I, Sniper

“I can’t think of one either, Nick.”

“So, I’m going to let that drop. That’s my decision. But I look at Fields and I think, I’ll run it by him, just get his take on it; he’s a salty old dog.”

“The salty old dog says, sometimes it’s best to let things drop.”

Nick smiled.

“Then it’s dropped. She’ll be a star. You get Sniper SWAT at Quantico. Maybe I get assistant director.”

“If there’s any justice-”

“And the important thing is the bad guys go down or away. Let’s not forget that.”

“Never forget that. It makes me feel all warm and fuzzy.”

“Cool,” said Nick, rising. “Okay, that’s a big help. I’ll let you concentrate on your testimony now. I’ve got to get back to DC and-Oh,” he said, “one other thing.”

“Sure, Nick.”

“How do you suppose she got it down?”

Fields smiled but his eyes showed bafflement.

“What’re you-”

“You know, my picture. The fake photo used info from a real picture. It was hanging on my glory wall. Sally and I in Hawaii on vacation, about four years ago. They needed a real photo so their computers could transfer and manipulate the information. That’s why it seemed familiar.”

“Gee, I hadn’t thought of that,” said Fields. “I mean, I guess she just wandered into your office one day and slipped it off the wall.”

“I suppose,” said Nick. “But she’s only five-two. She can’t reach any higher than six feet, much less manipulate something. That photo was in the top row, close to seven feet off the ground. And my office has a glass wall. So she’d have to do it in plain sight of the office, and she’d have to move a chair over to get up to it, and she’d have to have another photo to hang in its place, and all that would take time and anyone would notice it.”

“I guess she did it after hours.”

“But she’s only an SA. Special agents aren’t allowed in after hours unless they’re with an assistant special agent in charge; of course an ASAIC can come in anytime.”

“Huh,” said Fields. “Interesting. So you’re saying-”

“I’m not saying anything. The facts are saying that if someone took down that pic and replaced it with something else, it was done after hours, meaning by an ASAIC or higher, six-two or taller. Know anybody like that? Oh, and he’d have to be familiar with that wall.”

“Maybe she-”

“Maybe. But I did some checking. It’s interesting, yeah, her fiancé’s a CIA guy and might have had access to that lab. But did you know there’s a guy on Taskforce Sniper who partnered up early with a guy named Jerry Lally? Five years, a few gunfights, that sort of thing. And of course Jerry took a leave of absence, went back to school, got a master’s in chem and a PhD in physics and came back to work science for us. He’s now head of our photo interp. And let’s not forget that although CIA has the best photo lab in Washington, we have the second-best photo lab in Washington. Really, not one floor and a hundred feet from our office. And whoever did this little thing, he really knew our building forward and back, much better, I’m guessing, than a new special agent. No, this guy’d be an old salty dog.”

“Pretty interesting,” said Fields.

“And see, here’s the fu

“Nick, you have some imagination. You ought to write a book.”

“Nah,” said Nick. “Nobody’d believe it. As I say, it’s dropped now.”

Then a bailiff came and called Fields as next to testify, and he rose, and Nick reached out to shake his hand and said, “You are the best, big guy, the very best,” and Fields smiled and was off.

Here’s another possible ending: a notice that appeared on page A-2 of a recent issue of the Times in the Corrections Box.

On October 29 of last year, a photograph appeared on page one of this newspaper purporting to show a federal agent in the company of executives from a firearms company attempting to land a federal contract with the agent’s employer, the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The Times has since learned that the photo was a fraud and its publication was in violation of the newspaper’s own code of professional ethics. The Times regrets the error.

Still another ending could have been the marriage of Bill Fedders to Jessica Delph, who was younger than his youngest child. Bill had quite a run on the strength of his multiple testimonies against Tom Constable and emerged as some kind of media hero. He was also smart enough to make phone calls to a half dozen or so representatives and senators at his earliest convenience and warn them ahead of the curve that Constable was going down hard and that they ought to begin this second to distance themselves from the sordid spectacle. All were grateful, all did favors in return, and Bill prospered beyond belief. He finally decided that, for some reason or other, it was time to retire the first wife and be seen about town with the trophy more than once a month. It just shows that in Washington, you can’t keep a bad man down. Perhaps God will punish him by giving him a few more children.

But maybe the best ending was the reinterment of the marine sniper Gny. Sgt. Carl Hitchcock (Ret.) in the consecrated ground of the USMC Cemetery at Camp Lejeune, North Carolina. Unlike his first interment, it didn’t take place in a heavy rain and it wasn’t sparsely attended. In fact, among the two-thousand-odd attendees, almost the entire shooting community turned out, from writers like Ayoob and Bane and Huntington and Taffin to editors like Bre

There was one other difference between this ceremony and the first one.

Swagger was not there.

And where was he?

It is known that after a week of depositions and debriefings in Washington, he took a train to Chicago and presented Detective Sergeant De

Then, all presumed, he retired to his place in Idaho. But no one knows for sure, because he stopped answering his phones.