s-eye. He saw that the kid’s head was invisible behind the Marshal’s but that it was tending to emerge. By the time it emerged, other things might have happened, and if he fired on it while emerging, it might have moved too far when time in flight finally put the bullet there. But, simultaneously, he couldn’t put the bullet through the Marshal’s head because it might not make it all the way or it might get deflected. So he put it on the edge of the Marshal’s skull, above the ear, beneath the cowboy hat, knowing that it wouldn’t impact straight on and explode, deform, deflect, whatever. Basically, he shot on the deflection, like putting the cue ball off the edge to hit two walls, knocking the eight ball on the other side of the table into the sock. He deflected the bullet about fifteen degrees, and it caught Jared just as he turned and emerged, under the right eye of a target that was probably only a quarter visible. Nobody but Juba hits that shot. What does that tell us?”
“It shows that on top of everything else, he’s creative in real time. A difficult man to outthink,” said Mr. Gold.
“Hope I’m up to it. One other thing. You speak Arabic?”
“No outsider really speaks it, not fully and fluently. But in the shallow sense, then, yes, I speak it.”
“He said something to me, even as he didn’t shoot me.”
“You must have impressed him. He doesn’t seem the loquacious sort.”
Swagger spit out clumsily the sounds that Juba had uttered as he stood over him with the recovered Krink.
“Majnun jiddo,” clarified Mr. Gold. “It means ‘crazy grandpa.’”