The Third Bullet

CHAPTER 8 Moscow

It was a perfect twilight in utopia as couples strolled, children frolicked, lovers squeezed, dogs yipped, and intellectuals theorized in the park off Ukrainski Boulevard. They glided with the radiant happiness of those who were happy to be who they were where they were when they were. “Life, it’s good” seemed to be the prevailing ethos. Lights winked in the soft darkness, more show than anything else, for in this urban playing field, there was no crime, or very little, nearly full employment, and low taxes. The dark for once concealed the construction frenzy of backhoes, bulldozers, and cranes as daytime Moscow reconstructed itself for about the thirtieth time in its long and convoluted history, this time giving capitalism a good shot even as the citizens ebbed and flowed through and around all the projects, dashing nimbly to avoid being crushed, either by the errant construction machine or that jet-black gleaming Ferrari whistling down the cobblestones at ninety per. Meanwhile, observing without comment, stone or steel men in greatcoats with those clamshell World War II helmets and the old red tommy guns, with their signature ventilated barrels and gangster-style seventy-one-round drums, stood fifteen feet tall every block or two, as if unsure whether this was what all their fighting and dying had protected and made possible.

Flanked by the nine-story banks of the Kutuzovsky 7 apartment complex and nestled under trees, the restaurant Khachapuri was operating at full meat ahead. It was a place that specialized in animal parts on sticks. They arrived glistening yet crisp, with the fat broiled out of them by raw flame, chunks of pure protein whose odor filled the air and made one think of Cossack camps along the Don after a good day massacring Tsarist infantry in about 1652. The restaurant itself had a Cossack quality, as it was an open-air tent affiliated with the kitchen of a bar in the building across the sidewalk, and a gathering place for those of the new generation seeking sustenance, vodka, and comradeship, at which it excelled in providing.

Swagger, of course, couldn’t try the vodka, knowing he’d end up in Siberia with a new Uzbek wife and nine children, plus some really cool tattoos; he wasn’t hungry, though the meat smells touched some primal thing in him; and the comradeship he sought was of a particular kind.

He leaned alone at the bar, drinking koka, as Coca-Cola was called here in the capital city, and watching the proceedings with a wary eye, not quite willing to buy in to it. Something held him back, history perhaps, his own as well as his country’s and his culture’s. It was hard to believe he’d been nurtured to hate all these people and they’d turned out to be so beautiful, energetic, and happy. Gee, folks, he thought, glad we didn’t blow you to nuclear shreds in about 1977; that would have been a big mistake.

It was his second day in Moscow. The first he’d spent wandering from his room at the Metropol onto Red Square and around the area and being stunned for the first time by the sheer joy of the city, a dusty, ramshackle, still-makeshift-after-865-years place. The ranks of Stalinist apartment buildings, with their dour exteriors and their ancient memories of tears and slaughter, all had been invaded by retail at the ground level and boasted gaudy signals of various frivolous goods, every luxury car and perfume and fashion designer known to man. In at least seven points on the horizon, brand-new Dallases of steel and chrome pierced the sky, lording over the five-story flatness of the now-dead Communist reality at their feet. It was a true gold-rush city, even if over a millennium old and the site of a massacre hall of fame. He couldn’t get over how the place throbbed.

He saw her then. She had the smart, tough look of a journalist, nothing to her of show or pretense, just a kind of irony playing through her eyes under her American hairstyle. She wore pants and a black T-shirt, as fitted the warm weather, and looked comfortable among the natives.

“Ms. Reilly? I’m Swagger.”

“Oh,” she said, “the great Swagger. Nice to meet a hero.” Handshakes, tight smiles, a little awkwardness.

“I’m just a beat-up goat trying to stay on the wagon around all this potato juice,” he said.

“The Russians do squish a nice potato. Here, I’ll get us seated.”

He followed her to the maitre d’s station, and the maitre d’ in turn led them through the tent, past family and office parties of swilling laughers and carnivores, to a smallish table at the margins of the place, which looked out on the recreations of the vast parkland, crosscut with walkers on both two and four legs and other sorts of relaxed civilians.

“You weren’t followed?” he asked.

“This is exciting,” she said. “No one’s ever asked me that before. No, I don’t think so. The Russians don’t follow American reporters anymore. They’re much more interested in making money.”

“So I’ve heard. Anything’s for sale in Moscow.”

“Anything,” she said.

“What about rent?” he said. “See, I want to rent the Lubyanka for a night.”

She laughed. “Good luck with that. You must know oligarchs.”

“Since I don’t know what an oligarch is, I don’t know if I know any. What are they, by the way? I saw that word in the English-language paper.”

“Rich guys. Tycoons, billionaires, conspicuous consumers. Mostly ex-KGB goons. They were buddies with Yeltsin in ’93, and when he dismantled the state economic apparatus, they butted their way to the head of the line and got all the pie. In short order, they became mega-rich. Pie, pie, pie, all day long. Now they drive around in gold-plated limos, marry flight attendants, buy American sports teams, try to get on Page 6, and generally run the place. Abramovich, Krulov, Alekperov, Vekselberg, Ixovich. One of ’em is married to Yeltsin’s daughter, as a matter of fact. Will and I did a story on them. Petonin, Tarkio, a couple more I can’t think of.”

“The names would be lost on me anyhow. But it sounds typical. That’s how headquarters towns always work. Anyhow, nice of you to meet me.”

“How couldn’t I? I did some checking, and if half the rumors are true, it’s like meeting John Wayne and Ted Williams and Audie Murphy in one man. Plus, your daughter says you’re a teddy bear.”

It was through his daughter, Nikki, a TV news reporter in Washington, that Swagger had effected a meet-up with Kathy Reilly, the Washington Post’s correspondent in Moscow.

The waitress came, and the reporter consulted the menu, which essentially consisted of meat with more meat, some other kinds of meat, some usual meat, some unusual meat, and, of course, meat. Kathy Reilly ordered some meat.

“So you’re working for the FBI, is that right?” she said.

“More or less. That’s what Nikki believes, that’s what the Russians believe. But they also believe my name is Jerry Homan and that I’m a special agent. I have all the credentials and diplomatic okays to back it up. I did meet with the State Department-FBI liaison guy at our embassy, and he thinks I’m who I say I am.”

“Wow. Undercover stuff. This is turning into something glamorous. What’s it all about?”

“Short version, I was asked to look into the death of a man in Baltimore by hit-and-run. He’d just returned from Dallas, where he’d been asking pointed questions. I went to Dallas and asked the same pointed questions. Sure enough, someone tried to kill me, hit-and-run.”

“It didn’t work out for him, I take it.”

“Not exactly. Fortunately, I’d contacted an FBI agent in Dallas, a fine man with whom I’ve worked before, and he agreed to run me as a contract undercover even though I was the one who brought it to him. It was a thin fiction, but it held up. Then it turned out that the fellow who tried to kill me was what you might call a trophy. Russian mafioso, associated with something called the Iz-may-lov-skay-a gang here.”

“Okay, now I’m impressed.”

“That bad, huh?”

“Very bad.”

“This character was wanted by Interpol all over Europe, he was wanted by the Moscow police, and he had relocated to a Coney Island outpost of the Iz-may-what’s-it empire and was doing jobs for them and freelancing. Technically, I’m here to try to find out from this end who he was working for. Not which family, but who contracted with that family either here or in New York to hire him and for what reason. I’ve got an appointment with a top Russian gang cop in a few days to try to get some dope. We may talk to some snitches and so forth.”

“You don’t want to get too close to the Izmaylovskaya boys, take it from me,” she said.

“I’m just going to ask some polite questions and go on my way. No need to mix it up with the locals.”

“Sound policy. I will tell you, and you didn’t hear it from me, that the oligarch Krulov is said to be most intimately associated with the Izmaylovskayas. His enemies had a way of disappearing or getting hit by vagrant untraceable cars.”

“Krulov,” said Swagger, marking it down internally.

The dinner arrived. It appeared to be meat. There were also suspicious vegetables, which Swagger avoided, and some soups, equally menacing. He did enjoy the animal he ate, whatever species it might have been, however it died. “It’s very good,” he said.

“She said you needed a favor. It happens that this is a perfect time. My husband is in Siberia – no, I didn’t send him, he’s covering an oil conference – and I’m sort of at loose ends, with only thumbsuckers due. So I can take you around, introduce you to people, if you want.”

“I’m not sure you should be seen with me. These people are serious. That’s why I asked to meet after dark, close to home, at a loud public place.”

“Do you think–”

“I just don’t know. I do know if you look into Russian mafia, you can get dead all of a sudden. I might have some skills that would help me get out of a tight, dangerous situation, but unless you’ve had a lot of SEAL training, I doubt that you do.”

“Not unless it’s slipped my mind.”

“Nikki says you speak Russian well but that you read it very well.”

“I can get by on the streets. I read it like a native.”

“I’m trying to get hold of some records. Copies won’t work; I have to see the actual files and try to determine to what, if any, degree they’ve been tampered with. I’m hoping you’ll read them for me. Or at least scan them. I hope to arrange it discreetly, so you’ll be in no danger of exposure. Is that a possibility?”

“I suppose it is. What are you looking for?”

“The Russian James Bond,” he said. “Circa 1963. I can feel him. I can recognize his talent, his imagination, his will, his decisiveness, his creativity. He was their top agent, and in 1963, it’s possible he pulled off the operation of the century. I’ve come to Moscow for him.”

It was another box of a building, this one much bigger. No bricks, some sort of yellow stucco, maybe ten stories tall, with all the early twentieth- or late nineteenth-century gewgaws, like pillars and arches and stone window frames, its flat roof festooned with radio communications antennas. And it was gigantic, about a block wide, a huge chunk of real estate eating up land on an empty Moscow circle a mile from Red Square.

“That’s it, huh?” Swagger asked.

“In the flesh. Or in yellow stucco. Source of evil, source of cunning, source of murder, violence, conspiracy, treachery, torture. It’s a very bad place. You did not want to make people in that building angry with you.”

“I get it.”

“Nothing military in there,” said Mikhail Stronski. “It’s all secret-agent spy shit, games in games in games, always fucking people up.”

It was the Lubyanka: former home of the Cheka, GPU, OGPU, MGB, NKVD, and KGB, and now FSB. During the purges, many were hauled here from Swagger’s polished luxury hotel, the Metropole, which in the thirties housed the wreckers and oppositionists of Comintern, and in Lubyanka’s cellars, they were shot behind the ear. No one knew what became of the bodies. Maybe they were still there.

“It’s hard to hate a building,” said Swagger.

“This one, no problem.”

Stronksi was a heavyset man with a glowering face that seemed like a map of Eastern-bloc misfortune. He had wintry gray eyes under wintry gray hair and heavy bones, and looked as if he could crush a diamond between his fingers, or at least fracture it a little bit. He had a bear’s body, yet at fifty-seven he moved with surprising grace. He had been in the same business as Swagger, but his outfit was called Spetsnaz, and he practiced the trade in Afghanistan-fifty-six kills.

An American gun writer who’d come to Russia to do a feature on the new Russian sniper rifle, the 12.7 mm KSVK, had found him and interviewed him; Swagger saw the story, contacted the gun writer, got the e-mail address and a recommendation, and reached out across the ocean to another high-grass crawler, another brother of the one-shot kill, another infiltrator and exfiltrator who knew too much about certain things but would never speak of them. Stronski had heard of Swagger – it was a small world, after all – so the two men were a natural fit, having killed for a king whom they later doubted, having lost too many good friends for a cause that now seemed to mean nothing in the world, yet sought for certain recondite skills that never go out of fashion.

“This woman, she’s okay?” Stronski asked.

“She’s not of our world, which I like. No games to her. I haven’t told her everything; that’s tonight. But she reads your language as well as a native–”

“I love her already.”

“–and she’s super-smart and tough. It’ll be fine if I can get her to feel secure. Like all Americans, she’ll fear the building.”

The two sat in an elegant restaurant, called Spy for the irony (irony was as new to Moscow as capitalism), that fronted Dzerzhinsky Square and lurked three hundred yards across the circle from the Lubyanka. They were on the balcony of the third floor, eating blintzes and caviar and cold slices of salmon, Stronski throwing down vodka, Swagger trying to keep up with old-fashioned water.

“We fear that building too. A good young fellow named Tibolotsky, good operator, brave as hell, spotted for me in the mountains, he voiced doubts about the war. He was fighting it; his right, no? Someone informs KGB, and young fellow is disappeared. Wrong for him to fight so hard and end up in cell or worse. That is why I hate bastards so goddamn much.”

“The politicals were always assholes,” Bob said. “I lost a spotter, and politicals were involved. Any apparatus in the world, the politicals are assholes.”

“It’s true,” said Stronski.

“You’ve made the arrangements?”

“I have. You have the cash?”

“Smuggled in, in my shoe. You trust this fellow?”

“I do. Not because he’s brave but because in Moscow, corruption is like any commodity. He has to deliver or it gets out, and new business goes to the competition. So the market guarantees this lieutenant-colonel will shoot straight and deliver, not his own honesty, of which, of course, he has none.”

“If Stronski says yes, I say yes. I trust Stronski.”

“I am as crooked as all of them. I extend certain courtesies to Brother Sniper, that’s all.”

“Fair enough.”

“Now put your hand under table and receive.”

“Receive what?”

“You will see.”

Swagger received. It felt like a Glock 19, loaded, from the weight, three- or four-inch barrel, no 1911 but nevertheless substantial in feel and lethal in purpose. The slide was steel, though ceramically finished for dullness and durability, the frame some sort of super-polymer. He held it out of sight under the table and looked down and saw that it was a near – Glock, dark and blunt, no safety, nothing to catch or pull on fast removal. It was a generation more streamlined than Glock’s stolid Teutonic brick, and its ergonomics were better; it slid into, rather than fought, his hand. He turned it and saw the marking in Cyrillic, and under that in English on the slide, IxGroup, 9 MM. He slid it into his belt, behind the point of his hip, under the coat.

“I have enemies. Maybe they get on to you from me. Moscow is full of bad people. You can never tell. That gun, freshly stolen from factory, no serial number. If you get in trouble, use and ditch. It can’t be traced.”

“It’s not a Glock?”

“GSh-18, better than Glock. Eighteen in magazine, double action, from the Instrument Design Bureau KPB, in Tula. Manufactured by IxGroup, meaning rich guy named Ixovich, one of our new big oligarchs.”

“Just learned the word.”

They made their plans.

You couldn’t help but love the Metropole, the famous old hotel where Swagger had booked himself. Rich in history, it was also – at least in the new Moscow – rich in appointments, possibly restored to something like prerevolutionary glory. Everywhere glitter, glass, shiny brass, marble, full of beautiful people. Even the whores sitting in the bar were high-class.

Yet Swagger tried to see it as it had been in 1959, when it housed, for a few troubling weeks, the melancholy Lee Harvey Oswald, as the Russians tried to figure out what to do with him. In those days, before the fall of the reds and the infusion of Finnish capital, the hotel must have been a dump, smelling of cabbage, vodka, and sewage, dour and dank and grim. It fit the self-exiled American perfectly, a man with a dismal past and not much future, who’d as yet impressed nobody in his short life.

When he got to his room, Swagger found that Oswald wouldn’t go away. The little hangdog mutt, radiating anger and self-pity, tracked him at every stop in the classy room that, in dumpier days, could have housed the would-be defector.

The whole thing turned on him, didn’t it? You couldn’t ask why. There was no point in asking why. The only question had to be how.

Don’t think of him as a man, Swagger instructed himself. Think of him as an agent, a servo-mechanism, some anonymous hinge in history that did what he did, and you have to figure out how he did it. It wasn’t as simple as waking up one day and deciding to kill the president. There were too many factors involved and too many questions to answer.

Swagger wished he had vodka. He wished he had a cigarette. Many a man had gotten through a bad night in the Metropole on vodka and cigarettes. Maybe Oswald himself, as the bosses figured out his immediate fate.

Little fucker. Who would have guessed?

Don’t think about that, Swagger ordered himself again. Think only of the how.

Don’t waste your time on his feckless, difficult personality, his pitiful upbringing, his learning problems, his attitude problems, his bullying problems, his endless string of small-time failures, his temperament, his vanity and narcissism, as all are on record. Anyone can look up Lee Harvey Oswald and conclude that he was exactly the type of lazy loser who might abandon the ongoing parade of nothingness that would be his life in exchange for eternal notoriety.

Instead, let’s stick to the how of the act. Not did he do it, but could he do it?

Swagger tried to make contact with him through the only vessel that connected them, the one he loved and Oswald hated: the United States Marine Corps. After all, Oswald was a trained rifleman, as his scores attested, particularly in the sitting position, similar to the position he fired from in the Book Depository. Similar but not exact: different stresses, different angles, different muscles involved, and while some skills are transferable, position to position, some are not. His training – which, after all, had been five full years previous – was entirely restricted to the iron-sighted M-1 Garand rifle. Swagger remembered his own M-1, even to the serial number, 5673326, built by Harrington & Richardson. Oswald’s had to be about the same: a nine-and-a-half-pound semi-auto with well-calibrated aperture sights, heavy recoil, and no necessary manipulation between shots. Both men had to master the fundamentals, as universally, the Marine Corps does a good job of building them in.

Swagger presumed Oswald had mastered the most basic of basics: solid position, bone-on-bone support, sling management, focus on sights, trigger s-q-u-e-e-z-e, breath control. Would that be enough? For one shot, possibly. But he missed his first, not his last, shot. Baffling. You would think it the opposite. Because after the first shot, it’s all new again.

He’s got to manipulate the bolt, which takes him out of position, he’s got to refind the position on the fly, he’s got to reassert his concentration, his breath control, his trigger squeeze. Rather than fighting him, the Carcano with its cheap-jack Japanese sights is overresponsive to his commands, because it is so much lighter than the Garand, at under six pounds. Then he has to reacquire the target through the lens of the scope. And since Garands aren’t scoped, he’s used to seeing the target in his peripheral vision as he brings the recoiling rifle back toward it on the shooting range. With the Carcano, after the first shot, he is looking at blur, so he has to do two things quickly. First of all, he has to refind the proper eye position so he’s able to see through it clearly, and then he has to reacquire the target, which, being transported by vehicle at unknown speed, is in a different place. Still, Swagger had to admit, much of this is instinctive, and a relatively competent Marine-trained shooter such as Oswald, especially with a little practice time, ought to be able to bring it off. It was not likely he made the shot, but it was at least possible. You couldn’t deny that reality.

Still, the scope presented a whole host of problems. For example, the FBI gun expert Robert Frazier testified that when the rifle and scope arrived in FBI HQ on Tuesday, November 27, 1963, the plate holding the scope to the rifle was extremely loose. Moreover, it was secured to the receiver by only two screws, although the metal of both the scope and the rifle receiver had been machined to accept four.

Why was the scope loose? Was that the condition under which Oswald fired the rifle? Frazier testified that he assumed it had been loosened in Dallas for fingerprinting; that is, disassembled, fingerprinted, then reassembled somewhat haphazardly. Yet no inquiry to Lieutenant Carl Day, the Dallas fingerprint expert, was ever made, so it is unknown in what condition Day received the rifle. It seemed odd that Day would have disassembled the rifle, because he was a salty old pro and would have known it was highly unlikely to find prints on the few centimeters of metal that the scope rings covered, and that the integrity of the piece as a whole was more important. It was also unlikely that, had he disassembled the rifle, he would have reassembled it haphazardly. It wasn’t his nature.

Swagger knew that the screw-tightness issue was important because the looser the scope, the more it deviates from the point of impact. At each shot, it resets itself. Even a slightly loose scope equates to misses in the field, so a remarkably loose scope would make accurate shooting almost impossible.

However, at a certain point, the FBI was required to make accuracy tests with the rifle. According to everything Swagger had read, the rifle could not be zeroed – that is, its point of aim indexed to its point of impact – under any circumstances, as it was presented to the FBI shooters. A machinist had to grind out two spacers – called “shims” – that were inserted at some point, between the mount and the receiver or between the ring and the scope, to provide extra metal that would align the scope at an angle otherwise unattainable. Then the whole thing was tightened up for shooting. If that was so, it was highly improbable that Oswald, lacking those adjustments, could have hit the head shot.

Bugliosi suggested that it was a moot point, since Oswald would have diverted to the iron sights he was used to from his Garand experience. Highly unlikely. The nonadjustable battle sights on the Model 38 were set to the anticipated distance of engagement, which was three hundred meters. To hit the small and diminishing target in the back of the limo with iron sights, Oswald would have had to know the distance, would have needed much experience discovering the relationship of the point of impact to the point of aim, would have had to display unusually sound, to say nothing of quick, math skills in estimating how much below the target he would have to hold to hit at 263 feet with sights regulated to 875 feet, known where that spot was on the blank of the limo trunk behind the president – it would have been a low hold, a very low hold – and squeezed off the shot precisely. Very few people could make that shot on the first try.

Sitting there in his room, vodkaless and cigaretteless, Swagger came to a conclusion: it was not impossible but was highly unlikely that the shot could have been made by Oswald. And that led him to another key question: why did Oswald’s shooting, over the course of the engagement, as his own desperation increased and the distances expanded, improve radically?

Same meat, different restaurant. This one was a sort of porch to a classic old-Moscow property on a busy downtown street, open-air, and the patrons sat on cushions instead of chairs, lounging like pashas as the skewers loaded with animal were brought, along with spices and other vivid treats. Hookahs were available, and the Russians, not having received the cancer memo yet, greedily sucked on them or on cigarettes. Meanwhile, just outside, a backhoe struggled with the hard earth; to get into the restaurant, you had to walk on a wooden board over the shattered concrete. If the backhoe happened to squash you, it wasn’t your day. It was like a Panzer out there, hard to ignore.

“Sorry I’m late,” said Swagger, showing up at five after the hour.

“It’s not a problem,” said Kathy Reilly, putting away her Black-Berry.

“Were you followed?”

She laughed. “I wish. My days are so routine, a little excitement like that couldn’t hurt.”

“It could,” he said, “and I hope to spare you that. You were followed – by me. That’s why I’m late. I tailed you back to your building a few nights ago, then picked you up tonight as you left and was with you on the subway and everything.”

“I– I never saw you,” she said, a little nonplused.

“I followed you to see if anyone else was following you. The answer, both the first time and tonight, was no. So we’re clean, I think. We can continue, if you’ll still play.”

“Oh, sure,” she said. “It’s so Cold War. I love it. Have you arranged for the files?”

“Absolutely. I know they’ll be there.”

“Great. And where is there?”

“The ninth floor. They centralized their archives a few years ago, with the idea of moving them all to digitalization. But the budget never caught up, so it’s still old paper, some of it a century or two old. Very delicate. Fortunately, we don’t have to do a lot of digging. We’re just going to look at one month, one year.”

“You said 1963.”

“September. Maybe October, maybe November.”

“Of 1963.”

“That’s right.”

“And where is this archive? Ninth floor of?”

“Lubyanka.”

He waited. Her eyes stayed calm, maybe fell out of focus for a fraction of a second, then returned to the full-on gaze.

“I take it you’re not joking?”

“No. Please, it takes some getting used to.”

“You’ll have to explain.”

“We’re not parachuting onto the roof or shooting our way in. We’re not blowing a vault or tunneling up from underground. We’re traveling by that glamorous transportation means called the elevator.”

“I don’t–”

“Money. I’ve bribed, through my friend Stronski, an SVR lieutenant colonel. To show you how serious I am about this, I’m giving him forty thousand, American cash. Mine. Not the FBI’s; mine, hard-earned.”

“Swagger, you spent forty thousand dollars of your own money on this?”

“I did. I’d do it again. I gave a woman my word I’d look into the death of her husband. I ain’t near where I have to be on that one. There’s other issues too. Anyhow, to me, the money don’t mean a thing. I’ll spend it all if I have to. I gave my word, I got myself engaged, and maybe there’s some other memories yelling at me. I’ll do what I have to do.”

“‘Crazy with honor’ is the phrase that comes to mind. Did you step out of a thirties movie?”

“Ms. Reilly, I don’t know enough to know what a thirties movie would be. I only know what I’ve got to do.”

“You are so insane, it’s kind of impressive.”

“Maybe so. Anyhow, enough on me. Let’s get back to tomorrow. Let me tell you, if Stronski says it’s guaranteed, it’s guaranteed. It’s safe.”

He explained the details. “The lieutenant colonel himself will give us ID badges and escort us to the ninth floor. He will show us where we need to be. We have six hours. No photos, no notes. All by memory. What we’re looking for isn’t that big a deal. As I say, the Russian James Bond. We have to find out if he visited or worked in the Mexico City embassy in September through November of 1963.”

“See,” she said, “that’s the other thing.”

“I know it is. You see what this is about.”

“I know Lee Harvey Oswald went to the Mexico City Russian embassy sometime in 1963, trying to get a visa or something. He failed, I guess. I think it’s all been looked at.”

“It has. Over and over again. A man named Norman Mailer even managed to interview all the KGB people and examine the records. There’s nothing there. Case closed. History reclaimed. End of story. That’s what I believed too, until a few weeks ago.”

“And now you believe a Russian James Bond killed JFK?”

“No. I don’t know enough to believe anything. I will tell you, however, why I think that if – I do say if – there was some kind of game being played, it had to be played through the Russians. Maybe in a big way, maybe in a small way.”

The waiter cleared the plates.

She ordered a vodka tonic. “I think I’ll need this.”

He stuck with koka. “A few weeks ago a piece of information came to me. It was too mundane for anyone to have made up. There was no profit in it, and it was transferred over the years through completely normal, workaday people, none of them troublesome in any way, all of them sane, productive, middle-class. It was about a tread-print on the back of a coat. Stupid, huh? Briefly, it suggested that a rifle may have been present in something called the Dal-Tex Building in November 1963. Dal-Tex is right across the street from the Book Depository, and its windows give virtually the same angle on the limo on Elm Street as the sixth-floor ‘sniper’s nest’ of the Book Depository. The treadprint suggested the presence of someone I know about who was a superb rifleman.”

“He would be the second gunman?”

“Possibly. Just barely possibly. But the coat could have also been owned by an old-boy Texas pheasant hunter, and it was his daughter’s bicycle that put the treadprint there. Still, worth investigating.”

“So that was what the man went to Dallas to investigate. Then he got killed. Then you went to Dallas. And a Russian tried to kill you. Is that how the Russians come into this?”

“Possibly. It’s another indicator that somehow in this thing, all lines of possibility run through Russia. But the fact that the guy who tried to kill me was Russian wasn’t the thing I zeroed on.

“What I’ve done is, I’ve tried to isolate hard data points from the Warren Commission report, that is, the things that we know happened, times, dates, places, all multiply verified. And I’ve tried to triangulate from that a possible scenario by which someone besides Oswald could have been involved. I have worked hard trying to find the intersection of certain streams of information that were necessary for anyone trying to kill Kennedy. If I can find a place and a time where all the lines come together, that would be the place to start. My only technique is trial and error, try this, try that, try something else. Believe me, I ain’t no genius. But I’ve come to something. And that something has to be at the Soviet embassy in Mexico City in the late fall of 1963.”

“Tell me. Wait, the vodka hasn’t arrived. If I’m going to spend ten years sunbathing in the Gulag archipelago, I’ll want to know why.”

He waited, composing his thoughts. The vodka and the new koka came. She took a swig. “Very good. The world is nicely blurred. Please proceed.”

“If anything of a conspiratorial nature happened,” Bob said, “it had to have sprung from the intersection, by chance, of five elements. I say ‘elements.’ They tell me it’s a lousy word because it means ‘stuff.’ That’s because the five things are different in nature, and no word other than ‘stuff’ collects them all.”

“I’m listening.”

“The first four are pieces of information. Three are related but separated in time. One is completely unrelated, from left field, and it arrives real late. The fifth isn’t information at all; it’s a personality.”

“Okay. I can follow that, and I get lost in Agatha Christie, much less le Carre.”

“First bit of information: someone had to know that a man named Lee Harvey Oswald existed. And that he was kind of a pathetic screwball with dreams of glory that his sad little life couldn’t possibly support. Who would know that?”

“His mom? His poor wife?”

“The second thing they had to know was that he had homicidal tendencies. He was violent. It went with his loser personality. They must have known that he had a rifle with a telescopic sight and that on April 10, 1963, he had taken a shot at and missed Major General Edwin A. Walker.”

“I think I remember that.”

“Walker was a right – wing general who had just resigned in scandal when it was learned he was indoctrinating his troops – the Twenty-fourth Infantry Division, in Germany – with John Birch propaganda. He was briefly notorious. As a civilian, he was even more annoying to many people: he gave speeches, he made accusations, he showed up at various civil rights demonstrations and was violently segregationist, he called Kennedy pink, the whole nine yards.”

“Okay. Oswald took a shot. Someone mysterious and conspiratorial knows that.”

“The third thing they had to know was that he worked in a building on Elm Street in Dallas, Texas, called the Texas Book Depository. But since he didn’t start working until October 14, they couldn’t have known until then.”

“Who is they?”

“That’s where we’re going. Who would care enough about this little schnook to record those pieces of information? The FBI questioned him, the CIA debriefed him, but both dismissed him as a twerp, unlikely to be of any consequence. They had no idea about the Walker shooting.”

“I have you.”

“The late piece of information was that on the afternoon of Tuesday, November 19, 1963, the Dallas Times Herald announced that JFK was going to be parading down Elm Street in front of the Texas Book Depository at twelve thirty in the afternoon on Friday, two and a half days later. Remember this – they couldn’t possibly find Oswald in that short amount of time. And they couldn’t possibly have predicted that Kennedy would pass within seventy-five feet of this screwball. So, you ask, who knew all that about Oswald? Not the FBI. Not the CIA.”

“I know the answer. I know what you want me to say.”

“Of course. The Russians. He’d been to them. He’d begged them to take him back. He said he’d do anything for them. I’m sure he bragged about the shot he’d taken at Walker as the proof of his willingness to serve. They knew. They had to know. But all that was in September. He didn’t start at the depository, as I say, until October 14. How’d they know he was working there over a month later?”

“I don’t know.”

“This is where the Russian James Bond factors in. The fifth element.”

“Hmm,” she said.

“Someone who would see the potential in Oswald after the Walker shot and establish a clandestine communication. So he would be up-to-date. He would know Oswald was working at the Depository. See?”

“I see theoretically.”

“We need a certain personality. Actually, I say James Bond, but I’m being inaccurate. James Bond is an operator. We don’t need an operator. What we need is a case officer. Do you know what a case officer is?”

“I’ve heard the term, but that’s about it.”

“He would be the guy like the movie producer. He has the vision. He sees the possibilities. He sets the goal. His talent is putting a team together to get the job done. He keeps everybody focused. He adjudicates. He administers. He finances. He hires, he fires. He’s the tough guy, not the creative guy. He does logistics. He gets everybody there when they have to be there. He figures out cover stories, escape routes, all the petty details that the specialists are too good for. He’s the guy who makes it happen. He’s the guy we’re looking for.”

She said nothing.

“Here’s what I’m seeing. Maybe this isn’t exactly how it happened, but I’m guessing it’s close. Oswald does his crybaby number for the KGB and, of course, is laughingly turned down. Ha ha, what a schmuck. But there’s this guy – maybe he’s GRU or some other branch of the apparatus – and he hears about Oswald, particularly the part about trying to hit General Walker. And unlike the stooges, he thinks, You know, this guy has possibilities. So he tracks him down in Mexico City, which would be easy, as there’s a whole Sunday, September 29, when we don’t know what Oswald did.

“He says, speaking in Russian lingo that would astound Lee, ‘Say, Comrade, let me buy you a beer.’ He says, ‘You know, they all think you’re a loser, but I’d like to give you a chance. If you want that chance, you have to clean up your act. None of this letters-to-the-editor bullshit, none of this Fair Play for Cuba bullshit, none of this reading the Party newspaper in the cafeteria. You get a job, you live straight, you work hard, you put your ‘radical past’ behind you. Your goal is to get a job in the next ten years in aeronautics, defense, high-tech engineering, medicine, something where you can do us some good. Can you do that?’

“Oswald is flattered. Nobody’s ever trusted him before, thought he was worth a damn. ‘Yeah, sure,’ he says. The guy says, ‘Look, I’m giving you an address. You can send me a letter there. Any place I am in the world, I will get that letter quickly. Now go home, get to work, and keep me up-to-date.’

“Oswald goes home. He gets the Book Depository job. ‘Dear Comrade, I am now gainfully employed at the Book Depository at blah-blah Elm Street. My plan is to remain here five years, complete high school, be a success, put all crazy radical childishness behind me, and then maybe begin some college as a way of getting into the sectors you need me to be in. Yours truly, Comrade Lee Harvey Oswald.’

“Our guy’s got one of those case – officer minds that doesn’t forget anything. It happens. The really talented guys have them. When he finds out Kennedy’s going to Dallas, he thinks of Lee Harvey, and when he sees the route – two and a half days before – he sees he’s got the chance of a lifetime. He’ll never have another chance like this. He flies to Dallas, he meets Lee on that Thursday, he says, ‘You’ve got to do this, Comrade.’”

“But would KGB–”

“See, maybe it’s rogue. Maybe he knows the general committee would never say yes. Too risky. But he doesn’t see it as risky at all. And he can take out a guy who’s making noise in Vietnam and putting pressure on Cuba and looking for a place to draw a line in the sand and replace him with a Texas guy who knows nothing about foreign policy and just wants to be the next FDR. It’s easy as pie. He can do it.”

She said, “It sounds original. But I don’t know enough to point out your errors.”

“Oh, they’re there. For one thing, this whole thing started with someone looking at the Dal-Tex as the site for another rifle. So if there’s another rifle, there’s a complex ballistic-deceit issue involved. I’ll spare you the details, but no one could have figured out the complexities of it, recruited another shooter, found him the place to shoot, and gotten him in and out without a hitch in two days. Not even the greatest case officer in the world. It can’t be done. That’s the crucial issue of the assassination. How did they set it up so fast? The route wasn’t known until the nineteenth. I just can’t get by that.”

“Maybe. .” she started. Then, “No, I don’t know.”

“Anyhow, that’s why I’m here; that’s why I’m hoping you’ll help me. There’s not much else I can say, Ms. Reilly.”

“I told you, it’s so cold-war, how could I turn it down? Maybe, maybe, maybe somewhere down the line, there’s a story in it for me.”

“If there’s a story, you’ll get it.”

Was she sold? Enough to do the job, which, after all, was only scanning old files, looking for records of visits by Soviet intelligence personnel to one embassy over a relatively short period of time.

Nothing to it.

CHAPTER 9

The Russian spoke, Stronski translated.

“You will not be challenged. You may run into others in there, for the library is never empty. They are simply other spies who’ve paid the same price for their few hours of gnawing at the scraps of history. They will not see you, nor should you see them.”

The officer led them to a dedicated passageway – no other entries were placed along its way except at the end – and to that last door. Again, it had that old Commie look, the steel, the harsh lights behind cages, girders with rivets everywhere, the smell of paint and iron, the sense of muscular, even brutal industrialism as aggression.

The officer did discover a bright plastic keypad, self-lit, a concession to the modern era. His fingers flew across the pad, and the door clanked ajar.

He led them into a final chamber. This one had a sense of hospital to it. The officer pointed to a box of fresh-pressed surgical green utilities, and they pulled them on over their clothes. A mask slipped over nostrils and mouth, a rubberized surgical cap to contain the hair. Gloves came next, rubberized as well, tight and thin, to handle the delicate papers. When they were sealed off in their operating-theater garments, the officer took them through a last door, and they felt the temperature drop twenty degrees.

Swagger blinked to adjust his vision to the greenish hues. It seemed they were on a metal balcony of some sort, restrained by a railing from a twenty-foot drop to the floor of the place itself, a vast, hushed space with metal racks on two levels, cut by steel stairways running this way and that, the whole thing seeming to extend to infinity or whatever was beyond the realm of the greenish lights on the far side of the opening. Clearly, the cavern occupied the entire eighth and ninth floors.

Swagger beheld the belly of the red beast: a vast room with crude steel shelving sustaining boxes, each box labeled and containing a forced mass of good old paper-and-ink documents. How many coups, how many deceits, how many black ops, how many wet ops, how many pix of fat diplomats with whores sucking their cocks, how many assassinations? All chronicled here, so it wasn’t a belly, it was a memory, a part of the brain loaded with forgotten info, hard to access, buried deeply away, barely acknowledged.

“Sixty-three, Mexico?” the Russian officer said.

Swagger nodded.

“Okay, you come.”

He led them downstairs and into the maze of two-leveled shelving, turning so many times that Hansel and Gretel would have become lost. Now and then another pilgrim would pass in the green night without acknowledgment. The officer turned at last down an aisle no different from any others. He spoke in Russian to Stronski, who translated.

“He says during duty hours, clerks process requests from SVR or army intelligence officers of rank, take the box, find the file, check it out, and present to officer, who can only read in reading room, also on ninth floor. You do not have it so easy. You will have to find your own files, pull your own documents. Sorry for dust, sorry light is not good, sorry no place to sit, no bathroom, no Coke machine.”

The two Americans nodded.

The Russian spoke again through Stronski.

“Rules once again. No pictures, no notes, no Xerox machine, all must be memory. Replace everything. Delicacy, please: no tugging, no folding, no forcing. You must respect the material and make allowances for its age and brittleness. You are interviewing an old man, and his attention may wander, do you see? You yourself, do not wander. Do not leave this area. Do only business you have paid for. Be honest, diligent, and bring glory on your cause, whatever it is. I will come get you in four hours.”

“Ask him,” said Bob, “if this is all agencies, including, I’m guessing, not only KGB but GRU as well as specialized military teams, or just KGB.”

The Russian listened and, in time, responded.

“I don’t know. The idea initially was to consolidate, all by hemisphere and target country, all of it in one place so that access would be better and those who had to know could find all from one area. But budget ran out before it could be completed, and I am not certain if consolidation project got to ’63 or not. Also: this is only ‘offensive’ materials, that is, initiatives generated by heroes of the past. ‘Defensive’ – that is, ‘counterespionage,’ in response to something done by main target and others – would be on different floor. That is not so interesting, just notes of suspects being followed, wiretaps being uncovered, traitors found and executed.”

“Would I be able to get in there at some later date?” asked Swagger.

“I will take it up with committee,” the officer answered, then laughed at his own joke. “All things are possible for a man with cash in his pockets.”

“Excellent,” said Swagger.

“I will see you in four hours,” said the officer. “Not a second longer.”

They worked on their knees, as if in genuflection to the material before them.

“Station 14Alpha (1963),” read the marking on the box. That would be it, the Mexico City KGB reports, that year, that place. Stronski removed the box and set it on the floor for inspection, and they crowded in close. This, as much as anything, was what Bob had come for: to see the thing, to check it for evidence of tampering.

He bent and looked at the cardboard box full of papers, all held in coherence by a red ribbon illuminated in the beam from Stronski’s flashlight. Bob went lower, looked carefully at the knot. “Has it been untied and retied a lot?” he asked.

His two colleagues closed in as well.

“I can see the worn-flat signature on two of the intersecting ribbons that suggest it was untied once,” said Reilly, “but it doesn’t look as if it’s been subject to chronic tying and retying. I’m guessing that when Norman Mailer was here in 1993 or ’94, that’s the last time the box was opened. They untied it, found and removed the Oswald reports from the KGB goons, and took those to him in the reading room.”

“Does anybody see signs of disturbance since then?”

All looked as Stronski rotated the beam across the messy surface of the raggedly stuffed-in paperwork. Tatters and flags stuck out unevenly; a corner or two peeped out at the edges. Stronski gently ruffled the uneven edges, as though pushing his hand through sheaves of wheat, and fluffy clouds of fine dust puffed outward, roiling in the flashlight beam.

“It does not appear to have been disturbed recently,” said Swagger. “Everybody agree?”

“Let me compare with others,” said Stronski, and leaped up with his flashlight and walked a few feet, making random examinations. He returned. “It is same. Dust, chaos, paper disintegrating at the edges.”

“Okay,” said Swagger. “Now what do we see?”

“I can see divisions, I’m guessing by month,” said Reilly. “Do we start with September, when Oswald showed up?”

“That makes the most sense,” said Swagger.

Reilly pointed to the appropriate cardboard separator that demarcated the adventures of September, and he pulled it out as gently as possible, amid more clouds of dust and flecks of disintegration as the paper – at least at its edges – eased toward oblivion. Three sheaves extended a bit from the more neatly collected mass of April reports. They were an obvious starting point. He pulled them out and held them open.

She examined the first. “This is just the September 27 report by Kostikov on his immediate discussion with Oswald. It’s been published by Mailer, I have the book. Standard stuff.”

“Would you do me the favor of examining this one for any info that Mailer might not have published or missed?”

“Sure.” She read it carefully. “I don’t see anything.”

“Anything on claims or boasts by Oswald?”

“No. His intensity comes through, his seething anger, his disappointment that they don’t greet him like a brother, but there’s no specific dialogue or claims.”

“You’re sure.”

“Absolutely.”

Swagger considered this carefully. “But is there a transcript?”

“No,” she said. “It’s based on notes, not recordings.”

“Okay, fine. I get it. Let’s go to the next one.” He slid the next file over, and her eyes attacked it.

“This is a report by Nechiporenko, another KGB, the next day, on the disposition of the case, the rejection, Oswald’s anger and unpleasantness.”

“Please read for any indications of boasts or claims.”

“No, nothing. But there is a second page.” She read it, her eyes scanning hard behind her glasses as Stronski tried to keep the light steady. “Okay, this is a summary by a third KGB, I’m guessing the boss, his name is Yatskov, he’s a jock. Oswald comes back a second time, Saturday the twenty-eighth, shows up at the KGB-GRU volleyball game, and Yatskov is there and takes him into his office. Oswald is beside himself by this time. God, he even pulls a gun! Yatskov takes it from him, and the idiot collapses crying on the desk. The only thing that Yatskov can do is tell him to submit for a visa through regular channels, and no, he can’t get in contact with the Cubans for him. Meanwhile, Nechiporenko shows up and pitches in. Then Yatskov gives him the gun back! And leads him out. Pathetic.”

“No boasts, no claims?”

“Why is that important?”

“I have to know what he told them about himself that might be interesting to the James Bond guy I’m looking for.”

“The gun, doesn’t that signify something?”

“Possibly. But no transcripts, no specific language, nothing like that?”

“No.”

“Okay, then, that’s that. Next move: we scan, start to finish, looking for visitors to the embassy; by that I mean intelligence professionals not assigned to it but arriving and departing around the same time, the last week in September. KGB, but also GRU or military as well. SMERSH, even, why not? Maybe there were units of intelligence I don’t know about, connected with the air force or strategic warfare or signals intelligence. Intelligence outfits are like mushrooms.”

“They grow in the dark and thrive in shit?” said Reilly.

“I thought I made that line up, but I guess I didn’t. Are you ready?”

Both nodded.

“Mikhail, you hold the light. I will pull the documents one at a time and turn the pages. Kathy, you tell me when you have the gist of the page, and we can go on.”

That was what they did for three hours, with breaks for sore knees, eye fatigue, backaches, and on and on. It was not fun. It seemed to last six or nine rather than three hours.

Finally, she reached her verdict. “Agriculture reps, diplomats, doctors, lawyers, but nobody is in the official record as a case officer, an agent, a recruiter, nobody who seemed remotely like an operator. Maybe the Russians used codes within their own top-secret documents, and when I see ‘Dr. Menshav the agronomics professor,’ that means ‘Boris Badanov, special assassin,’ but I doubt it.”

“I doubt it too.”

They had done all of September, then the October and November files, through the assassination. That event produced its own tonnage of paper and demanded its own box, but Swagger saw no point in looking at it, since everything after the fact was meaningless.

“No sign of James Bond,” said Reilly. “No sign of any cogitation, activity, meetings, anything that would suggest the embassy was anticipating or knew that someone in its own sphere was involved in what would happen on November 22. No sign of any contact with outside agents from outlier espionage groups, no suggestion of special ‘visitors’ from Moscow.”

“Did you see the name Karly Vary?” asked Stronski. “It’s the Spetsnaz and KGB training site on the Black Sea; all ‘wet’ operators go through there for technical expertise and are held there on downtime.”

“No Karly Vary,” said Reilly. “Not a whisper.”

“Red bastards probably killed your president anyway,” said Mikhail. “They like that shit, they pull it all over the world.”

“If so, it was entirely out of the embassy sphere, and none of the bureaucrats noticed anything out of place or out of norm,” said Swagger.

“Mikhail,” said Reilly, “the reports are consecutively numbered. I kept careful track.” She had noticed something Swagger hadn’t. “That means nothing could be inserted or removed without retyping the entire file that came after. I don’t see any difference in the tone or state of the paper to suggest that new paper was added sometime. Also, the typing is clearly from the same typewriter, and I got so that I recognized the font, particularly since the H was clouded under the bridge. That typewriter – some poor Russian girl had the job of typing more than forty pages a day – was used all the way through. I can recognize her style. She was a little weak on the last two fingers of her left hand, and those letters were always a little lighter. But she had Mondays off, and a much less gifted typist took over, more typos by far, more uncertain on the right side of the keyboard, so I’m guessing the substitute was a lefty.”

“Wow,” said Swagger. “Kathy, you’re in the wrong business. You should have been an intelligence analyst.”

“I’ve looked at a lot of Russian documents, a lot of reports. I get used to the style, the diction, the nomenclature, even the bureaucratic culture. It hasn’t changed all that much since ’63, even if everything else has. This has the feel of the authentic, so I don’t think there’s any suggestion that someone came back to it and tampered with the evidence to hide James Bond’s visit.”

“That damn James Bond,” said Swagger. “He’s never around when you need him.”

The next day, Swagger as “Agent Homan” had his sitdown with the ranking gang specialist of the Moscow police, who, well known on the international circuit and a Moscow rep to Interpol, spoke fluent English. They sat in the inspector’s office, glass-enclosed, off the usual bright, impersonal ward of the organized-crime squad on the third floor of Moscow’s central police station.

“This fellow Bodonski, he was a nephew of the Izmaylovskaya boss, or in their language, avtoritet, also a Bodonski,” said the inspector as they looked over the thick Bodonski file and Swagger saw a photo of the man he’d killed. Bodonski had been handsome, dashing, even, with thick sweeps of dark hair and piercing eyes. He must have had the gangster way with women. The last time Swagger had seen him – which was also the first and only – his face had been pancaked into the steering wheel of his car, and what flesh was visible in the nest of crushed plastic and bent steel looked like the rotting fruit of a watermelon smashed against a brick wall. Too bad for him.

“He was a tough guy, very capable,” the inspector continued. “If someone topped him, whoever did it must have been a tough guy in his own right.”

“Inspector,” said Swagger, “he just shot him. It wasn’t a fight. A gun is always tougher than a man. Even a man in a car.”

“The car was coming right at the man, as I hear it.”

“Yes, that’s true.”

“So that man, if he panics and runs, as most will do, Bodonski breaks his spine in two. He did it enough here. We have him for at least fifteen hits, which was why his uncle suggested he get out of town. Anyway, your man on the gun, he didn’t panic, he stood and fired well. Bravo. My compliments.”

“I’ll tell him you said so.”

“This Izmaylovskaya is the toughest of the gangs in town. Most of these outfits, they call themselves a bratva, meaning ‘brotherhood.’ It gives them some gentility, like a guild or something, a group of business associates looking out for each other. Not the Izzies; they just go by ‘gang.’ Their specialty is applied force. Murder for hire, extortion, human trafficking. The dirty end of the stick. Much more disciplined, much more violent, much scarier. They’re smaller – three, four hundred, maybe – than the brotherhoods, which may have as many as five thousand men. They’re not Jewish, they make no show of religious belief or ethnic identity. Hard guys, killers, danger boys. They take their money up front, lots of it. You want to swindle a financier, you go somewhere else; you want to murder your boss, the Izzies are for you.”

“Any connections? Gangs usually flourish where they have some kind of semi-official connection with power.”

“Only rumors. Nobody talks. You only get out of that gang the way Bodonski did, on a slab in the morgue. Nobody gets inside, as each rank is tattooed with a code of stars and dragons, and all the codes have to be perfect or you go swimming in the River Moscow with a zinc sink chained to your ankle. I’ll be honest: it’s a thing I can’t look into closely or I’ll be the one with my spine broken in two on the street, but the rumors say they have an affiliation with oligarchs. The one most usually named is Viktor Krulov.”

“I heard the name before. I think we have oligarchs too.”

“Yeah, everywhere, the same smart guys figure out how to get to the front of the line and get all the potatoes. They get so big, you can’t stop ’em. If I go against an oligarch, I don’t mind telling you, my wife is looking for a new husband.”

“Let me ask you this: since there was no personal reason for this Bodonski to hit our undercover, clearly, he was a professional doing a job. How would you go about hiring him? Would you do it from Moscow, or could you do it from New York?”

“Good question, which I will have to look into. See, with other groups, much bigger groups, there is more sophistication. They have lawyers, brokers, advertising directors, journalists all on the payroll. Many ways to approach them, to slip through that portal between legal service and illegal service, like a murder. With the Izzies, it’s different: they’re so small, they’re so specialized. You would have to know exactly who to go to. There would be one guy, that’s all.”

“Do you have a source who could tell you the name of that guy in New York?”

“Again, I’ll put it out. How long are you going to be here? You want to go on raids, we do a ceremonial raid once a week so it looks like we have a chance of enforcing the law against the bratvas. It’s a big joke; everybody laughs and goes out drinking together afterward. Certain sums are passed. Do I shock you?”

“No, I appreciate the honesty, Inspector.”

“Agent Homan, I don’t want to represent myself as a hero above it all. I take my envelope too, I know the rules, I know what can and can’t be asked and what will and won’t be answered.”

“Am I getting you? You will ‘ask’ about that name I requested, but you won’t really ask about that name. Is this the message I’m getting?”

“I’m trying to be honest and don’t want to get your hopes too high.”

“It’s not a problem. You have to do what you have to do. You live here, I don’t.”

“This I can tell you. You say two killings, one in Baltimore, one in Dallas. For a known man with a high rep, Bodonski would expect big dollars, plus expenses. I’m thinking fifty thousand dollars for one, maybe a discount, only twenty-five thousand dollars for the other if business has been done before. Not small change. Whoever paid, he had big money to spend, and he had highly sophisticated connections. He is not a small fry. This is not something that would be arranged to punish an adulterer, squelch a debtor, get a store owner to pony up his monthly. This is quality work, big-time stuff, usually for other bosses, big debtors, well-guarded politicians.”

“You’ve been a great help, Inspector.”

“Wish I could help more, Agent Homan. Do give my congratulations to the shooter. He was a man in a million.”

“So I will,” said Bob.

CHAPTER 10

The man wore the baggy, nondescript workingman’s grunge so common in Eastern Europe and Russia, corduroys, an untucked plaid shirt, an indifferent burgundy jacket of some Chinese miracle fabric whose zipper didn’t quite work, a watch cap pulled low over his eyes. He carried no luggage, though anyone with a close eye for observation might have noted a bulge on his hip, even possibly suspected that it represented the sleek lines of an IxGroup GSh-18. But nobody had that close an eye. He was too ordinary.

He was one of Moscow’s unseen millions. The cheekbones suggested Magyar or Tartar; the gray hair, full and brushy, suggested good genes; and he kept his mouth closed because his teeth were too bright and he knew few Russian factory men used Crest White Strips. He had picked up a pair of red and white Nike rip-offs made in Malaysia, and he walked like any of the proletariat of the earth, head down, hands stuffed disconsolately into his jacket pockets, not quite homeless but seemingly without destination, past or future. Flashing Russian Federation ID, he checked in to a workingman’s hotel in a zone far out of the flashier precincts of the new Moscow, disco king, BMW and Porsche capital, Armani outpost of the world. There he sat in his room and waited for four days, eating mainly from food-dispensing machines in the Underground station nearby, where his lack of Russian wouldn’t cause problems or be noted, nursing his scraggy beard and unkempt hair. He let his teeth turn yellow with disinterest and the hair in his nostrils grow repulsively.

He had one companion on this journey into shadow: Lee Harvey Oswald. The killer would not leave him alone and haunted his dreams. Swagger could not stop thinking about him; it seemed just when sleep was deepest, Lee Harvey would poke him in the ribs and start muttering in his ear. Actually, it was his subconscious muttering in his ear, and the damned thing was no respecter of regular work hours.

So Swagger blinked awake in his Russian shithole, more like a fifties-man-on-the-run hideout than anything, and a voice was muttering to him about the timing.

The timing, it kept saying, the timing.

The timing was 4:17 a.m., that was the timing.

But no sleep returned, and the voice grew louder, and he saw that the muttering came from his own throat.

Timing. Timing! Timing: this is where most conspiracy theories wander out into the ozone. Because the time schedule was so fucking fast from the evening of November 19, when the route became known, to the early afternoon of November 22, when the kill shot was delivered – sixty-six hours – a great number of things had to happen very quickly. Those who wanted to believe in conspiracy could only ascribe that kind of speed and efficiency to the result of deep government intrigue. Someone in “deep government,” in a shadow department of great but unseen influence, was able to arrange something far in advance so that immaculate long-range planning could be initiated: Oswald had to be found and brought under discipline, a job for him had to be arranged, and that job had to be on the motorcade route that itself had to be forced on the Kennedy people. Since only CIA was paid to do such things professionally, quite naturally, CIA was almost always invoked. Since both CIA and FBI had previous knowledge of, ran files on, and had dealings with Oswald, their presence could be quite naturally inferred. But that was all shit.

The hard data points of the assassination totally dismissed any deep-government intrigue; rather, things happened as they do normally: by chance opportunity, by whimsy, turning on someone’s eavesdropping.

Swagger felt he was on to something. He ordered himself to begin at a beginning: how did Lee Harvey Oswald end up in the Texas Book Depository on November 22, 1963? Swagger recalled Posner and Bugliosi. The first hard fact that would never go away was that he got the job before there’d been any announcement that JFK would come to Dallas at a specific time and date (there was a general acknowledgment that the president, for political reasons, would have to make a Texas trip “in the fall”). So any idea of “placing” Oswald in TBD was absurd on its face. What would be the point of placing him in any building in Dallas against the faint possibility that the president might someday drive by? Don’t make me laugh. And that becomes even more ridiculous in view of what actually happened.

He got that job the way most people get most jobs. Someone who knew that he was looking for work heard a certain place was hiring, made some phone calls, notified Lee, and Lee showed up in a place he’d never heard of, was hired in the lowliest of positions – essentially a stock boy – and started work the next morning, Wednesday, October 16, at $1.25 an hour. Were these CIA or military-industrial-complex shadow agents or even Men from U.N.C.L.E. or SPECTRE manipulating bureaucracies to bring killer and victim within range? Hardly. They were the redoubtable Ruth Paine, a sublimely decent Quaker gal who had met and taken a liking to Marina Oswald and was trying to help her by helping her husband, whom she didn’t like much – she had a nose for character, that one – and Roy Truly, supervisor of the Book Depository, who was always filling his staff of clerks with transients, knowing that the jobs were perishable and demanded little except a strong back and a willingness to do boring, menial work. In fact, Truly was responsible for another facility and assigned Oswald to the Dallas building only on a whim; he could have as easily sent him to the suburbs. By what secret method did the U.N.C.L.E. agent Ruth Paine learn that Truly was hiring? She heard a neighbor’s son had just been hired there!

Swagger was now up, walking about, the muttering getting louder.

Later that week, the White House announced that there would be a fall trip. But planning didn’t begin on the trip for some time. Agendas had to be worked out and translated into schedules, which had to be coordinated with Texas officials as well as the vice president’s office. All this took time and negotiation, and it wasn’t until November 16 that the Dallas Trade Mart was selected as the site for the president’s 1 p.m. luncheon speech. The Secret Service advance party didn’t arrive in Dallas until the seventeenth, to begin the more intensive preparation for the trip; and it wasn’t until the nineteenth, when two Secret Service officers and two ranking Dallas officers drove the routes from Love Field, where the president would arrive on the twenty-second, to the Trade Mart, that a certain route – the one that took the president down Main, to a right-hand jog on Houston, to a sharp left-hand turn down Elm to access the Stemmons Freeway entrance – was selected.

At best, a “mole” representing the deep-government conspiracy could have alerted the kill team the night of the nineteenth; but in all likelihood, the killer (or killers) didn’t find out about it until the next morning, when the route ran on the front page of the Dallas Morning News. Since Oswald was in the habit of reading day-old newspapers, he probably didn’t learn about it until November 21, the day before.

Swagger tried to advocate against himself for a bit. If indeed there was a conspiracy planning to kill JFK in Dallas long before Oswald entered the picture, he thought, it would have had a maximum of the night of the nineteenth, the days of the twentieth and twenty-first and half a day of the twenty-second, sixty-six hours, to do the following:

Find and recruit Oswald and get him committed to the sixth-floor Book Depository shot.

Learn what kind of rifle he would be using.

Develop a method of ballistically “counterfeiting” the rifle that was so successful, it would withstand nearly fifty years of the highest-tech scrutiny, with the tech getting higher every decade.

Find an alternative shooter who could make the head shot on the president that everyone who knew Oswald would consider well beyond his modest range of talent.

Find an alternative shooting site whose angle to the target was close enough so the trajectory of the counterfeited bullet wouldn’t give the game away.

Plan and execute an entrance and exit with such precision that it would go unnoticed in the hubbub.

One more thing occurred to him, and he wondered why his gun-soaked brain hadn’t come up with it earlier: the rifle would have to be silenced so its noise wouldn’t give away the existence and locale of the second shooter. Silencers, more accurately “suppressors,” are not easy to come by. In the first place, they are Class III items, controlled by federal regulation, like machine guns. It’s probably safe to assume that, as with machine guns, professional government espionage agencies and underworld organizations have access to them, but procuring them quickly and testing them for effectiveness and their influence on the point of impact demands time that these theoretical conspirators didn’t have. Also, a sudden search for such a device is certain to have attracted notice, and even in (or particularly in) the underworld, people talk. If circa November 20, 1963, a search of underworld inventories for a rifle suppressor had been suddenly run, snitches sure as hell would have squawked to the police as a way of sliding a few months off a breaking-and-entering sentence. So the suppressor remains completely mysterious, another item that could not have been obtained in the time frame without having left a record.

BANG! BANG! BANG!

He looked around, startled. It was someone in the next room pounding on the wall. Something was yelled in Russian, presumably “Shut up, asshole.”

Swagger took the hint.

He turned off the light and crept back into bed, and this time sleep was awarded him. But he had a new conclusion to add to his mental inventory: they’d have to be the best team ever assembled in order to bring it off.

On the fifth day, late in the afternoon, he took a roundabout walk to the Underground and headed into another precinct of Moscow.

He arrived at the flea market late. Most of the tourists had left, there was little activity, and already the merchants were rearranging their wares and closing their booth fronts. It was another maze, as avenue bisected avenue on a square mile, all of it with the appearance of something temporary that had become something permanent. Most of the structures were low wooden booths, possibly walled or awned in canvas. The plaza of low-end retail was dominated by a central building in the old style, with the typical onion-shaped dome of gold gilding, which rose on a tower from a complex structure that could have been a monastery or a refurbed software outlet. The flea market was the place to go for nesting dolls, which had come to represent the universal symbol of Russia, and shop after shop offered them in dazzling variety, including those boasting the symbols of great NFL teams, as each doll inside revealed a new and smaller icon of gridiron greatness. Ceramics were another popular sales item, as were watches, particularly the Russian diver’s model with the screw-on cap chained to the case protecting the winder, jewelry, knickknacks of all sorts, imitation icons, photo books, and store after store of medals and badges where you could pick up a Panzer-killer award with three bars, signifying that you had knocked out three Tiger IIs in the ruins of Stalingrad.

Swagger dawdled here and there, setting up switchbacks and ambushes to check if he was being followed. Finally, satisfied that he was at least for now unobserved, he found a corner, navigated a street and then another, and found his destination, a surplus-military hardware shop that sold ponchos, helmets, bayonets, T-shirts, boots, tunics, everything that spoke of war, including some old Marine Corps helmets with the jungle-green camouflage cover. He slid up, pointed to the pile of helmets, and said to the proprietor, “I’ll take six of them, please.”

The man looked up from his newspaper, took a second to comprehend, then said, in English, “Jesus Christ, Swagger.”

That he spoke English was no surprise, since the flea market’s economy sustained itself on tourism, so if a fellow wanted to make a living, he had to know the language of the people with the dough.

“I have to see Stronski.”

There was nobody else around, though down the way, an old woman was closing down a nesting-doll joint, delicately stacking the ornate doll faces back on the counter so they would be enclosed when she lowered the shutter.

“Man, do you know you are the most hunted guy in this town? Here, look at this.”

He shoved over a piece of paper from the mess on his counter, and Swagger beheld himself, sans the beard and low cap, in a kind of Disney caricature.

“My eyes aren’t that close together,” he said, and in a second tumbled to the rest: how had they – never mind yet who they were – gotten this out so fast, so completely, so nearly lethally? How did they know? The intelligence operation was superlative. Whoever put it together – the red James Bond again? – knew what he was doing.

He felt his anxiety level raise six degrees. “Is it shoot on sight or anything like that?”

“No,” said Stronski’s man. “Person of interest. The instructions are ‘detain for questioning.’ They had these all over the place four days ago.”

“Figures. Three days ago I went and saw a cop, and his eyes lit up when he looked at me. I didn’t know why, but I had a feeling he’d seen me before and was interested in continuing the relationship. I thought it was time to blow town fast. I’ve spent the last four days in a crummy room in the crummy suburbs, sneaking out at night to buy clothes from used-and-maybe-washed places.”

“And here you are now. The underground man. You could be some Raskolnikov lurking in an alley with an ax. Who’d notice you except for the height?”

“Where is Stronski?”

“You never know where Stronski is. He hides well. He was a sniper.”

“So I’ve heard,” said Swagger.

“We’ll disappear you.”

It became a progression of squalors. He was shunted from place to place in darkness, by friends of Stronski’s, who had no names and issued no instructions. Some spoke English, most did not. He stayed in a room in a brothel and heard people fucking all night. He stayed behind a Laundromat in a room of near-unbearable heat with lint floating in the air. He stayed in the cellar of a Star Dog place that sold imitation American hot dogs. He had one. It was good.

Always, it was the same: at a certain time in the evening, a new man showed, picked him up, and drove him through dismal streets to another dismal hovel. Without a word, he was dropped, entered, shown by his new host his deluxe suite for the night, and there he spent the next twenty-two hours. A farmhouse, a suburban garage, another brothel, the rear of a pawnshop, on and on, for what seemed weeks but was shy of one. Time doesn’t fly when you’re not having fun. He lived in a cold fusion of nerves and shallow sleep, knowing in his heart of hearts that he was exactly where no man should be, hunted in a country whose language he didn’t speak, whose streets he didn’t know, and whose culture baffled him. He knew also: I am too old for this. But it was a thing he had to do. He had given his word. Crazy with honor? Nah. Stubborn was all, an old crank’s privilege.

Food was brought or bought, but nowhere within the whole elaborate structure of escape and evasion was there a cash economy, and no one wanted or would accept payment.

On the seventh day, he was dropped at a bar and told “fourth booth.” He entered a dark place full of bitter, isolated drinkers, found his way through the low lighting and the cigarette smoke, slid into booth no. 4, and indeed, there was Stronski.

“My friend,” said Stronski. “Still alive by the narrowest of margins. They’re hunting you everywhere.”

“Do we know who ‘they’ are?”

“Powerful enemy, whoever. The Izmaylovskaya have called in a lot of favors and essentially control a large part of the police apparat. You never know which cop is your friend, decent, honest guy, and which is Izzy, who will make a call and send the killers on your tail in a second. The main thing is, we have to get you out of here. That is why I have you moved around, wait until the novelty of manhunt has worn off and watchers aren’t so watchful.”

Swagger nodded. “Good strategy.”

“I think,” Stronski said, “now it’s good to go. You rest tonight, tomorrow you will be taken to truck yard and hidden in long-distance trailer north, out of Moscow. Long ride, my friend, over seven hundred miles. You’ll make it out soft route on the Finnish border. I have friends there too. Finland, Sweden, you home safe with warm memories of Mother Russia.”

“No,” said Swagger.

“No? What the fuck, brother? Is it money? No money. It’ll cost you nothing! This isn’t about money, at least your money. This is business. I back you, I give you my loyalty, no matter what it costs short-term, people have to know Stronski can be trusted. That’s my long-term. I got you into Lubyanka, I’ll get you out of Russia, everyone says you go to Stronski, you get what you bargained for. He is man of trust. In my business, that’s money in the bank.”

“That’s not it. I still have business here. There’s a last detail that has to be nailed down, and I’m not leaving until I’ve nailed it.”

“Swagger, are you nuts? These Izzy birds are gunning to kill you. They are not going away soon. They will in time track you down, it has to happen. Somebody will see, somebody will call, gunmen will show. Don’t matter if you’re in nice restaurant, in park, in orphanage, it don’t matter. In they come, blazing, killing any and all in the way, and that’s you on the floor, leaking. Nobody wants to leak.”

“I don’t want to leak. But I can’t move on unless I cover one more thing.”

“Goddamn, Swagger, you are a stubborn bastard.”

“I need to get back into the Lubyanka.”

“Jesus Christ! That’s the one place they look hardest for you. You’d be the one hundred thousandth killed there, but the first sniper. You want that record?”

“Of course not. But I don’t mean I’d go myself. I mean my representative. I have to get a man in there. Get him in there to check a certain thing. Then I am out of here.”

Stronski’s blunt face showed frustration. “Swagger, go home. Tell me what it is. I will find out. I will let you know. No need to die for something so small.”

“No, I have to debrief the guy who goes in. I have to see him, talk to him, ask him stuff so I trust him. So there are no doubts. That is why there is only one man for the job. That is you, Stronski.”

“Jesus Christ, you’ll get me killed too in your madness over something that happened fifty years ago. Crazy, man, crazy.”

“I have to trust the guy. I trust Stronski. Then we have to have a sit-down afterward in some safe place in Moscow for a debrief.”

He did trust Stronski. Also, knowing Stronski, he felt he could read the man’s face more than he could read a stranger’s.

“Money. You know the price that shit charges? And that was after haggling.”

“I don’t care.”

“Man, you don’t. I never thought I’d meet a guy who didn’t care about money, but that’s you, brother.”

“Maybe it won’t be as much. It’s just you, for under an hour, not the three of us in all night, prowling, two of us American. And you’re not in the big room, you’re in that other room, the counterespionage annex on the other floor.”

“If I do this, you’ll go home?”

“I’ll walk into the American embassy and turn myself over to the Marines. They’ll get me home easily enough. No Finland border stuff, no crawling through the snow. I’m way too old for that.”

Stronski shook his head in doubt.

“We’ll set it up,” Swagger said, “so that I meet you somewhere public close by the embassy. We have our debrief chat, that’s that, shake hands, and I walk into the embassy. They’ll cooler me for a day or so, but they’ll verify me through U.S. sources, the FBI will okay it, and I’m out of here. Does that work for you?”

“What makes you think I can do it? I am sniper, not professor. That Kathy, she was good, she would get it, but me? Suppose I can’t find it?”

“I’m sure you can.”

“What would it be?”

“There has to be a security sweep every few years. All services do that. I have to know to what degree the embassy in Mexico City, particularly the KGB suites, were penetrated in 1963. That was the game back then. Microphones all over the place, in the most amazing locations. Stalin’s eye, Lenin’s beard, the men’s room urinal. That place, the American place, all the places all over the world, they were radio stations broadcasting twenty-four hours a day, and not far away we had a little roomful of listeners writing it all down or monitoring the tape recorders. There were no secrets, at least not until cyber-cryptography came in, and that probably didn’t last too long either. I need confirmation that anything Oswald told the KGB goons wasn’t private. That is, it reached other parties.”

“I think I know who you’re talking about,” said Stronski.

“Yes. The red James Bond didn’t have to be red at all. He could have been a listener. And who was he listening for? He could have worked for the CIA.”

CHAPTER 11

It cost ten thousand dollars, and that was after much haggling. Give it to Stronski, he drove a hard bargain and finally got his price. Swagger was driven in the back of a delivery truck to a Bank of America ATM in downtown Moscow – he was too tense to ponder the ironies – and took out the money after having arranged it via satellite phone call with his banker in Boise. The miracle of modern satellite communications: he, in the back of a bicycle shop in Moscow, calls a man in Boise who calls Atlanta so that a computer transaction is verified back in Moscow, and the next day, with the PIN, Swagger walks away with the cash, gets in the delivery van, and heads back to the bicycle shop.

Then it was wait, wait, wait, more days fled by, days of nothingness and boredom that did nothing to alleviate the crush of anxiety. Too bad he no longer smoked or drank – either crutch might have provided some mercy – but it was a thing of staring at the ceiling as the plaster crumbled away while time decayed slowly. He cultivated an interest in a soccer team, wondered when the NFL would get to Moscow, tried not to think of his daughters and his son and the fine lives they were building, missed his wife, mourned his dead (always), thought about certain flavors, colors, and smells, and more or less concentrated on existence. His only companion was the pistol, brilliantly engineered by the Instrument Design Bureau, flawlessly manufactured by oligarch Ixovich’s IxGroup. He stripped it, examined it, dry-fired it, drew it, grew proficient and familiar with it, learned it in all the ways a man can learn a gun without firing it, which happen to be considerable.

His nighttime visitor, Lee Harvey Oswald, stubbornly stayed away. No ideas, no insights, nothing. Swagger tried to nudge the work along by sitting at the desk of one hole where he stayed and writing LEE HARVEY OSWALD three or four times in the margin of a Russian magazine about health food. The pen wouldn’t work, the paper was too glossy, and nothing came of it.

Or maybe something did.

That night, as before, he swam from unconsciousness in the dark and felt the presence of the other man. Lee, you fucking little monkey, what are you up to now?

The chilly punk bastard was silent and smug, as always, and Swagger scoffed as if to play hard to get and sailed back into sleep, but then it started.

He saw the creep in his sniper’s nest, hair a mess, limbs a-tingle, full of hunger for glory and immortality, on his sleazy, tiny rifle.

What the fuck are you up to, you little bastard?

The first question that came to mind was: why did he wait until the limousine had turned the corner off Houston onto Elm and was obscured in the few trees in the area to take (and miss) his first shot? What a moron!

This one had stuck in Swagger’s craw since he’d stood in the sniper’s nest. It spilled over him again. What the fuck? What’s going on here? Any shooter looking at the situation would know that he was assured one clear, unhurried shot before any kind of reaction took place. He would not choose a shot through the cover of trees at a moving target. Rather, as Swagger had chewed on a million times or so, the best shot was when the limousine had slowed almost to a standstill as it was rotating around the left turn directly below Oswald. At that point, the president was at his closest to Lee Harvey, around seventy-five feet. His chest and head were plainly exposed. The angle was roughly seventy-five degrees, so the trajectory ran well over the windshield of the limousine and the windscreen that cut off the driver’s compartment from the passenger compartment. It was the literal fish-in-a-barrel shot, and it was so close that difficulties with the scope alignment or even the three-hundred-meter battle zero of the iron sights wouldn’t move the bullet placement outside of the lethal zone. That had to be the shot Oswald planned to take.

That was in fact the shot he tried to take. Consider that when he arrived on the sixth floor that morning, he had his choice of windows. There were six. Why did he chose the left-hand corner? Because it gave him direct access to the turning automobile immediately beneath him. It was the right choice. If planning a shot farther down Elm Street, he surely would have chosen the right-hand window: it was the building’s width closer and, in terms of the curve in Elm Street, gave him less deflection to the target. It seemed that even Oswald, fired up on a wave of egomania and sense of destiny as he was, doubted his ability to make a deflection shot at close to three hundred feet, which was what his choice of the left-hand window ultimately committed him to doing. It was difficult to believe he could hit that shot if he didn’t think it was within his powers and had planned to avoid it.

Knock knock.

Hello, who’s there?

An insight.

Swagger realized the little creep in the nest had tried to take the closer, easier shot, and his failure to bring it off – consistent with his goof-up’s personality and his tendency to fall apart at big moments – was what determined the outcome of the next eight to ten seconds. Oswald prepped for that shot, put his scope squarely on the president’s chest, and at the moment of minimum movement and maximum proximity, pulled the trigger to discover that the rifle would not fire.

Had he put the safety on his loaded weapon and, in the heat of the moment, forgotten to remove it? The safety on a Mannlicher-Carcano is a devilishly small thing, poorly designed and not for battle usage. It’s a button located under the bolt plunger at the rear of the receiver. To manipulate it, you’ve got to break your hold, look at the fucking thing, and carefully guide it out of one condition and into the other. The idiot whom the other boys called Ozzie Rabbit snapped dry, panicked, went through the process, then went back into the shooting position, aware that he was already behind the action curve. His first shot may have been premature, as he was hunting for a target through the trees and stacking the trigger for the final pull, and the M-C trigger, unlike most of the age, is surprisingly light.

The rifle fires. He knows it’s a clear miss and now the clock is ticking on his effort and his old friend failure is nipping at his heels again. He rushes through cocking the weapon, reacquires the position, and is amazed to see the car emerge from the trees into plain view with almost no reaction from occupants, security, or crowd. He throws the crosshairs onto the president – this is his most likely shot to hit the brain, as the president is much less than two hundred feet away; the angle is beneficial to Oswald, producing little lateral movement and only slight diminishment, probably not even noticeable through the cheap glass of the inferior optical device; and he’s on much firmer ground regarding the trigger pull, knowing exactly how much slack to take out to get the trigger to stack up at the point of firing and when to exert that last ounce of pressure to fire.

And he misses again.

Of course, that’s the famous magic bullet, and not only does he not miss, he puts a bullet through two men. It’s not God’s point of view that matters, however, but Oswald’s point of view. The president does not react spastically to the bullet strike; rather, he makes a little jerk, which, being lost in the blur of the recoiling scope, Oswald may not see. By the time he gets the rifle cocked and is back to the target, he sees – nothing. That is, the president doesn’t collapse, tip, tilt, implode, pitch forward, splay his arms. Instead, he begins a slow, subtle forward lean, and his hands go toward his throat, but not with any wounded-animal instinct or speed. Oswald cannot see any indication of a hit and must think, You idiot! Another fuckup! And he must think, What the hell is wrong with this scope? I was right on, and I missed. Is it all fucked up? Where do I hold to make the shot?

Given that psychological reality, Swagger found it mind-blowing that Oswald recovered enough to reacquire the target after running the rough action a second time, and though the target was smaller, his psychological condition possibly more scattered, his doubts about his system more intense, his fear of failure even more concentrated, he managed the perfect brain shot.

What the fuck? How did this schmuck go from two strikes to a home run? How did he recover so fast and pull it off? You can look for years at his record for any hint of such a moment and be bewildered. There is nothing but utter failure; random mediocrity is his best accomplishment.

Swagger sat back, astounded that he was sweating and that he’d been transported to a faraway place and time. Now he was back in a sordid room smelling of piss and puke, sleeping on a dirty mattress, man on the run all the way.

Yet the dreamscape of Lee Harvey Oswald killing a president would not abandon his head. In another second, it took over his brain and Swagger was back among the boxes, smelling the burnt powder, standing next to the little prick who brought such shame on all of us who call ourselves shooters. The question, eternal and lingering: what the fuck?

Was it simple sniper’s luck that he hit that last shot? It could have been. The wild shot can hit as accidentally as it misses. The bullet doesn’t know where it’s going, what’s on the other end. It just goes where the physics tell it to go, and that can be into a brain or a curb, whatever.

Swagger understood that this idea sucked: nobody wants the key moment of the late twentieth century turning on nothing more than a nobody loser’s one stroke of luck. But maybe that was what happened.

Luck or whatever, Oswald has just shot the president in the head. Freeze the moment, which is the most interesting moment in the entire event. He has just seen his bullet detonate the president’s head into a geyser of brain matter and blood. Even if he lost specifics of the image in the recoil, when he comes back on target out of the recoil stroke, he sees chaos, panic, and hysteria in the back of the car. And what does he do?

He cocks the rifle again.

Excuse me, but what the fuck?

Why?

Does he mean to shoot again? Is it pure reflex? It wasn’t learned in the Marine Corps, where his M-1 automatically reloaded itself. What is his motive? Most good hunters have trained themselves to cock again for a fast follow-up, but by no means is this ass-clown an experienced hunter, and there’s no indication that he’s hunted in five years. Or does he need a motive at the time? Maybe it can’t be explained; it just is, it happened because it happened, and to look for motive is to see him as rational when he was an irrational man at an irrational moment.

Still, it seemed to Swagger, aware of the sniper’s instincts after the kill, in that situation, his task done, Oswald now knows that his chances at escape can be measured in mere seconds. It seems far more likely that instead of cocking the rifle, he abandons it, exits the nest, and beelines toward the only stairway, which is over ninety feet away diagonally across the empty space of the sixth floor.

He doesn’t do this.

Instead, he carries the rifle with him, loaded and unlocked, across the floor those ninety-odd feet. Suppose he meets a colleague? Suppose someone sees him from a building across the street, the Dal-Tex Building or the Dallas County Records building, both of which have floors and windows that look directly onto his area? At that point he is acting more like a marine on combat patrol, fearing ambush, than he is a fleeing assassin.

He reaches the stairway directly in the floor at the other corner of the building, and realizing he can’t reenter the world with rifle in hand, he shoves it between two boxes there at the stairs, where it will be found, fully loaded, shell in chamber, an hour or so later.

Why does he cock the rifle after killing the president? Why does he carry it with him as he proceeds across the floor? These issues seemed to bother nobody. They bothered Swagger.

Finally, enough time passed so that Stronksi felt safe enough to set a night; he met Swagger again, this time in the back of a van, to arrange the debrief and pass over the money.

“You swear,” said Stronski, “that after I have this thing for you, we will proceed directly to embassy, I will watch you enter, and can then finally relax, knowing I served you as you required and lived up to all promises.”

“Absolutely.”

“Now tell me where to meet.”

“No.”

“Swagger, you are such a bastard. Such a stubborn son of bitch. You don’t trust me?”

“What choice have I got? But let’s take elementary precautions. Though troublesome in the long run, they will cut down on the yips, and we can concentrate on our work.”

“You talk like general. All the time soothing, reasonable, and probably right. Goddamn you, man, you are a hard friend to have.”

“I’m just a country boy scared of city slickers, that’s all.”

“I don’t know what ‘slicker’ is, but I get the meaning. So when we settle on place?”

“I will call you on a cell that morning after you are out of the Lubyanka. I will give you a street. You will drive down it. At a set time, I will call you with a turn to make. I will guide you by me in this way and make sure nobody follows. I may do that two or three times. When I am certain you are alone, I will give you the destination, my choice, and you will be dropped. We will chat, then head by another cab to the embassy. Is that acceptable?”

“You have a cunning Russian mind. No rush to do anything.”

“It’s how I earned a glorious retirement in the basement of a bicycle shop where I watch the plaster slowly fall from the ceiling.”

“It is not very interesting, I am sure, but still, I am sure it is more interesting than death.”

“It is.”

Swagger gave him the envelope: ten thousand dollars in rubles.

“I hope what I get for you is worth that. There are no refunds,” said Stronski.

“I understand. I take the risk cheerfully.”

“I wonder: why do you do this, Swagger? The money it costs, the danger you run, after all you’ve been through. It’s so insane. I can make no sense of such a thing. Vengeance. You took the death of this president fifty years ago so seriously, the pain is so deep?”

Swagger laughed. “Frankly,” he said, “I don’t give a shit about JFK.”

Three days later, Stronski called at precisely 7 a.m.

“I have it,” said Stronski. “It was fine. Walked in, found the Second Directorate volumes, found the right year, found the report, broke the rules by writing it down, he never asked or wondered, got out easily, now I am with driver.”

“Anyone following?”

“Hard to tell. It’s crowded. All Porsches look the same. But no, I think not.”

“Take a few more turns around the town. I’ll call back shortly and give you a boulevard.”

Shortly, Swagger called. “Go to Bruskaya, then go north on Bruskaya.”

“That’s seven miles.”

“I will call in half an hour.”

Then it was “Bruskaya to Simonovich, left on Simonovich.”

Swagger waited forty minutes. “Simonovich to Chekhov. Right on Chekhov.”

He himself stood in an alley on Chekhov and watched as Stronski’s black Cherokee roared by. He watched the busy Moscow traffic flow that followed, looking for cars with intent pairs of middle-aged men, their eyes hammered to the vehicle they were following. He saw nothing like that, mainly commuters as glum as those on any freeway in America, truckies cursing the schedule, buses driven by women, a few cars of youngsters too full of booze and vitality to notice how early it was.

He moved a block, rerouted Stronski around another street, brought him by, and again noted no professional followers; this time he looked for repeats from the first batch of vehicles he’d monitored. He found none.

“Okay,” he said, “you’ve heard of the Park of Fallen Heroes, near the Tretyakov Gallery?”

“I know it well.”

“I will meet you there in an hour. I will take the Underground to the Okty-er, Okty–”

“–abrskaya station. Yes, it’s a few blocks.”

“See you at” – looked at watch – “nine-thirty or so.”

“Sit in front of Comrade Dzerzhinsky. He will appreciate the company,” said Stronski.

Possibly Comrade Dzerzhinsky did enjoy the company. He had no one else there. He stood on his pillar twenty feet above the ground, wrapped in a swirling greatcoat, his strong face ascowl with contempt for the world he looked upon. The man had ruled from the same altitude in the center of the square named after him, where he had commanded the ceremonial space before the Lubyanka, whose apparatuses he had invented as founder of Cheka in the early days after the revolution. He was the first of the Communist intelligence geniuses, if Polish by birth, and had helped Lenin cement his hold and built the machine that helped Stalin sustain his. He ruled from that spot in stone certitude for years, radiating the red terror from each eye.

Now, covered in graffiti and bird shit, he commanded nothing. Look ye mighty and despair, was that the message? Something like that. After the fall, he had been removed to this far place, a glade behind the Tretyakov art gallery. He had become a perch for the avian citizens of the state, and he looked out on a small patch of grass and bush in which other dead gods had been dumped, including about twenty-five Stalins, some big, some small, all broad with the muscular mustache and the wide Georgian cheekbones but all turned somehow comic by their extreme proximity to the earth. It was as if the Russians were afraid to throw out the icon that was the Boss, but at the same time they couldn’t honor him with a dictator’s height from which to command fear and obedience. So, low to the ground, sometimes swaddled in weeds, sometimes noseless or otherwise defaced from street action at various colorful times, he looked, in his rows on rows, like a mysterious ancient statue, unknowable, mysterious, vaguely menacing but easy to ignore, and he was ignored, for of the many beautiful Moscow parks, this was the least beautiful and maybe the least visited. It was unkempt and overgrown, unlike the formal perfection that was within the Kremlin walls. It was strictly an afterthought.

Swagger sat in almost perfect aloneness with the stone men. Sparsely visited in normal time, the park was even more desolate this early. He felt secure from his hunters: he had not been followed on the Underground, he had not been followed on his walk over. He checked constantly and knew himself to be unmonitored. It was a matter of minutes before Stronski arrived, and then he could go home and get on with it. He yearned for a shower, American food, a good, deep sleep, and a fresh start. Maybe all this shit would begin to swing into focus after he got away from it for a while. He knew he had to persist in his nighttime journeys with the creep Oswald. Who? What? How? Why? Nah, fuck why. Why wouldn’t make any sense. Only how mattered.

Oswald went away, and Swagger returned to man-on-the-run guy. He looked up and down the sidewalk; from the direction of the Tretyakov, a museum whose modern fortresslike walls could be seen through the trees, he saw Stronski approaching. He had read Stronski’s file, which Nick had obtained through CIA sources; he knew that Stronski had his finger in a hundred dirty pies, but everyone in Russia did. Some didn’t have so many pies. He also knew Stronski was known as a reputable assassin. He always delivered, he never betrayed. His stock in trade was efficiency combined with trustworthiness; he worked with equanimity for whichever bratva needed a job done, never tarnishing himself with their affairs, never playing their games.

So Swagger trusted him as well as he trusted anyone in this game.

“This is Petrel Five at Tretyakov, do you read?”

Static crackled over the handheld radio set, but the young man on the roof of the Tretyakov waited patiently until it cleared.

“–have you loud and clear, Petrel Five, go ahead.”

“Ah, I think I see Stronski.”

“What’s your distance?”

“About four hundred meters. I’m on the roof. He’s got Stronski’s hair, his build, muscular, he looks to be about the age.”

“Where is he going?”

“He’s in the park, just like you said. No rush. No worry. No indication he realizes he’s under observation.”

“Okay, drop out of sight, let the situation settle. Come back up in three minutes and tell us what you have.”

“Got it.”

The young observer did as he was told, sliding into repose below the edge of the wall at the roof’s precipice. He was by profession a construction worker in one of the companies that the Izmaylovskaya mob owned, but he and many others had been pulled out for observation duties on sites known to be favored by Stronski. This was quite exciting for him, for like many young men, he dreamed of gangster glory, of running with the feared Izzies on their violent adventures in Moscow. The chicks, the blow, the bling! It was the same for gangsters everywhere.

He rose, looked through his heavy binoculars, had a moment of panic, and then made contact.

“Petrel Five.”

“Go ahead.”

“He is sitting on a park bench with someone. Yes, now I see, a taller man, at least his legs are longer. Thin, not so big as Stronski. Workingman, probably, not a Westerner. Doesn’t look like an American.”

“Can you see his face? His eyes?”

“Let me move a bit.” The young man slid down the wall of the flat roof, coming to the corner. This would give him the best angle.

“I can now see they are sitting before the statue of Dzerzhinsky.”

“The eyes.”

He dialed the focus carefully, hoping to squeeze a bit more resolution out of it.

“The eyes,” he said. “Very wary. Hunter’s eyes.”

“Good work, Petrel Five. Now stay undercover.”

“First the good news,” said Stronski. “The good news is that there is no bad news.”

Swagger nodded. He waited for it.

“In those days, KGB started a program where a Second Directorate technical team was in constant rotation, station to station, the world over. That’s all they did. They stayed a few days, a week, they did a complete sweep, using every electronic countermeasure and tracking device at their disposal, and they issued a report to center with copies to the KGB resident in place. A Comrade Bukhov seemed to be in charge. Very thorough man, very patient, very wise in the ways of concealed microphones, wires, long-distance amplified eavesdropping, the power of batteries.”

Swagger nodded, listening hard.

“Soviet embassy, Mexico City, 1964 inspection, twenty-three listening devices found, eighteen of them removed, the point of leaving five, I suppose, to feed bad information to your eavesdroppers.”

“So in 1963–”

“Your people had it all. Everything in that building, your people heard it.”

Swagger nodded. “Of course,” he finally said, “that was a lot of info, most of it routine, I’m sure almost all of it routine. I wonder how carefully the work product was examined, who made the initial discrimination; probably someone low on the totem pole, and then what they winnowed out got passed upward to senior officers.”

“Very good questions, my friend, but answers will be found in Langley, not in Lubyanka.”

“Was there a ’62 report?”

“No, the program started in 1962, and Mexico City being not exactly a big priority, the team didn’t get to it the first time until ’64.”

Again Swagger considered.

“I saved best for last,” said Stronski, so pleased with his success. “Comrade Bukhov, very professional, very thorough, as I said, includes offices that he had found penetrated, and chief among them was that belonging to Yatskov, senior KGB and supervisor of Kostikov and Nechiporenko in Mexico City and first interrogators of Mr. Lee Harvey Oswald.”

Swagger let out an involuntary sigh. “That means that CIA had access to whatever Oswald said the last day, when he was so distraught and pulled the gun. He was in Yatskov’s office.”

“I suppose that is conclusion you could draw. I only tell you what the records say about wire operation at the embassy at the time.”

“What it proves,” Swagger said, “is that someone in the Agency could have known about Oswald’s hit on General Walker. It is not proved, but it cannot be ruled out.”

“You’re the genius. You’re the–” He went still.

Swagger picked it up immediately.

“Two,” said Stronski in the same even tone, “coming from around the bushes behind us, heavy coats, I cannot see hands. You have that pistol?”

“I do,” said Swagger, his mind gone instantly tactical. Was this a setup? Had Stronski betrayed him? If so, Stronski could have pulled a pistol and finished the job in one second. He wouldn’t have placed himself in the kill zone. In an odd way, a clarification had been issued. On the point of bad action, Swagger felt a wave of inappropriate enthusiasm. He could not help but smile.

“You laugh. Swagger, you are crazier than even I.”

“This is the only shit I was ever any good at,” said Bob, still smiling. He scanned for threat, immediately seeing two men, also in heavy coats with obscure hands, coming at them from the same direction that Stronski had come, from the Tretyakov, maybe moving with a little too much energy for so early on a sunny Moscow morning in such an out-of-the-way place.

“Two,” he said, “my twelve o’clock.”

“And two more make six, heading in from other entrance, just passing by Dzerzhinsky’s statue on the right. Are you hot?”

“I’m hot, but no reload.”

Neither body posture had altered, neither man had swiveled his head or signaled sudden anxiety through tensed body. In fact, Stronski laughed, and as he did, he reached over and shook Swagger’s arm in mirth, and Swagger felt something heavy slide into his jacket pocket and knew it to be an eighteen-round magazine for his GSh pistol.

“No cover here,” said Stronski, laughing, “and they’ve got baby Kalish, I’m sure. On three, draw and fire, then break around the bench, run straight back to cover.”

Swagger knew what was back there sixty feet or so: Stalinland. Row on row of stone Joe, wisdom in his eyes, sagacity on his face, mustache flowing like the Don, hair thick as the wheat fields of Ukraine.

“I lay down fire, you move. Get into the Stalins. Good cover, you can move, will stop their rounds, you can get shots. We’ll see if they have guts to come against our guns when we are on the sights and shooting calmly.”

“Let’s kill some bad-asses,” said Swagger.

“On my one, three, two, one–”

It happened so fast after such a long wait. The Izmaylovskaya kill team had sat in a Mercedes limo behind the Tretyakov, a glossy black beast of a car with three ranks of leather seats, smelling of new car and also of perfume, as if someone had a woman there recently. But not now. Two men in the front, two in the middle, two in the rear. Very tough, very good men, had done wet work all their lives, first in Spetsnaz, then for the mobs, and now as dedicated Izzy hard guys. It was a great life, and they had everything that the kid code-named Petrel Five dreamed about, blow, chicks, and bling. They had bleak faces and small dark eyes and wide Slavic cheekbones and frosts of gray hair, and each weighed over two hundred pounds. Each could bench his weight and was expert at Systema Combat Sambo, an advanced Russian and deadly martial art. All had scars, mended limbs, jagged knuckles, memories of death in cold or faraway places or, more recently, in back streets or nightclubs. To see them was to fear them, and the exquisitely tailored dark suits they wore over dark shirts – some black, some chocolate, some dark blue – warned the world to step aside.

Each carried what is commonly but incorrectly called a Krinkov, or “Krink” in the vernacular, the preferred weapon of choice of the late Osama bin Laden and perhaps the instrument he was reaching for when SEAL Team 6 popped his balloon. (These men had done a lot of that sort of work themselves.) It was a short-barreled AK-74 variant with a large, almost bulbous flash hider, a folding stock now cranked tight along the left side of the receiver, and a wicked, curving plum-colored mag of thirty 5.45-mm high-velocity steel-cored cartridges. It was secured by shoulder sling under the heavy Armani overcoats they wore, and in each voluminous pocket were a few more mags.

The news came to the team leader when he answered his cell in perfunctory language, without drama or excitement; they were professionals at this, none of it was new.

“Oleg, we’ve got a confirm. They’re on the bench at the Dzerzhinsky statue. You set to roll?”

“On our way, Papa Bear,” said Oleg, tapping the driver hard.

Behind him, he heard the sound he loved best in the world, which was the klack of bolts being racked as they were slid back to turn the gun hot and ready. He himself made that wonderful adjustment, feeling the slight vibration as the bolt slid back, permitted a cartridge to pop into place, then rammed it home to the chamber, the firing pin held tense by the trigger. His fingers inspected while he called out the commands to his team, as he had done in the mountains so regularly: “Bolts back, safeties off, full auto engaged.”

“All positive,” came the ragged response.

The heavy car gunned to life but did not jump into the traffic. As in all action, smooth is fast, and the Izmaylovskaya driver was an equally experienced pro. He slid arrogantly into the traffic, accelerated, made the proper turns while obeying all laws, and in a few minutes pulled up to the margins of the park.

Oleg spoke into his phone. “Papa Bear, we’re set. Still a go?”

He heard Papa Bear speak into another phone and then come back with “Yeah, he’s still got them sitting there like birds perched on Felix’s cold nose. Go rock their world.”

“Showtime,” he said to his boys.

The car slid to the side of the road, and two men slipped out. They’d hold a few seconds, the other two two-man subteams would get out at two other spots around the perimeter of the Park of Fallen Heroes, they’d coordinate the walk-in, and then they’d converge on the bench. All would go to guns, the shooting would be over in seconds, and in the stunned silence, they’d return to the patiently waiting limo, which they knew would go unseen by any of the hundreds of witnesses in the roadway, including Moscow police or militia.

The car deposited the second team, turned a corner, and drove fifty yards to deposit the third. The driver began the heavy labor of a U-turn meant to move him back and place him at the exit to the park closest to the bench, out of which, if all went well, the six shooters would soon emerge.

All did not go well.

Pistol up, two hands, front sight, front sight, front sight and press, the jerk of the recoil snapping the pistol up a bit, its slide in super-time hard back, a spent shell a blur as it spun away, and then Swagger found the front sight again and followed up with another to the midsection, cranked right a degree or so, and hammered two more nines into the partner, who was unlimbering his Krink, and watched that one blur spastically while his nervous system announced he’d taken hits and he staggered, the Krink dropping but not falling as the strap held it.

Swagger heard the reports behind him of Stronski, his own GSh-18 rapping as he fired a suppressive spray, having more targets and not being able to aim after the first.

Swagger’s old legs drove him off the bench and behind it, and he was stunned to see that though he’d hit and slowed them, the two on his side had not pitched to the earth. He fired again even as one of them, in a lurching move, jerked on the Krink’s trigger and chopped up a cloud of dust and debris at his own feet.

“Go, go, goddammit,” yelled Stronski over his own new dialogue of shots; Swagger was too excited to feel his age and ran like hell, low, with first a zig and then a zag and then a zig and was in seconds, it seemed, absorbed by the formation of Joes in Stalinland. He fell behind the nearest, went prone, and shooting with the earth as his sandbag, fired at the smears of men to the left moving and shooting, scattering as they looked for cover, their chopped-for-handling assault weapons jerking arcs of unaimed fire into the air to cascade wherever. Stronski ran, and Swagger held on the head of a man who’d wisely dropped to kneeling to steady his front sight for an aimed shot, but Swagger fired first, careful on the press, and saw a splat of gas-inflated shirtfront to mark a hit high in the chest; the man staggered to his knees, dropped his weapon, and seized it again. Swagger fired, and the man went sluggishly, reluctantly to earth. He seemed so disappointed.

Swagger looked back. One of the first two he’d hit was down, finished, but the other – though his black shirt, now wet and heavy, clung tightly to his chest – staggered ahead, weaving the Krink with one hand, bull-crazed by his job and meaning to finish before he bled out. Holding carefully, Swagger managed to press one off that blew a jet of mist from the man’s broad forehead. He fell like a toppled statue.

A strange ripping sound went stereophonic on Swagger as a spray of stone or marble frags lacerated his cheeks and hands. He turned and saw that two of the original four to the left had taken positions behind the bench and were laying out fire into the fleet of Stalins, ripping through nose and mustache and wavy Georgian hair, blowing out all-seeing eyes, ripping the comfy pudge of sanctimony that in some variations bunched the Boss’s cheeks. One Joe split radically in two, its lesser half dropping to Earth; another, of porous material, simply evaporated into a fog of dust as, hit centrally, it shattered.

“Go back, go back,” screamed Stronski from an adjacent Joe head, and Swagger, usually the yeller of orders in such situations, obeyed, crab-walking back a rank to find another stout stone Joe behind which to crouch even as he heard full-metal jackets hum through the air and was aware that, around and behind him, the whole world was dancing and crumbling to the jig of velocity. Situated and alive, he rose, and though he could see only flashes and that thin scrim of burned chemistry that accompanies multiple smokeless powder discharges screening the bench, fired the last five shots of his mag at the bench, hearing the protest of punctured wood as his bullets bore into the bench slats.

Stronski, under that distraction, scuttled backward, hooked behind a Joe, and slammed a new mag into his GSh. Swagger’s, similarly hors de combat, received the same treatment, and dropping the slide on a fresh eighteen, he hoisted it before him to hunt for targets. He heard Stronski yell in Russian.

“I call them fucking gutless Izzy dogs, tell them to come visit me in the Joes and I will kill the rest of them and fuck their asses when they are dead, hah!” he translated in the next lull.

A new fusillade ruptured the blasphemy, and more stone fragments sang as they pranced from the various Joes that the high-velocity bullets pockmarked.

“He’s coming around,” yelled Swagger, seeing that the two on the bench were covering for a brave guy, cutting right and hoping to ease among the Stalins from that flanking point of entry. Swagger rose, guessing the gun smoke, floating debris, and floating slivers of grass and brush would give him a little concealment, and set to intercept. He dropped back a row of Joes, cut right, ran low, paused as he waited for the shadow of the gunman, then stepped out on the diagonal and fired twice into the approaching killer’s heavy chest, then fired a finisher into center forehead. It was not pretty, but it was final. The gunner went down hard, headfirst, feet flying up with such force that a Gucci loafer popped off one. Swagger scurried, leaned forward, and retrieved the Krink, deftly unlinking the sling catch.

Swagger rose and, as steadily as possible, emptied the mag, about fifteen remaining rounds, into the bench where the last two bad boys hid, this time rendering it further useless under splinters and dust. One of them rose to run, and Stronski leaned into a sight picture to take him. He fired once and his pistol jammed, its slide stuck halfway back.

Swagger swung to take the runner down with the Krink, not remembering it was empty, and pulled on nothing. He dropped it, shifted the pistol to his right hand, and suddenly felt a horse kick in his hip as a pelting spray of frags and superheated dust flew upon him.

He rolled left into the fetal, locked his elbows between his knees, and found the man who stood over the defenseless Stronski and pressed just as that guy got another mag into his Krink and was about to massacre the sniper. Swagger hit him in the eye, blowing it out, and the man twisted like a dancer and corkscrewed earthward.

Swagger turned back on peripheral motion and settled in for a shot on the surviving gangster now fleeing, saw civilians across the street behind him, possible friendly-fire casualties, and opted not to shoot. The big guy, all athlete and amazingly fast, made it out an exit and dove into the open door of a sleek black limo, which burned rubber on the acceleration.

“Dump guns, get out of here,” commanded Stronski.

“You’ve been hit.”

It was true. The left side of Stronski’s white silk shirt bloomed the dark spread of blotted blood.

“It’s nothing, you go, get out of here. Do it now! I am fine. I cannot run much.”

Swagger dropped the pistol, pulled his watch cap low, and started to walk forcefully away, crossing a street, finding an alley, cutting down it, finding a broad boulevard. Police cars roared along it, looking for a turn to the park, which, as it developed, was not accessible from that thoroughfare. Two passed within feet of Swagger, but in them, youngish men seemed alarmed and unaggressive, unwilling to get any closer until they were sure the shooting had stopped.

Finding a small restaurant, Swagger tried to look cool. He said, “Koka,” and waited as the drink was brought, hoping no one noticed that he was hit too.

CHAPTER 12

Reilly e-mailed her boss at Foreign. “Seems to be a big shoot-out downtown here. They say five dead in an assassination attempt. Some mafia deal. Interested?”

She heard back in a bit.

“Sounds routine. Happens here all the time. Pass, thanks. Stay on that Siberian gas thing for the time being. Maybe if Putin comments on shoot-out, set up a Sunday thumbsucker on Russian mafia-getting more violent? Think about it.”

So she went back to tap-tap-tapping. “. . while concerns about the danger of cold drilling for natural gas under the Siberian tundra continue to rise after last month’s blast, Petro-Diamond spokesmen argue that the explosion was a fluke. Moreover, they say the billion-dollar energy firm will stick with recently announced plans to expand drilling operations beyond the Nebeyaskaya range in the Arctic Circle.”

Her cell rang. She saw the number was local but didn’t recognize it. “Hello?”

“Hey,” she heard Swagger say.

Normally able to handle cops as well as grieving widows, angry generals, and romantic drunks, she was momentarily nonplussed by the voice, arriving as it did from a man who’d vanished ten days before.

“Where are you calling from? Why are you here? I thought you’d left.”

“I’m in the parking lot. I’m under your car, actually. Flat on my back.”

“What?”

“I seem to be bleeding. I made it here on the Underground. I had to get flat or even this small wound could empty me.”

“Jesus Christ, Swagger. You! You were in that gunfight. I should have known.”

“I think I’m the missing bodyguard.”

“And that was Stronski?”

“Stronski and Swagger, the two of us, both old guys, against the world. How is he?”

“They say the purported target is all right. Wounded, but expected to recover.”

“Very good news.”

“Okay, stay there. I’ll come down and get you. I need to get you to a medical–”

“No, no. It just tore through some muscles and skidded off the steel ball I have for a hip. That’s all. Bandages will do fine. In a few days, maybe you can dump me at the embassy, and I’ll be all right. Some corpsman will sew me up. The FBI will verify me, and they can ship me back more or less in one piece. I don’t want any police interviews, believe me.”

“Swagger, you have such a talent for getting yourself into bad shit.”

She got down to the dark lot to find him wriggling out from underneath one of the small Chevys that the Post provides its reporters in Moscow. Once he got himself upright, he was able to move without much more of a limp than he normally had, though looking closely, she saw the small bullet hole and a dark stain that suggested some blood loss.

“No arteries, no veins. Like a whack from a baseball bat. My whole side’ll be purple for a month, but once the laceration heals, it’ll be fine.”

“You’ve been shot!” she said. “It can’t be fine!”

“I’ve been shot before. Please, it’s not a big thing. My main worry is Stronski now.”

“He’ll be all right.”

The small elevator took them up seven flights. They turned through a metal door that could have guarded a bank vault and walked into a spacious double living room apartment laden with sofas, icons, books, textile hangings, art, all of it in splendid taste. Swagger had nothing to compare it to; he had never seen such a den of the mind as opposed to the body, but he imagined it as the kind of place some sort of fancy professor might keep.

“Nice,” he said. “Lots of books. Bet you’ve read ’em all.”

“Not hardly. The office is through the door down the way; it’s another apartment, rigged for business with our computers, which are tied in to the Post’s in Washington. It’s like I’m twenty-five feet away from my boss, not four thousand miles.”

He flopped on the sofa, not that interested in miracles of modern journalism. “This is fine for me. Maybe in a few minutes I’ll head into the bathroom and take a shower. The bleeding seems to have stopped. I can feel it stiffening.”

“Do you want anything to eat or drink?”

“You know, I am hungry.”

She fixed him a sandwich and a koka, which he greedily consumed. Then he told her all about the event.

“God,” she said, her face alarmed, “how can you be so calm? All those men trying to kill you, and it’s some kind of a joke.”

“Sooner or later, somebody will manage it. Or I’ll fall off the porch and starve to death like an old stag with a broken leg. It’ll happen. I’ve seen it enough. It’s a fact. I just want to get this one done, though. That would be enough.”

“How did they find you?”

“They didn’t follow either of us. Maybe they had a GPS planted on Stronski, but I doubt it. I picked the spot, he didn’t, and he didn’t know about it early enough to notify anyone, and neither could anyone else in his outfit. So my guess is they had a bunch of likely Stronski places under static observation, with a kill team near each one, and when we showed up, they got into action in a few minutes. What that tells me again is what someone else said: someone is spending a lot of money on this. Only governments have money like that to spend, or oligarchs, or Hollywood directors.”

“I doubt Steven Spielberg has it in for you.”

“You never can tell.”

“You’d better get some sleep. Do you want to move into the bedroom?”

“I’ll take the shower, sack out. I should be okay to move tomorrow. You won’t tell anybody I’m here?”

“If I told my editors I had a guy on the couch shot up in a Russian mafia gunfight who was investigating the Kennedy assassination, they’d ship me to the Anne Arundel county mall in two minutes.”

“I don’t know what that is, but if you say it’s a bad thing, I’ll take your word for it.”

He lay on the sofa. Escape. I made it. Tomorrow I’m safe, the Moscow thing is over, and nobody’s hunting me. He tried to relax, and in a bit, fed and showered and only marginally uncomfortable from the hit on his steel hip, he fell into a restless sleep.

But escape was the theme of the evening, and as he tried to draw some pleasure from his own, his mind naturally went to his buddy Ozzie Rabbit. That guy had been on the run too, although he never made it. Swagger, reliving the sense of crushing dread that had accompanied him on the walk out of the Park of the Fallen Heroes, came awake in the Moscow apartment. He knew sleep would not visit again. But Ozzie Rabbit would.

He rose, went to the window, and looked down across the open park between the buildings in the complex, while on the horizon, those various new Dallases that were the future of Moscow rose and sparkled against the dark of the night. He could barely make out his own image in a trace of reflection on the window; he saw a specter, a shape, haunted by the nearness of death.

In time Lee Harvey moved in and sat next to him, face dull (as it always was, except when he got shot), hair a mess, skin pasty, broadcasting distress and melancholy and yet defiance and pure psycho anger. Man on the run, 11/22/63.

He makes it out of the Book Depository, though he is briefly stopped by a policeman, and heads up Elm Street. He has skipped out seconds before the police arrive in force to cordon off the building and search it. He continues on Elm Street, passing the Dal-Tex Building, disappearing into the crowd, and four blocks later jumps aboard a bus heading back down Elm Street. He is so determined to get aboard this vehicle that he stops it in the street and hammers on the closed door for admittance.

That was a mystery in the classical assassination canon, Swagger knew. Many wonder why he chose to go back in the direction he came from, back toward Dealey Plaza, the site of the assassination, where crowds and policemen were collecting in large numbers and traffic, as a consequence, was backing up.

Some say he had no plan at all, he was a moron in a panic, he took the first chance he saw to get out of the area.

On the other hand, it is the no. 2 bus, and its destination is not arbitrary. It will take him past the Depository, under the triple overpass, over the Trinity River, and into Oak Cliff, the area of Dallas where his roominghouse is located.

Swagger realized: Peculiar. It’s clear he has no escape plan in place. This means either, first, he’s an idiot, acting irrationally, beyond comprehension; or second, his original escape plan is ruined for some reason, and the only thing he can think to do is return home. He counted on something happening, and it has not; now he must deal with that reality.

The bus soon runs into traffic as it approaches the chaos of Dealey. Oswald hops off, cuts a few blocks across town to a Greyhound station, and catches the only cab ride of his life.

Swagger had a new thought: This known fact has been undercommented on. Oswald is at the Greyhound station, he has dough in his wallet, and hey, it’s a bus station, right? So there are buses leaving regularly for other cities in Texas. Yet he does not buy a ticket and climb aboard. It’s true, he may know that it’s a matter of time before law officers arrive, check on last-minute ticket purchases, and send messages to the highway patrol to waylay buses. But if escape were his goal, given the way his world was about to be closed down, wouldn’t that be his best chance, to scurry away before the manhunt net was thrown out?

No answer presented itself. Swagger continued narrating to the two figures in the dim window that overlooked the Russian nightscape.

It is known that Oswald takes the cab to his roominghouse in Oak Cliff. He’s smart enough to have it drop him a few blocks away, so he can recon for law enforcement activity before blundering in. That suggests that the roominghouse is a rational destination, something he’s thought about and decided makes the most sense given the problems he faces. He knows that it won’t be long before a canvass of employees is taken at the Texas Book Depository and his name comes up and he’s ID’d as missing. He knows that eventually – but not how quickly – the police will connect him to the recovered rifle. The cops could arrive at any second. Yet he takes the chance to go to his roominghouse, to beat the police response, in order to get one thing: his pistol.

Who did he think he was, Baby Face Nelson?

The next day, right at 5 p.m. when the office closed, she pulled up to the American embassy on Bolshoy Deviatinsky Pereulok, and he peeped up from the well of the front seat where he’d been crouching and opened the door. The marine guards were twenty feet away across the sidewalk, so he felt quite secure.

“You were great,” he said. “I can’t thank Kathy Reilly enough. If anything happens with this, I’ll try to repay you.”

“Swagger, get out alive. That’s all the repayment I need.”

“Good idea. Here, can you get rid of this?” He pushed the pistol across the seat toward her, wrapped in newspaper. “Just dump it in a trash can. It can’t be traced. Sorry, but I had to carry it until now.”

“It’s loaded?”

“Extremely.”

“I’ll throw it in a river.”

“Much better. It’s a great little gun. Saved the geezer bacon. Your friend Mr. Yexovich knows what he’s doing.”

“Ixovich. The oligarchs are all-wise. Plus, they give great parties. Endless caviar.”

He leaned and kissed her on the cheek. “Kathy Reilly. The best.”

“I’m sorry it didn’t work out.”

“Oh, that,” he said. “The trip.”

“The trip. You paid, what, forty thousand dollars in bribes–”

“Fifty. There was another installment.”

“You paid fifty grand in bribes, you got hunted like an animal for two weeks in the Moscow demimonde, you lost about twenty pounds, you got shot, and you didn’t find your red James Bond.”

He smiled. “That’s true. But it reminds me, I swore to set something right with you. Please don’t hate me, but I lied to you. Or rather, I played you a certain way.”

“Why is this not a surprise?”

“I told you I wanted to find the red James Bond – actually the super case officer. That was to motivate you to make that your goal, to try to see him everywhere, in every file and every report. You tried your damnedest to make me happy. But you failed. Except you succeeded. I wanted your best effort, because then I knew if you couldn’t find a red James Bond, there really wasn’t a red James Bond. See, a red James Bond screws everything up. He muddies the waters, makes all the linkages problems, confuses the lines of command, brings in foreign guys, makes the thing international and not home sweet home. It’s all spy-movie then, and I’m a lost puppy. So I was hoping to Christ he didn’t exist. But before I could move on, I had to make sure he never existed. He had to be eliminated. A lot of it is about elimination. It all traced back to the Soviet embassy, but as it turned out, the reds were conduits of information, and basically, everything they told that guy Mailer was true. Their role is small: their Oswald info was intercepted by the real killers. Now I can go after them.”

“If you can find out who they were, you mean?”

“Oh, no, Ms. Reilly. I know who they are. I’ve always known who they are, from the first second. That bicycle print; remember it? It’s actually from a wheelchair. I know the guy.”

“You know who they are?”

“I even know his name and what happened to him. I saw his body.”

“He’s dead?”

“Yeah, but he wasn’t the brains guy, the case officer. He was just operations. I think the case officer is still around, because he keeps trying to kill me.”

She looked at him, dumbfounded. “I don’t- I don’t know what to say.”

“You don’t have to say a thing,” he said. “There’s nothing to say anymore. It’s time to hunt.”