The Third Bullet

CHAPTER 1

Baltimore

The sidewalk before him bucked and heaved, blown askew by high winds howling through the night.

Oh, wait. No. Let’s edit that. There was no bucking and heaving. Ditto with the “blown askew” and the “high winds howling through the night.”

It just seemed so to Aptapton, because the winds that toyed with the stability of the sidewalk blew-“howled”-only through his own mind. They were zephyrs of vodka, and they’d substantially loosened his grip on the solidity of the little chunk of earth that lay between the bar he’d just exited and the house where he lived, a few hundred yards ahead.

Aptapton: alcoholic, writer, success, melancholiac, and gun guy, was in a zone that might be called greater than a buzz but less than a full staggering drunk. He was one sheet to the wind, you might say, happyhappyhappyhappy, as three vodka martinis will do to a fellow with only moderate capacity for drink, and what lay ahead, although slightly challenging, didn’t really seem insurmountable. After all, he had to walk only another few feet, cross the street, and then–

Digression. Pause for autobiographical interlude. It’s allowed when under the influence. One thing suggests another, and in this case the suggestion is appropriate.

The street was called Light, and that suggested a kind of hopeful conclusion to the evening. Light as in light of heart, light of spirit, light at end of tunnel, light as in amusing, fey, witty, light as symbol of hope and life. But also: Light as in Light for All, as a famous newspaper, located a mile or so up the very same Light Street, had proclaimed on a daily basis for 175 years or so, twenty-six of which he’d spent in its employ and where his wife to this day toiled.

Yes, he was that James Aptapton, minor local journo celeb who’d gone on to minor fame as a writer for money of hardcover books about gunfights and the stoic heroes who won them, and now he found himself at sixty-five improbably successful (in a small way) and awkwardly pleased to be himself. He had it all: beautiful wife, a couple of mil, a nice house in a fabulous part of town, a minor reputation (enough to take some pleasure in), a grand future, a munificent multibook contract, a really cool project ahead, and a lot of guns.

The reason for the three vodka martinis was liberation, not celebration. His wife was absent, ha ha ha, too bad for her. She was at some newsroom woman thing, birthday party, maybe – why did women take birthdays so seriously, by the way? – and so he’d wandered on his own to the nearby bistro, had a burger with a Bud and then V.1, which weakened his resolve to resist V.2, which shattered his resolve to resist V.3. Fortunately, there’d been no V.4, or he’d be asleep in the men’s room.

Now.

Where was I before digression?

What place is this?

Where am I now?

Ha ha ha ha.

Oh yes: home is the hunter. He. Was. Walking. Home.

The street slanted, then rolled. Ahead, it humped up, then dipped down to permit a view of the valley. It rocked. It rolled. It shook, it rattled, it coiled, it double-bubbled, boiled, and troubled.

He laughed.

Do you find yourself amusing? his wife always asked, and the truth was, yes, he did find himself amusing.

The mood, like the geography, chemically amplified by red potato crushed by kulak descendants, was quite good. That James Aptapton had been recognized. It happened. Rare, but not without precedent for your minor-league non-qual-lit celeb.

“Mr. Aptapton?”

Halfway through V.3, he’d looked up to see an earnest young fellow, possibly the assistant manager.

“I just wanted to say, I’ve read all your books. My dad turned me on to them. I really, really love them.”

“Well,” said Aptapton, “say, thanks so much.”

The young man sat and gushed Aptapton love for a bit, and Aptapton tried to give him a meaningful Aptapton experience. The transaction worked out well for both of them, in fact, and at the bottom of V.3, a pause in the praise gave Aptapton the time to gracefully excuse himself, bid Tom? maybe Jack? possibly Sam? good-bye and make his exit. So his mood was mellow and radiant. He’d cross Light Street here, and only the narrow alley called Churchill lay between himself and horizontality in bed, his destination.

The Russian watched from the stolen black Camaro parked on Light. This looked to be the night. He’d been stalking for three days now, in his patient, professional way, and part of his talent lay in understanding exactly when the arrangements favored him and when they did not.

Thus, a police scanner played out its truncated cop-speak ten-code and laconic locality identifiers, and it suggested no police presence here in the immediate Federal Hill area. Thus, it was late enough that the action in this night-town district had played itself out and the streets, though glistening with dew, were largely empty, and only periodic parties of drunken twentysomethings rolled this way and that. Thus, finally, the target had emerged, functionally reduced by alcohol intake and self-love, and bobbed his way along the street.

The Russian saw a man in jeans and a tweed coat with a pair of writer-like glasses, Trotsky out of Orwell by way of Armani or some such. You saw glasses like that in New York. The man had a round, pleased face, bearded after Hemingway and to disguise jowls, narcissism blasting out of him more powerfully than any other human attribute. Expensive shoes. Nice shoes. A well-turned-out fellow.

Barring the unforeseen arrival of some whimsical force that favors thriller writers above all others in the world, it was probably going to happen tonight. The Russian did not believe in whimsical forces: he believed only in the power of a fast car to break the spine of a poor unsuspecting fool like this one a hundred times out of a hundred times. He had seen it, he had done it, he had the nerve and the cool and the coldness of heart to do such damage without a lot of emotional involvement. He was a professional and well paid.

The target for tonight, joints loosened by the alcohol, managed to get himself across Light Street without falling. He navigated with that overcontrol typical of the drunk. Great forward movement, momentum building, but without the capacity of adaptation; he arrived at where he tended, not at where he aimed, and at the last, lurching moment, he bumbled through a sideways correction, a sort of exaggerated funny-walk bit.

All of this meant nothing to the Russian, who found nothing funny. He noted distances, angles, and surfaces as a way of computing acceleration rates into speed on impact. The Russian prosaically jacked two wires together in the torn-out key unit of the dashboard, and the beast of a car stirred to life. He was not showy or stylized, so there was no gunning of the engine to allow the horses under the hood to roar and the exhaust pipes to bellow steamy toxins. He eased into first, nudged his way into the empty street, and waited just a bit, because he needed at least three seconds of acceleration time in the alley to get to fifty miles per hour, which was the killing impact.

On either side, there was nothing but Baltimore. At the mouth of Churchill, a church to one side and a typical Baltimore row house meant for the miniature people of the 1840s to the other, Aptapton re-aimed himself and pressed onward down the concourse. It was listed as a street in city records but had been constructed as an alley many years ago, its tiny brick dwellings serving as servants’ quarters or backyard administrative units for the larger houses that faced outward to prouder, wider streets. For a hundred years this back way had probably been the province of pig and horse shit commingled with blood and Negro or immigrant sweat, where the invisible servers lived to sustain the opulent ease of those in the big houses. Then it became the inevitable slum, but that condition never quite went terminal, as the dwellings were too cute for demolition. Now, of course, gentrification had come in the form of museum-quaint cobblestones, which gleamed moistly as if at an art director’s bidding, little mock-gaslight streetlamps, lots of gardening and painting and each tiny building essentially remanufactured from the inside out, so that they had become nesting sites for the young urban hip. Aptapton, that Aptapton, began to amuse himself by inventing sexual perversions he imagined were ongoing on either side of Churchill. Then he heard the sound of a car engine.

Agh. This meant he’d have to re-adjust his somewhat sloppily functioning internal gyro and get himself off the cobblestones and onto the little shelf of sidewalk. He heard basso profundo, deep-chest utters, and turned.

He made out the streamlined form of the Camaro one hundred feet away and felt himself seized in its illumination. A friendly type always, he raised a hand and smiled, and indicated that he yielded to superior power and would manfully attempt to arrive upon the threshold of the curb. At the same time the whole thing reminded him of something, and it froze him in place as his mind examined its files.

Finally, it came to him: an image from one of his own books.

Didn’t he do one where the bad guy, some kind of car genius, used Camaros and Chargers and Trans-Ams to take people out? He’d thought he ought to get away from guns for a bit, and so he’d moved on to the high-pro muscle car as weapon of choice. Nobody seemed to like it very much, however. He’d also tried swords in one, to much chagrin. He was a gun guy, so he did best when he stuck to his guns.

Anyway, this was setting up sort of like a scene in Thunder’s Evening, as the one had been called, and he had to laugh (“Are you amused by yourself?”) at the thing at the end of the alley, hazy in the glare of its headlights but sleek and black and damp, the odd refraction of street- and houselights playing magically off its shiny skin, film noir to the very end.

It’s from my id! he thought.

In the next second it accelerated.

It came at a speed he’d never imagined possible, as if it had gone into warp drive, blurring the stars, and well before this information could be processed, he was airborne.

He was airborne.

There was no pain, though the blow he’d been delivered must have been a mighty thud. Again, when he rejoined Earth in a heap of breakage and ruin, there was no pain. He lay askew on the cobblestones, thinking, Oh, she’s going to be so mad at me, because he knew he was in big trouble with his wife.

CHAPTER 2

Idaho

In Cascade, everybody goes to Rick’s. Even Swagger.

He showed up every once in a while, maybe three, four times a month, preceded by myth, isolated by reputation, and cloaked in diffidence. He sat alone, if he came, at the counter, and had a couple of cups of coffee, black. Jeans, old boots, some kind of jacket, and a faded red Razorbacks ball cap. He could have been a drifter or a trucker or a rancher or a gunfighter. The body was rangy, without fat, slightly tense, also radiating signals of damage. He always arrived, if he was to arrive at all, at 5 a.m. with the ranchers. It was said he had trouble sleeping – said, that is, by Swagger watchers, since the man himself spoke hardly a word – and if he was still awake when the sun cracked the edge of the world, he’d drive from his place out on 144 to Rick’s, not so much to join in the community but to reassure himself that community was there.

That was pretty much Rick’s purpose in the general scheme of things. The food wasn’t much – it was primarily a breakfast place whose short-order cook knew every way to wreck an egg and had the gift for the right fusion of crunch, grease, and chew to pan-fried potatoes – and the early risers – who drove the Cascade economy, paid the taxes, hired the Mexicans, guided hunters for a week or so in the fall, and plowed the roads – always stopped there to fuel up for whatever the long day of honest labor held in store. Swagger, though no glad-hander, seemed to like the company, to enjoy the ranch badinage and the talk of Boise State football and the weather complaints, because he knew no fool would come up to him with questions or requests or offers, and that these sinewy gentlemen, themselves joshers but not speech givers, always played by the rules.

As for them, they knew only what they’d heard, though they weren’t sure where they heard it. War hero. Retired marine. Lots of deep-grass stuff in a war that we lost. Supposedly the best shot in the West, or at any rate, a hell of a shot. Gun guy, got a lot of stuff from Midway USA and Brownells. A late-arriving daughter, Japanese by birth, who was the twelve-and-under girls roping champ and seemed born to horseback. Beautiful wife, kept to self, running the barns the family owned in three or was it four states. Business success. Knew of the big world and chose to live in this one. Out of a movie, someone said, and someone else said, Except they don’t make them kinds of movies no more, and everybody laughed and agreed.

That was the easy truce that reigned at Rick’s, and even Rick and his two gals, Shelly and Sam, seemed okay with it. That is, until the Chinese woman showed up.

Well, possibly she wasn’t Chinese. She was Asian, of an indefinite age somewhere between young and not young, with a strong nose and dark, smart eyes that could pierce steel if she so desired. Though she seldom showed it, she had a smile that could break hearts and change minds. She was short, rather busty, and looked pretty damned tough for someone who was probably soft in all the right places.

She showed at 5, took a seat at the counter, ordered coffee, and read something on her Kindle for two hours. At 7, she left. Nice tipper. Pleasant, distant, not an outreacher, but at the same time completely unfazed by the masculine brio of the 5 a.m. ranch crowd at Rick’s.

She came every day for two weeks, never missing, never reaching out, maintaining her silence and her secrecy. It didn’t take the fellows long to figure out that none of them was of interest to a crafty, contained beauty, so she had to be there for Swagger. She was stalking him. A reporter, a book writer, a Hollywood agent, somebody who saw a way to make some bucks from whatever secrets Swagger’s war mask of a face concealed without murmur or tremor. Yet when he came in, she made no move toward him, nor he – he noticed her instantly, as he noticed everything instantly – toward her. They sat with an empty stool between them at the counter, each drinking black coffee, while she read and he ruminated or remembered or whatever it was he did when he came in.

This ritual continued for another week or two, and it consumed the Cascade gossip circuits, such as they were. Finally, almost as if to satisfy the town gabbers instead of any genuine impulse of his own, he walked over to her. “Ma’am?”

“Yes?” she said, looking up. In the light, he saw that she was quite beautiful.

“Ma’am, it seems the fellows here believe you’re in town to have a chat with a man named Swagger. I’m Swagger.”

“Hello, Mr. Swagger.”

“I wanted to spare you any more trouble, because I imagine you’ve got better places than Rick’s in Cascade, Idaho, to spend your time. I have essentially retired from the world, and if you’re here to see me, I have to disappoint you. I don’t see anyone. My wife, my daughters, and my son, that’s about it. I just sit on a rocking chair and watch the sun move across the sky. I don’t do a thing no more. My wife does the work. So whatever it is you want, I’m sparing you the time by telling you it’s probably not going to happen. And this is more than I’ve said in a year, so I better stop while I’m ahead.”

“That’s fine, Mr. Swagger,” she said. “Time isn’t the issue. I’ll stay years if I have to. I’m in this for the long haul.”

He didn’t know what to say in response. He just knew he had no need whatsoever to go back to what he called, in the argot of that war so many years ago, The World. Each time he went, it seemed to cost him. The last time it had cost him a woman he’d allowed himself to care about, and he did not relish a revisit to that grief, at least during waking hours. He had enough to worry about with two daughters and a son, and at sixty-six, with a steel ball for a hip, enough scar tissue across his raggedy old body to show up on satellites, and so many memories of men dying, he needed no more adventures, no more losses, no more grief. He was afraid of them.

Then she said, “I know about you and what you did in the war. It seems to be a profession that prizes patience. You sit, you wait. You wait, you wait, you wait. Isn’t that right?”

“Waiting is a part of it, yes ma’am.”

“Well, I can do nothing to impress you. I can’t shoot, ride, climb, or fight. No book I’ve read would amaze you, no accomplishment I’ve achieved would register on your radar screen. But I will show you patience. I will wait you out. This week, the next, this month, the next, on and on. I will wait you out, Mr. Swagger. I will impress you with my patience.”

It was a terrific answer, one he’d never counted on. He let no emotion cross the Iron Age shield that was his face. Possibly he blinked those lizard eyes, or ran tongue over dried lips, as he was a dry old coot, wary and contained, who made noise when he moved because one adventure or another had left him with a limp, and even if the wind and the sun had turned his face the color of Navajo pottery, his eyes had somehow bled themselves of color and were reptilian irises, untainted by empathy.

“Yes ma’am,” he said. “So we’ll wait each other out.”

It took over three weeks. Each time he showed, he thought she’d be gone. But there she was, tucked away in the corner, not looking up, her face illuminated by the glow of the reading machine or whatever it was. He skipped for ten days straight and assumed that would surely drive her away. It did not.

Finally, halfway into the fourth week, she went to her rented car in the general cloud of pickups pulling out for the day’s first duty station and found his truck, a black Ford F-150, next to hers. He lounged against its fender, ropy and lean in his baseball cap, a high-plains drifter, a Shane, a truck driver off the interstate.

“All right,” he said. “If you were in this for money, you’d be long gone. If you’re crazy, the jabbering of those old men in this joint would have sent you off to the nut bin. What I’m getting is some kind of stubborn in you that usually equals high purpose. You win. I’ll give you what you want, as much as I can and stay my own man.”

“It’s not much,” she said. “No, no money, no contracts, no angles. I’m not from a big flashy city, just a blue-collar rust bucket called Baltimore. I want your judgment, that’s all. You know things I don’t. I want to put something before you, and then I want you to tell me if it’s anything or if it’s craziness, coincidence, whatever. That’s all, except I forgot the best part: it’s very dull and boring.”

“All right,” he said, “you have earned the right to bore me. I can be bored, it’s not a problem. Can you meet me at the T.G.I.F.’s off the interstate in Iron Springs tomorrow at two? It’s a craphole, but it’s crowded and loud and nobody’ll notice a thing. We’ll drink coffee and talk. I chose that place because I don’t want the old goats in this place all giddy over seeing us.”

“Fair enough, Mr. Swagger. I’ll see you there.”

She was punctual and found him sitting in a booth in the rear of the gaudy place, whose cheesy cheerfulness seemed in counterpoint to his grave countenance and all the hollows and planes of his tight old face, with its deltas of fissure extending from each eye like the broken cataracts of an ancient river of kings. Or maybe, sans the warrior romance, he was just a beat-to-hell old guy. Meanwhile, the kind of citizen who defines the interstate as freedom and paradise swirled and bobbed through the busy place, raising clamor, eating ice cream, yelling at children, and exhibiting all the discontents of motorized civilization that one can manage.

“Ma’am? Say, I don’t even have a name for you.”

She sat across from him. “My name is Jean Marquez. I’m Filipino by heritage, born and raised here. I am a journalist by profession, though this is not about a story, and I’m not working for my newspaper. I’m the daughter of two doctors, fifty-five years old, and a widow.”

“I’m sorry to hear of your loss, Ms. Marquez. I’ve lost some very close people and understand the hurting.”

“I thought you might. Anyhow, you should call me Jean. Everybody does. My husband was named James Aptapton. Does that name mean anything?”

“Hmm,” he said, and somehow, yes, it did. His mind and face fogged in search, and finally, he said, “I’m coming up with some kind of writer. Wrote about snipers? Knew guns, is that right? Don’t believe I ever met the fellow or read his books, but I’d run into the name here and there. I’d get asked, now that I remember, if I was some hero he wrote about, Billy Don Trueheart, something like that?”

“Something like that. Yes, Jim was a gun guy. He was one of those men who loved guns, and if you lived with him for twenty years, as I did, you got used to guns everywhere. He eventually got wealthy enough to spend seventeen thousand dollars on a Thompson machine gun. If you want to rent a Thompson machine gun, let me know. I can let you have one at an affordable daily rate.”

“I’ll bear that in mind, but I hope my Thompson days are long over.”

“Anyhow, the guns everywhere, the gun magazines, the biographies of people like Elmer Keith and John M. Browning, the dead animal heads, all that, that was who he was, and I knew that going in and accepted it. His politics, never, but the gun thing, it was okay because he was also funny about it, as he was funny about everything. He was also kind, and even when he became successful, he never turned into an asshole and stayed true and decent to his kids and my family and his mother and the people he knew. It was never about getting to the table where the cool kids sat. It was about buying guns, drinking vodka, and making people laugh. Everyone who knew him is missing him and will for a long time.”

“Is this about his death?”

“Yes. The idiot went to a bar one night and had three instead of the allowed one martini. He walked home, reflexes all messed up, and managed to get himself killed by a hit-and-run driver. It was merciful, they say, he went fast.”

“I’m sorry. Did they catch the driver?”

“No. That’s part of the issue. It seems that over two thousand people a year are killed by hit-and-runs, and about ninety-eight percent of those cases are solved. There are those that aren’t, and it is remotely possible that he was murdered. I know, I know, it was probably some kid high on meth in a hopped-up car who saw an old guy staggering down the street and stomped on the pedal. For kicks, for laughs, for the warm and fuzzy memories, I don’t know. But. . maybe not.”

“I have had experience with a man who killed by car. It’s more than possible. Driven by a professional, it can be a lethal instrument. I suppose you’re going to tell me why this could be a murder.”

“I am. We are at the boring part. Maybe you’d better pour yourself a cup of coffee.”

“I like your husband. I like you. It’s fine. Go on, try to bore me.”

“As I say, it’s a story in which almost nothing happens. It has no vivid characters, no sudden turns of fate, no dramatic reversals, no humor, no drama. It’s about something that happened in a workplace a long time ago.”

“So far, so good.”

“It can’t be verified. It’s hazy in parts. It might be a hoax, though it’s so dreary, I can’t imagine how anyone could gain anything off it. I don’t have the exact dates. It was first told in a letter, then years later in another letter, then years after that in a third letter. I’ve read none of the letters, and the passage of time between each installment suggests the erosion of failing memory. On top of that, my only experience with it was as told to me by my husband, and I must confess I didn’t pay much attention, so my own memory is questionable as well. All in all, as evidence of a crime, it’s a pretty pathetic deal.”

“It must linger?”

“It does indeed linger. People can’t quite put it aside. They think they have, and go about their lives, and then it comes back in the middle of the night and pokes them awake. It did that to the three letter writers and to my late husband. It did it to me enough times that I found out about a Mr. Bob Lee Swagger and tracked him to a flyspeck diner in a dying wide-spot in the road called Cascade, Idaho, and invested close to two months in earning an audience with him.”

“The lingering part is very interesting. So far, you’ve got me hooked.”

“We start with a young man, a recent graduate of an engineering school in Dallas, Texas. The time is unknown, but I’m guessing mid-seventies. He’s smart, ambitious, hardworking, decent. He wants to join a construction firm and engineer giant buildings. The first job he gets is entry-level, for an elevator contractor.”

“Elevators?”

“Right. Not exactly the glamour trade. But elevators, which we all take for granted, are heavily engineered. That is, they are overde-signed, overmaintained, overregulated, and no one involved with them takes them for granted. His firm installs them and maintains them on contract so they can pass their yearly examinations and don’t drop ten people fifty stories.”

“Sounds reasonable.”

“It’s hard, crummy work. The shafts and ‘engine’ rooms, as they call the motor and pulley devices that make them run, are dark, poorly ventilated, and not air-conditioned. Even more so back then. The space is cramped, and it involves a lot of twisting and bending to get access. The work is intensive and highly pressurized, because the building managers hate it when they have to shut down the elevators and the tenants hate it and everybody hates it. Are you getting a picture?”

“I am.”

“This young man and his crew are in the engine room on the roof of a particular building, and they’ve set up lights, and they’re measuring cable wear, gear wear, electrical motor wear, lubricating, trying to work fast so they can get the box, as they call it, back in service. It’s hot, crowded, and except for the light beams, dark. Not pleasant, not happy, and suddenly-kaboom.”

“Kaboom?”

“One of the workers, maybe resting, maybe backing away to make room for someone else, maybe doing whatever you do in an elevator engine room, bumps into something on the wall, and there’s a loud crash and the sound of stuff falling to the ground, a big cloud of acrid dust, everybody’s coughing and wheezing. All the flashlights go onto it, and they discover that he’s bumped into a shelf on the wall, and for whatever reason – the screws rusted or came out, the brick or stucco or whatever gave way, the metal itself sheared – when he jostled it, it collapsed, dumping its pile of whatever was stored there to the ground. That’s the action scene, by the way. The shelf falling, that’s as exciting as it gets.”

“My heart’s beating so fast, I can hardly stand it.”

“Here’s the really boring part. They figure out what’s wrong with the shelf, and somehow get it remounted, and start restacking the stuff on it. The stuff is carpet remnants. That is, the lobby of the building has a big carpet, and they ended up with remnants that they had to keep around for patching or whatever, so they had a shelf in the engine room and someone decided that would be a good out-of-the-way place to store the remnants.”

“Sounds pretty top-secret to me.”

“And someone says, ‘Hey, look at this.’ Be cool if it was a rifle, huh? Or a box of ammo, a telescopic sight, a spy radio, something really James Bond?”

“That would be very interesting.”

“Sorry. It’s just a coat. I told you it was a boring story.”

“It ain’t without interest. Please go on.”

“It turns out to be a man’s overcoat, XL, tan gabardine, fairly high-quality, in extremely good condition. Maybe almost new. It had been methodically folded and slid into the pile of carpet remnants in the engine room sometime in the past. Again, no dates, no specifics, nothing.”

“I’ve got it,” said Swagger.

“They unfold it and immediately make a discovery. It stinks. Unfolding it puts out some kind of chemical stench, very unpleasant. Flashlights go onto it. It seems that the left breast wears a rather gaudy petro or chemical stain, and even now, who knows how many years later, the odor of that stain is powerful. It hasn’t gone away. Instead of finding a free coat, they’ve found a fixer-upper, which would involve dry cleaning, which might or might not get the stain and the smell out, and no one is interested, and so it goes into the trash. It is thrown out. It disappears. It is gone forever. End of story. Not much of a story, is it?”

“No, but I give you it’s got some moments,” Bob said. Somewhere in his rat-pointed tactical brain, he was beginning to play with them. Something had been subtly provoked. Dallas. Abandoned overcoat. Strange smell and stain.

“Okay,” she said. “The Engineer is promoted, and he leaves the firm and goes to that big construction outfit. Again, he is promoted, because he’s very intelligent and hardworking. He’s the type that built America. He becomes a partner. He marries his high school girlfriend, they have three beautiful daughters and move to the suburb where partners live. He joins a country club. He becomes venerable. His daughters marry wonderful men. I’m actually making up the details, but you get the picture. One of the daughters becomes engaged to the son of a rancher, another prosperous fellow. The Rancher and his wife invite the Engineer and the wife out for a get-to-know-you weekend and barbecue. They’re sitting there in the big paneled living room looking out the picture window to the swimming pool and the white horse fences and the green meadows, and the Engineer notices something: dead animals all over the place. Turns out the Rancher is a hunter. He’s been all over the world. Lions and tigers and bears. Ibexes and sables and kudus. They’re all drinking highballs and having a good old time and the Rancher says, ‘Say, Don, care to see the shop?’

“Don nods and off they go. They walk into a big gun place. Guns, heads, safes, benches, targets, photos of men with dead animals, maybe an old Marilyn calendar, tools, all that, the sort of thing my husband had, although I’m guessing this Rancher kept his a lot neater than my husband did. And whammo, the Engineer is hit by an odor. It’s an old, old odor. I don’t know if you know it, but psychologists consider olfactory cues the strongest reminders. A smell can take you back to a time and place and re-create cues to all the other senses. So suddenly, you’re back where you were when you first hit that smell, and of course, Don is back in the engine room of the elevator in that building in Dallas thirty-odd years ago.”

“GI or Hoppe’s 9?” Bob asked.

“Hoppe’s,” she said. “Yes. Barrel solvent. Chemical cleaning fluid especially for guns. Been around since the twenties. That’s what Don smells in his new pal’s shop, and he realizes that’s what he smelled all those years ago in the building that I of course didn’t name.”

“You’re going to tell me it was the Texas Book Depository?”

“If only. No, it’s the building across Houston Street from the Texas Book Depository. It’s called the Dal-Tex Building. It was there in 1963 too. Dal-Tex doesn’t mean Dallas, Texas, but Dallas Textiles, as it was the headquarters of the Dallas wholesale garment industry. Actually, Abraham Zapruder’s office was there, along with a hundred other offices. Nothing particularly special except that it did offer close to the same angle and elevation down Elm Street next to Dealey Plaza that our friend Lee Harvey Oswald used. You can see why it lingers.”

“I can,” said Bob, trying to conjure the structure from a rush of image memories of Dealey Plaza, that triangle of grass at the heart of American darkness. He got nothing, no vision, no sense of place.

“It’s figured in a few of the thousand conspiracy theories. I checked into them; none of them are that interesting or convincing. Someone claims that a photo shows a rifle on a tripod on the fireplace, but it’s just shadows. There were some ‘arrests’ after the building was closed down a few minutes after the shooting, but nothing came of them. Some people claim without evidence that it was one of the nine or is it twelve shooting sites that the CIA, Sears, Roebuck, the Canadian Air Force, and Proctor and Gamble used in their conspiracy. All in all, it’s not much.”

Bob nodded.

“But it lingers,” she continued. “For the Engineer, particularly. He can’t get it out of his mind. You see why, don’t you?”

“The Hoppe’s suggests that someone had need to clean a rifle, which suggests the presence of a rifle. And you can assume the juice was somehow spilled or leaked onto the coat during the cleaning process. But the coat was carefully hidden, as if whoever had spilled the Hoppe’s, with its chemical smell, didn’t want it exposed to the public eye or nose. Lots of folks in Texas would recognize it right away, including most policemen. It was the universal gun cleaner then. All this could have happened on or around November 22, 1963. There’s your lingering. It puts a rifle where there ain’t been one. But it is thin. It’s real thin.”

“It gets thinner. A few more years pass. The Engineer doesn’t know what to do about it. He’s no dummy; he gets how thin it is too, way too thin to take to law enforcement. Then he reads a book. The book is called Shootout on Pennsylvania. It was written by my husband and a friend. It’s the story of an assassination attempt on Harry Truman in 1950 that ended up in a gunfight in the middle of the street in the middle of the day in the middle of downtown Washington, right across from the White House. Two men dead, three wounded. Almost totally forgotten. Anyhow, the Engineer reads the book. He reads in particular about a Secret Service agent named Floyd Barring, who was in command of the watch at Blair House, where the fight happened, and was considered the hero. He shot one of the bad guys in the head and took him down and maybe saved Harry Truman’s life. The Engineer finds from the book that Floyd is still alive and that, thirteen years after being a hero in Washington, he was the agent in charge of the Secret Service advance party for the Dallas trip, and was in Dallas for the assassination and testified before the Warren Commission and all that. The Engineer takes a shine to Floyd, who seems upright, decent, hardworking, committed. Since Floyd is retired yet invested in the assassination, he seems like a candidate to hear the Engineer’s tale. So here’s the first letter: the Engineer writes to Floyd and details everything I have laid out to you.”

“You never read the letter, however.”

“Not even close. I’m telling you more or less what I later heard from Jim when I wasn’t listening hard.”

Swagger nodded, seeing the old agent getting the thick packet from an unknown person in Dallas and slowly considering its contents. “What did this Secret Service guy do?”

“For whatever reason, nothing. In fact, he probably threw it out. Crazy Kennedy bullshit, you know the drill. He was sick of it, as he’d figured in some theories too, and he didn’t like it. He was also in ill health, living in a geriatric apartment in Silver Spring, mourning the death of his wife, and knew he didn’t have much time.”

“I see.”

“Yet it lingered. He couldn’t put it out of his mind. A few years after that, he writes a letter – half a letter – to my husband. He never finishes it. He never sends it. Maybe he thinks better of it. Who knows? Anyway, he dies. And that would seem to be that. No more lingering. The lingering is over. But then: his daughter finds the letter a few years later. So she sends it on to Jim. So years after the coat was found, years after the identity of the smell was discovered, years after it was communicated to a retired Secret Service agent, years after he died, courtesy of his daughter, it was sent to my husband.”

“And he sees the possibilities?”

“More than most. He’s looking for a project. He has a contract that calls for a book a year, he’s just finished one, but there’s no rest for the wicked, and when he gets the half-written letter that Floyd almost sent him concerning the lost letter the Engineer sent to Floyd, he sees something. He spends a few days researching, looking at maps, reading books or at least examining them, and then he has some kind of eureka moment. He claims he’s solved the JFK assassination. I suspect vodka played a part. It turns out he means he has an idea no one else has had. And he has to go to Dallas. And so he goes to Dallas.”

“Was he successful?”

“He talked to a bunch of people, I think he got into Dal-Tex, he came back very excited. He started working like a madman. One day a week later, he goes off to a bar for a drink and ends up with a broken back and pelvis in an alley.”

“You think he was killed because he was looking into a certain idea about JFK’s death?”

“I haven’t said that. I’ve spoken only in facts, and the fact is that now I’m the world’s sole possessor of the story. And it lingers. I can’t get it out of my head, and the connection between it and Jim’s immediate death by possible homicide won’t let me sleep at night. I have to do every last thing to make sure that the story is properly processed. Someone has to deal with it, judge it, assess it, contextualize it, someone who knows this stuff and has worked in this world. I have nominated you for that high honor. So now I ask the question I came all this way for. Is it anything?”

He let out a large breath.

“What does that signify?” she asked. “You think I’m an idiot? The whole thing is nonsense? What a colossal waste of time?”

“No. I can see how it provokes. I ain’t denying that. And I’m not saying I’m a hundred percent Warren Commission lone-gunman guy. I haven’t looked at it hard enough, but I do think, like you, that a lot of the ‘theories’ are stuff people dreamed up to make a buck. I also think that the thing has been looked at so much by so many people for so long that it’s highly unlikely there’s anything left unfound.”

“Fair enough.”

“Let me put it before you in a different way, all right? I think you’re missing something, and I think your husband missed it and Floyd missed it, all the way back to the Engineer. That thing you all missed is Texas. Texas is gun country. You may have to explain why you have a gun in Baltimore, but you sure don’t in Texas. Everyone has a gun in Texas. They have ’em to wear to barbecues or the opera or the swim meet. Nobody blinks an eye, and that was especially true down there then, before JFK. Nobody thought a thing about a gun. It just was, that’s all. The presence of a gun in that building isn’t remarkable. In fact, it’s nothing. I can think of a hundred reasons for a gun in that building other than killing a president. Maybe some boys were heading out for deer season straight from work. Save time, get there opening-day morning. They brought their rifles in, and one of them knew his needed cleaning, so he does the job. Nobody says a thing because it ain’t remarkable. He leans the gun in a corner and it rubs up against somebody’s coat. When that guy gets his coat, he sees it’s ruined, it goes into the wastebasket, and later that night the janitor finds it and decides to scavenge it. He hangs it up to dry out, but Hoppe’s being powerful, the stink never does go away. So he stuffs it somewhere, meaning to check it out later, and forgets about it. Years later, the elevator people discover it. That could have happened not just for deer season but in pheasant season too, as they kill a lot of them birds down there, and doves and pigeons and anything that flies. So you have found the suggestion of a gun in a building in Texas, and it surprises you only because you don’t know guns or Texas.”

“I see,” she said.

“Ma’am – Jean, if I may – you’ve got what the Marine Corps would call intelligence that doesn’t rise to the actionable level. It doesn’t carry enough meaning to be acted on. There are too many other possibilities here for anyone to do anything about it. My best advice is to congratulate yourself for following up on your duty to your husband and then go back to your life. I think your husband would have found that out in time too. Maybe he could do something with his discovery if it were a fiction book, but I don’t see it as having any real meaning in the world, and it sure didn’t have anything to do with his death. Sorry to be so blunt, but you didn’t come all this way and invest all this time for sugarcoating.”

“No, I didn’t, Mr. Swagger. I believe you’ve set me straight.”

“I hope I helped, ma’am. And I’m very sorry about your husband. Maybe by the time you get back, they will have caught the boy.”

“Maybe so.”

“Let me walk you to your car, and we’ll get you out of this godforsaken place.”

“Thank you.”

They both rose as he peeled off a few bills for the waitress and headed out to her Fusion.

“I guess we’ll never know,” she said as she got to her car, “who ran over the mystery man with a bicycle.”

He was only half listening at this time, trying to sneak a look at his watch to see what time it was and how soon he could get back, because he’d promised to help Miko on her low-roping skills and–

“I’m sorry,” he said. “What did you say?”

“Oh, the back of the coat, it had a smear on it that appeared to represent a tread. The Engineer thought it could have been from an English bike, you know, thin-wheeled. It was an impression, about an inch long, where it looked like a tread mark had been printed. That’s all. A minor point, I forgot to–”

“Do you have a list of the people your husband visited?”

“I have his notebook. It’s hard to read, but it does have some names and addresses there. Why, what is–”

“I have to set some things up. It’ll take me a week. I want you to go home and find that notebook and FedEx it to me. If he had computer files on the Dallas trip or notepapers, get me that stuff too. I’ll get down there as soon as I’m set up.”

“Do you want to borrow the tommy gun?”

“No, not yet.”

“You’re not joking, are you?”

“No ma’am.”

“Do you want me to help defray the expenses? I mean, I seem to be wealthy now, and I–”

“No ma’am,” said Swagger. “This one’s on me.”

CHAPTER 3

A man sat on a park bench at the corner of Houston and Elm, under a spread of aged oak trees, before some kind of odd rectangular white cement ceremonial pool that appeared to be full of Scope. Around him, la vie touristique occurred, a subspecies of human behavior mandating that small knots of oddly dressed people congregated here and there, with cameras inadequate to the scale of the urban space, called Dealey, which they commanded. It was all very strange. Sometimes a particularly brave one would dash onto Elm Street to stand, during a brief traffic interruptus, at one of two X’s that marked the spots on which a man had been shot to death. Meanwhile, homeless men roamed, some to beg, some to sell for five bucks a rag called The Conspiracy Chronicles that promised the latest dish on 11-22-63.

Directly across Elm from the man stood a box of bricks seven stories tall, undistinguished but famous, called the Texas Book Depository. Despite its banality, it had one of the most recognizable facades in the world, especially a corner of the sixth floor where the ambusher had lurked fifty years ago. The sky was bold Texas blue, and a slight wind blew east to west across the territory, which was surrounded by the churn of cars and trucks as they cascaded down Houston and made the tricky turn to the left down Elm for the access to the Stemmons Freeway just beyond the triple underpass. People had things to do, places to go, and for most Dallasites, the tragedy of Dealey Plaza had long since faded. Swagger sat alone, but in his mind, it was 1963, 24/7.

He looked this way and that, up and down, around, down streets, at his shoes, at his fingertips, and he tried to remember. It had been a day like this one, cloudless after a threat of early rain, the sky as blue as a movie star’s eyes. At least that’s what the papers said. He himself had been asleep at the time, half a world away on an island called Okinawa where, as a seventeen-year-old lance corporal, he’d just made the battalion rifle team and would spend the next three weeks cradling a ton of Garand on a flat, dry firing range, trying to put holes in black circles six hundred yards or so off. He didn’t know a goddamn thing about anything and wouldn’t for years.

But at 12:29 p.m., back in Dallas, the president’s motorcade turned right off of Main Street and proceeded one block up Houston, at the northern boundary of the triangular open park that was Dealey Plaza. Now he saw it. Lincoln limo, long black boat of a car. Two up front, driver and agent, two lower, Governor Connally and his wife, then the regal couple, the blessed, the charismatic, John F. Kennedy in his suit and his wife, Jackie, in pink, both waving at the close-by crowds.

The car reached Elm and cranked left. It had to access the Stemmons Freeway, which could only be entered from Elm. It was a 120-degree turn, not a 90-degree turn, so the driver, a Secret Service agent named Greer, had to slow down considerably as he maneuvered the heavy vehicle around the corner. Speeding up, he passed by some trees and continued on a slight downward angle along Elm Street. Immediately to his right was the seven-story building known as the Texas Book Depository, the undistinguished pile of plain brickwork that now loomed over Swagger. He ran his eyes up its edge and halted them at the corner of the sixth floor and saw. . only a window.

On that day, at 12:30 p.m., as the car passed by the trees, a sound that virtually everyone agreed was a gunshot was heard. It appeared to have struck nobody directly, but at least one witness, a man named Tague, reported being stung by what can reasonably be assumed was a fragment, as the bullet broke apart when it hit the curbstone behind the car or a branch in the trees. Bullets do this; it is not strange or remarkable. Within six or so seconds, a second bullet was fired, and most people there assumed it came from the looming depository. That bullet hit the president in the back, near the neck, tumbled through his body, emerged from his throat, nicking his tie, and flew on to hit John Connally horizontally. It penetrated his body entirely too, hit and broke his wrist, and thudded into but did not penetrate his thigh. It was found later that afternoon on a gurney at the hospital. This was the “magic bullet” that many claimed could not have done what this one did.

The third bullet was the head shot, a few seconds later (how many would be legendarily unclear) delivered at a distance of 263 feet from the sixth floor of the Texas Book Depository. It hit the president high in the back of the head on a downward angle. It appears to have disintegrated or detonated, as the few traces of its existence are controversial at best. It blew a large chunk of brain out of the skull, exiting in a burst of vaporized material that jetted or exploded from the right side of the head.

Chaos ensued. The limousine raced off to the hospital, with its cargo of two gravely wounded men and their women. Police moved, perhaps not quickly enough, to cordon off the building from which the shots seemed to have been fired. In time, after a roll was taken, police learned that an employee named Lee Harvey Oswald was missing, though he had been seen there that day and was even confronted by a police officer in the lunchroom right after the shooting.

A description of Oswald was broadcast, and some miles away, in Dallas’s Oak Cliff section, an officer named J. D. Tippit spotted a man who matched that description. Tippit stopped and called him over. He got out of his car and was shot four times by the suspect and died on the spot.

The suspect walked away, but concerned citizens followed him; others noted his odd behavior and knew that suspicions were flying around Dallas about the Kennedy assassin. They noted that he sneaked into a movie theater, and the police were called. Thus was Lee Harvey Oswald arrested.

Meanwhile, at the Book Depository, officers found a “sniper’s nest” of book cartons arranged at the site of the sixth-floor (NE) corner window, three ejected 6.5 mm Mannlicher-Carcano casings, and a hundred feet away, at the site of the sole stairway off the floor, a surplus Mannlicher-Carcano Model 38 carbine with a cheap and poorly attached Japanese-made scope. The rifle had been cocked and carried a live cartridge in its chamber.

It soon proved that Oswald’s fingerprints were on the rifle and on the boxes in the sniper’s nest, that he had carried a suspicious bag of “curtain rods” into the depository that morning, that he had ordered, under pseudonyms, both the Carcano rifle and the .38 Special S&W revolver used in the Tippit slaying. Moreover, he was a notorious malcontent with “revolutionary tendencies,” a self-proclaimed Communist, a former defector, a mediocre marine (accounting for his shooting skill), a wife beater, and an all-around creep.

He never stood trial because he was murdered by Jack Ruby on the morning of November 24, 1963, as he was being led to an armored car for transfer to a more secure holding area.

Those seemed to be the facts which, after much haggling, all had come to believe and accept. Swagger believed them and accepted them – that is, until his chat with Jean Marquez.

Her words touched one of his own memories, not a public memory at all but a private, long-buried one. He had been stalked once by a certain team of men in his long and turbulent past, and the smudge she had reported on the back of a coat had a meaning for him that it would have for no other man on earth. Amazing that it had, in some form and after all these years, reached him.

“I can’t believe I’m here,” said someone, and Swagger was pulled from his time travels to see a friend, younger, better dressed, a kind of Dallas up-and-coming executive type in a worsted Hickey Freeman suit, approaching on a beeline to sit next to him.

“We put the dumbest intern on the JFK squad,” the man said as he shook Swagger’s hand and dispensed with the how-are-you bullshit. “He fields the ten or twenty calls we get each day from people who’ve solved the case and now know for sure the Gypsies were involved with the Vatican and Japanese imperial intelligence.”

Nick Memphis was now the special agent in charge of the Dallas field office of the FBI. In most instances it would have been a plum assignment, but for him it was a last stop on the way out. His career had topped out when a new director took over the Bureau, heard he was intimately involved with the tragic incident at a huge mall in Minnesota, and wanted him far from headquarters. An assistant, some acid-blooded corpse named Mr. Renfro, had handled the delicate task of prying Nick from his deputy directorship and reassigning him to fieldwork in an office that was big and produced more than its share of cases closed but didn’t need radical shaking up or bold new leadership, just a dozing caretaker to sign the requisitions, approve the budget, and make sure the squads were adequately staffed until he retired.

Swagger didn’t say a thing. He knew he’d shaken up his pal with a strange request a few days ago and that Nick had to vent. He let the younger man flail away, unburden himself, get it all out.

It was typical Swagger, laconic and detached and seemingly camouflaged even if he wore a suit, an off-the-rack khaki rag that resembled a grocery bag on a scarecrow. He had one leg cranked awkwardly over the knee of the other, showing a beat-to-hell Nocona, and looked younger sitting than walking, because when he walked, the vibrations of several competing wound-deficient parts of him turned his progress into a slow and uncertain shuffle. You winced for the pain that hip had to cause him and wondered why the old coot was too stubborn to take painkillers. At least he wasn’t wearing that goddamn faded Razorbacks cap.

“I can’t believe I wasted a Justice Department witness protection identity on you,” Nick fumed. “Who do you think you are, Mark Lane? It’s over. Oswald did it. Nobody else. That’s what all the sensible research shows, that’s what the latest computer re-creations show, that’s what all the House panels concluded. Only fruitcakes and vegetarians believe in a conspiracy. Man, if it gets out that I bought in to this kind of scheme, Renfro will have my ass on a clothesline by Wednesday.”

“I appreciate your kindness,” Swagger finally said. “And no, I ain’t gone insane. I think my mind is working normally. Slow, as usual, but normal.”

Nick made a sound that expressed frustration. “Man,” he said, “I should never try to outguess you. JFK! Never in a million years would I guess you’d tumble into that slime pit.”

“If it helps, and you have to justify it” – the secret identity didn’t require formal computer paperwork and headquarters approval, which could be penetrated by hackers, only the okay of the senior bureau field officer, that is, Nick himself – “you can tell them you took a flier on a murder investigation. Fellow came to Dallas, your neck of the woods, went home to Baltimore, and got himself killed under circumstances that look very much like a professional hit.”

“Murder isn’t in our jurisdiction,” Nick said grumpily. “That’s a local issue.”

“True, but the wheelman traveled from somewhere to Baltimore to do the job. Maybe from Dallas. We know that because there can’t be but two or three professional car killers in the world at any one time, and they ain’t known to hang out in Baltimore.”

“You don’t even know it was a pro. It could have been a kid on meth.”

“I saw the Baltimore report. There was a witness, a girl walking a dog. She was observant. He accelerated clean through the hit and kept on a line afterward, without a waver or a wobble, then took a hard left at speed and was out of the neighborhood in about three seconds flat, without one squeal of brakes, one skid mark, one spinout or dent. That’s professional driving, even if nobody in Baltimore figured it out. If he went from anywhere to Baltimore, he’s your baby, and when you’re done with him on interstate violations, crossing state lines to commit a crime, five to eight, you hand him to the Baltimore prosecutor and he goes down for the long one and rots out in their pen.”

It was hardly enough, Nick knew. Murders were a dime a dozen. He tried to spin it enough to make friends with it. He came up with: contract killings were rare, and a good bust on some flashy mechanic from the Dark Side might be a good career feather, even if Mr. Renfro had knocked the cap off his head. Nice to go out taking down some pro kill jockey with a flashy resume. Maybe if the guy was hard-core enough and the evidence was strong enough – Swagger was good at digging up evidence – they might get an HRT team to go in hard and cap his ass and save everybody the hassle of a trial. The press loved it when HRT whacked genuine bad guys. It was so commando-chic.

“If you have any interaction with local or fed LE, don’t you mention the JFK angle. Not a word. It’s straight interstate to commit a crime. I didn’t want a local player, so I got an undercover who’d worked with the bureau before and that I knew and trusted. That’s the game. Who are you this time, by the way?”

“I seem to be one John ‘Jack’ Brophy, a retired mining engineer from Boise. I did some counterchecking against myself, and those boys did this one real good. You don’t find good work like that just anywhere these days.”

“The program was designed to keep Mafia snitches alive long enough to testify, then incentivize the possibility of a new life away from the Mob, although they usually revert. Putting one together is expensive and time-consuming work, and it requires a big payoff to make it worth the time and effort. That’s why I hate to waste it on somebody who isn’t named Vito.”

“Well, if it makes you happy, call me Vito.”

“Give me your plan, Vito.”

“I have the victim’s notebook. It ain’t much, because his handwriting is so awful that I can’t read most of it. It’s got his schedule and his appointments. I know exactly where he went and who he talked to and the issues he raised. I’ll follow that same path. Maybe someone will try to smoke me. Then we’ll know we have something.”

“Jesus, that’s it? You, sixty-six years old with a hip that hasn’t worked in ten years, are going to play the tethered goat? What on earth makes you think you can match it up with a pro forty years younger and walk away?”

“If it comes to guns, I’ll put ninety-nine out of a hundred in a hole in the ground to this day.”

“Are you packing?”

“Not yet. If I pick up cues that I’m in someone’s crosshairs, I have a .38 Super and three mags of straight hardball stashed in my room at the Adolphus. I figure if I’m shooting, I’m shooting through windshield glass or door panels, so I need speed and strength, not expansion.”

“That stuff ricochets like crazy.”

“I know. I’ll be careful.”

“All right. This is how it has to work. You call the number I give you every morning and report your sked and plans for that day. If I can, I’ll put a backup team on you to make certain no one else is on your tail. If someone is, I’ll call you on the cell I’m going to give you, and we’ll set up our own ambush. I don’t have to tell you this as a friend, but as the federal officer who’s running you, I am obligated to do so: No cowboy shit. Shoot only when shot at or your life is in danger. I would so much prefer if there was no shooting, not because I think you’ll miss, but because one of them might, and with my luck, he’ll hit the orphaned violin prodigy on his way to accept the Nobel Peace Prize. You keep me informed, Brother Brophy, or I’ll have to pull you in.”

“I always play by the rules.”

“No, you never play by the rules, and my career has benefited from it to no end. If you say this ultimately might have to do with something we nearly unraveled twenty years ago but which slipped through our hands, that’s fine. I’ll buy in to that, cautiously, like the pension-scared bureaucrat I’ve become. But I remember. Everything I got since then, I got because of that wild ride we went on out of New Orleans that made me a Bureau star back in ’93. And I don’t forget you saved my life on that ride. I will always owe you, and I will stand by you on this last wild ride, even if it goes straight into craziness. Just. . be careful.”

“Thanks, Nick. Stick with me, and we’ll get you back to Washington.”

“Yeah,” said Nick, “maybe in a casket or a pair of handcuffs. So what’s the first stop?”

“Up there,” Bob said, suggesting by shoulder twitch the sixth-floor corner window. The sniper’s nest.

He paid his $13.50 and received some kind of tape recorder to wear around his neck. The instructions were to push a certain button when the elevator dumped him off at floor six, and thereby launch the recorded narrative that would guide him across the floor at a certain pace and direction. He saw that the point of the tape recorder wasn’t to inform people, most of whom, if they self-selected themselves for the trip, knew where they were going and what they would see, but to isolate them, to keep them moving at a steady pace and to cut down on the chatter, as if it were a reliquary.

And it was, holding not the bones of a saint but the bones of the past. Now the empty, box-filled space of nothingness that had been the sixth floor fifty years ago had been turned into a generic JFK museum, a polite narrative of the themes of that day expressed neutrally, without outrage or snark, in the old journalism tradition of the five Ws. Swagger knew the five Ws of this one already and didn’t need a refresher, so he left the tape recorder silent and slid through the thin crowd of tourists who clustered in smallish groups at each of the signboards and photo displays that followed the strands. It all led to one spot.

Swagger looked at it. The good fathers of Dallas had decided to cut down on the vicarious teenage thrill of being Lee Harvey and lining up the head shot from exactly his place and posture; they had erected a cubicle of Plexiglas to seal off the corner but also as if to preserve it in amber, a frozen ghost of a lost bad time.

Swagger stared at the array of Scott Foresman boxes, arranged just as the screwball from New Orleans had done, building a childish little fort that would block him from the view of anyone else on the sixth floor and also give him a solid supported position for the shot. The guy had been a marine, after all; the importance of the sound position had been drilled into him, and on his day of days, he had not forgotten it.

Swagger looked, unsure what he was supposed to feel. Too many people were drifting by or resting on benches for it to have any ceremonial dignity; it was just a crummy corner of a crummy building looking through a crummy window. He went to the window – not Oswald’s, which was unreachable behind the Plexiglas, but the next one over, and saw how close the two crosses in the street were. The longest was 265 feet away, if he remembered correctly. The head shot. Under a hundred yards. The range wasn’t as important as the angle: he was here for the angles. This one was an outgoer, about three or four degrees to the left, diminishing slightly as the distance increased, moving laterally right to left but just as slowly. With any modern hunting rig and a hundred bucks’ worth of Walmart optics from low-end Chinese glassworks like BSA or Tasco, it would be an easy enough shot. Given the angle and the speed, it was hardly a mover at all; given the stability offered by the carefully arranged boxes, it was like shooting bull’s-eye at the bench.

There were other things that leaped out at him. The first was that when the big limo had pivoted around that 120-degree turn, it must have been almost still, or at least moving so slowly that the movement would have no play in the shooting. Moreover, it was so close. It was seventy-five feet away, almost straight down, and JFK’s chest and head were in total exposure and the windshield between the passenger compartment and the driver’s compartment was overcome by the vertical angle of the downward trajectory. That was the shot. He tried to figure out why Lee Harvey hadn’t taken it.

Maybe he would have had to lean out too far. Maybe if he’d had a better shot, they also would’ve had a better shot, and even a good pistol guy with a four-inch Smith .357 or a Colt .45 ACP, as both feds and Dallas cops carried in those days, could draw, fire, and hit in a second’s worth of move. Maybe Harvey would be the one with the brain shot from some Secret Servicer’s Smith four; he’d be the one with cerebellum shredded and blown raggedly everywhere. Or maybe he’d fogged the scope. Maybe he’d had a qualm, a regret, a bolt of fear, and lost his killer’s determination, a brief crisis of confidence. All of those could explain it, but which one did?

Swagger looked to the right. Lee Harvey doesn’t take that shot. Instead, he lets the car crank around the corner and disappear behind the line of oak trees at the side of the road, and shoots through them. Duh. How stupid is that? Why would he do something so stupid? Was he an idiot, in the grip of panic, a hopeless loser? And of course: he missed.

Swagger then looked at the first X on Elm Street, which would have been Lee Harvey’s second shot fired, after the miss. That was probably his best opportunity after passing on the turner below him and after recovering too quickly and missing the first shot, but he’d blown that one too, at least in the sense of missing the head shot and landing a few inches low, in the back under the neck. Yes, he was coming off a swift bolt throw, but the target was under two hundred feet away, and from the target angle (always the angles!), it did not present an image moving harshly or radically. By his standards, he missed, and given the president’s lack of visible reaction, Oswald might have counted it as a clean miss. You’d think, still, if he were going to hit a head shot, that was the one he would have hit, not the third, even farther out, the target even smaller, coming off another fast bolt throw. It was the third he’d hit. And he had hit it. No doubt, no regret, no pain, no nothing, no force on Earth could change the fact that a 6.5 mm bullet had hit Jack Kennedy in the head at 12:30 p.m. November 22, 1963, and shocked the world with the visceral reality of the shattered skull, the vaporized brain tissue, the animal vibration of catastrophic trauma.

Could Oswald have made that shot? Bob considered. The question wasn’t abstract; he might have had the skill, but that skill had to be expressed through the system he used, and it had to be forced through the prism of the actual. He was a punk nobody shooting at the president of the United States in a hurry, working a bolt that had to be at some level unfamiliar to him – he’d trained on the old semi-auto M1 Garand, as had Bob – so the adrenaline must have been coursing through his veins like lighter fluid. All the buck-fever things must have been happening; eyes wide to f/1, auditory exclusion, loss of fine motor control, vision impingement, the sensation of oxygen debt. Yet he made the shot.

It was an easy shot. Bob probably could have made it offhand, as any of the dozens of snipers he’d known could have. So what? The issue was, could this little monkey from all our dark furious dreams, with his hatred and bitterness and political crackpottiness, his incompetence and long history of failure, could he have made that shot on that day at that time?

It was stupid to ask, even if thousands had done so publicly. That’s because to answer, you had to be familiar with the capacities of the rifle at its maximum and at its minimum. He turned, and as if by magic, there it was: a full-size silhouette of C2766, the Mannlicher-Carcano Model 1938 carbine made in Terni, Italy, in 1941 and scoped by an anonymous mechanic – “gunsmith” was far too grand a word – with a cheesy 4X tube out of a Japan that hadn’t yet discovered its postwar optical engineering genius and was attached to the receiver by a machined piece of pot metal in the form of a scope mount, all of it held together by two screws when there should have been four. The image floated at Bob off a signboard a few feet away. He walked over and confronted the thing as reproduced in the full-size photo.

The FBI forensic ballisticians had done a number on the weapon as soon as they received it, but Bob had looked through the testimony and found it somewhat spotty. Frazier, the agent, was revered in the Bureau as a gun expert, but Bob noted that he was a high-power shooter by choice (and a champion at that), which meant he specialized in the discipline of shooting large, stable targets at long range (out to six hundred yards) with service rifles through open sights. His skill set would have included stamina, sophisticated wind doping, trigger control, and long-term nervous system control. By experience, he was not particularly knowledgeable about or comfortable with the telescopic sight or precision shooting. The one shot/one kill mantra of the sniper would have been lost on him. Though his testimony in certain areas seemed problematic, Swagger knew he’d have to look more carefully at it on another day.

Here, in 2-D glory, the rifle looked like something an eight-year-old tin soldier in a red papier-mache tunic might carry in a junior high version of The Nutcracker. He’d been dragged to a production when Nikki was in her ballet phase and remembered the stiff-legged little boys with the red circles painted on their cheeks under the tall cardboard faux-hussar hats. That was how miniaturized and quaint it seemed. It was small, hardly a weapon of war. Like many of the rifles of the Mediterranean, it seemed somehow to lack seriousness of purpose; it wasn’t a heavily machined vault that could shoot a bullet a mile with accuracy or provide a platform to drive a bayonet into a man’s guts, like a Mauser, a Springfield, a Lee-Enfield. You might use it to pot rabbits, as it was of light caliber: roughly .264 in an age before high-velocity powders, not a .30 with its tons of muzzle energy. The ballistics were unimpressive. He looked at the stamped pot-metal scope mount, well resolved in the photo blowup, and noted that it boasted enough detail to depict the two empty screw holes on the plate that held rifle to scope. What influence would that have had on events? How long would the two screws hold the scope tight, if they’d been tightened at all? Through one shot or two or, most important, three? What would the consequences be of a loose scope, which would reset itself whimsically after each shot, screwing up accuracy? All good shooters tightened their scope screws before they fired; had Oswald? Would he have known that? He wasn’t trained on scopes in the Corps, just the knurl-index click system of the M1 peep sight, a brilliant mechanical device in its day. Did Oswald understand the concept of zeroing a scope? Was this scope zeroed? Was it altered after recovery? All these questions would have to be answered in re: this particular rifle, not any other, before one could issue a comment on its capabilities.

If that was the thing that did it, he’d have to know more about it. He resolved to acquire and study such a piece – they were available dirt cheap, usually under three hundred or so. Could he learn the bolt throw, could he find a target fast through that little four-power, not particularly clean scope, could the rifle sustain its accuracy over a string of shots, could that improvised sling improve the accuracy, if indeed Oswald, who knew of slings from the Marine Corps, applied it during his shooting? All yet to be discovered.

Swagger tired of the place. No big deal, no emotional reaction to the foreign visitors, the running kids, the goofball Ohio tourists; it was just enough, and was time to go.

Now, the grassy knoll. It was a kind of absurd conceit, a mock Greek temple etched into a grass hillside along a busy commercial road in the heart of the city. Someone’s long-ago idea of class, when the Greek model was beloved and appreciated in America. But it looked like something out of an ancient Rome movie, and you half expected to see people lounging around in togas.

Swagger stood to the side of the circle of columns at the height of the crest and tried not to think of togas; he considered the angles. Below him, maybe fifty feet, cars rushed down Elm toward the triple underpass. The slope of grass ran down to the curbside, the road itself fed the commuters onto the Stemmons Freeway, and beyond that stretched the field, also pool-table green, of Dealey Plaza.

Here, the shooting was so close. Some kind of professional hard-core hit team without access to the TBD, which loomed to the left through some thin trees, almost certainly would have chosen this spot. They could yank subguns-grease guns, Thompsons, Schmeissers, all the common war bring-backs plentiful in the America of 1963 – and lay down a fusillade that no man could survive. Then they could race off and try to gunfight their way to freedom, but they’d fail, enough police would arrive eventually, and they’d die of extreme ventilation of the twelve-gauge variety at some roadblock a few miles away.

But one shooter, knowing he had to hit cold-bore on his first shot to syncopate with the patsy Oswald’s sure misses? He couldn’t make any sense of it. I came here for answers, Swagger thought. All I am getting is more questions.

Still, like all the other rubes, he moseyed down the hill and stood at the curb not seven feet from the X that marked the position of the car when the third bullet hit head. He’d seen it enough to view it with dispassion, but unbidden, a sound cue came to him. He had been near men hit in the head, and he knew that it was a sound like no other on the planet. He didn’t want to, but from some forgotten atrocity in his long and violent past, that noise abruptly reproduced itself. It sounded like a baseball bat hitting a grapefruit, as it held both the thud of power and the squirt of liquefaction. Vapor was left in the air, a cloud of atomized brain particles thick enough to register on Zapruder’s film before it dissipated in the rush of the car accelerating away.

Swagger shook his head. He hadn’t expected that moment of horror. He tried to clear his brain. He turned, looked up Elm to the cube of the depository with its front of mismatched windows, arc and square and arc and square, now lacking the gaudy Hertz sign that had commanded the heights in 1963, and he saw Lee Harvey’s window 288 feet away and 66 feet off the ground. But he saw another thing. He waited until a traffic light at the corner halted the stream so he was able to walk the seven feet to the X and turn and look back.

The other thing he saw was a building. It was also a brick box, and it was just across Houston from the depository. From this angle, its seventh-story window was but a few feet to the right of Oswald’s nest. Any fair computerized trajectory cone, imprecise to begin with, would have included it too.

It was the Dal-Tex Building.

Because the writer had spent an afternoon there, Swagger next found himself in the local history room of the Dallas Public Library on Young Street a few blocks from his hotel on Commerce. The library itself, which seemed to match City Hall across the street, appeared to resemble a spaceship crashed into the earth. It was a kind of inverted or upside-down pyramid thing, and each floor addressed the world through a line of wide, deep windows. It was so old-fashioned modern.

The room on the fifth floor was any other library room, in fact nicer than most, and the young woman behind the counter couldn’t have been nicer herself. Swagger was following James Aptapton’s notebook and explained that he’d like to see the Dallas Yellow Pages from 1963, and in seconds, literally under a minute, he was sitting at a table with a copy of the Dallas Yellow pages, not merely from 1963 but from November 1963.

As serious research, it was probably pointless. But he saw that the writer would use it as a source by which to re-create the city of 1963. It probably helped him if he knew what the cab companies called themselves, where you took your dry cleaning or went to meet your refrigeration or photography needs, where you’d go to get a nice tan overcoat, what the phone number of the Texas Book Depository was (RI7-3521) or that there were eight pages of churches but only one strip club – Jack Ruby’s Carousel, “across from the Adolphus.” He learned that you could eat Mex at El Fenix or buy liquor from a Mr. Sigel, who had stores everywhere, or stay at the Statler Hilton or the Mayfair or the Cabana as well as the Adolphus; buy a straight-up drink at the Tabu Room or the Star Bar or the Lazy Horse Lounge; buy ammo for your gun at Ketchum and Killum on Kleist, in Oak Cliff, or Wald’s; buy a book at the North Dallas Book Center, hear a song on KBOX or KJET or KNOK. Yes, a storyteller might find all this interesting, but it quickly drained Swagger of interest and his eyes glazed over in a bit. He hung around on sheer willpower, so that he traced exactly the writer’s footsteps.

Leaving, he hailed a cab. African cabdriver with a little magic box for getting directions, so the fellow had him on his way to 1026 North Beckley, in Oak Cliff, in seconds. That destination was noted in Aptapton’s little book, and Swagger knew it to be the location of Oswald’s roominghouse in the six weeks before the assassination. A writer would have to see such a thing and know for sure, as Swagger soon learned, that it was a wooden box under trees with a scruffy yard off the main drag of Zang Boulevard, that it had a mansard roof concealing what had to be a small upper story, that it was deep, probably much bigger than it seemed from North Beckley Street, containing many small rooms, one of which had housed the creepy young killer. Nothing marked its place in history. It sat among other decaying wooden houses on a block that seemed to be slipping into disrepair and possibly into something he had never heard of until he started reading – that is, existential despair. It held no mysteries for Swagger.

He directed Mr. Ruranga to drive farther down Beckley to Tenth, for that was the route of Oswald’s last walk as a free man. Oswald had thundered down Beckley with seemingly no direction in mind, then turned on a street called Crowley, which led him to another turn down Tenth. Swagger had forgotten Crowley and settled for Tenth. When they reached it, it turned out not to go through, so the driver had to mull around until he found a way around the church parking lot that now barricaded it. That route led to the bleak street where Oswald had been confronted by the police officer, right before the corner of Tenth and Patton, and Oswald had hit three of his four shots, all fatal. No plaque marked J. D. Tippit’s falling place among the rotting bungalows and uncut lawns, just a whisper as dry leaves caught in the persistent Texas wind rushing over the earth. It seemed so wrong.

Then it was a brief shot up Oak Cliff’s main drag, called Jefferson, to the low strip of commercial buildings that held the Texas Theatre. The theater was still there and still called Texas and recognizable from a million reproductions of photos taken at 2:30 p.m., November 22, 1963, when the surly young man with the snub-nosed .38 Special was taken down by Dallas Homicide, getting a shiner in the process. In retrospect, he was damned lucky he didn’t get a .357 in the thoracic cavity, as the Dallas cops in those days weren’t particularly merciful to cop killers.

Again, the theater held no fascination for Swagger. It was just an old building, and its deco stylings spoke thirties, not sixties, and its marquee in Spanish suggested that a new wave of inheritors had moved in.

Swagger ordered the cab back to the Adolphus, because it was, happily, nap time.

The nap never arrived. Not even with lights out and shades down would sleep approach. Too much danced in his brain.

Conspiracy theory. Second shooter. Third shooter. Triangulation of fire. All that Oliver Stone stuff. How could you think about this thing at all with all the crap around it? You couldn’t see the target, there was so much camouflage, some of it deceitful, some of it well meant, some of it earnest, some of it crazy. CIA. Castro. From deep within the government. The trilateral commission.

He told himself: Think hard. Think straight. Concentrate.

Could there have been a second gunman elsewhere in Dealey? How do you attack that proposition? There was no reason why there couldn’t have been one, from a gunman with a rifle in his umbrella to a guy on top of the TBD to someone on one of the other buildings that ringed the square, Dal-Tex or the Records Building or even the Criminal Courts Building.

But. . What am I missing?

What am I missing?

He had nothing. Then he had something.

Most if not all of the multiple shooter/grassy knoll theorists proceeded from a fundamental lack of rigor, under false assumptions. Most assumed, sloppily, that what became known on November 22, 1963, was known before that. It was not. You have to discipline yourself, when thinking about this shit, to limit your thoughts to what was known on November 22 and not after. Most of them had not been able to do that.

There was one unassailable fact: only one bullet was found that could be associated with the murder of John F. Kennedy. That is what is called an anomaly. Swagger knew from too much experience that many shootings feature anomalies: things that could not be predicted, that could not be expected, that were seemingly impossible. Yet they happened, because reality does not care what people think or expect.

No sane planner could have assumed that only one bullet would be found, WC399, the later-to-be-famous “magic bullet.” Any planner utilizing multiple shooters (i.e., personnel on the grassy knoll) would have to assume that bullets from their firearms would be recovered as well. The odds certainly favored that outcome. If that was the fact, why bother to use Lee Harvey Oswald as a “patsy”? Why not do the job straight out, like a Mob hit, and make a break for it after the last shot? Why not use an automatic or a semi-automatic weapon and put a burst on target instead of three shots separated by several seconds each? A good man with a Thompson at the grassy knoll could have killed everyone in that car in two seconds. The only reason to have a single shot fired from the knoll was the false-flag operation, to set up a chump. Why would you do that if your own assumed-to-be-recovered bullet would give that away quickly? The deceit that Oswald was the only shooter would last, it had to be assumed, until an autopsy surgeon removed a bullet from JFK’s brain, or Mrs. Kennedy’s left shoulder, or John Connally’s lung, or the upholstery of the limo.

Any “other-shooter scenario” without some kind of ballistic deceit, meant to link whatever really happened with Oswald’s Mannlicher-Carcano 38, was utterly dismissible on its face. It was even surprising that such craziness wasn’t laughed off the face of the earth when it was first theorized, though nobody in the press knew enough about rifle ballistics to catch on.

He sat back. That seemed solid. He looked at it a thousand ways and couldn’t see through it or around it. It was okay.

Progress? Maybe a little.

And tomorrow. To make sure it was there, he picked up the Aptapton notebook and noted what the writer had inscribed in a careful hand: “National Institute of Assassination Research, 2805 N. Crenshaw.”

CHAPTER 4

As is true of many grandly named enterprises, the National Institute of Assassination Research was located in somebody’s basement. The house was shabby, with shedding shingles, in another decaying Dallas prewar bungalow neighborhood, a one-story wreck that hadn’t seen paint or putty in too many years. The glass-and-steel spires of New Dallas seemed a long way away from this broken-down zone. As Swagger walked through the gate in the cyclone fence on a sidewalk smeared with wet leaves, he noted a sign that said “Bookstore in Back.” He followed that around and found a stairway down to another sign that instructed him to “Ring Bell,” which he did.

“Come on in, it’s open,” came a shout.

He walked into a room jammed to bulging with bookshelves, all of them ominously creaky and distended from load-bearing responsibility as their fibers struggled with the tonnage of pages they were asked to contain, the whole thing musty and basement-smelling. The shelves were indexed by handwritten-on-tape topic labels: CIA, RUSSIA, RIFLE, LHO EARLY, LHO LATE, WARREN COMMISSION PRO, WARREN COMMISSION CON, DOCUMENTS, WITNESS ACCOUNTS, FBI, JACK RUBY, and so on and so forth. Bob looked for one called DAL-TEX, but didn’t see it. He moseyed, unmonitored for a good deal of time, pulling this or that tattered paperback from a shelf, tracking the conspiracy theories from Mafia to KGB to Castro to MI-Complex to Big Oil to Far Right, none of them particularly motivating.

The stuff felt like an undertow; it could suck you in and in minutes you were annealed into the gel of conspiracy, your clarity gone, your logic-gyro hopelessly out of whack, your ability to distinguish this from that eroded into nothingness. Too much information; which of it was trustworthy, which dubious? Too many claims and assertions, too much speculation, some out-and-out lies for profit. In all, as if some madhouse virus of paranoia had been set loose, infecting all who breathed it.

“Hi, there,” a voice said. “Sorry, I was trying to catch up on shipping. Can I help you?”

The man was tall and gangly, a kind of seedy academic with a matting of thick blondish hair and glasses held to his head by an elastic strap, now pushed back into his hair. He wore a tatty green crewneck sweater under a tweed jacket that had some mothholes flagrantly displayed on the lapel. Mid-forties, no commando type, his hollow, pale cheeks bristly with day-old beard. He smiled, introducing the fact that he hadn’t discovered tooth-whitening strips, and extended a long-fingered hand. Bob shook it, discovering as he’d anticipated that it was slightly squishy and moist, and smiled back.

“Well,” Bob said, “I seem to have a bug in my head that’s saying ‘Dal-Tex’ over and over again. If there was a second rifle, it had to be there, given a bunch of other factors. I thought you might have books on it. I thought you might have a file.”

“Ah,” said the proprietor of NIAR, “very interesting.”

“I stood at the Elm Street X, and I couldn’t help but notice how close its trajectory is to the Sniper’s Nest.”

“Agreed. Many, many folks have found that fascinating.”

“I’m sort of late to this game, so forgive me for my ignorance. I’m guessing that a lot has been thrashed over, gone through, shaken out, and I don’t want to waste my time doing what someone already did in 1979.”

“I don’t blame you, friend,” said the man, settling easily into a conversational posture by resting his rear on the counter and crossing his arms. “Especially now. You know, with the fiftieth coming up, we’re anticipating a big surge in interest and attention. It seems like Stephen King isn’t the only guy working on an assassination book. I’m aware of a great deal of activity.”

“I’m no writer,” said Bob. “Lord knows, I couldn’t string two words together if my life depended on it. It’s the puzzle aspect of the thing, the pure solution, that is so damned fascinating.”

“I hear you,” said the man. “I’m Richard Monk, and I guess I’m CEO and janitor of NIAR. Also shipping clerk, accountant, and lightbulb replacer. It’s pretty damn glamorous.”

Bob got out his wallet and pulled a card, handing it over.

John P. Brophy (Ph.D.) (NSPE)

“Jack”

Mining Engineer (Ret.)

Boise, Idaho

“Spent my life digging holes all over the globe,” he said. “It’s pretty boring in a tent in Ecuador, so I started reading when I wasn’t digging or sleeping or drinking or whoring. I’m still reading. About three years ago, I noticed I had five or six million bucks ticking away and declared myself retired. I got hooked on JFK and have been digging into that. It seems to have taken over my life. I read your website for news every week. Anyhow, I finally worked out some stuff of my own and thought I’d come to town to check it out, see if it stands up to reality.”

“So you’re a Dal-Tex guy. I could put you in touch with a couple of other big Dal-Texers.”

“Well. .” said Bob. “Yes, but I am cautious–”

“I get it. You’ve got a theory, it’s your intellectual property, you don’t want it getting out. All of us are like that, halfway between hungering to share and fearing being ripped off. I’ll go easy, no problem.”

“You know everybody and everything?”

“I am the Kennedy assassination,” Richard said, laughing. “I live and breathe this stuff, Jack. And I have the unfortunate problem of a photographic memory. If I read something, it’s there forever. Or at least so far. Maybe it’ll reach a point where one more fact makes my head explode.”

Swagger laughed. Richard Monk was engaging, if weird, and didn’t have that suspicious, feral quality that so many in the “assassination community” seemed to have.

“Offhand, what’s the state of the art on Dal-Tex?”

“Well, for a time the people who owned it were generous in letting researchers tour it if they made an appointment. Their policy has changed lately, I suspect because of the fiftieth, and the attention is ginning up, and they’re trying to rent out a lot of office space. I know the building manager; I might be able to get you in.”

“That would be great,” said Bob.

“To be honest, you shouldn’t expect much. The whole thing has been gutted and rehabbed twice over since ’63. Now it’s modern, you know, kind of ‘lofty,’ very chic urban Greenwich Village vibe happening. They even built an atrium into the lobby that goes up all the way through the center of the building so it looks like the Bradbury Building in L.A. Very old-movie cool, but completely disconnected from 1963.”

“The windows are still where they were?”

“Absolutely,” Richard said, “and of course you’ll confirm that certain windows line up almost perfectly with the angle and the trajectory of the head shot allegedly taken by LHO that day.”

“Good. See, I get into it through the guns. I’m a shooter. I actually did a lot more hunting than whoring and drinking and feeling sorry for myself, and I’ve seen a lot of animals and even some men die when hit by a high-powered bullet, or even, believe it or not, a low-powered six-point-five. My work has been on guns and ballistics, and now the problem is to make it fit the possibilities of the day.”

“Got it. See, I think it’s good that you don’t come into it with the preset conviction that ‘The CIA Did It’ or ‘Dallas Right-Wing Oil Bastards Did It,’ because that skews your thinking.”

“Exactly.”

“You know what, Jack? I’m way behind in my shipping. I more or less survive by mail order. Man, without the Internet, I’d be trying to get by on a major’s pension from Big Green.”

“Army?”

“Intel. Twenty years, mostly Germany. Anyhow, I’m thinking maybe we ought to meet for dinner and talk there. Is that something you’d be up for?”

“Only if it’s on me.”

“Great. Better than I hoped for. Where you staying? I can at least come to you.”

“The Adolphus.”

“Oh, then the French Room,” Richard said airily, and Swagger knew it was a joke, for the French Room was the swanky hotel’s glamorously decadent restaurant.

“Seriously, go down one block to Main, go up Main, there’s a great Mex place called Sol Irlandes.”

“Got it,” said Swagger.

“See you at eight. It’s an easy walk.”

“Okay,” said Richard, after a long grateful swallow of Tecate, “I didn’t bring the file, because I am the file. But when you come back, I can pull all the pictures and references for you, or I can attach it to an e-mail and ship it to you, whichever.”

“Great,” said Swagger.

“Meanwhile, I’ll call Dave Arons, who manages the building for its owners, Galaxy Capital Limited. Dave’s okay, he gets it; I’ll tell him you’re an old friend, very trustworthy. He just doesn’t want loonies parading through there in tinfoil hats.”

“I left mine in Boise.”

Around them, the dark restaurant hummed with commerce. It seemed to be a popular place, maybe because the salsa was so good. Swagger sipped his Diet Coke.

“By the way, they’re playing down the connect to the assassination, even if they’ve got an assassination museum souvenir shop right there on their corner, at Houston and Elm.”

“I noticed it,” said Bob. “I didn’t go in.”

“They now call it 501 Elm, not Dal-Tex.”

“Makes sense.”

“Good marketing move, I think. Okay, right now Dal-Tex is featured in at least thirty-eight of the two hundred sixty-five formally recognized conspiracy theories. It’s got the angles, and as you’ll find, access and egress on that day was more or less easy. It wasn’t closed down till twelve-thirty-nine or so, so a team could have gotten out pretty easy. But you probably know neither Bugliosi nor Posner, the two great Warren Commission acolytes who’ve studied all the theories, give it much time of day. They don’t even bother to rebut it. When you think about it, maybe that’s sensible. I mean, man, it would have taken some balls. Go into a public building, crack an office, pop the president, and walk out whistling ‘Dixie’ ten seconds before the cops arrive. Balls and luck. Over two hundred people worked in that building.”

“Weren’t most of them at Dealey, like Mr. Zapruder?”

“There’s always some guy hanging around.”

“Maybe they were disguised.”

“Possible, I suppose. But disguised as what? A giant charm bracelet? No way strangers can disguise themselves as friends.”

“‘Giant charm bracelet’?”

“Sorry, Woody Allen line. Not funny if you don’t love Woody.”

“I must have missed it,” Swagger said. “Anyhow, on the disguise thing, maybe it was long-term. The group rented an office before, and after the shooting stayed there for six months, when the lease was up. No, wait, dammit, the route wasn’t known till the twentieth.”

“That would free you up to the big deep-conspiracy thing, where some sinister force buried in government uses its tentacles to manipulate things into place far in advance.”

“I’m an engineer. I have a distrust of big plans, because I’ve made my money troubleshooting when big plans go wrong, and believe me, they go wrong all the time. It’s better to have a plan than not have a plan, but at the same time, no plan survives contact with reality.”

“You sound military, Jack. I was in for twenty, I saw it happen all the time.”

“I was in the marines for a–”

“The limp, Vietnam?” interrupted Richard.

“Nah. Ecuador. A piece of drill bit going a thousand feet a second. That was my real education. The engineering teaches you that a plan is a set of assumptions or diagrams that are wrong or impossible. Everything affects everything, everything changes, and you end up in a place you never thought you’d be.”

“I agree.”

“Still, dammit, the angle of any of six windows to that X on Elm Street gives us exactly the brain shot that killed the president. It’s attractive to a conspiracy theorist.”

“It is. You say your thing is ballistics?”

“Yeah. I think I’ve figured out some things as to how there could have been another gun, but no forensic evidence of it.”

“Fascinating. But don’t tell me, because you’ll be angry at yourself in the morning.”

“I wasn’t going to. ‘Intellectual property,’ as you say. For a mining engineer, the whole world is secured by mineral rights. That’s what I bring to the table, and it makes me kind of paranoid.”

“That’s fine. Also, as it turns out, I’m not much of a gun guy, and I’d have no way to evaluate it.”

“That’s a common failing in this assassination research world,” said Bob, taking another sip of Diet. “Too many gun opinions by people who don’t know a damned thing about guns. A lot of time has been wasted.”

“I’ll tell you why. Because it’s so big. In order to make sense of it and make fair assumptions, you’ve got to have expertise in too many areas. The medical people know nothing about guns and the gun people know nothing about the Mafia and the Mafia people know nothing about the CIA and the CIA people know nothing about the Cubans and so sooner or later you’re making judgments on something you know nothing about, and the result is always nonsense.”

“Let me ask you, Richard,” said Bob, “do you have a theory?”

“My problem is that I know too much about it. I can’t judge anymore. I see the flaws in everything, the contradictions, the micro findings. I could do twenty minutes on the metallurgical analysis of the bullet fragments found on the floor of the limousine and whether it disproves a second-gun theory or buttresses it, and it’s arguable either way. But I have no real opinion as to which side of the issue is correct. How can I judge? I wish I could forget some of the stuff I know, but I can’t make it go away. It’s my curse. On the other hand, it made me a good intel analyst, and it helps me in my chosen line of work.”

“Got it.”

“But since you’re paying – do you mind if I order another beer?”

“Go ahead.”

“I will share with you the one theory I’ve heard that explains everything. I may have made it up, I may have heard it somewhere, I don’t know, it was just in my mind one day. Perhaps God put it there. It accounts for every nuance and inconsistency and witness confusion and everything. The only problem is, after I tell you, I’ll have to kill you.”

Where is this guy going? Swagger thought.

“I’m not going to live much longer anyhow, so you may as well fire away.”

“Let me ask you one favor. Don’t interrupt when I say something that doesn’t accord with the thing we laughingly call ‘history.’ It’ll all become clear in the end.”

“I’m listening,” said Bob.

“On November 22, 1963,” Richard began, “a screwball Marxist loser named Lee Harvey Oswald, for reasons too banal to be believed, fired three shots at the president of the United States, who by utter coincidence showed up outside his workplace window one day. The first shot missed, because Oswald was an idiot. The second shot hit Kennedy under the neck, in the high back. It drove through his body, deflecting because of the president’s heavy neck musculature, hit Governor Connally in the back, passed through him, and hit him in the wrist and finally the thigh. Oswald’s third shot missed, because he was an idiot.

“Oswald is not important, but let’s stay with him for a second. He panicked, raced downstairs, and there met a police officer named Marion Baker, who commanded him to halt. Oswald instead bolted by the officer and headed out the door of the Texas Book Depository, and Officer Baker drew and fired. End of Oswald.

“What happened to Kennedy is the gist of our story. His Secret Service driver raced to Parkland Hospital, less than five minutes away, and a very good team of emergency physicians got to work. It was touch and go, nip and tuck, all through the day and night. In the morning Kennedy finally stabilized. Though feeble from the devastating wound, he hung on, sustained by his incredible will to live and the good wishes and hopes of millions around the world.

“The recovery was slow and painful. Lyndon Johnson became acting president in his absence and ruled judiciously, as guided by Kennedy’s advisers, and made no tragic, boneheaded decisions. No Vietnam, obviously. Meanwhile, Kennedy grew stronger and stronger each day. It was feared that his spine was damaged and that he would be paralyzed, but by the narrowest of margins, that proved not to be the case. During this time, his wife, Jackie, hovered like an angel at his bedside, and perhaps the power of her love was another force for the good in helping the man regain his capacities as he healed slowly over the months. He sat up in March ’64, he took his first tentative steps in May, and by August he returned to the White House (LBJ, of course, had never moved in) and began to take up light duties. By the convention, in mid-August, he was able to give a rousing speech and was renominated by unanimous acclaim. He barely had to campaign and barely did campaign, and his opponent, Barry Goldwater, was wiped out at the polls in November. Less than a year after the tragedy in Dallas, he was re-inaugurated as president and began his second term.

“But he had changed. At first only his closest associates noticed it, but as his policy tendencies, uncontested because of the sheer charisma of his near martyrdom, became evident, the press and then the public noticed. It seems that he had ‘seen the light,’ as it were. The near-death experience altered him profoundly; the long months of solitude with nothing except his medical team and the enduring love of his wife had cemented that alteration.

“Gone was the anti-Communist cold warrior. Gone was the savvy political pro, not above a dirty trick or two. Gone too were the philandering, the drug excesses, the games of carrot-and-stick with the press for maximum advantage, the partying, the glamour, the whole sense of the glory of Camelot. Instead, he became an ascetic.”

“A what?” said Swagger.

“Guy with great self-discipline, clear moral beliefs. True believer.”

“Got it.”

“Having come so close to death, he hated it and would have made it illegal if possible. In policy, that feeling of the fragility of life, the rapidness with which it may be taken away and the permanence that even a tiny act of violence leaves in its wake, turned him into a pacifist. He saw that war was wrong in the abstract and in the particular, that strength was a pitiful disguise for fear, that more was gained by reaching out with love than shunning while locking and loading. He immediately recalled the ten thousand American troops in the Republic of Vietnam, he canceled a hundred million in defense spending, he began to open avenues to rapprochement with Castro in Cuba and ordered the CIA to stop all its anti-Castro activities. He also forbade the agency from playing in the internal politics of numerous Latin American and African countries, all of which promptly went Communist, as did the Republic of South Vietnam, absorbed without struggle by the North Vietnamese. It didn’t matter to him that we ‘lost’ those countries; we ‘won’ by avoiding battle and the loss of our precious young men.

“His grandest ambition was to end our nuclear arms race with the Russians. The idea of millions cowering in fear across the globe because some mad general could push a button and end the world in nuclear holocaust, essentially on a whim, horrified and sickened him. That would be his crowning glory.

“In the years 1967 and 1968, his most ardent initiatives addressed the arms race, the escalating accumulation of atomic devices and delivery systems (their presence made the possibility of accidental annihilation all the more feasible). He offered the Russians everything he could think of, on bended knee, so to speak, anything to move away from the madness of mutually assured destruction that held the world in its iron grip, as the Atlases and the Poseidons and the SS-12s and 14s seethed and steamed in their silos all across the American West and the Siberian Plain, and the B-52s and the Tupolev Badgers held in their fail-safe orbits just outside of each other’s airspace, twenty-four/seven, their high, feathery contrails against the blue blurry reminders of how close we were to the brink and how fragile were the mechanisms that seemed to guard our safety.

“As for the Russians, they wouldn’t budge. Sure, some liberals in the politburo appreciated the opening for a softening of attitudes and lobbied to play along, but the hard-liners, astounded by how readily the president was acquiescing and how much he was giving up without recompense, counseled sternness, to see how much more could be gotten out of a fellow they thought was clinically insane, even if neither they nor anyone in the United States could say as much.

“Finally, as his second term was running out and egged on by liberal Eastern newspapers and new media that celebrated his willingness to defuse the bombs threatening the world and replace bellicosity with understanding, the president ordered the unthinkable. He ordered unilateral nuclear stand-down. To prove his sincerity, he would prostrate himself and his country to the Russians.

“He ordered the B-52s of SAC grounded. He ordered the computers at NORAD unplugged, as well as the over-horizon radars of the DEW line. He ordered the Minutemen in their silos defueled and began a program of warhead neutralization, removal, and destruction. He ordered the MX experimental program halted. At a certain date, he had done what he set out to do: He had removed the United States from its position as a nuclear power. He had achieved peace.

“At twelve minutes after midnight on Tuesday, November 5, 1968, the Russians launched.”

“Wow,” said Swagger. “Richard, this is getting a little weird, isn’t it?”

“Jack, you promised not to interrupt.”

“It’s a good thing I’m not a drinking man anymore, or you’d have me all bourboned up by now. I’d be fighting sailors, talking to young women, and calling my kids.”

“My whistle is dry. I need another beer.”

“After destroying the world, I’ll bet. Waiter!” He hailed the kid. “Get my father here another Tecate and refill my Diet, will you?”

“Sure. You guys want to see the dessert menu?”

“Hey, ice cream and nuclear firestorms turning me to ash, that’s a great idea,” Bob said.

Richard laughed. “Oh, it gets better.”

The beer came, and Richard rewarded himself for destroying the Western Hemisphere with a swallow, while Swagger drained his own half a Diet Coke in tribute to the burning cities and civilians slaughtered in their beds by the millions.

“Okay, Richard,” he said. “I guess I’m manned up enough to get on through this.”

“You only think you can’t handle the truth,” said Richard. He took a breath and began again.

“Who can blame them? It probably wasn’t even a decision made in the Kremlin. I’m sure it was some junior lieutenant general in some command bunker outside of Vladivostok. By the iron logic of his national philosophy and the Doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction, he did the right thing. Once the ‘mutually’ is taken out of the equation, the sane thing to do is fire.

“In thirty minutes of sustained SS-9 warfighting, over a hundred million Americans perished. All command and control bunkers were hit, SAC-NORAD was turned to radioactive glass, but there was no point in wasting megatonnage on the silos because they’d been disconnected from the computer grid and the local commanders, the first lieutenants in the holes with the two keys, didn’t have the flexibility to launch without command authority. Fail-safe, you know. Those weapons were redirected at smaller cities, so even the Dubuques and the Cedar Rapids and the Lawtons were fried on the thermonuclear griddle. So the Russians won World War III quite handily.

“Unfortunately, they didn’t do so well in World War IV, which started the next day. Assuming the Brits would sit it out, they assumed wrong, and the RAF went in low and hard and turned Eastern Europe into a funeral pyre. For its efforts, the RAF’s airfields were awarded secondary strikes from intermediate-range SS-7s, and since the airfields were attached to the island of Great Britain, another twenty or so million went up in flames.

“The Russians also thought they had the American carriers zeroed, but it turned out their subs were the ones on the zero. The American destroyers hunted and killed them like fish in barrels, and the carrier planes took out the Russian surface fleet with first-generation air-to-ship missiles, allowing the carrier medium bombers and attack planes to get close enough to roar up the soft underbelly of Redland at low level and deliver tactical nukes on all Red Army groups, tank concentrations, and any unfortunate cities in the neighborhood. Finally, one Boomer-class nuke missile sub that had been at sea and missed the fire that time got itself back into the game and launched without command. Sixteen Poseidons. A hundred and sixty megatons, COD. Returns not accepted. By the end of the first day of World War IV, the Russians had lost close to two hundred million people and their military structure had been utterly cremated.

“Then it looked like the Chinese, the Africans, and the South Americans would inherit the earth. Ha ha, joke’s on them. A little thing called nuclear winter set in. One of those unintended consequences people are always talking about. I hate it when that happens. A blanket of radioactive debris filled the sky – I mean everywhere – and, robbed of sun, agriculture wilted and died where it grew. The temperature dropped forty degrees mean. The seas became oceans of poison. Marine life went the way of the dodo. Mutations, new plagues, new parasites, actual vampire attacks, all these microscopic nasties that had heretofore yielded to the killing power of soap and water flourished and multiplied and grew, killing yet more millions. The flu, black plague, cholera, you name it, ancient diseases not seen in eons came trotting out for their pound of flesh. Ovaries shriveled, and among the few million survivors, the birth rate fell precipitously. We were going down. We were dying faster than we were replacing, and nothing could change that demographic trend. By 2014, there was almost nothing left.

“There was only one solution. The remaining high-IQs agreed on it. With fewer than a hundred thousand people left on the planet, there was only one choice. In one of the most moving spectacles in human history, the world’s remaining top scientists, engineers, physicians, soldiers, and thinkers gathered; it was like the Manhattan Project, a colossal undertaking underwritten by all surviving power structures, backed by all humanity, a concentrated species effort the likes of which hadn’t been seen since Australopithecus crushed his first gazelle with a femur on the African savannah, with one goal; to find a way to use the power of science to save humanity.

“They had to send a man back in time.”

“I think I saw that movie,” said Bob. “I think it was called Terminator.”

“Hmm, never heard of it,” said Richard, taking a finishing draft on his Tecate, then raising his hand for another one. “Now that you mention it, I might have seen it a time or fifteen.”

“I think I was with you until the time-travel jazz came up. I dig holes in the ground, long, straight holes. In other words, I live in and fight dirt. Dirt is about as elemental as you can get, Richard, especially when six miles of it are between you and what you’re trying to dig up. So for me, time travel is a nonstarter. I just can’t wrap my mind around it. I have to get off the boat right here.”

“Jack, trust me on this – time travel, by the laws of physics, is theoretically justifiable. I’ll spare you the math, but the secret is the position of the body in space. You see, if you sent a man back a hundred years from here, from this nice restaurant and among all these attractive young people, and he stepped into the here of a century ago, he would instantly die, because he’d be in outer space. Hello, no air, 5,000 degrees below zero, and pieces of shit flying along at light speed because there’s nothing to slow them down. That’s because the earth, the solar system, the whole shebang, nothing is where it was. It’s all moving and moving fast. You have to first devise the mother of all computers to calculate exactly where here was a hundred years ago, and by particle beam transmission, that’s where you send him. So when he gets there, there is a there to be gotten to.”

“I’m getting a headache,” said Bob.

“We’re almost done,” promised Richard. He took another long draft and resumed. “He wasn’t a special man. But he had to be a hundred percent certain. After rigorous psychological testing, he was found, winnowed from the thousands who’d sworn they could do the deed. But in 2015 everyone knew the temptation to stay in the past would have been overwhelming. The past was so much better than the ever-diminishing present. They had to have a man with the integrity to destroy himself on faith for a world he’d never see, for children he’d never know, who’d not only die but, more tragically, perish from memory, a man who not only wouldn’t exist but never would have existed.

“They found him. Maybe he was someone like you, Jack, tough and smart, salty, been around, walked with a limp, always with the watchful eyes, always slightly tense, as if he’s ready to dodge a flying drill bit. That would be the guy. A hero, like Jack, with a limp from a wound he never talks about.

“They sent him back. He entered the past at twelve-twenty-nine p.m. CST on November 22, 1963. They sent him to the southwest corner of the Texas Book Depository, just beyond the Hertz sign. He had a minute or so to set up, and he’d been trained well. He didn’t flinch. He didn’t hesitate, doubt, fear, regret. Very capable, a Jack Brophy if ever there was one. Good with tools, even or especially guns. He had a rifle, nothing special, nothing complicated, and a nice midrange scope, and several rounds of ammunition. All of these were chance survivors of the nuclear wars, located at great cost and effort by our descendants in the year 2015.

“The hero on the roof put his well-zeroed scope on the head of the vital, attractive young man known as John F. Kennedy and saw the president take Lee Harvey Oswald’s second round and flinch but not fall, watched his hands involuntarily rise to his throat in the nerve behavior known as the Thorburn position, counted to five, and squeezed the trigger. He drove a bullet into JFK’s skull.

“In that moment, he disappeared. The rifle disappeared. All traces of the bullet disappeared. As it performed its killing duty, it ceased to exist. All evidence of the second rifle ceased to exist. And that’s why nobody will ever ‘solve’ the case. A confused but still idiotic Lee Harvey Oswald was left to go Huh?, panic, and begin his crazed last run. Who cares what happened to him. What’s important is that in the moment of JFK’s death, the next hundred years ceased to exist, or ceased to have existed. JFK was dead; he wasn’t wounded, he didn’t recover, his brain had been turned to vapor, he didn’t pull the troops out of Vietnam, he didn’t beg the Russians for mutual concessions, he didn’t unilaterally stand down from the brink, thus pushing us over the brink. There was no nuclear holocaust, no deaths in the billions, no nuclear winter, no collapsing ecosystem, no vanished agriculture, no poison seas, no demographic suicide, no second Manhattan Project; we got, as a planet and a species, something unknown – a second chance.

“That’s where we are now, Jack, fifty years into the second post-November 22, 1963, reality. Vietnam. Watergate. Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, Bush One, Clinton, 9/11, Bush Two, the war on terror, Iraq, Afghanistan, it’s been one mess after another, Jack, but we haven’t blown ourselves up, and billions of us still drink the water and breath the air. So maybe that lone gunman did us some good after all.”

“Well,” said Bob, “you promised me a theory, and that’s a hell of a theory.”

“See, most theories assume that had JFK survived, the consequences would have been positive. There’s no way to make that argument. Just as likely, by that goddamned law of unexpected consequences, they could have been negative, tragic, even catastrophic. We can never know.”

“Richard, you are either brilliant or insane, I don’t know which.”

“I’ll bet you’re not surprised to learn I’ve heard that line a few times before. Now chew on that one overnight, and tomorrow at eleven, show up at the lobby of Dal-Tex, and Dave Arons will take you through the building.”

Swagger got back to the hotel with a headache, as if he’d been drinking. In a sense, he had been: Richard’s science fiction story, with time travel and all that goofy bullshit. What the hell was that about? It had a meaning, somehow, but he couldn’t see it.

He almost wished he had a drink, and as usual, the temptation to go to the bar, to have the one that would become two and then three and so on was still there, like a pilot light, something that never went out.

He had to think of something else. He had to put something between himself and his appetites and the craziness that swirled in his head. He pulled on clothes and boots, took the elevator down, and walked the twelve blocks in darkness and coolness and emptiness to Dealey in a haste that belied the pain in his hip and the gracelessness of his walk.

He wanted to look at it again, see it in the dark, as form without detail, as shape. That nightmare site of so many crazies: the grassy knoll.

Without features, the small hill to the west of the plaza seemed utterly nondescript. He walked to it, climbed it, and watched the cars peel down Elm. He imagined himself as that legendary French gangster, the favorite candidate from one of the first theories, who somehow had lingered. A Corsican, the story went, like someone out of an old Hollywood movie, so degraded that he could kill the world’s most beautiful and dazzling man. There he was with his M1 carbine, leaning forward at 12:30 p.m. that day, putting the front sight blade on the president’s head and squeezing the trigger.

But–

No, it was wrong. The French killer couldn’t have aimed at the president. The president was moving at an uncertain speed. His killer would have to aim ahead of him. He’d have to hold, what, six inches to the front to make that brain shot. It was called shooting on the deflection, and it took talent and practice. Some people never got it.

Most people assume that the Frenchman on the knoll had the easier shot because he was closer. In their minds, close equals easy, far equals difficult. Oswald was 263 feet away, the Frenchman 75. Clearly, these people hadn’t done any wing shooting, or taken any shots at running game or men.

Swagger estimated that the theoretical Frenchman would have been on a ninety-degree angle to the vehicle, which itself was beginning to accelerate at an uneven speed. In order to place one shot – and he would be limited to one shot in order to preserve the false-flag operation – he would have had to shoot on the deflection. In skeet and trap and sporting clays, this is the hardest shot, called a “crosser,” because it demands the biggest lead. It is mastered by shooting it over and over again to develop a feel for the necessary lead given the speed of the target. The Frenchman would have had to find the target, keep the rifle moving, pull ahead of the target a certain (unknown) distance, and then pull the trigger without disturbing the sight picture as he kept the rifle moving. Swagger knew that was hard enough with a shotgun, which blasts a pattern of shot covering a fairly wide area, but almost impossible except for the top professionals with a rifle, an instrument that puts a single bullet into a single spot. The odds on making that shot the first time out are extremely remote. No, they are not impossible, but it seemed unwise for a professional team to base its plan on one man hitting a near-impossible shot first time, cold bore, unless it had at its disposal some sort of shooting genius, and such men are rare and difficult to find.

As for Oswald, or whoever was back there in the building, whichever one it was, his situation was completely different. His shot, in wing-shooting terminology, was an outgoer. It’s pretty easy. The target presents very little angle. The limo wasn’t exactly at zero degrees angle to him, but as it moved down Elm Street and as he oriented himself in the window to track it, it was under five degrees. From his point of view, even through that poor-quality scope, it was trending right to left slowly, possibly even undetectably to him. Its main quality was that it was diminishing in size as it traveled farther in distance. Neither of these conditions required that he shoot on the deflection, demanding that skillful computation of lead. He could hold point-blank on the target, concentrate on his squeeze, and get his shot off. If the rifle was accurate and the sight aimed dead zero, then the shot was technically no harder than a benchrest shot at a rifle range. The difference in distances – 75 feet versus 263 feet – was hardly meaningful. To Bob’s sniper’s brain, the shot from behind and above was far easier than a shot from 90 degrees at a vehicle accelerating at an unknown rate.

Swagger thought: Hmm, that’s kind of interesting. The shot had to come from behind.

CHAPTER 5

Shower, dress, coffee, paper. The same khaki suit, still baggy. The same red tie. He noticed neither tie nor suit and headed out. Dal-Tex was eight blocks or so away, the same walk as last night’s jaunt to Dealey, and he thought it would do his hip some good to walk it.

He made them easily enough. Two of them. One on foot, one trailing in a car, which looked to be an ’09 Chevy. The car hopscotched, and the man on foot would change duties with the driver. One guy was black, in a black suit with no necktie, a porkpie hat, and shades. The other was dour and plump, in plaid sport coat and slacks, no tie, no hat, no glasses, sun or otherwise. They were not amateurs.

Bob walked down Main, swallowed by the glass-and-steel canyons that had not been there fifty years ago. As last night, he followed Kennedy’s route, pungently aware that the style of modern air-conditioning climate control largely banished the open window from large building construction. No open windows in the sheets of tinted glass that rose forty stories.

It was all different for Kennedy. The buildings then were squatter, stouter things, constructed mostly in the twenties and thirties, lots of ornamentation and showy work, arches and cupolas and the other flourishes that cheap skilled labor could routinely produce in brick or stone. And windows. The close-in canyons of Main must have pushed JFK past fifty thousand open windows, and a shooter could have lurked in any of them. It was outside the limits then. Kennedy himself joked about it and drew smiles because it was such a fantastic possibility. He was just about out of windows too; beyond the depository, it was wide-open space all the way to the Trade Mart and the speech he never gave. The fifty-thousand-and-first window had a gunman behind it. End of story.

As had Kennedy, Swagger reached Main’s jog at Dealey, and instead of turning left to follow Main, he turned right down Houston. A block brought him to the corner where he’d met Nick, where Houston crossed Elm and the two brick piles stood side by side, the Book Depository and Dal-Tex, almost twins: square girder and mortar palaces.

He looked hard at Dal-Tex. A biggish office building, seven stories tall, redbrick, flat roof, fairly elaborate with arches built into the brick, recessing the windows, thick stone slabs edging the roof, big windows that opened from the bottom up. He could see where new oranger brick had replaced a couple of chunks at the joinery of the Elm-Main corner, to sustain a new brand for the unit. That corner also sported the building’s sole retail unit, the Sixth-Floor Museum souvenir shop and coffee gallery, though it was unclear if it was officially connected with the museum in TBD across the street, or if they had claimed the name as a marketing ploy. He noted that a fire escape, which in 1963 ran the height of the building on Houston Street, was gone.

Swagger’s vision drifted leftward, across the gulf of Houston Street, and settled again on LHO’s sniper’s nest, at the sixth-floor corner window. From where Swagger stood at the corner of the two streets, the window seemed immense. It couldn’t have been seventy-five feet away, and the downward angle wouldn’t affect the trajectory because the range was so close. You point at the white shirt through that junky scope and pull the trigger and cannot miss; no bad trigger pull could jerk the gun far enough to make a difference, no wind deflection could push the bullet from its destiny, nothing could interfere with its flight into flesh.

He stood on the corner, again imagining the slow pivot of the big car as the driver wheeled it through the 120 degrees of the turn. It would have been all but stationary except for the slow pivot. And up there, behind Window 50,001, was the gunman.

Again: why didn’t he shoot then? Wide-open target, straight angle into the high chest, Connally too far forward to interfere, Jackie to the right and out of the way, the shot so easy. A Boy Scout could have made it.

What was going on with LHO up there in his nest?

Another mystery, unknowable, unsolvable, that had died with Jack Ruby’s .38 Special into Lee Harvey.

Swagger waited for the light to change, crossed the street, turned right and then left up the four steps, and entered Dal-Tex.

The first thing he felt was the openness. Looking up, he saw space, as an atrium scooped from the guts of the building exposed several floors of balconies and the wood trusses of the roof. Moving ahead to the security kiosk, he was greeted by a man in his forties, well dressed and pleasant.

“Mr. Arons? My name is Jack Brophy. I think my friend Richard Monk called you on my behalf.”

They shook hands and Arons said, “Yes, he did, Dr. Brophy–”

“Jack, please.”

“Jack, then. He did, and I like Richard, so I’ll be happy to take you through and try to answer any of your questions.”

Swagger peppered the man with inquiries. The first concerned the atrium, which, no, wasn’t there in ’63. It was the creation of a nineties refurb. The whole building, Swagger saw, had the kind of urban-hip tone of so many gentrified older units, and the new designer had stressed raw brick where possible, lots of plain white structural wood, simplicity and unforced elegance everywhere. The ceilings had been cleverly peeled of stucco, exposing the stout girders that were the frame of the building nested in the still-sound wood beams that also sustained the building’s pressures.

“I’m guessing these three elevators were here before?” he asked as they rode up.

“Since the beginning,” said Arons. “They’ve been rehabbed, of course” – the elevator was sleek stainless and teak, with mirrors for the vain – “but the shaft was always here, central rear.”

“Got it. Were there ever any elevator operators? Particularly in 1963?”

“Not then, not ever.”

“What about security?”

“Never. Not until recently, that is.”

Swagger felt that the building was smaller on the inside than on the outside, even with the opened atriums and ceilings. Also, it was squarer; somehow you sensed the perfection of its symmetries inside, whereas from outside, it seemed longer one way, more rectangular.

They started on the seventh floor, and Arons took him to an unrented office suite that fronted on Houston Street, looking south to the Book Depository. Its roof could be seen twenty-five feet away, but more evident was the angle down Elm, exposing totally the street up to and beyond the X that marked the brain shot.

It didn’t take a genius to see how easy that shot, or the back shot that preceded it, would have been from here. Moreover, the wide sill made for superb, almost bench-quality stability, and since the window was recessed in an encompassing arch, the muzzle wouldn’t have been visible from the street nor, given the height, from the TBD across Houston, the only building on the horizon. The angle into the car and bodies would have been almost identical to Oswald’s, depending on the subtleties of twist and turn of the president and the governor.

“And the windows? They’ve always been the kind that slid up and down, like these, not the kind that hinged outward?”

“Always up and down.”

“And the floors? All wood, like now? Ever covered with carpet?”

“Just as you see it, except in those days, plasterboard covered the brick. Then as now, it was used for office space and storage. It was a much busier building, with a lot of garment wholesalers. They used it as a distribution center, so it was in one sense more a warehouse, particularly on the lower floors. The office suites were on the upper four floors.”

Swagger wanted to see the angle from the front, that is, from the Elm Street windows. That was easily arranged, and he soon found himself facing down Elm from a more severe angle, yet if he stood to the left of the window and oriented himself to the street, he had an equally easy shot. Moreover, the shooter would have to be, by the mandate of the angles, concealed, as he’d be standing or sitting to the left and shooting out the window at roughly a forty-five-degree angle.

He also noted one of his watchers sitting on the park bench at Elm and Houston, right at the top of Dealey, where Bob had sat with Nick earlier. It was the black one, and he sat pretending to read a paper but in reality keeping his eyes nailed on the Dal-Tex entrance between the lid of his hat and the top of the newspaper. Bad craft. A smarter move would have been to amble down the street and set up against the Dallas Records Building across Elm, where he wouldn’t have been so visible.

The roof was next. It was accessed through a narrow stairway at the top of the stairwell, then a horizontal door. Stepping onto it, you were invisible to any building extant then, for none had been higher than it in the vicinity. The roof supported but one structure, the elevator room, which was a freestanding brick pillbox centered in the rear of the building. It had clearly been rebuilt in one of the refurbs, and unlocked, it yielded a surprisingly minimalist interior, with three big units for hoisting, each attached to an electronic board, all of it evidently computer-controlled and run by robot program.

It would have been much smaller in ’63, and Jean Marquez’s evocation of a room jammed with gears and pulleys, with the naked winding and unwinding of the cables and the stench of lubrication, all of it dark and dangerous and crowded, rang true, even if the twenty-first-century iteration had become something a lot more high-tech.

And that really was that. No puzzles solved, but no possibilities rendered inoperative by reality. He thanked Dave Arons, shook hands in the lobby, and went on his way, awaiting the phone call on Nick’s cell. It came when he was halfway back to the hotel.

“Have you picked them up?”

“Yeah. Black guy, porkpie, suit, no tie. White guy, chubby, no hat, plaid coat. Working out of a ’09 red Chevy. Should I be worried?”

“No. They’re local bozos. Ex-Dallas dicks. They work for Jackson-Barnes, the big detective agency. Their usual deal is following husbands to the love nest and getting some nice dirty ones. The dirtier the shot, the bigger the settlement. A blow job can cost Mr. Big a cool two million. Unbelievable. These guys are pretty good at following software millionaires and new-oil people around. They’re overmatched by you.”

“Who hired ’em? Richard?”

“Yeah. One of our agents has a source in their office.”

“I wouldn’t have thought Richard had the dough.”

“See, that’s interesting. He lives poor, he dresses poor, he’s the complete assassination monomaniac, but he’s worth over five mil and takes two vacations a year to, wouldn’t you know it, Bangkok.”

“Is he legit otherwise?”

“Everything checks out. Fifty-two years old. Brown University grad, went army intel for twenty, very good rep, some good undercover ops, mostly in Germany. The photographic-memory deal is apparently real, and he was valued for that. Faster than a computer. Married to a German gal, divorced. Retired a major in ’04, showed up here in ’05, set up the institute, got to know all the players, got them to trust and like him and view him as a harmless fuzzy-wuzzy nutcase but adorable. His vice appears to be porn. Not kiddie stuff, he’s too tame for that. He buys a lot of DVDs from Japan and is a member of several ‘Japorn’ chat rooms, where he holds forth with great authority.”

“Everybody has his little kink. Who pays for the ‘institute’?”

“It’s run on a yearly grant from the Thompson Foundation, a lefty outfit out of D.C. that also gives to big gun control, big green, big lib, and other similar entities. We can’t trace it beyond that, so I don’t know if the dough originates with them or not.”

“Should I start packing?”

“No. These two Dallas flatfeet, as I say, are non-vi types. Both were in Vice, never did SWAT action. They wouldn’t be involved in a hit. Too scary for them. They’re strictly nine-to-fivers and want to go home at the end of the day and play with their kids.”

“Okay, I won’t even ditch ’em yet.”

“Jackson-Barnes is almost certainly doing some deep data mining on ‘Jack Brophy,’ but the Justice Department work should withstand that easily. You’ll check out. Richard will believe you’re who you are. Then what?”

“Tonight, when Dumb and Dumber are home, I’ll check out and disappear. I’ll let Richard wonder if I’ve left or what. In a couple of days I’ll catch him off-balance and start throwing some hardball at him. His next job, if he’s something other than a paranoid, will be to get a pic or a print on me. I’ll make sure he doesn’t. Then we’ll see what happens.”

“I don’t like that, Swagger. You’re trying to goad the violence, and we may not be able to stop them in time.”

“No, I’ll stay in touch, and we’ll set up a nice sting op when the time is right and see what we net.”

“No guns.”

“Not unless I know I’m being hunted. Then I’ll hunt back.”

Swagger spent another normal day, dropped by Richard’s bookstore and bought three used books at the friends’ rate, 25 percent discount – Bugliosi, Posner, and the abridged copy of the Warren Commission report; he owned them all but hadn’t brought them – then went back to Dealey, sat, hung out, read yardage with a small Leica Rangefinder, walked this way and that. Then he went back to the Adolphus, had an early meal, and went to bed. He was tailed the whole way.

At 4 a.m. he woke, showered, shaved, packed, and checked out of the hotel. He checked his suitcase at the hotel desk and carried an overnighter with the books and some fresh clothes, toiletries, and his .38 Super, mags, and speed scabbard, then slipped out a side door. He walked about nine blocks through a dark devoid of human activity, dodging the occasional police car whose attention he might merit, and got to Dallas’s West End, a nightclub and entertainment zone a few blocks northwest of Dealey, where cabs were plentiful.

He arrived in twenty minutes at his destination, a randomly selected Econo Lodge on a road that led to the airport, and checked in, paying cash for a week so no one could trace him via credit card. He didn’t think Richard had that capacity, but the big detective agency might. He called Nick’s number and left his new address, then went back to bed.

Nick called at three the next afternoon. “My news is that the boys are going crazy trying to find you.”

“Let ’em sweat.”

“What’s your plan now?”

“I’m going to chill here for a few days and hunker up and reread all this crap. As he said, it’s so goddamn big, and no matter how you enter it, you get lost in the maze. I’m going to try out a more concentrated, less scattershot approach.”

“I thought you had it nailed good by sticking with the rifle stuff.”

“The rifle stuff is great as far as it goes, but I can’t get beyond the timing issue. How’d they do it so fast? If it couldn’t be done that fast, then the whole thing goes away, Lee Harvey’s the bad boy, Robert Aptapton got smacked by a punk on meth, and Bob Lee goes back to his rocker, wiser but poorer. You could go nuts with all this stuff.”

“Many a poor man has, I know, I’m one,” said Nick.

“In a couple of days I’ll pop in unexpectedly on Richard, and we get to the new game of now-he-sees-me-now-he-don’t.”

“Okay. Let me know what I can do.”

That was that. Bob spent the three days poring over the three books, cross-checking, trying to find a pattern, looking for something that might tie everything together in a nice little package. A million others had done so before him, and like them, he failed. Nothing. No holes. Oswald did it, that was all, had to be, nothing else worked. Shot from Dal-Tex? On the wildest frontier of the physically possible but unsupported by any evidence whatsoever, except the generalized conceit that the third bullet came from behind and above, and certain windows at Dal-Tex were within the cone of trajectory that the computer age had imposed upon the reality of the event. No known photo existed that showed the upper floors of the building at around 12:30 that day, which would document whether or not a window had been open.

The one new fact was that someone had killed James Aptapton. If so, then maybe it was over something mundane, not the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Maybe Aptapton had divulged his theory, and that guy had recognized it as something new and special, wished it were his, and decided it was his. So he killed him in Baltimore for it. Murders have happened for lesser reasons by far, for pennies, for toys and gym shoes, for pride and prejudice, for honor and glory, for blow jobs and rim shots. Maybe it was Richard himself, though it was hard to feature someone so rumpled and disheveled as a badass killer. But maybe if “Jack Brophy” came clean with Richard, Richard might have some suggestions about who in the assassination community was capable of such a thing.

It was hard to know what to do next.

On the third day, Swagger could tolerate the inactivity no more and took a cab to an address in the suburbs that he’d found on the Internet. It was a huge sporting goods place called Outdoor Warehouse, and it lived up to its claim of holding nearly everything indoors that could be used outdoors. That included the hunting department, where, among the beautifully crafted new rifles and the black plastic assaulters and the endless variations of 9 mm, .38/.357s, and .45s in the gleaming showcases, he found a wide-ranging aisle of ammunition offerings and, between the 6.5 Creedmore and the 6.5 Swede, some boxes of 6.5 Mannlicher-Carcano. It was Czech or something, from an outfit called Prvi Partizan, but in the requisite 162-grain load. It was surprisingly cheap, at around fifteen dollars, and the thirteen-year-old behind the cash register up front displayed no sense of irony at the sight of a man buying a box of six-five Carc in Dallas, Texas.

Back in the room in the Econo Lodge, Bob opened the box, took out the twenty cartridges, and brought one close to his eye. It looked like a small blunt-nosed missile, all gleaming and reflective in the fluorescent light. The bullet was abnormally long, given the length of the case, and spoke of the nineteenth century with its blunt tip, which was the latest thing in the 1890s.

He looked at it from a dozen angles, trying to uncover its secrets. It was a lynchpin of sorts, close enough to the original to stand in for the bullet that LHO had nominally used.

Though it was the magic bullet, today it didn’t look magic, just comically old-fashioned, with that rounded “meplat,” the technical term for bullet point. He recalled the number of wounds it had inflicted, hitting the president high in the back, passing through him, hitting Governor Connally, passing through him, passing through his wrist and smacking his leg, all without doing much damage to itself. From a certain angle that bullet – Warren Commission Exhibit No. 399 – did look as “pristine” as the one three inches from Swagger’s eyes. But Bob recalled that from other angles, it became clear that the base of the bullet was severely mangled, crushed out of round by some impact, with core lead extruded from the interior by the impact. It was far from pristine but at the same time suspiciously intact.

Swagger had a melancholy fund of knowledge on what bullets did to bodies, his own and others’. To him, it was not nearly so mysterious when he considered that the bullet did not strike bone until it left the governor’s body, when it struck his wrist, fracturing it, by which time it had slowed considerably from its initial muzzle velocity of two thousand feet per second and lost most of its power to crumple or break when colliding with hard structures.

Swagger couldn’t get away from the old-fashionedness of it. It was old-fashioned by the standards of 1963. It was eighty-two years old in theory and design when it struck the president. Lots of folks missed that; it was just another bullet to them.

Another way to look at the bullet was to consider its origin and purpose. Too many fools had written about the event without reference to those two issues. Too many fools thought a bullet was just a heavy piece of lead screwed into a cartridge and sent arbitrarily on its way. In fact, even in 1891 bullets and their design and performance were among the most overengineered items in the human inventory, thought about hard and mathematically; long before men had indoor plumbing or hot running water, they had substantive mathematical treatises on ballistic performance, principles, and laws. Ballistics were always the first thing the state’s mind turned to, not the last.

That bullet, like the one in its brass casing in his hand now, weighed 162 grains and consisted of copper gilding of unusual thickness over a lead core, 1.25 inches in length with a round nose. It was designed after great research and experimentation to perform a certain military job, which the Italian general staff believed would be of importance in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. There was nothing arbitrary about it. It wasn’t designed just “to kill” but to kill a particular enemy in a particular environment.

It occurred to Swagger that to understand WC399, he had to understand the military realities of the Italian army in 1891, when the round was adopted as the standard infantry cartridge, during the general European upgrade of that era from single-shot muskets to magazine-fed bolt actions, such as the Mauser K98, the French Lebel, the British Enfield, and eventually, the American Springfield.

Who was the Italian general staff planning to fight, and in what environment? The Italians have never been expansionist, and Mussolini was thirty years down the pike. They were not great colonizers with an overseas empire to safeguard, like the British or the Germans. Despite two pathetic forays into Africa, they did not see their troops fighting indigenous forces in Asia, India, or the Pacific. What they imagined was protecting the good life that was lived in their beautiful country, with its abundance of resources, its grapes, its pasta, all roasted by a warm sun.

The Italians of 1891 understood that the important battles to come would be defensive in nature. They would not invade. They would be invaded. Their task was to stop invasion in its tracks. Where would such a battle take place? The amphibious landing had not yet been attempted, much less perfected, so it seemed likely a foe – German or Austrian, most likely – would come overland. If you look at the map, that tells you much: the invasion would have to come through the Alps. It would be a mountain war.

In such a battle, who would an Italian soldier be trying to kill and at what range? Well, Swagger reasoned, the nature of mountain war is that the ranges would tend to be long. Just look at Afghanistan and its five-hundred-yard firefights. Mountain war would involve shooting uphill, downhill, across valleys. Except in rare instances, there’d be little hand-to-hand combat; targets could be expected in the two-to-four-hundred-meter range. That would dictate a bullet noted for its accuracy, which in turn would result in a long, thin bullet, so that the rifling could be counted upon to give efficient spin, with an unusual density so as to resist the unpredictable spurts of wind found up high. It occurred to him that was an excellent description of the M-C 6.5 in the ideal, although Italian manufacturing practices may have meant that the ideal was seldom achieved.

Who would the Italian soldier in the mountains be shooting at? The enemy would be a German or an Austrian mountain soldier, skilled in climbing, hearty, with a higher pain threshold, a more athletic demeanor, superb physical conditioning, an elite soldier. One more thing, the key thing: he would be heavily dressed. He would be wearing underwear, long underwear, heavy woolen pants, a heavy woolen shirt or battle tunic, probably a sweater or some kind of tight leather-and-fleece vest, a parka heavily matted (no Gore-Tex in those days), all bundled tight by belts and pack straps.

To kill him, what do you have to do? You have to penetrate him. You have to drive a bullet into him with such force that it will not deviate if it strikes a button or a strap or a canteen, that will not disintegrate if it strikes a bone, but continues on its quest for heart or lungs or guts that lay deep inside the insulation. That is what the Mannlicher-Carcano was designed to do, and that is exactly what WC399 did on November 22, 1963. It was not an anomaly. It performed totally within its design characteristics.

Swagger saw immediately where his thought process had taken him. It was enough to drive a man to drink. If the second bullet performed to design specification, that meant that the third bullet did not. It disintegrated when it should not have. And that was the key question of the whole goddamned thing.

The true magic bullet of the JFK assassination was bullet number three. It was a heavily encapsulated round designed to penetrate, not fly apart. It killed by penetrating, not by detonating. Moreover, at a range of 265 feet, it had lost a great deal of its momentum – from a high of 2,100 feet per second, it had probably dropped off to 1,800 feet per second. It hit the skull fully flush. Swagger had no difficulty understanding why the president’s head yielded a massive, explosive wound upon impact, as the bullet would have pushed an energy wave through any material it encountered, and if that material were enclosed, the results inevitably would be explosive, but he couldn’t see why the bullet itself would have detonated. There was no ballistic principle for such a thing happening.

Why did the third bullet explode?

CHAPTER 6

Richard Monk allowed himself a steak once a week, and on Friday, he went to the Palm in the West End. He had a nice martini (straight up, slightly dirty, olives), ordered the small filet medium rare with mashed potatoes, nursed his ’tini while the steak was seared, and then looked up in astonishment when Jack Brophy slid in across from him.

“Richard, I do declare, mind if I join you?”

“Jack, God, I thought you’d left. I tried to call you, and they said you’d left.”

“I changed locations, that’s all.”

“Where are you now?”

“See, that’s it, Richard. I’ll be honest with you. I think I’m being followed.”

“Followed?” said Richard with a little too much dramatic emotion driving the word from his lips.

“Two guys, I’m sure. Black guy, white guy, a team working out of one car. You wouldn’t know anything about that, would you? You were in intel, you know how these things can be arranged.”

“If I was in intel, I’d be a trained liar, right? So if I tell you no, you won’t believe it. I don’t know what to say except that if you look at it, why on earth would I have you followed, which, after all, would cost some money, and I don’t have enough of the stuff to throw around like that. The piece of meat I ordered is my one weekly luxury.”

“Okay, okay,” Bob said. “Sorry, didn’t mean it as an accusation. But let me ask you this: do you know anybody in the wide body of buffs, fanatics, researchers, whatever, who might follow me? I’m thinking I may have a valuable piece of intellectual property. Maybe you mentioned it to someone who mentioned it to someone who thought it sounded interesting and decided to look into me.”

“Jack, I don’t even know what it is. Something about guns, that’s all.”

“That’s right,” said Bob.

“Maybe it has to do with something else altogether, something back in Boise. Child support?”

“If my children can’t support themselves by now, there’s nothing I can do for ’em. I think the money manager sends my ex-wives their checks, so I believe I’m okay on that. No, my life’s too dull for intrigue.”

“Jack, no one’s approached me, asked me any questions about you, anything like that.”

“Richard, I’m just going to disappear for a bit. You okay with that?”

“Sure, Jack.”

“I’ll see you in three days at that Mex place on Main, twelve-thirty.”

“You’ve got it, friend.”

Of course, Swagger didn’t show at the Mexican place, but two FBI agents did, and they confirmed that the operatives from the Jackson-Barnes detective agency were in place down the street with a Nikon and a heavy telephoto lens.

Swagger called Richard while he sat there, apologized for being unavoidably detained, and promised to make it up to him and that they’d meet soon, but he couldn’t set a time because his schedule was so “fluid.” He let three days pass and ambushed Richard in the parking lot outside the Y.O. restaurant, another famous joint just across from the Palm in the West End.

Richard was a little buzzed from the martini, and his belly was loaded with protein and carbohydrates. “Man, you show up at the oddest times,” he said, perturbed, Bob guessed, because his photo team wasn’t with him and there was no way he could call it in to them in time.

“I’m secret-agent man, all over the place. I think I dumped my followers. Let’s get a cab and drive around for a while.”

“Jack, maybe you’re overdoing it a bit. I should tell you again, in the past three days, nobody asked me anything about you, and nobody’s keeping an eye on me or anything. I do have something for you.”

“Yeah?”

“I have a friend who has a gun as close as you can get to the Oswald rifle. It’s a Mannlicher-Carcano Model 38 carbine, serial number CV2755, just eleven shy of Oswald’s, from Terni. It’s got the Japanese scope and mount, and it was ordered from Klein’s just a week or so before Oswald ordered his, in March 1963. I’m guessing the same technician attached the scope to the rifle. You couldn’t come closer. A wealthy collector I know paid over three grand for it. I think you’d find it interesting to shoot. We’ve even got some white-box 6.5 from Western. You know how hard that stuff is to come by.”

“Nah,” said Swagger. “See, it doesn’t matter how 2755 shoots. It only matters how 2766 shoots. For a dozen reasons, a hundred reasons, they could shoot different by far. And you know what, Richard? In my theory, it doesn’t matter a lick how even Oswald’s rifle shot that day.”

“Okay, I get it. Second gunman, second rifle. Another Mannlicher.”

“Close, but no. Let me tell you this: I don’t know why, I don’t know who, but goddammit, I know how. Come on, let’s get that cab and go for a ride. On me.”

He herded Richard toward the street in a friendly-bear manner, and the younger man couldn’t resist. If working for somebody, he had to maintain the contact; if the assassination nut he claimed to be, he had to find out whether the new info was cool.

They got in, and Swagger instructed the driver to drive around for a while on the meter, that he’d pay whatever. It was a great gig for the fellow, who rarely got a big ride this late at night. Off they went.

“Richard,” Swagger said, “I want your judgment. Maybe I’m nuts and all I’ve got is bullshit. Or maybe it’s part of the answer. Anyhow, I had a what-you-call-it, epiphany today, which makes me even more sure I’m on to something. It came out of something you said. Let me run this by you–”

“Jack, I don’t know anything about guns. I can’t make a judgment.”

“You’ll get this, Richard. Then tell me if it’s worth hiding, worth looking for an author to partner up with, if it has any value book- or movie-wise. I don’t know about that stuff; you do.”

“Okay, Jack. I’ll give it my best shot.”

“Here’s the key question. Why did the third bullet explode? In my opinion, nobody has answered that correctly. The best answer you get is, it exploded because it exploded. Bullets occasionally explode. You can’t predict it, but you can’t deny it. Get something moving that fast, anything can happen.”

“What’s your answer? Why did the third bullet explode?”

“You said, ‘As it performed its killing duty, it ceased to exist,’ isn’t that right? The bullet from the future, which, in doing its duty, obliterated itself, its rifle, its shooter, and a hundred years of tragedy.”

“I said that, yes. That’s the crux of the conceit. It’s kind of cool, I think.”

“Richard, do you know what ‘lingering’ means?”

“Of course I do.”

“I mean something that hangs around, won’t leave your mind, seems always there, that kind of lingering.”

“Yes, I know what that kind of lingering is.”

“What you said, ‘it ceased to exist,’ that lingered for me. It lingered and lingered, and finally, I realized something. The third bullet. The one that hit Kennedy. It ceased to exist.”

“So it did. To the eternal annoyance of the Warren Commission and the delight of conspiracy animals the world over.”

“No, no. It wasn’t an accident. Here’s the point. It had to do that. It was engineered to do that. And because the engineering was sound, that’s what made the conspiracy possible.”

“Explosive bullet, huh? Just like The Day of the Jackal, with the mercury inside. Or I suppose–”

“No, no. No explosive, no mercury, no glycerin, nothing like that. All those leave chemical traces, easily detectable by the forensics of 1963.”

“I believe the Warren Commission asked the FBI forensics guy about such a possibility, now that you mention it.”

“Yeah, Frazier his name was, and as usual, he was both wrong and stupid. I’m talking about something else. What I mean is that the bullet itself, without changing its composition, its metallurgy, its anything, was engineered in such a way that it had to explode – it had to, that was the brilliance of it all – so that it left no record of its existence. It was the real magic bullet, only everybody was too stupid to figure that out.”

“So what are you talking about? How do you make a bullet explode?”

Swagger said, “I’m talking about velocity.”

He continued to explain to Richard, who sat rapt, as if he did know something about guns after all.

“Where are you?” Nick’s voice came over the cell. It was a few days later. In the meantime, he’d stood up Richard at a planned meet, sent him a few e-mails asking whether he’d come across anything similar to his velocity theory, which Richard was presumably checking, and generally making an annoyance of himself without showing up anywhere to be photographed.

“I’ve switched motels,” Swagger said, giving him the new address. “I’m closer in now, and I can get cabs easier. Man, am I wearing out the ATM, all the cash I’ve been using.”

“Okay, listen to me,” Nick said. New tone to his voice: official G-man, dead-zero serious. “I want you to stay there. Under no circumstances are you to leave and expose yourself. Don’t make me send a car to bring you in and put you under protective; just comply, okay? It’s for your own good.”

“What’s happened?”

“This may mean nothing. I have no evidence it’s anything other than what it seems to be, but still, it’s provocative. A black Dodge Charger, brand-new, the big muscle-car variant with that supercharged 370 Hemi under the hood, was stolen out of a garage in Fort Worth yesterday. It’s exactly the kind of muscle car that was used in Baltimore.”

Swagger said, “He’s here. He’s hunting me. Either Richard told him, or someone is on Richard and knows what Richard knows. And whoever it is, he doesn’t like the velocity theory. See, Nick, this proves it has to do with JFK.”

“It doesn’t prove anything like it. It proves a muscle car was stolen. Maybe it’s in parts in some chop shop, or on the way to a soldier of the Zeta cartel’s garage in Nogales, or being driven around by a couple of meth heads with chicken feed for brains. Those are all possibilities, and they may be more probable than this slightly improbable car killer, whoever he is, if he even exists.”

“Ask James Aptapton if he exists.”

“So. Here’s what I require. You stay put. I mean put. Room-service pizza and Chinese food, lots of daytime cable, get to know your housekeeping staff, that sort of thing. Meanwhile, I am going to put together a task force. I want to bring Dallas Metro in, and since it involves cars, maybe the Texas Highway Patrol. We’ll figure out some kind of sting, find a way to expose you under controlled circumstances, and when he thinks he’s taking you – assuming he exists – we’ll take him. Bet he has some interesting beans to spill.”

“Everything says he’s a pro. He spills no beans. He shuts up, takes whatever ride he gets without ratting, because he believes his outfit will bust him somewhere along the line, maybe not this year but the next. Those guys have made friends with that kind of math. It’s the price they pay for the chicks and the coke and the respect, for being a hard guy. Nick, he won’t tell you shit. By being here, he’s already told you everything he’s going to tell you.”

“Ten years in Huntsville, followed by life in Hagerstown, that might budge him.”

Bob sighed. “You’re thinking like a lawman. Everything’s leverage. Sometimes you have to send a message; that’s the best leverage.”

“Bob, I’m going to have you picked up if you pull any shit. You will go down. You have to play by our rules on this one. It could be a big bust. It all goes away if you go cowboy.”

Bob saw that Nick was bluffing. It wasn’t so. Dead, the pro would be just as much a trophy as alive, particularly if an FBI undercover put him under through Nick’s supervision. And whoever he was, his identity would be his true testimony and point to a next step.

“Do I have your word?”

“Please tell me you’ll set this up fast.”

“It takes time, coordination between agencies. If he’s after you, he’s not going to go away. We haven’t even spotted him yet. We’ll put a net around Richard and see if he shows. If we nail him, we’ll move on to the next step. I need time from you. And sniper patience.”

“He’ll pick up on that in two seconds.”

“For God’s sake, you–”

“It’ll happen late, no traffic, no pedestrians. Tomorrow night, near Dealey, in some alley. He likes alleys. Have a rolling team set up, get there fast, and it’s your crime scene. It’ll be your kill.”

“Or your death.”

“This guy ran down a decent man who never did a thing except pay his taxes and educate his kids. Broke his spine in an alley. Now let’s see him try that trick against some real competition. I won’t lie to you, Nick. I’m not going to sit here in this goddamn room eating Chinese and rereading books for the tenth time. It’s not my nature. My nature is the hunt.”

Nick said, “I can’t authorize this.”

“I’m your undercover. You get all the credit.”

“I’m hanging up. I cannot authorize this.”

“But you will not pick me up, right?”

“Agh,” said Nick in frustration. He hung up.

Swagger went to the closet and removed his small overnight bag from behind the spare blanket, feeling the heaviness inside. He opened it, picking up the stainless-steel Kimber .38 Super, taking reassurance from the familiar lines of the 1911 platform as designed by John M. Browning over a century ago, with its twenty-three-degree grip angle, its flatness, its ergonomic genius of safety and slide-release placement created in a world where the word “ergonomics” hadn’t been invented. It was already cocked and locked, for what was the point of having a pistol if you couldn’t shoot it fast? He knew that nine hardball +P Winchester 130-grainers were in the mag and a tenth in the chamber, bullets that had their own velocity attributes, moving out at 1300 with enough juice to puncture glass or metal and keep on the straightaway for a killing shot. The gun had a familiarity; its ancient frame was of the perfect width and boasted the perfect relation of grip to bore so that when it came to hand, it went on point naturally. Bob slipped a speed scabbard, a minimalist concealment holster that yielded pistol to draw in a flash, on his belt, along with a mag pouch that already concealed two mags. He cinched his belt, then slid the pistol into the holster so that it rested three inches behind the point of his hip but flat against his body.

He put on his khaki coat to conceal it. Then he put his lucky dollar in his pocket. His lucky dollar was four quarters Scotch-taped together. In the pocket, the four coins supplied steadying weight, but if he had to draw, he’d give it a swat, and the heaviness of the coins would pull the coat back and clear and straight, presenting the pistol to the same hand that came back to snatch and deploy it.

Then he called Richard and told him he had to see him tonight at eleven, at the bench outside the Book Depository.

CHAPTER 7

The Russian saw them. Two men sitting on the bench by the reflecting pool. The Book Depository was well lit at night from the front, so the two were bold and clear in the refracted glow. On top of that, the Russian’s eyesight was absurdly superior, so the details leaped at him. No problem telling target from bait. Target was tall, angular. He looked like he’d been around some, been hammered here and there, even if his posture was relaxed. The Russian suspected he’d do better than the last one, that dish of pudding in the alley.

The Russian was parked out of the lights on Houston, across from the Book Depository near the tracks on Pacific. He had a good angle, and he was invisible to them. He hunted for signs of wariness but picked up nothing. The older man never looked around, his body language was not tense, he never swallowed or licked his lips, all tells of high anxiety. He wore a khaki coat, a red baseball hat, jeans, and a pair of boots. He was talking earnestly and listening earnestly.

Soon the chat would be over. Target would get up, and in whatever direction he went, the Russian would follow at a decent interval. The trick of the hit was the timing. No traffic downtown this late, and the police scanning radio indicated no presence of official vehicles in the vicinity. The plan was: wait for him to cross a street and head down a block. Then circle that block at speed with good angle control at the corners to beat him to the next intersection, get there before him, park with lights out. When he approached the intersection, he’d look both ways, probably wait until he had the green even though it was an empty weeknight, then start across the street. Find the angle of interception, accelerate through him (the Dodge did zero to sixty in 3.7 seconds) and smash him hard. Speed should be up to sixty-five by then. At the last second, as he turned to the noise, hit him with the lights, which would visually disorient him and freeze him in place. The kill was certain. There would be no time to react.

He waited, he waited, he waited. Occasionally, a cab pulled by, headed to the passenger-rich zone of the West End, not far away. Music and light issued from that neighborhood, but it meant nothing to the Russian. He sat in the dark corridor on the dark pavement in the dark car. On either side of him, two square brick buildings, dark as well, loomed. He had no idea what they were.

“Donahue seems to come the closest,” Richard said. They sat as if stage-lit on the bench, near the reflecting pool filled with Scope, under the shagginess of the overhanging oaks. A cool breeze stirred the leaves above to low whispers in the night, perfect for talking conspiracy.

“He goes nutty at the end,” Richard continued, “but it’s a logical nuttiness. He’s tried to answer your question: why did the third bullet explode? His answer is that a Secret Service man in the follow car with something called an AR-15, brand-new in ’63, I don’t know what it is, rose and accidentally fired after the second shot. That was the bullet that hit Kennedy.”

“And being a thin-jacketed, high-velocity 5.56-millimeter round impacting at close range, it behaved differently than the much heavier Carcano 6.5 from six times farther out, and that it was indeed engineered to explode? Is that it?”

“Yes.”

Swagger grunted.

“You don’t like?”

“It’s hard to believe that A) the agent could fire a bullet from an unusual-looking space-age rifle in front of, what, two thousand people, and that nobody would see it or hear it. Or B) on top of that, by the randomness of the universe, his muzzle would line up pointed directly at Kennedy’s head.”

“It’s a theory with many difficulties, yes. As I say, discredited.”

“You’re telling me. I guess the point is, he has good analysis of the Carcano, and he was stuck as to a way to explain the behavior of the third bullet. That AR-15, what would later be called an M-16, seemed to answer all the questions, and it sure as hell was there, but he didn’t realize it raised more than it answered.”

“There is testimony that some people smelled burnt powder in Dealey. And it would explain the government ‘cover-up’ and why they would never admit that friendly fire killed JFK.”

“I can’t buy it. I acknowledge that gun accidents frequently turn on great anomalies, like a .45 that’s never before doubled suddenly doubling, or a ricochet pattern that you couldn’t duplicate in a million years. That does happen. But here you’ve got two, one at either end of the shot, appearing in front of two thousand witnesses, and no one saw it?”

“As I say, many problems. Still, you should read the book and see what you make of the first hundred pages. I think it accords with your idea, to the degree that I understand it and am capable of making such a judgment.”

“Great, Richard. Richard comes through again.”

“You wanted to see me. What was it? You didn’t just want my report. I had the idea it was an emergency.”

“I get these ideas and get excited. Here’s my new one. It has to do with the angles.”

“What about the angles?”

“It’s very odd. Everybody who knows nothing thinks it’s all about distance. Close shot easy, far shot hard. Well, that ain’t true, and it especially ain’t true when you’re shooting on the deflection.”

“Deflection? No comprendo.”

“Deflection. Shooting at a moving target. You’ve got to solve the angle, that is, find a way to produce not a hit but an interception. You have to put the bullet where the thing is going to be. It’s like nobody who wrote about the Kennedy assassination ever shot a duck on the wing. So it’s all made up, assumptions, guesses, hunches.”

“Hmmm,” said Richard. “Interesting. All right, I’ll bite. Tell me what you’re getting at.”

Bob explained it to Richard. “So, does it hold water? Does it make sense to you? I think this is the best one yet. How would I check it? Does it connect with anything else? Has anyone else thought of this approach?”

“Jack, I love the way you get all into this, and how it becomes so important to you that you have to discuss it at” – he looked at his watch – “ten after midnight. Offhand, it seems new to me.”

“I thought you had a photographic memory.”

“I thought I did too. You are testing the limits of it, however, so let me think about it overnight. Maybe do some checking. I do have a business to run, you know. Anyhow, it’s late, and I’m no longer a monomaniac like you; I’m just a human, so I need sleep. I’ll check, you call in the next few days, and we’ll get together soon. Right?”

“Sorry, Richard. Okay, swell.”

“Drop you somewhere?”

“No, I’ll get a cab. I appreciate the way you humor me without really seeming to humor me. Your mother raised an honorable man.”

“Thank you, Jack. Okay, I know well enough to know that I can’t persuade you to accept a ride. I’ll await your call.”

They rose, shook hands, and separated, each heading off in his own darkness.

The Russian watched. The tall one crossed Houston and headed up Elm into the high buildings of downtown. It seemed he had a limp, as if someone had taken a hard shot at his hip. There had to be a story behind that! It slowed the old man considerably, and the Russian winced at the clear discomfort the man felt while on the go. The Russian waited for him to drag his wretched, bent old body along until it disappeared behind the corner of the building to his left, waited twenty seconds, then turned on his lights, drove slowly and under control to Elm, and turned left. He could see the tall man half a block ahead, sending out vibrations of painful imprecision but at the same time holding not a care for security in his mind, lost in whatever internal drama consumed him, limping along.

The Russian timed it perfectly, made certain not to look at the man, since some people have a weird gift for feeling the presence of another’s eyes upon them, reached him just as he was at the corner, and turned left. He drove at under thirty to the next block, turned right at the corner, and hammered it, aware only marginally that he was on the railroad tracks of Pacific Avenue, shooting up to sixty-five in three seconds to reach the next corner, found the ideal angle, and hardly lost a mile an hour on his controlled right-hand burn around the corner, then pulled up in the block with the intersection a hundred feet or so ahead of him, and halted, downshifting to neutral, putting his lights out. All was fine. It was no problem at all.

He waited, he waited, he waited. Time sometimes goes slow on the hunt. But at last his quarry arrived, ambling into view at the same distracted old man’s pace, disfigured by the limp so that he had an odd comic bearing. The Russian cracked a rare smile at the old man’s funny walk.

The Russian also had a gift for instantly computing interception angles. He knew not to go to the pedal at the man’s first step into the street or even the second. He had time to check for beams from oncoming traffic out of sight, and he noted there wasn’t any traffic. At the target’s third step, he got the go-code from his deep brain and rammed the car into first, controlling the clutch with a virtuoso’s touch, and a split second later, a really fast throw into second as the car’s 370 horses roared into high gallop and got there as fast as anything on earth except a straight custom drag. The sound of the engine eating gas with a basso profundo growl and alchemizing it instantly into speed filled the air. The car lurched ahead so powerfully, it turned the hard edges of reality into a blur.

Swagger had the gun in his hand along his right leg, hidden behind his comically exaggerated limp, and at the roar, losing no time on surprise, none on regret, nada on indecision, and in his pure-killer move, beautiful and stoic and all-American gunman, he pivoted and, because smooth is fast, slid the gun up so smooth it moved at a rate that has no place in time, and his subconscious acquired the front sight exactly as it came to center, driver’s-side windshield, and the pistol’s double tap lasted but a tenth of a second, recoil not fast enough to catch up to fully firing fast-twitch muscles of the trigger pull, even as one muzzle flash became another and two pieces of hot brass spewed from the ramjet breech eight inches apart. The windshield yielded instantly into a haze of micro-fracture, the car careened right, ate up the curb, hit a building with the sound of metal crunching, flipped, and roared on its beautiful, glossy black flank along the sidewalk, chewing up pavement, spraying sparks and stone debris, ripping sheets of window out of storefronts, its hood bending and twisting like a burning piece of paper, at last halting in a heap of twisted steel, with the stench of gasoline, tendrils of steam and smoke arising from several wounds in the body and engine well.

In the quiet that followed, Swagger slipped the gun into his holster and grabbed his cell.

“Memphis,” came the quick answer.

“I’m at Elm and North Market. He’s piled up to the right, on the sidewalk, no citizen collateral, all of it clean. Get your team here fast, and get me the fuck out of town.”

“What happened to him?” Nick said.

“Bring a body bag,” said Swagger. “And a mop.”