Cascade, Idaho
Spring
Fall came hard, winter harder. Bleak, even savage, months, with harsh winds and blankets of snow that lay across the prairie like the base coat for the end of the world in ice. He saw none of it.
The collarbone wasn’t the problem. It was replaced by titanium, coated in nitride to prevent tissue stain. The bone chips weren’t the problem. They were picked out, one at a time, all two hundred and thirty-one of them, ranging in size from .25 inch to .004 inch, scattered throughout the thoracic cavity. The clavical, hit by the .338 Lapua traveling sideways after having been slowed and deflected by the helicopter’s fuselage, had exploded like a grenade, deflating his left lung, pricking his heart. But that was not the problem. The lung was patched and reinflated, the heart de-pricked.
The problem was the chip of bone shrapnel that had cut into and almost—it was a matter of a few thousandths of an inch—destroyed his aorta. That would have been fatal in a few seconds.
But in minutes they cracked his chest, pried him open like an oyster, and went to work. They delicately removed the intruder and sutured the artery up. It was fourteen hours on the table, with relays of surgeons and nurses, the whole thing a close-run battle of its own, leaving exhausted participants soaked in sweat and limp from fatigue all over the surgery floor. But they were brave and tough and the best, and they saved him in time. Somehow the major vessel eventually healed. Seventy-three-year-old blood highways are not noted for such cooperation, but his nevertheless came through for him.
He sat, he rocked. No horseback riding, but each morning two hours of physical therapy, administered by a no-nonsense young woman from the hospital who saw him merely as a data unit to be manipulated toward certain goals, and who was always behind schedule and always cranky. Not much love flowed between them.
Audrey the Evil gone, he sat, he rocked. Late March. Scabby patches of snow on yellowed prairie grass. No buds yet, just nodules. The smell of wet everywhere. The clouds fat with rain, low and surly, moving remorselessly, a breeze that cut. One color and few variations, all off the murkiest part of the spectrum. It was a landscape designed by Nietzsche to melody composed by Wagner, both men in their deepest depressive phase of their bipolarity. He sat, wrapped in an old Indian blanket, his walker on the porch beside him. He had a thermos of coffee, black as usual, and a nice pair of binoculars in case any animal life decided to acknowledge his existence.
Phone made that god-awful sound and showed the front gate, where a new, expensive, and, hopefully, temporary guard spent the day, chasing off the too-many assholes who had propositions.
“Mr. Swagger, woman here, says she knows you. What is it, ma’am? Yeah, McDowell—a Mrs. McDowell.”
“Yeah, she’s okay.”
He knew she’d come this way as before, unannounced, so that nobody would feel the need to make preparations, and in a cheap rental car, this one in an even more insane shade than the last, some kind of econo Chevy that pushed its underpowered way over the crest and into the yard.
The same old Janet got out, no more chic or polished up than the last time, in jeans and a sweater under some kind of waxed outdoorsy jacket. As usual, running shoes, as if she still had a marathon to run when she’d just finished one.
“Well, hey,” he called.
“Was in the neighborhood,” she said, “thought I’d drop by.”
“Yeah, I’m halfway between the 7-Eleven and the dry cleaners.”
She laughed. “Well, it’s a big neighborhood.”
He didn’t rise; he couldn’t. She bent and hugged him, he nodded toward a chair nearby, and she pulled it over.
“So, how’s the hero?” she asked.
“I don’t know. Ask him, if you can find one. I just pulled a trigger.”
“Knowing he’d be pulling a trigger too.”
“Didn’t think that far ahead.”
They caught up. The news was good, as everyone had prospered. Nick got to retire again, this time as an Assistant Director, a goal finally achieved. Neill and Chandler got promotions, commendations, and Glory Wall photos with Mogul. Mr. Gold was back in the black cube, and even Cohen was respectful—at least for a little while.
“All you got was a bullet,” Janet said.
“I’m a big boy. It’s okay.”
Health notes: his progress, his mood, his day-to-day, his expected recovery rate.
“I’ll be back on the horse in three months. Not sure about the motorcycles. Doctors do not like motorcycles. I’ve recently started working in the shop again—you know, the crazy gun tinkering that I enjoy. Still be a few weeks before I can get behind a rifle. Lucky he nicked me in my left shoulder, not the right.”
“Some nick,” she said.
And finally: the thing itself. Who was behind it, who put up the money? The Iranians facilitated it and supported it, but nobody at the CIA thought it was their sort of operation. They sensed a bigger, smarter state actor, maybe a Putin, drawing on five centuries of Russian intelligence tradecraft. The Chinese? They were that good, so that was a possibility. Or maybe some “friend” who saw the ingredients on the table to take an ally down hard and move to the front of the line. Anyway, a joint Bureau–Agency task force was on it.
“Tell me your thoughts,” she said, “who saw it as a possibility, where it could have come from. Is there anything like it?”
“More than anything, it reminds me of our job on a Japanese admiral in World War Two. We were reading their code. Their guy Yamamoto was on an inspection tour. Our intel guys worked out the route and saw that on one tiny stretch of his flight he would be in range of our fighters. When he got there, the P38s were waiting and jumped him. Remember Pearl Harbor, and all that. Same thing here. Renegade’s in range for the few minutes he’s on the eighth green. Juba knew. Like the P38s, Juba was waiting.”
“And the cover story: New York? Did they just get lucky it was the same time?”
“Not really. They knew Mogul’s personality would compel him to show up Renegade. So they knew something would happen and that they could use it. That’s the kind of thinking the Agency people consider beyond the Iranians.”
She nodded, as if she understood or even cared. But it was clear she didn’t. She’d come for one thing, and, finally, it was all that was left.
“So I really came to ask a question,” she said.
“Figured as much.”
“How should I feel?”
“Pretty good, I’d say. You got him. Seemed impossible, but you got him.”
“I don’t really feel it was me. I had help from the best folks in the world. They believed, and, on that, I could keep going.”
“No, it was you. It all happened because you made it happen. The rest of us did our parts and got the screws tightened up real good, but no Janet, Juba gets away with it. No justice, nothing for Tommy, nothing for Baghdad, nothing for the bus, nothing for the New Mexico gun guy, nothing for the homeless fellows popped at a mile, nothing for a former president and the chaos his death would bring to us. We’re so fragile these days, maybe some kind of civil war. Nothing for the others on down the line that Juba would have put down. All that’s because Janet made it so.”
“Maybe,” said Janet.
“But you don’t feel any better, is that it?”
“Not really. Not where it counts. I’m a mom, that’s all. I’d rather have my son back than all that other stuff, and no matter how much of what someone calls good came from it, the price was too high. That’s how I feel.”
He didn’t say a thing. What was there to say?
“How long will that last?” she said. “That’s my question. You would know. You lost so many over the years.”
“Oh, you can do things. Help veterans, write an inspirational book, and if you make some money—and you should—endow a scholarship, fund a school, contribute, keep Tommy alive that way.”
“Sure,” she said. “Good advice, all of it. But you know it only takes you so far. Bob, tell me the truth. How long does it really last?”
“It lasts forever,” he said.