Persuader

White male, about forty. He had been shot twice in the head and once in the chest. Small-caliber, probably .22s. Then they figure he was thrown off a cliff into the ocean."
    "He was alive when they fished him out?" I asked, although I already knew the answer.
    "Barely," she said. "He had a bullet lodged near his heart and his skull was broken. Plus one arm and both legs and his pelvis, from the fall. And he was half-drowned. They operated on him for fifteen straight hours. He was in intensive care for a month and in the hospital recuperating for another six."
    "ID?"
    "Nothing on him. He's in the records as a John Doe."
    "Did they try to ID him?"
    "No fingerprint match," she said. "Nothing on any missing-persons lists. Nobody came to claim him." I nodded. Fingerprint computers tell you what they're told to tell you.
    "What then?" I asked.
    "He recovered," she said. "Six months had passed. They were trying to work out what to do with him when he suddenly discharged himself. They never saw him again."
    "Did he tell them anything about who he was?"
    "They diagnosed amnesia, certainly about the trauma, because that's almost inevitable.
    They figured he might be genuinely blank about the incident and the previous day or two.
    But they figured he must be able to remember things from before that, and they got the strong impression he was pretending not to. There's a fairly extensive case file.
    Psychiatrists, everything. They interviewed him regularly. He was extremely resolute.
    Never said a word about himself."
    "What was his physical condition when he left?"
    "Pretty fair. He had visible scars from the GSWs, that's about all."
    "OK," I said. I leaned my head back and looked up at the sky.
    "Who was he?"
    "Your guess?" I said.
    ".22s to the head and chest?" Eliot said. "Dumped in the ocean? It was organized crime.
    An assassination. Some kind of hit man got to him." I said nothing. Looked up at the sky.
    "Who was he?" Duffy said again.
    I kept on looking up at the sky and dragged myself ten years backward through time, to a whole different world.
    "You know anything about tanks?" I asked.
    "Military tanks? Tracks and guns? Not really."
    "There's nothing to them," I said. "I mean, you like them to be able to move fast, you want some reliability, you don't object to some fuel economy. But if I've got a tank and you've got a tank, what's the only thing I really want to know?"
    "What?"
    "Can I shoot you before you can shoot me? That's what I want to know. If we're a mile apart, can my gun reach you? Or can your gun reach me?"
    "So?"
    "Of course, physics being physics, the likely answer is if I can hit you at a mile, then you can hit me at a mile. So it comes down to ammunition. If I stand off another two hundred yards so your shell bounces off me without hurting me, can I develop a shell that doesn't bounce off you? That's what tanks are all about. The guy in the ocean was an army intelligence officer who had been blackmailing an army weapons specialist."
    "Why was he in the ocean?"
    "Did you watch the Gulf War on TV?" I asked.
    "I did," Eliot said.
    "Forget about the smart bombs," I said. "The real star of the show was the M1A1 Abrams main battle tank. It scored about four hundred to zip against the Iraqis, who were using the best anybody ever had to give them. But having the war on TV meant that we'd shown our hand to the whole world, so we better get on with dreaming up some new stuff for the next time around. So we got on with it."
    "And?" Duffy asked.
    "If you want a shell to fly farther and hit harder, you can stuff more propellant into it. Or make it lighter. Or both. Of course, if you're stuffing more propellant into it, you've got to do something pretty radical elsewhere to make it lighter. Which is what they did. They took the explosive charge out of it. Which sounds weird, right? Like, what's it going to do? Go clang and bounce off? But they changed the shape. They dreamed up this thing that looks like a giant lawn dart. Built-in fins and all. It's cast from tungsten and depleted uranium. The densest metals you can find. It goes real fast and real far. They called it the long-rod penetrator." Duffy glanced at me with her eyelids low and smiled and blushed all at the same time. I smiled back.
    "They changed the name," I said. "Now it's called the APFSDS. I told you they like initials. Armor Piercing Fin Stabilized Discarding Sabot. It's powered by its own little rocket motor, basically. It hits the enemy tank with