So what do you say? Well, the good Bureau man doesn’t say anything; he doesn’t let anything show; he just nods and knuckles under and gets behind the team.

And that’s what Nick committed himself to doing, biting down his anger that he’d missed a shot at the Secret Service bomb detail. Now those guys were pros. He’d wanted to see them work, they were so legendary. They did site preparation, and when they were done working an area over, you knew it was sanitized, that the dogs had sniffed no explosives or wires, that the spectrometers had uncovered no unusual radio waves for command detonations, that no sniper’s nests or shooting platforms had been uncovered.

And it was outdoor work! It was doing something! It was getting back into the field, away from all this political nonsense and being just a clerk-jerk. And, the truth was, what Nick hated most of all of it was sitting in the office. He knew he wasn’t thorough enough, that he tended to make small mistakes. He cursed, silently, as his fate overtook him. But he kept his face flat and mild.

When it was over, Herm Sloane, who wasn’t too bad a guy, slid by and said, “Too bad, Nick. Know you wanted to slip out tomorrow. We’re just bogged down.”

“No problem,” said Nick, trying for cheer, which was his usual way of dealing with adversity.

“I don’t know who’s worse,” Sloane added conspiratorially, “my guy assholing it all over the place or your guy sucking it up all over the place.”

“It’s pretty fucking pathetic,” Nick said. “You got those Charlies for me?”

“Fraid so, old pal.”

Sloane handed over the stack of files that he had triaged into the Charlie category. Nick looked at them sadly. It was hours and hours of work. He knew his investigation on the death of Eduardo Lanzman was falling apart. It wasn’t happening, because he couldn’t get to it.

The names were prosaic, pitiful, and as he glanced through the files, he saw the usual litany of failure and hatred, the usual roundup, the usual suspects. Little men with large grudges and imprecise grips on reality, who were only to be reckoned with because they had or could get guns.

And then Nick saw the name of his hero:

Bob Lee Swagger.

Bob the Nailer, he thought. Jesus Christ!

In three fourteen-hour days, Nick managed to eliminate fifty-six of his seventy Charlies. It was exhausting work, sitting there, phoning this office or that, tracking down that parole officer or this one, going through phone books and the state prison records division, talking to cops and lawyers and the various parish morgues. Of the fifty-six, more than half, twenty-nine, had simply died since, for whatever reason, they had been placed on the Secret Service Active Suspect List. Nick suspected therefore that the list was very old; so many old men. Another sixteen were serving jail time. Five were currently in mental institutions – these were the real crazos, whose difficulty in dealing with authority over the long term had finally gotten them classified pathological and who were now rusticating in some picturesque bayou bin. Six more had vanished, left the city or the state, simply disappeared off the face of the earth. They were now, happily, somebody else’s worry. That left fourteen to be accounted for, tracked, located, what have you; it was not easy work but he went at it with a great deal of effort.

And it left Bob the Nailer.

Nick had first heard of the great Marine sniper sometime in the early eighties, in an article in one of those Soldier of Fortune-type magazines that he used to read at the time. He remembered the cover photo of the lean young man in the camouflage paint and the intense eyes, and the beautiful Remington rifle he was carrying and the cover line: THE MOST DANGEROUS MAN ALIVE. The stories were incredible; whatever the guy shot died. Bob the Nailer had eighty-seven confirmed kills in Vietnam; he did some jobs for the Agency, it was said; and, his masterpiece, he’d hit a North Vietnamese battalion moving on an isolated Green Beret camp and held it down for two days, killing thirty-odd men in the process, saving the Special Forces’ bacon.

That was when Nick himself was trying to be the great shooter, back in his ass-kicking SWAT days, before Myra and Tulsa. Thinking back now, it all seemed so clear and innocent; you were a trained man, you went against bad guys, and because you were so good, they got nailed.

That was when he’d sold his soul to the rifle, when he was, however briefly, an acolyte in the cult of the sniper. He shivered a bit at the vanity of it, remembering what his pride had turned into in Tulsa.

Still, all these years later he had a place in him full of respect for Bob. Bob had never wavered, had let nothing stand between himself and what he wanted to be, and Bob had tested himself in the crucible of the actual, while Nick had only tried once and failed spectacularly. His bullet had gone exactly where he had not wanted it to.

So it was with a sense of facing his old self and his old beliefs and the mistakes of his own youth that he set about to track down Bob the Nailer. And like many memories, this one proved easy enough to unearth. Bob was not hard to find, that is, the traces of Bob. He’d checked into the Robert Oliver Hotel in the French Quarter on February 3 and checked out on February 4. Two days. Nobody much remembered him; the only vague reports Nick could scare up told of a tall western-styled man, very leathery, who said nothing, kept to himself, was gone all day, and left without fuss. Had a funny camera with him, some expensive Jap thing probably.

Business of some sort, Nick thought. He’d heard that Swagger hadn’t been able to stay in the Marines because of his injuries. Probably today he was some kind of traveling salesman or something, or an Arkansas farmer into the big city for the hell of it, a wild few days or something, take some pictures like any tourist, and go on back to the South Forty.

But it occurred to Nick to ask a more fundamental question. Why was the guy on the Suspects List at all? Who put him there? What gets you there?

He ran Swagger through the FBI computer and learned he had no record, at least no felonies listed anywhere. He checked him against the National Crime Index and again came up with nothing. Calling the Department of the Navy, he learned that Bob had retired at the rank of gunnery sergeant with physical disability pay after twelve years active service and close to three years in the hospital undergoing joint reconstruction and extensive physical therapy and had no blemishes on his record. He checked with the Veterans Administration and found out that Bob had never sought or received any kind of psychological testing, or counseling or anything like that. There seemed to be nothing on him at all. Now why the hell had he ended up on this list? And who was tracking him enough to note that he was here in New Orleans?

He called Herm Sloane.

“Hey, Herm – ”

“Nick, we’re really pressed for time up here? What is it?”

“I just have one question. These Charlies, where do you get them? How does a guy get on the Charlie list?”

“Well, the Alphas are usually developed from intelligence, usually from the Bureau investigations of dangerous groups, from other Justice Department or DEA sources and our own intelligence unit; um, the Betas are usually guys with minor criminal records, guys who’ve made lots of public threats, who have an authority complex and tend to attract attention; and your Charlies are letter writers. We keep all the threatening letters the president gets, or threatening-seeming letters. Why?”

“Oh, there’s a Charlie here that surprised me.”

“Listen, call Tom Marbella at Treasury in DC. He collates the letter files; he’ll let you know what’s what.”

Some minutes later, Nick managed to track down Marbella and Marbella said he’d check it out, let him know, and some time after that – it was the next day, actually – Marbella called back.