Legends

“Chances are you won’t believe me if I tell you,” Lincoln Dittmann said.

“If he don’t believe you,” said the short American with the tooled cowboy boots and tapered Levis and slicked back hair, “you’re in deep shit.” He spoke in a Texas drawl so silky that Lincoln had to strain to make out the words.

The Egyptian and the Texan, strange bedfellows in this godforsaken Paraguayan frontier town across the border from Brazil, both laughed under their breaths, though there was no trace of mirth in their voices. Lincoln, sprawled on a sofa, his bad leg stretched straight out in front of him, the cane within arm’s reach, his hands clasped behind his head, laughed with them. “I was teaching Civil War history at a junior college,” he said. “My area of expertise—I wrote a book on the subject once—was the battle of Fredericksburg. Collecting Civil War weapons seemed like the natural thing to do. My pièce de résistance is a rare English Whitworth.”

“That there’s a sniper rifle, ain’t it?” said the Texan.

Lincoln looked impressed. “Aren’t many people around who can tell the difference between a Whitworth and an ordinary barnyard Enfield.”

“My daddy had one,” the Texan said proudly. “Feds went an’ impounded it along with his other guns when he was nabbed for burning a nigger church to the ground in Al’bama.” He tilted his head back and regarded Lincoln warily. The Texan, who had introduced himself as Leroy Streeter when he’d picked Lincoln up in front of the mosque with the gold-tinted roof on Palestine Street across the border in Foz do Iguaçú, said, “Go and describe your Whitworth?”

Lincoln smiled to himself. Back at Langley, they’d learned from the FBI that Leroy Streeter’s father had once owned a Civil War Whitworth; they’d reckoned the son would be familiar with the weapon. If Leroy’s quiz was what passed for checking bona fides in Triple Border, it certainly was amateur hour; an undercover agent wouldn’t name drop—even the name of an antique rifle—if he couldn’t backstop it with details. Fact of the matter was that Lincoln did own a Whitworth—a collection of Civil War weapons went with the Dittmann legend. He’d even fabricated cartridges and gone out to a remote landfill in New Jersey to see if the rifle was as accurate as its reputation held. It was. “Mr. Whitworth’s rifle,” he told Leroy now, “came factory-equipped with a low-powered brass scope fixed atop the hexagonal barrel. Not many of the Whitworths around these days, even in museums, still have the scope. Mine also has the original brass tampon to plug the barrel against humidity and dust. The scope’s fitted with little engraved wheels to sight the rifle and adjust for latitude and longitude errors.”

As he spoke, Lincoln kept his eyes on the Egyptian, who obviously ran the show here. He had not been introduced—though Lincoln had a good idea of his identity; the FBI’s briefing book back in Washington had contained a blurry photo taken with a telephoto lens of an Egyptian known as Ibrahim bin Daoud talking to a man identified as a Hezbollah agent in front of the entrance to the Maksoud Plaza Hotel in São Paulo the previous year. The long delicate nose and carefully trimmed gray beard visible in the photo were conspicuous on the Egyptian sitting on the sill across from him now.

Stretched out on the unmade bed in the room above a bar in Ciudad del Este on the Paraguay side of Triple Border, the muddy heels of his boots digging into the mattress, Leroy was nodding emphatically at the Egyptian. “He sure as hell’s got hisself a Whitworth,” he confirmed.

Lincoln was hoping that gun collecting could provide a useful bond between him and the Texan. “Crying shame about your daddy’s Whitworth,” he said. “Bet the FBI goons didn’t have the wildest idea what a goddamn prize they had in their hands when they confiscated it.”

“They was too fucking dumb to tell the difference between fool’s gold and actual gold,” Leroy agreed.

Lincoln looked back at the Egyptian. “To answer your question: From the Whitworth and my other guns, it was just a matter of branching out to Kalashnikovs and TOW antitank missiles, with the grenades and ammunition thrown in for good measure. Pays a lot better than teaching Civil War history at a junior college.”

“We are not in the market for Kalashnikovs and TOWs,” the Egyptian noted coldly.

“He’s not interested in Ak-47s and TOWs,” the Texan explained. “Now that Commie Russia’s got one foot in the grave, you trip over this kind of hardware out here on Triple Border. He’s interested in Semtex or ammonium nitrate, something in the neighborhood of eighty thousand pounds of it, enough to fill one of those big moving vans. We pay cash on the barrelhead.”