The Third Bullet

CHAPTER 13

It’s a peculiar way to run an investigation,” said Nick.

Swagger couldn’t think of an answer. His hip had been sewn up, a process that essentially involved tying two slabs of scar tissue together with hemp thread, the highest, strongest magnitude, with a needle that looked like a stainless-steel flagpole; he’d been loaded with antibiotics, and the State Department, with FBI intervention, had found space for him to return from Moscow, quite the worse for wear, aboard its weekly diplomatic flight. Complaints had been filed; FBI agents were not permitted to work undercover in Moscow, much less shoot up parks with well-known gangsters, leaving bodies all over the ground. If the new director hadn’t been so busy giving speeches and interviews, he might have objected and brought heat and smoke on Nick, not his favorite to begin with, but he missed the boat on this one, so for the time being, it went officially unremarked upon.

Now Swagger sat in his living room in Idaho, hip sore and swaddled in bandages, in the silence of his disapproving wife and daughter, while Nick upbraided him.

“It’s not the diplomatic embarrassment I care about. I’m too old to give a damn about that. But this technique you’ve come up with is pretty spectacular. You find a target. You run at it in full aggression, guns blazing, daring it to destroy you. It makes that attempt, and somehow, by luck, talent, whatever, you survive and proceed to learn what can be learned from the assassins whom you’ve just killed. Does it ever occur to you that you’re too old for this kind of shit, that sooner or later your luck is going to run out, and when that happens, it will be tragic, as well as a mess for all involved?”

“It never occurs to him!” Jen hollered from the kitchen. “He is self-destructive and stupid.”

Bob didn’t answer her either; he couldn’t. “I didn’t plan on the gunfight,” he explained to Nick. “That was their idea. It came, we dealt with it, and we prevailed. We were armed, we reacted faster than they expected. We won the fight to the action curve. Honey, can you get me some more coffee?”

“Get it yourself,” came the call from the kitchen.

“I’d say your wife is a little perturbed.”

“Can you get Nick more coffee?”

“He can get it himself too.”

“There you have it,” said Bob. “At any rate, I feel we made substantial progress. I feel I have cleared the brush away from any high-level Soviet involvement in this thing, and that any information that was in play in ’63 may have originated in the Soviet embassy in Mexico City, but it was available to other parties.”

“Meaning Agency.”

“They were the ones who were listening.”

“Now you want to focus on the Agency, 1963.”

“Yeah, I know, there’s not much left of that place at that time. It was so long ago. Everybody’s dead. Still, if people in the Agency knew Oswald took a shot at Walker, which they could have learned from their intercepts, that made certain things possible. They used the same model in 1993 in their operation against Archbishop Roberto-Lopez. Manipulate a patsy into place with a known rifle, engineer some sophisticated ballistic deceit, have the backup shooter make the kill shot that the patsy couldn’t be trusted to make, then betray the patsy. It was the same goddamn thing.”

“It’s a lot of could haves, might haves, possiblys, and maybes,” said Nick.

“There was nothing possibly or maybe about the bullet Lon Scott was about to put into me, and there was nothing possibly or maybe about the bullet you put into him in 1993. You tagged him before he tagged me, maybe by a second.”

True enough. Nick remembered the six-hundred-yard shot, the way the dust or debris vibrated into a puff when he put the bullet into the man and watched him slump back and disappear into his hide. Later, he remembered looking at him, crushed, so still, just wreckage. Great shot, somebody said. It wasn’t till later that Nick learned that Lon was wheelchair-bound, and though confined to the steel trap, had fought his way admirably to a righteous life, that is, until the end.

“The ops were similar, yes. But there’s something in Latin that means ‘Just because it came first, doesn’t mean it caused it.’ In other words, they could have planned 1993 on the model of what they thought happened in 1963 or what could have happened in 1963. Nothing that happened in 1993 proves anything about 1963.”

“It’s too goddamn provocative to be left alone. Agree with me on that. That’s the favor I’m asking. You’ve come this far. It’s worth a hard look, and people seem to be trying to kill me because I’m taking that hard look. And you remember the 1993 people even better than I do. One in particular.”

“I remember him,” said Nick, thinking of the frosty figure of a man called Hugh Meachum, who supposedly represented the “Buddings Institute of Foreign Policy” but clearly spoke for a larger, more secretive entity when he tried to convince Nick to testify against Bob.

“So. . are you going to help me?” asked Bob. “I know you’ve gone way out on a limb, but the fact that twice, high-priced, highly connected killers have tried for me, and that previously one of them killed James Aptapton, is evidence that we’re close to something.”

Nick shook his head.

“I know you’ve never really believed in this,” said Bob. “I’m not sure I do either. But I don’t know what to do except push ahead. Here’s one idea. The people who tried to take Stronski and me out were from an outfit called the Izmaylovskaya gang, known to be the most violent of the Russian mobs. They seem to be, by reputation, connected to an oligarch named Viktor Krulov, very powerful international presence, that sort of thing. Could we run a deep cyber-search of Krulov? See what connections he has to American businesses. My assumption is that whoever hired the Izzys had to do so under the auspices of Krulov. So if we get a shake-out on Krulov’s business affiliations in the U.S., we’ll know who was capable of making such an arrangement. There’s also one named Yeksovich. No, no, dammit, Ixovich. Weird name, huh? He owns some gun companies, and that might tie him to arms exports that might involve criminal activity and possibly the Izzies.”

“Yes, I will look into Krulov and Ixovich.”

“Okay, the next thing is Hugh Meachum.”

“He died in 1993.”

“Officially. That has to be looked at carefully.”

“I have. Unlike John Thomas Albright, whose life as Lon Scott was clumsily hidden, everything about Meachum’s death is perfect. All t’s crossed, all i’s dotted. I looked very carefully at the public documents, and they are complete,” said Nick.

“But he was a spy, one of the best. He would be good at that.”

“You can’t say that lack of evidence is evidence. Then it all goes crazy. That’s why all the conspiracy theories are bullshit. And I can show you his ashes.”

“Can his ashes be read for DNA?”

“No.”

“Aha!”

“Swagger, it proves nothing.”

“It was a joke.”

“He has three sons in the Washington area. They appear to be outstanding men, above reproach. I’m reluctant to engage them. Until we have something definite on Hugh Meachum, and we’re far from that, I have no plans to visit or otherwise agitate them. This is America; they are not responsible for anything their father may or may not have done.”

“Agreed,” said Swagger. “That would leave only other vets of Clandestine Services from the early sixties.”

“Most are dead. These are guys who lived hard. They fought the Cold War. And, it should be noted, won it. Paid a high price in alcoholism, divorce, breakdown, suicide, heart disease. Through the Retired CIA Officers Association, we have been able to locate only one, and he’s been institutionalized for over five years.”

“Agency records?”

“Hard to access unless you’ve got something to trade or hard data. You’ve done them favors, maybe you could get in contact.”

“I don’t know anyone there since Susan Okada died. And I hate to play that card.”

“I don’t blame you.”

“I have an idea, though.”

“You attack the CIA with an M-16. When you’re captured, you escape and recapture your capturers, and we interrogate them.”

“Exactly. That’s it. What could go wrong? No, no, it’s actually subtle.”

“This I gotta hear.”

Swagger flew to Washington a few days later. It was a wretched flight through lightning and cloud, not smooth, and as usual, his mind would not settle down. He tried to nap, couldn’t, got up and went to the bathroom, earning displeasure from the flight attendant because the seat-belts sign was lit.

He returned, sat back, glad he had gotten an aisle seat, and tried once again to relax, tried again not to look at his watch or disturb the person next to him, Lee Harvey Oswald.

Of course not. Just a slumbering American male, teacher, salesman, lawyer, father, uncle, brother, what have you. Mr. Ordinary. Sleeping through it all.

But his hair was slightly disheveled, maybe that was it, like Oswald’s, and the next thing Swagger knew, he was back on the run with Ozzie Rabbit, who, despite the fact that he is the object of a city-wide manhunt and has only a limited amount of time to escape, has risked everything to return to the one place the police will expect him at any second to retrieve his revolver.

Why didn’t he have it with him in the first place?

A gun makes a man comfortable. Swagger remembered his own recent adventures with the .38 Super in Dallas and Comrade Ixovich’s GSh-18 in Moscow. Not using them, having them. The weight, the reminding pull on the waistline, the density, the pressure of the hard metal against the flesh. If you knew someone was going to try to kill you, that pressure was what let you operate. You were armed. You could fight. It was the enabler of all those who, for whatever reason, knew they would travel in violence’s way.

Oswald knew that up front. He had to know that. Yet he didn’t carry his pistol with him, even though it was designed for that reason.

It was, after all, a midframed revolver with a snub-nosed barrel, built explicitly for undercover use, for concealment. It’s the gun you carry when you can’t carry a gun. His ability to hide it really wasn’t an issue. While the gun – a Smith & Wesson .38 Special of the model known as M&P, originally chambered in the less powerful British .38 S&W round, then rechambered for the more powerful Special, its barrel cut down for that “detective” look – is no derringer, it can be easily concealed. After all, that is its point. For example, he could (as he did later) have tucked it in his belt, under a shirt or sweater. Since nobody was looking for it, it would have been an easily sustained deceit. Or he could have taped it to the barrel or the forestock of the Mannlicher-Carcano and concealed it in the same paper sack that held the rifle. He could have taped it to his own ankle. He could have hidden it in a sock and secured the sock to the barrel. Lacking tape, he probably could have hidden it in the pocket of loose-fitting pants and kept his hand on it to keep its weight from distending the trousers, attracting attention. He could have carried it in a readily secured lunch pail or bag.

He knew he was going to shoot the president of the United States. He knew he was going to be the object of a big-time manhunt. He knew armed policemen would be hunting and ultimately confronting him. He probably dreamed of a glorious death in a blazing gun battle at the hands of law enforcement as the fitting climax to his heroic sacrifice. Yet he leaves his snub-nosed revolver at home.

This struck Bob as either the product of a mind too deranged and incoherent to have brought off the assassination in the first place or, at the least, a curiosity.

The fact that he didn’t bring it was superseded only by the astonishment that he went back, an immense risk, to retrieve it.

So here was a question: what happened that made the revolver so valuable after the assassination? Clearly, something happened. Clearly, Oswald’s circumstances changed, and his thinking and tactics changed.

Swagger listed the things that his subconscious had brought to his attention: three odd behaviors in a few minutes, from 12:20 to 1 p.m., November 22. First, from two abject failures, Oswald makes a great recovery and shoots on the president. Then he arms himself for a ninety-foot walk across an empty room. With the manhunt tightening around him, he passes up a bus out of town and takes an incredible risk to get home and arm himself again when he could have been armed all along.

“Excuse me,” said his seatmate. “I have to go to the john.”

“Sure,” said Bob, and radio contact with station KLHO was lost.

The house looked like a book, a slim volume packed into a shelf of larger, more intimidating tomes. The others were mansions set back from the brick sidewalks of Georgetown, under the place’s looming elms, but this humble dwelling was like a ragged paperback squished between the heavier works. It was a wood-frame, with white shingles and a mansard roof and a sidewalk around back, where perhaps someone once built a modest garden. The shutters were black, the door was red, the number sixteen stood out in brass next to it, and when he knocked, a man his own age answered.

He put out his hand. “Sergeant Swagger? Or do you prefer ‘mister’?” he asked. The man appeared unlikely to have been shot at and looked comfortable in a professorial way; he wore corduroys, a blue button-down shirt, wire-rimmed glasses. His hair was a softly tousled white, as if on some bird’s breast.

“Mr. Gardner, thank you. Bob is what I prefer.”

“Please, then, come in. Call me Harry. I’m very pleased about this. I love to talk about Dad.”

“That’s what” – Bob mentioned a name – “told me.”

The fellow named was an editor in the Washington bureau of Newsweek, to whom Bob had arranged an introduction via a mutual friend, because the editor’s first book was called The New Heroes: The CIA’s First Generation of Cold Warriors, a multi-biography of some Agency stars of the postwar years.

Gardner led Bob into a well-furnished if old-fashioned living room, revealing the house’s surprising depth, then to a study lined with books. He taught at Georgetown University Law School some blocks away.

“Please, sit down. Coffee, something stronger?”

“No, thank you.”

“I’ve been told you almost won the Vietnam War single-handedly.”

“No sir. My one accomplishment was to come back more or less intact. All the truly brave men died over there.”

“I’m sure you’re too modest. I heard the word ‘greatness’ whispered.”

“The whisper should have been ‘lucky old crank.’”

Harry laughed. “Very good answer. Anyway, Dad. You wanted to know about Dad. He was a hero in his way as well.”

“I understand. What put me on to your father were the several references to him in the New Heroes book. He was Boswell, the biographer. He put together fictitious lives that the Agency forgers documented – legends, I guess they’re called in the trade – and as these fictitious men, our people went out and penetrated or at least operated in dangerous areas.”

“Dad never lost a man. No agent who went underground as a Boswell construction was ever arrested or tortured or imprisoned. He brought ’em back alive. He was very, very proud of that.”

“Yes sir. As well he might be.”

“But I have to tell you, Bob, Dad was also discreet. Believe me, I should know, I tried to write his biography. I went through everything. All his papers, all his notes, all his diaries, all his unfinished novels. The man committed nothing to paper, and when I was growing up, in this house, mum was the word. He never brought work home with him, which is another way of saying he was almost never home because he stayed in Langley eighteen hours a day.”

“I see.”

“I don’t know if I can be of help to you. I just don’t know a lot. Maybe if you told me specifically what it is you’re after.”

“Yes sir,” said Bob. “There is a slight possibility, and I can offer you no proof, that somewhere in the world a man is living under a ‘biography’ that your father assembled for him. It still hasn’t been penetrated, as an example of your father’s genius.”

“Wouldn’t it be in the Agency work-name registry?”

“If he exists, he would have managed to remove it. He was a sly dog, this guy.”

“All right. Can you tell me his name?”

“You’ll scoff. According to all documents, he died in 1993.”

“Hugh Meachum! Yes, Hugh was capable of something like that. Hugh was the best. My father loved Hugh. Hugh was the ideal agent: bold, cunning, unbearably brave, but nothing like James Bond, whom Dad loathed. Hugh was smart and never showy. He didn’t need recognition or glory. The work was reward enough. He was like a priest, a Jesuit, I think. Intense, not macho, dryly witty. Many a time Hugh has sat in the chair you’re sitting in now, drinking my mother’s wicked vodka martinis, his beautiful wife, Peggy, over there, Dad and my mother here on the sofa, the four of them laughing like hyenas.”

“Hugh was quite a guy, no doubt.”

“Anyhow, he would be, what, eighty-five or so if still alive.”

“Eighty-two. Born in 1930.”

“Old-school spy. Raised in France, spoke Russian, French, and German flawlessly, Yale lit major, turned out to have the gift for the game.”

“That sounds like him.”

“I can’t tell you anything specific about Hugh. Neither Hugh nor Dad would talk about specifics. They were so disciplined, it couldn’t have happened or been committed to paper. They distrusted journalists, even if at one time Dad was a journalist.”

“It’s more a mind-set. By that I mean your father had a technique for building a legend. It may have varied case by case, but it had tendencies. It had patterns. It had technique. Possibly you would know that, or you could have discerned it or inferred it. So if you could talk about that subject, you might give me some road signs I’d be on the alert for as I continue with my inquiry.”

“I’m not going to ask you what for. If you’re vouched for by the right people and you fought hard for your country, then I’ll take you at face value.”

“I would tell you if I could. Thanks for not making me cook up a lie.”

“If it’s about the war, then I can tell you Hugh was against it, that I know. I heard him arguing quite explicitly with Dad. He’d been over there early; I’m guessing he was involved in the plotting against Diem, so Hugh was definitely a good guy.”

“See, I didn’t know that. Very interesting,” said Swagger, thinking, That’s one for the bastard. He may have killed Kennedy, but he tried to keep me alive. “Anyhow, as a result of my investigations, I’ve come upon some indicators that Hugh might be alive but underground for one reason or other.”

“Yes. A man like Hugh made a lot of enemies.”

“He can clear up some things if I can get him to talk.”

“If Hugh doesn’t want you to catch up with him, you won’t be catching up with him. He’s that clever. Maybe in his old age, he’d spill his secrets. And they’d be many and interesting. He does know a lot about Vietnam – he tried to stop it, failed, and then waged it hard as any man. Any man except possibly you. He had three tours in heavy danger. He was a wanted man. And the two of you – boy, I’d like to be a fly on the wall during that conversation!”

“I’m just an Arkansas farm boy. I wouldn’t say much.”

“Sure. Anyhow, Dad. How would Dad proceed in building a legend? That’s the issue, right?”

“Yes sir.”

“It depended on whose influence he was feeling most keenly. He was remarkably sympathetic, picking things up from the air, it seemed. A movie would stimulate him, and he’d draw on images from it. Something would happen in the news that would set him off, he’d learn a new name, it would buzz around in his head until he found a way to use it. A painting could do it, and he was an inveterate museumgoer. He was a stimulus junkie, needed provocation to work. Do you have a time frame?”

“I’m guessing – middle seventies, early eighties. Vietnam’s over and done, no one wants to think about it. China’s coming up.”

“Dad was not one they’d go to for something Chinese.”

“It could be American.”

“It could be. But again, not Dad’s forte. He was classic himself, old espionage. Ohio State, but he could hold his own with the snooty Ivies.”

“Russia, East-bloc countries, the Cold War. The old standbys.”

“The eternal enemy. Okay,” said Harry Gardner. “That would be Dad. Got it. One word: Nabokov.”

Bob blanked, and knew his eyes registered emptiness.

“Nabokov, the writer, the genius.”

“Well, sir,” said Bob, “one of my embarrassments is how poorly educated I am. I have tried to catch up, but a day doesn’t go by when I don’t humiliate myself by exposing my ignorance. I never heard of any Nabokov. I even had to look up Boswell to figure out what it meant.”

“Vladimir Nabokov. White Russian, born at the turn of the century. St. Petersburg. Lost it all in the Revolution, and the family fled to Paris, where all the White Russians went. Cambridge education. IQ 353 or something like that. Spoke English, French, and German as well as Russian, spoke ’em all brilliantly. Wrote intricate, troubling books, usually about intellectuals, with always an undercurrent of dark sexuality and violence. Probably regarded humans as another specimen to be mounted on a needle and studied. He was a butterfly collector too.”

“Your father was an admirer?”

“A devotee. As was Hugh. They’d rather sit in this room and argue Nabokov and smoke and drink and laugh than almost anything. So whether it was conscious or unconscious, I’m betting that any work product Dad turned out was touched by Nabokov’s influence. And what would that be?

“Nabokov loved all the candy corn of prose, puns, allusions, cross-linguistic wordplay, wit for wit’s sake. I’ll give you an example. You’ve heard of Lolita?”

“Old man, young girl. Dirty as hell, that’s all I know.”

“Believe me, it’s the cleanest dirty book ever written. But the bad guy is a TV writer named Clare Quilty, Q-U-I-L-T-Y, who ultimately steals Lolita from Humbert and uses her for his own purposes. Nabokov loves to play games with the names and at one point has Humbert muse in French something like ‘that he is there,’ and in French it’s qu’il t’y, that is, Q-U-apostrophe-I-L-space-T-apostrophe-Y. You see how it works? It’s a pun but in two languages, the phrase in French, the name in English.”

“So a Boswell work name would have a pun in two languages?”

“This is literature, not physics, so nothing is definite. It would be a hint, a shade, a ghost of a meaning subtly brushing against a word. If the name were a Russian name – this is a real simple example – Dad might have come up with Babochkin. That means ‘butterfly man,’ and Nabokov was known as a world-class butterfly collector. So anyone looking for a giveaway who happened to know that Dad, in his Nabokovian phase, was the author of the legend and spoke fluent Russian might look at a list of names, and immediately, Babochkin would stand out. It would be a dead giveaway. Of course, that’s the principle as enacted at a primitive level. If he were doing it for real, it would be much subtler and go through a batch of meanings and languages before it gave up its final meaning. It would bounce-bounce-bounce all over the place. And no one would ever get that last meaning because you’d have to know such a broad range of disciplines, languages, cultures. That was the sort of thing he liked to do.”

“I think I got it,” said Swagger.

“Would you like to see Dad’s office? I kept it the way he had it when he died. I think it’s a kind of portrait of the way his mind worked. You might enjoy it.”

“Great. That’d be very helpful.”

“Okay, come this way.” Harry took Swagger up a narrow, creaky back staircase, down a crooked hallway, and into a room off to one side, with a window staring at nothing except the vines on the house next door. Bob looked: this was the mind of Niles Gardner, creator of legends, who always brought ’em back alive.

“This is where Dad tried to write his novels,” Harry said. “I’m afraid it never worked out. He was a brilliant beginner, but whatever it is that brings the writer back to the chair week after week and month after month, Dad lacked. He didn’t have it in him to finish. By the time he was halfway through with anything, he’d changed so much intellectually that he no longer recognized the person who began the story and had no sympathy for him and the characters he’d created. A lot of geniuses never finish their novels, I guess.”

“It’s too bad,” Bob said. “He must have had a lot to say.”

The wall-to-wall, ceiling-to-floor shelves were crammed, spine out, with books, books, more books, arranged alphabetically. Many were foreign, and of the ones in English, Bob recognized no titles except some Hemingway and Faulkner. A couple of incongruities stood out. For example, there were four ceramic bluebirds on one of the shelves, papa, mama, and two babies. There was a surprisingly sentimental picture, or more of an illustration, of six green elms against a countryside. The oddest thing of all was on the desk, piled with pages of typescript. An old Underwood typewriter, battleship – gray and weirdly tall and complicated, stood in the center. On the desk were jars of paper clips, pens – and a pistol.

“I see what you’re looking at. Yes, for some reason, Dad glommed on to this old thing and wouldn’t let go of it.”

Harry picked it up carelessly by the barrel, and Bob recognized it as a C-96 Mauser, commonly called a “Broomhandle,” for it carried that shape in a grip that plunged almost at 90 degrees from the intricately machined receiver. The handle was freed up to be unique because it had no responsibilities for containing a magazine; the magazine was contained in a boxlike structure ahead of the trigger. The barrel was long, the whole thing oddly awkward and beautiful.

“I’m sure you know more about these things than I do,” said Harry, handing it over.

Bob pulled back the bolt latch on the receiver – it was so early in the evolution of semi-automatic technology that it didn’t have a slide – to expose the chamber, revealing the gun to be empty. “Mauser Broomhandle,” he said.

“Yes, exactly. Winston Churchill carried one in the cavalry charge at Omdurman in 1898, when it was the latest newfangled thing. I think Dad kept it around because it reminded him of classical espionage. You know, Europe in the thirties, Comintern, the Storm Petrels, the recruitment of the Cambridge Four, the Gestapo, Gauloises, POUM, the novels of Eric Ambler and Alan Furst, that sort of thing. That was when espionage was romantic, and he loved that part of it, as opposed to the cruel war he was engaged in fighting, where the stakes involved nuclear exchange and maybe global annihilation.”

Swagger looked at the old pistol, feeling its cavalryman’s solidity. Loading was problematic, especially on horseback: ten rounds held in stripper clips had to be indexed into grooves in the magazine, then forced down into the gun by a finger’s pressure. You wouldn’t want to do that with dervishes whacking at you. Swagger turned it this way and that, somewhat charmed by its ugly beauty or its beautiful ugliness. He noted the number nine cut into the wooden grip to signify its calibration.

“You won’t mention the gun to anybody, will you? Definitely illegal by current D.C. law.”

“Your secret is safe with me,” Swagger said.

“I have no objection if you want to stay here and go through the papers to your heart’s content. I will tell you that when Dad died in ’95, a team from the Agency came and went through everything. They took a few papers, that’s all, but they assured me that everything that remained was of a nonclassified nature.”

“That’s very kind of you, sir,” said Bob, “but for now I don’t think it’s necessary. Maybe when I have more information somewhere down the line and have something exact to look for, then I might come by again, if the invitation is still open.”

“Anytime. Anytime. As I say, talking about Dad is always fun for me. Those were great days, that was a great war he fought. We won that one, didn’t we?”

“So they say,” said Bob.

In his Washington hotel room that night, Bob didn’t need to sleep to get to the subject at hand. Old man Gardner had raised it himself. Pistols. His was an ancient thing, from the Jurassic of the semi-auto age two centuries earlier. Yet it meant something to the old guy, even if he wasn’t an operational type who might have used it in hot or cold blood, hopelessly obsolete or not.

Swagger opened his laptop, went online, and quickly acquired the basic info about the C-96 pistol, confirming what he knew with more details. He also learned the source of the nine on the grip, seeing that during World War I, the inscription was the Prussian way of informing the troops that this variation was a 9 mm instead of a Mauser 7.65 mm, like the earlier 96s. The thorough Germans even painted the nine red, and the pistols became known as “Red Nines,” even if old Gardner’s red had worn off. Then Swagger had a thought: Red Nine. Four bluebirds, Blue Four. Green trees, Green Six.

Bob wrestled with that. Radio codes, somehow? Map coordinates? Agent work names? A way to remember the number 946? Or, er, 649. Or 469.

He came up with exactly nothing except a headache and a feeling of stupidity. This wasn’t his game. He went back to his game.

When he tried to price the Red Nine on the GunsAmerica website, that vast repository of used firearms, he came across something else: a S&W M&P .38 of exactly the sort Lee Harvey had gone all the way home in the middle of a manhunt to carry. It rolled up the screen, and Bob fixed on it, recognizing the sweep and balance of the brilliant Smith design, which had lasted over a century, the odd orchestration of ovals and curves arranged in a stunningly aesthetic package that achieved, as had just a few other handguns, an accidental classicism.

How odd it was that Oswald had risked all to go back for a gun he could have brought with him. Try as he had, Bob hadn’t cracked that particular nut. Maybe Oswald was going to head to General Walker’s and take him out too, as his last beau geste to the world he was leaving behind. Maybe he thought, if trapped, he could administer his own coup de grace?

The only coup de grace he administered was to a poor man named J. D. Tippit, who, like Bob’s father, had done his duty and caught a slug for his trouble.

J. D. Tippit was the forgotten victim of that bloody day. A Dallas policeman, he was armed with a description of the assassin – it nailed Lee Harvey to a T – and ordered into Oak Cliff, closer to downtown, to patrol and scan. He spotted a man who matched perfectly. The fellow walked, perhaps too hastily, up Tenth Street in Oak Cliff. Tippit trailed the walker from his squad car, then halted and hailed him over. Their conversation is forever lost. At one point it seems that Oswald satisfied the inquiry, left the squad car, and began to depart. But Tippit had a second thought, called, and got out of his car. It does no good to wonder why, in that age of less politically correct policing, he didn’t brace the suspect more aggressively, at gunpoint, and put him in cuffs before sorting things out. He chose the courteous way and took three bullets as a consequence.

But what was odd wasn’t Tippit’s politeness, Swagger thought, with the silhouette of the stubby revolver before him on the screen, so much as the intensity of Oswald’s homicidal response. It is known that the man had a temper and was prone to and not afraid of interpersonal violence, as frequent arguments and fistfights attest, but at the same time he was a yakker, a talker, a debater. He may have had or believed he had the skills to talk his way out of anything. He may have thought he’d done so. When he was hailed a second time and saw the officer emerging from the car, he never deployed those skills. His whole personality was based on them, his sense of self. Yet he abandoned them and drew and fired.

A case can be made: he snapped. He was a fugitive on the edge of rational control, his mind wasn’t working properly, and he saw that he had to act or wake up on death row. In a panic, he did that. Swagger thought: I suppose that makes sense, at least as much sense as anything, even if it contradicts his basic character.

But what happened next is even more peculiar and out of character. Why did Oswald walk to the prone body and fire a last shot point-blank into the head? You might say execution-style, but that would be wrong. It wasn’t style, it was execution.

It seems to have attracted little attention, but it puzzled Swagger deeply. He might concede that a fleeing man in a panic with no impulse control and abject fear for his life would draw and shoot. Almost certainly, he would turn and walk away rapidly. He is killing to live.

That is not what happened. Instead of turning, Oswald deliberately closed the ten feet of distance between them, bent over the fallen man, and delivered the brain shot at such close range that he could see the face as he drove the bullet into the head, see the spew of blood and the fall across the body of that utter stillness that marks the dead from the living. Why? It makes no sense in terms of his situation, and it really makes no sense in terms of his politics and previous behavior.

He never hated JFK. He wasn’t a punisher, a psychopath, a coup de grace giver, a scalper, a Bushido warrior who took the skull knot of his fallen adversary. His killing never had that personal edge of contempt. Yet in this instance, he goes the extra effort to lean over and deliver the final expression of contempt with the brain shot at close range.

Why?

The next day was the first stop on what Swagger thought of as the Hugh-Lon Grand Tour. From Georgetown, he traveled to Hartford and went through birth records, finding out that indeed a Hugh Aubrey Meachum was born in 1930, to Mr. David Randolph Meachum and his wife, the former Rose Jackson Dunn, both of whom listed their address as American Embassy, Paris, France. He found Lon as well, born five years earlier to Jeffery Gerald Scott and his wife, the former Susan Marie Dunn, address Green Hills Ranch, Midland, Texas. Evidently, the Dunn sisters preferred that their beloved Hartford OB-GYN deliver their children in the comforting confines of Hartford Episcopalian Hospital.

On then to New Haven, mostly decayed old city but part of it medieval university, with real ivy on the towers and buildings clotted with elm and oak, the whole thing a delusion of propriety and yet oddly comforting. He didn’t bother with Yale itself. Who’d cooperate with a cranky geezer with a cowboy accent and boots, who looked like Clint Eastwood on a bad-hair day? It probably intimidated him a little too, maybe the only thing that ever had.

The public library was more accommodating; it had bound copies of the Yale Daily News that yielded information without attitude, and paging through the lost and forgotten record of elite success on the gloried fields of New Haven had a weird feel, as if he were on a different planet so far from the squalor of his own upbringing in the hills of Polk County, Arkansas. But Yale in the forties: what a glorious place it must have been, as half the faces later achieved, under the camouflage of more chin and less hair, national distinction of some form or other. Of the cousins, Lon Scott was by far the more outstanding, particularly as a fullback and linebacker for the Bulldogs. Many old photos showed that particular form of American male beauty, the square, symmetrical face, the strong nose and jaw, the ease of smile and warmth of eye. Confidence: it was born into this man as surely as his blond hair and the aquiline blade of his nose, broken once to great dramatic effect on some ball field somewhere. Swagger remembered Lon – then calling himself John Thomas Albright – stuffed in his hole on the ridge over Hard Bargain Valley in the desolate Ouachitas of 1993, head destroyed by the energy of Nick Memphis’s six-hundred-yard shot. It came to that? Yes, it did. So sad. Three touchdowns against Harvard, led the league in points scored (few field goals in those days except by the rare drop kick), to say nothing of his spring glories, where, for four years running, he won the Ivy rifle championships in standing and prone. It was too bad the war couldn’t have lasted a little longer, for Lon’s skills at riflery and football would have done the American forces good wherever he served.

There was much less of Hugh five years later. He’d been no macho jock dominating the back pages of the Daily, only a sub on the Bulldog basketball five. Besides the cage mediocrity (best game: eight points against Brown his senior year), he appeared in only one other notice, his election to the board of the Yale Review, though Bob couldn’t force himself to look that up and see Hugh’s undergraduate poetry. Hugh was smarter: he graduated with cum laude honors; Lon did not.

Back in Washington, Swagger had the entire fifties-sixties run of the National Rifle Association’s American Rifleman publication shipped to his hotel room off an Internet purchase. He spent nights going through the volumes, tracking Lon’s early run of brilliant victories in competitive shooting at the national level, even finding a picture of Lon standing with a trophy exactly where Bob stood with the same trophy twenty-five years or so later. Bob had no father to stand behind him, but Lon’s beamed proudly from behind his so-accomplished son, who, in just a few years, he would paralyze from the waist down.

By day, at the Library of Congress, Bob combed the gun magazines of the same fifties-sixties for Lon’s work as a writer, as an inveterate reloader and experimenter, as a rifle intellectual, if such a thing existed, and saw that he was as revered as Jack O’Connor, Elmer Keith, and the others of that golden age. Bob could find no mention of the paralyzing accident, or the supposed “death” in 1965, but after a several-year interval, the byline John Thomas Albright began to appear and did so steadily for the next twenty-five years.

That left one more stop: a visit to Warren, Virginia, near Roanoke, where Lon “died.” Swagger learned there only what he already knew: the death was a thin counterfeit, all the documents forged, all the newspaper accounts based on a funeral-parlor press release. The body, naturally, had been cremated, the ashes scattered.

Suddenly, there was no place left to go. No one was following him. Nobody was cyber-mining him. Nobody was trying to kill him. It seemed that when he had lost Hugh’s scent, Hugh had lost his, even if it wasn’t clear whether Hugh Meachum existed.

“You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style,” writes the great Russian novelist Nabokov. Well, we’ll see about that.

I am undisputedly a murderer, but my prose style has been abraded of its sparkle, if there was ever sparkle to begin with, by four decades of filing largely unread administrative reports, a few research papers, too many after-action reports. My daily vodka intake hardly helps matters, nor does the arbitrariness of my memory. Speak, memory, I command; it responds with vulgarity. The issue is whether my old and creaky imagination will be stimulated by recollection and at least propel my words to the level of readability, or whether this record will disintegrate into drivel and incoherence. That would be a shame. I have much to tell.

For though I’m a dismal writer, I’m a great murderer. I’ve never pulled a trigger, but I’ve sent hundreds, maybe thousands, to their deaths in that bureaucratic intelligence-agency way: I’ve planned and authorized assassinations, raids, and commando assaults, the necessary by-product of which is murder. I supervised Phoenix for a year in Vietnam and made a jaunty figure with a boonie hat and a Swedish submachine gun slung under my arm, even if I never fired the damned thing, which was annoyingly heavy. Phoenix probably killed at least fifteen thousand, including some who were actually guilty. I put together and managed from close at hand all manner of paramilitary black operations, involving every sin known to man. Then I went home and slept in a warm bed in a very nice home in Georgetown or Tan Son Nhut. You’re probably right to despise me. But you don’t know the half of it.

I am also the man who murdered John F. Kennedy, thirty-fifth president of the country in whose services I labored so bloodily. I did not pull the trigger, but I saw the opportunity, conceptualized it, found the necessary arcane talents to staff it, recruited those talents, handled logistics, egress, and fallback via safe routes and counter-narrative alibis, also, as it turned out, unnecessary. Moreover, I was in the room when the trigger was pulled. Then my shooter put his rifle away, and we left to be quickly absorbed in the public frenzy of grief and mourning. Nobody stopped us, nobody questioned us, nobody was interested in us. By four o’clock, we were back at the bar at the Adolphus.

It was, as you must know, a perfect crime. No six – or was it eight or ten? – seconds in American history has been more studied than those between which Alek, poor little mutt, fired the first shot (and missed) and my cousin fired the last shot (and hit). Yet in all the years and against all investigation and attempts to comprehend, in all the theories, in the three-thousand-odd books by clowns of various mispersuasion, no one has ever come close to penetrating our small, tight, highly professional conspiracy. Until now.

I sit on my veranda. I am eighty-three healthy years old and hope to be around for at least another twenty. Before me the meadow, the valley, the purple forests, the river. The land is mine as far as the eye can see, and it is well patrolled by security. In the large house behind me are servants, a Japanese porn-star mistress, a chef, a masseuse (and occasional mistress), a gym, nine bedrooms, a banquet room, an indoor pool, the most elaborate entertainment center on Earth, and an array of real-time communications devices by which I can administer my empire; in short, the products and perks of a vastly remunerative and productive life. I’m worth more than several small countries.

At long last, five decades later, there is a tremor in my world. A threat. A possibility. A chance of discovery and destruction, even vengeance. It has impelled me to sit out here in the warm sunlight with a yellow tablet of legal paper and a cupful of Bic ballpoints (though I’m a traditionalist, I’m not so goofy as to insist on a fountain pen) and tell the story in my own hand. At any moment in the next few days, a phone will ring and tell me if the threat has gotten larger or has gone away forever. But as I’m a man who generally finishes what he starts, I expect that no matter the outcome of the drama being played-again, at my insistence and according to my instructions – I will finish this manuscript. Assuming I haven’t been interrupted by a bullet, I will consign it to my safe. Maybe when I die, it will become known and shake the foundations of history. Maybe it will disappear, tossed into the furnace like Citizen Kane’s sled. That’s beyond my control and therefore beyond my care. I know only that now, for the first time, I will set it down. Speak, memory.

Though I am naturally reticent, resolutely shallow, and not one for self-analysis, I feel obligated to produce a few brisk paragraphs of pedigree record-straightening. I am Hugh Aubrey Meachum, of the Hartford Meachums. It’s old Yankee machinist and tinkerer stock, with branches in the hardscrabble farming that Connecticut offers. My forebears were known for a shrewd eye on the dollar and opportunities to make it; quiet, severe faces (men and women); good hair; and taciturnity, with a black streak of alcoholism and melancholy evincing itself a couple of times in each generation. Given that as my stock, I was more fully formed by three mentors, about the first two of whom I will say just a bit.

The first would be a man named Samuel Colt. I was wise enough to pick as a great-great-grandfather an otherwise odious tyrant named Cyrus Meachum, who did one intelligent thing in a legendarily grim life as a Hartford hardware-store owner. He believed in young Samuel Colt and his twirling new gizmo called the revolver, and invested in the sprout’s first Connecticut plant (the first of all, in New Jersey, had failed). It was an excellent career move, as all of us subsequent generations of Meachums have benefited from the colonel’s invention, in a never-ending supply of just enough moolah to let us do what we wanted instead of what we needed. We had the best of schools, the best of holidays, the pleasures of big houses on hills under towering elms and of hearing the peasantry call our fathers “sir.” We rode the genocide of the Indians, the elimination of the Moros, the whipping of the Hun, the destruction of the Nazis, and the Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity sphere to financial independence, happily. A few of us died in each of those campaigns, and my father, a career diplomat who served in the State Department before the war – in Paris, where I was raised, 1931-1937, where I picked up the language easily and totally – and in an outfit much heralded and, like all intelligence agencies, almost wholly worthless, called the Office of Strategic Services, which was actually more Red than Moscow was in the thirties! Then back to State for a genteel gentleman’s career. Thank you, Colonel Colt, for underwriting it all.

Here I should insert a footnote about the language that I learned “easily and totally.” It was not French, though I speak French. It was Russian. My nanny, Natasha, was an exiled White, a duchess, no less. An exquisite and cultured lady, she moved in high White circles, and Paris before the war was the White Russian Moscow, with the largest population of exiles anywhere on Earth. They were brilliant if deluded people: immensely cultured, extravagantly cosmopolitan, charming and witty and bold to a fault, of extremely high native IQ, generously seeded with genius, indefatigable in battle and literature. After all, they produced not only the great Nabokov but Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky as well. I may have even, as a small child, attended a soiree where N. himself was present, though I have no memory of it. So Russian was my first language, with a bit of aristocratic frost to it; meanwhile, my parents were busy doing the Paris scene, all but ignoring me, for which I thank them. Natasha’s lessons were far more meaningful and lasting than anything they could have taught me. This will explain much of what is to come in the tale ahead.

My second mentor was a man named Cleanth Brooks, of Yale, where I majored in American literature with a view toward going to Paris and working with some Harvard boys on an enterprise they had started up that seemed damn keen to me, called the Paris Review. Dr. Brooks had his problems, about which I will remain discreet, but he was the founder and high priest of an early-fifties discipline called the New Criticism. It held, with Spartan rigor, that text was everything. It didn’t matter what you read about a fellow in Time or Life, or what movie star he’d married or whether his dad had beaten him or his first wife had belittled the size of his dinger, none of that mattered. He didn’t even matter. Only the text mattered, and it must be examined closely, under laboratory conditions, without regard to personality or psychology or voodoo-hoodoo or what have you. Only then would its message, its meaning, its place in the universe, if any, be teased out. I loved the discipline of it, the zeal of it, the sense of probity. I suppose I longed to apply it to life, and I suppose I did, in some fashion.

Enough of those old ghosts. My most powerful mentor was a famous man, a glamorous man, a brave man, a man who sent me on my way. I must address him at some length for you to have any grasp of what happened and why in 1963.

His name was Cord Meyer. He recruited me on my father’s recommendation, spook-to-spook as it were, from the University of Pennsylvania, where I was a graduate student in lit and alone insisted on the seriousness of a pornographer named V. Nabokov, to the Plans Division of the Central Intelligence Agency, where I was to toil and happily murder by proxy for forty years, every second of every day spent in the idea – or possibly delusion? – that I was helping my country against its enemies, that I was living up to the standards of dead Meachums the world’s battlefields over, that I was ensuring all those big words that made Hemingway cringe in the rain, such as “freedom” and “democracy.”

Cord was a toot and a half, believe me. I still have dreams and nightmares about him; I’ll never escape him. Perhaps you know the story: he was one of the most famous men the Agency ever produced, and, I would say, having known most of them, the best. He was thrice touched by fire when I went to work for him in 1961. He had first of all lost an eye as a marine officer in the Pacific. Cord never discussed it, but we are given to understand that he saw the hardest of hard combat, even the gory squalor of hand-to-hand with bayonet and entrenching tool against a desperate enemy. Cord was too diffident to wear an eye patch, knowing that it would make him too famous too young. He simply slipped a glass orb in the vacant socket, and only a man studying him would notice. It was the idea of the eye gone on Iwo or Entiwok or one of those god-awful, never-heard-of-again places that was far more powerful than a showy patch would have been.

His background after the war is probably pertinent. He emerged a pacifist, having seen too many bayonets crammed into the bellies of teenage boys who’d never gotten around to getting laid. He was attracted to the idea of one-world government, so that nations wouldn’t send fleets of boys with bayonets after one another on flyspecks in far oceans. He was active in the United Nations movement and labored sweatily in service to that dream. Somehow, around 1948, after three years of hard work, it dawned on him that the whole outfit had been infiltrated and taken over by Commies and that it would henceforth work exactly the opposite of its intended mission – that is, it had come to exist to enforce the hegemony of the red over the blue. Disillusioned, he made contact with Mr. Dulles, who, duly impressed, offered him a position.

He had a talent, a nose for it. Within five years he became head of Clandestine Services, in the Directorate of Plans, and if you don’t yet know, Clandestine was where it all happened, a hatchery for mayhem. Other outfits would call such a unit “Operations,” and it would acquire flashy nicknames like “The Ranch” or “The OK Corral,” and its operatives would be called “cowboys” or “gunslingers” or some such. It never looked as deadly as it was: a bayful of mild-looking Yalies (a few Princetonians and Brownies thrown in, the odd nonpedigreed genius with special skills) with narrow ties (never loosened), horn-rims or black-framed heavy plastics, Brooks Brothers dark gray or summer-tan suits, Barrie Ltd. pebbled brogues or loafers, as dull as the Episcopal ministry. On weekends, a lot of madras, rather lurid Bermudas (red was popular, I recall), old Jack Purcell tennis shoes, usually battered orange by clay courts, khakis, old blue button-downs, maybe an old tennis shirt. Little would one know that behind those bland eyes and smooth faces lurked minds that plotted the downfalls and upswings of tyrants, the murders of secret-police colonels, an invasion or two, and a coup or three.

Back to Cord, wizard of Clandestine. His second immersion in flame was not cool or enviable. It was awful. In 1958 he lost his second child, a nine-year-old son, who was fatally hit by a car in, of all places, the spiritual home of all us Yalies waging the Cold War, Georgetown. The loss of a child is something I cannot fathom. As emotion embarrasses me, I will not linger on it, nor try to conjure its effects on him. It cannot have inclined him to a merry view of the universe.

It was his third tragedy that made him famous, pitied, beloved, scorned, doubted, mistrusted, suspected, and yet somehow vivid. He was, in his way, a pre-George Smiley Smiley, in that his public cuckolding served allegorically for the earnestness with which he loved his country and the disdain with which it repaid him. The name of his disaster was Mary Pinchot Meyer.

I suppose she could be termed a transitional woman. She came too late to be called a beatnik and too early to be called a hippie. “Well-bred bohemian,” though it has no public cachet, is probably the most accurate term. It goes without saying that she was beautiful, that she had the social ease being well bred confers upon its progeny (why do I insist on “progeny” instead of “children”? fancy again!), that she had beautiful flashing legs, that most everybody fell in love with her, that she was witty, effervescent, charismatic, that she had a great mane of hair, tawny and thick, and that lipstick looked redder on her than on any woman in Washington. She must have been sexually precocious, she must have loved danger, she must have had in her the seedlings of feminism and a need to be a person outside the illustrious reign of her husband as warrior-king of the Cold War and smartest of the very smart people who coagulated in then-seedy, dumpy, but somehow glamorous-amid-the-rot Georgetown.

She left him in 1961, citing the usual suspect of that age, the catch-all “mental cruelty,” whatever that meant, and I suppose it means anything its attorneys want it to mean. Did she begin her famous affair before or after the divorce? Was Cord officially cuckolded, or did the two lovebirds have the courtesy to keep it legal until the papers were served? No one will ever know, and it’s doubtful that Cord ever told anyone. He never told me.

The two were Georgetowners before 1960. It is known that she was friendly with and passed time with his gorgeous if slightly vague wife. Moreover, they must have seen each other in the streets, perhaps at the grocery, perhaps at the various drunken lawn parties to which their set, our set, “the” set seemed to gravitate, all the bold young shapers of the future, all the technocrats of the fashionable agencies (and our agency was very fashionable, while the poor boobs of the FBI were not), and all the young, ambitious journos who would write books about us and end up richer and more powerful than any of us.

It is not known when Mary Pinchot Meyer began to sleep with John Fitzgerald Kennedy, before the November 1960 election or after; nor if they waited till the divorce was final. But have at it they did, and she is credited with at least thirty visits to the White House during his three years, at many odd times of day or night. It was such a terribly kept secret in the Washington of the era that it could hardly be called a secret at all, although perhaps she was most in the dark, for she may never have quite caught on to the fact that if he was sleeping with her, he was in the meantime trying to bed every vagina between Baltimore and Richmond, with the odd movie-star bang thrown in for good measure. Other rumors swelled in the wake of the two. She had some mysterious connection to the least interesting man of the period, Timothy Leary (Harvard, of course! agh!). So it was said that she brought LSD and marijuana into the White House and introduced the president to them, in hopes of somehow lessening his childish aggression. Apologies, I have no inside dope on this and mention Mary only because she was part of Cord’s glamour and because this was one more reason why Plans – not the Agency as a whole, as there is no Agency as a whole, only a loose confederation of tribes, some of whom get along and some of whom do not – was not a big Kennedy supporter.

Possibly I will address that later; let me just assure you that as far as I am concerned, sexual jealousy was not part of the equation – it would not be recognized under the New Criticism – and that I, little Hugh, latest of Cord’s Yale wonder boys, was not secretly in love with Mary. I always loved Cord, I never loved Mary (and let me hasten to add, I had NOTHING to do with her murder in 1964 or whenever it was); I did what I did for the dreariest of reasons – a policy dispute. Again, you’ll have to suffer my fancy for prose another few pages before I discuss that.

So I did not murder JFK to punish him for sleeping with Mary Pinchot Meyer, the former wife of my boss and mentor and a far better man, in all respects, than he was. Too bad; it would give a nice spin to what follows, would it not, if the assassin of Camelot turned out to be the noblest of them all, and the man he slew the rankest of dogs? It would turn popular history, where by default I am the most hated of all men on Earth, on its ear. The truth is, I never saw or met Mary; she was only a ghost, a whisper, a legend. As I said: I did it for the policy.

Let us pick a beginning spot. I know exactly when my subconscious announced its decision to me and my life turned on its axis. I also know that the subcon had been busy grinding away for months, trying to fit new intelligence, new insights, new relationships into a sort of coherent action plan that I felt I must engineer even before I conceptualized it. Something was wrong in the kingdom, and it would kill the kingdom if it was not stopped, and yet nobody had recognized it, no vocabulary existed by which the issue could be discussed, and when that vocabulary emerged, it would be too late, we’d be gone, we’d be doomed. If you believed, you had to act now; if you didn’t act now, you were letting people down, even if they had no framework by which they could comprehend your motives.

Beginning spot: a party in Georgetown, at Win Stoddard’s, the crummy west side of Wisconsin Avenue, he and his family in an old, decaying pile of bricks, painted yellow to scare the termites, with a garden straight out of a Tennessee Williams play, all thick and jungly and rancid with moisture and rot. Pathetic fallacy? Dangerously close, I agree, and will not mention the garden again.

It was mid- to late October, the year of our lord 1963, two and a half years into the Kennedy era, Camelot Anno Duo and all that, and what was happening was nothing much: a shop party. That is to say, the glamour Ivies of the Clandestine Services subgroup of the Directorate of Plans met to let their hair down (figure of speech; we wore neat trims in those days) and ease office competitions, grudges, cabal forming, and the like by applying copious quantities of gin or vodka (anthropological note: we did not favor brown drinks) as a lubrication to the competitive friction of the place, as well as a dash of fizz and some citrus wafer in each glass, the martini being entirely too uptown Mad. Ave/gray flannel for us crusaders. It was, I suppose, any staff party, any department party, any unit party, any entity party in any town in any state on Saturday night in America in 1963: cigarettes dangling insouciantly from lax mouths, points made stabbingly, everyone too loud, too close, too drunk, maybe some jazz playing on the hi-fi. (We were the last pre-rock generation.) You know how such things go, and that’s how they went: in the early hours, the high officials pay their obligatory visits. Even old man Dulles, though deposed after the Bay of Pigs fiasco, came by for a quick drink with his old boys; and there was an obligatory look-at-me appearance by his successor, Mc-Cone, if memory speaks the truth, and to have them both would have been a good nab for Win. Cord came with his youngest boy, Tommy, though I don’t think he stayed late and just glowered with tragic nobility while holding a glass of gin in one hand and absently running his other through the boy’s thick hair and smiling at the gifts of wit and insight his supplicants brought him. The almost legendary Frenchy Short came and went quickly with a beautiful Chinese girl in tow; an honorary drop-in had to be James Jesus Angleton, a friend of Cord’s, even if he was charged with catching theoretical doubles and could destroy any of us with a whisper of suspicion. It was probably better to suck up to him than to ignore him, though it was always a tough call. The dry stick Colby was there briefly, though he had bigger fish to fry that night. Des FitzGerald, who’d run the Bay of Pigs and was, rumor had it, engaged in replacing Fidel, came, got drunk, and left early by cab. Just powerful, secretly famous men behaving with mild sloppiness, no harm done, probably better for morale that way anyhow.

By 11 the big shots were gone; by 11:30 most of the wives, all of them luscious and creamy, tans not yet faded from their summers at Bethany, and since most lived in then-safe Georgetown, there were no difficulties about leaving. They had been upstairs anyway, my own dear Peggy among them, Smith girls mostly, as we were Yale boys mostly; they’d come down, give the sweet peck on the check, warn us not to drink too much, and remind us that we were due at early Mass or to serve communion or something ceremonial the next morning at St. Whatever or First Whatever. Memory speaks: I remember a sea of ragged, baggy tweed jackets, an ocean of blue or white button-downs, maybe a faded madras here or there, dimpled khakis, the more frayed the better, loafers or possibly those suede things that used to be called “dirty bucks.” The hair was short, the cheeks clean, the noses straight, the teeth white. We were square yet cool, brazen yet innocent, savage yet mild.

Win demanded the floor. “My brothers,” he cried, “I need an ethical finding.”

Laughter. We never discussed ethics; to discuss it was not necessary, as it was part of our heritage to know what was and was not allowed. (Hmm, yes, I would say that I would soon push that line a bit.) So that set the key, which was irony, accelerated by gin or vod, and the need to be funny if not coherent.

“Win, you gave up on ethics the night you stole Morison’s final in American Classics,” and again everyone laughed because the idea of Win stealing from Samuel Eliot Morison was quite amusing, partially because the old admiral was Harvard and Win hated Harvard.

“He never locked his windows, what can I say?” joked Win. “Anyhow.” He paused, refortified the gin surge to his system, took a puff on cigarette thirty-five or forty, and proceeded dramatically. “Anyhow, you know how Cord encourages us to dip into wire transcripts from the embassy teams?”

Everybody groaned. It was a testing ground for newbies, their patience and diligence, but Cord liked to see people seriously busy, and if you found, as the business often produced, an odd spare hour or half hour in the duty day, he encouraged you to wander down to Embassy Wire, pick up typescript of recent interceptions, and peruse. Did anything ever come of this? I don’t know. Not until tonight.

“So,” said Win, “I’m running through the pages from the Sov Mex City joint, and it’s the usual crap, low-grade, beneath action or contempt, mostly ‘how come we have to work so much overtime’ and ‘how come Boris got Paris when I was supposed to get Paris’ crap, they’re just like us, always whining, and I come across what seems to be some kind of interview with some kind of beatnik defector or something. An American, I mean, southern-fried variety, an ex-marine as far as I can figure out. I track down the actual tapes and run ’em on the reel-to-reel, and over the earphones I hear this guy, Lee Something Something, trying to talk his way into Russia. I should say back into Russia, because it seemed he’d already been there for two and a half years, and now and then he’d burst into bad Russian. Well, Igor and Ivan aren’t having any of it, even if he was a genuine United States Marine and everything, but he’s the asshole type, won’t take no for an answer, always looking for a fight or a chance to impress, and he claims, I kid you not, oh, you’ll get a kick out of this one, he claims he’s the guy who took that shot at General Walker!”

Lots of astonished laughter. Shooting General Walker was a much-approved action in our circle. It had taken place on April 10 of that year in Dallas. Someone had winged a bullet at the old beast as he sat at his desk, plotting the next week’s atrocities. It missed (typically, I was soon to learn), as the unknown shooter apparently had an uncertain trigger finger.

Major General Edwin Walker (Ret.) was a particular bete noire of Clandestine Services. He was an authentic war hero in both the war we thought of as The War and the thing called Korea. He had prospered, but as with so many of that warrior ilk, hubris destroyed him. His anti-communism became a zealotry, then a psychosis, and finally, a craziness. The commander of the huge 24th Infantry Divison in Germany – he and his men would face the red tanks pouring through the Fulda Gap if it ever came to that – he lost all perspective. He indoctrinated his men with John Birch Society pamphlets, he gave them voting instructions, he gave speeches in which he declared that all the postwar Democratic leaders, particularly Truman and Acheson, had been “pink,” as was, by inference, anyone who followed their steps in the Democratic Party of Treason.

It’s not that we were Democrats, although we probably were. Some of us – that would include young Hugh with the soft face and meek eyes and grown-up pipe – were even liberals. It’s not that we were in any way pro-com. But he did not meekly disappear into the night, as one would have hoped. When he resigned after refusing McNamara’s transfer, all this occurring after a newspaperman exposed his ugliness, he returned to America a kind of hero, like MacArthur, I suppose, though lacking the elegance and poise. He set himself up in his hometown as a speechifying one-man infantry division, riding his notoriety to the max, demanding action from Kennedy, denouncing Kennedy and his minions, supporting segregation, generally raising hell and crowding the administration into postures not sound in the long run. Did he seek power himself and imagine a career in politics? Possibly. At one point he threatened to unify his followers, of whom there were thousands, into a kind of political action force, and that sounded ominous. He was a troubling psychopath with clear fascist tendencies who did not like the Negro or any who supported the Negro’s quest for equality, who loathed “diplomacy” as a solution to Soviet expansion as opposed to “battle,” who would leap to his feet and start singing tearfully whene’er Old Glory was unfurled. He may have petered out when his gadfly act grew tiresome and reporters no longer bothered to cover his stem-winders, but all through the summer of ’63, particularly emboldened by the missed sniper’s shot, he seemed to be everywhere, hammering away, not so much a threat in a political or operational sense but more of a malign presence, clouding the policy debate, pushing Kennedy hard to the right even as Kennedy’s own instincts may have pushed him hard to the right already.

I particularly loathed him. He made anti-communism, to which I had devoted my life, stupid, coarse, loud, ignorant, rabble-rousing, and suspect to the intelligentsia, a particularly fickle audience with fear of fighting deeply ingrained. He would be one more reason for them to withdraw from duty and strength; a brute, a bully, a screamer, a sprayer of saliva. No one with an IQ over 100 seemed to care for him.

There was a deeper issue. It was pure policy, and here I apply the New Criticism and speak no more of the general’s manifold unpleasantries and vulgarities. Stripped of all psycho-historical-stylistic nuances, his sense of anti-communism was inimical to mine, that is, ours. He was macho and wanted to dominate by daring and, if it came, winning a military confrontation. That millions would die in such a conflagration meant nothing to him. His was the iron fist in the iron-glove approach, as it worshipped domination, destruction, and enslavement as the highest, purest form of triumph.

Our gestalt was far different. We feared the big war, the full-theater nuclear exchange, the dark piles of rubble, corpses, and poison air that such a crusade would unleash. We felt that to defeat communism, we had to co-opt the soft left and offer sensible alternatives to the billions of people who yearned for freedom from colonialism, imperialism, and capitalism. We fought surrogate wars, culture wars, if you will. We funded socialist parties all over Europe, we sponsored fashionably lefty lit mags like Encounter to woo the intelligentsia to our more reasonable approach, we promoted American jazz and expressionism as a way of winning the hearts and minds of the world population to our gentler persuasions. If we had to resort to force, it would not be the 24th Division’s five thousand Patton tanks taking on the T-54s in a new, more tragic Kursk on the plains before the Fulda Gap, and not another iteration of Fat Man and Little Boy providing instant genocide to half the world. It would be a coup here, a labor union strike there, at most an assassin’s bullets. We were influencers, nudgers, political engineers, reluctant snipers. We were not soldiers.

“So what’s the problem, Win?” somebody shouted.

“Okay,” said Win, “here’s the problem. Do I A) snitch this guy out to the Dallas police, or B)” – Win let it build, master comedian – “buy him a new box of ammo?”

The place exploded in laughter, as well you might imagine. No one laughed harder than quiet Hugh, leaning against the sofa, nursing a gin and tonic, tamping his pipe, joining heartily in the merriment.

I was aware that I had the answer to Win’s dilemma. I would buy Lee Something Something a new box of ammo.

It was all different in those days. The building was new and smelled of paint and fresh spackle and putty. It had yet to acquire the dinge that old bureaucratic sites acquire, the grease spots where generations of sleepy clerks have rested their heads, the scuff marks on the linoleum, the bathrooms leaky and stinky and stained with God knows what, all the caulking having begun to rot, the light uncertain and sure to go bad when most needed. No, the new campus smelled delicious, seemed in synchronization with the spirit of Camelot, and also symbolized the official putting of the Bay of Pigs, our last scandal, behind us. It was all beige with muted carpeting, and we had definitely entered the miracle age of the fluorescent lighting system, so it was always illuminated in the stark light of scientific truth, which was oddly comforting.

You looked out windows still dustless and smearless and saw green trees everywhere, as the Virginia countryside, cascades of leaf, seemed boundless and lush. In memory, at least, it never rained a lot in Camelot. From some high north-oriented windows, you could see a flash of the broad Potomac, and on a sunny day, as I remember most were, that plate of liquid turned blue itself off the sky overhead. Trees, walks, freshness, ripeness everywhere, cheer and high morale, pep and vim and vigor, hope and audacity, the perfect background for my treachery in the most heinous yet most successful intelligence operation in history, the Earth’s or any other planet’s.

I had to get that transcript and learn who Lee Something Something was. It was not hard to do. A few days into the next work week, I sent Win Stoddard some kind of meaningless though TOP SECRET/EYES ONLY file with a cover note requesting his input on the proposed project. I cannot remember what it was, and I knew that even with the melodramatic stampings on it, Win would routinely stuff it in his desk drawer for a few days before he got around to considering it. I waited a day, then, timing it perfectly, managed to intercept Win on his way to the elevator at 5:04 on a Wednesday afternoon. I could tell by the speed of his gait – I’m not a spy for nothing, you know! – that he was in a hurry.

“Win, say, sorry to trouble you, that report I sent, did you have a chance to look at it?”

“Not yet, Hugh, sorry. This, that, the other thing.”

“I kind of need to get it circulated. Could I have it back and ship it on to the next boy on the list? If Cord calls a meeting on it, I’ll brief you.”

“Sure, Hugh. First thing tomorrow.”

“Damn, I’d like to get it to one of Wisener’s people tonight.”

“Okay, look, I’m in a rush.” He smiled, reached into his pocket, and pulled out his ring of keys. “Here, the little one, it’ll open the drawer right away. Help yourself. You can give me the keys back tomorrow. I’ve got drinks with a senator at the Army-Navy Club, and I’m already behind.”

“Good man,” I said, and I exchanged with him the one secret I will not violate in this account, the Skull and Bones handshake.

As I said, easy, too easy. Security then was a twenty-two-cent hardware lock on a file drawer made of tin-can alloy. No computers, no magnetic striped cards, no monitoring video cameras, nothing in the beige hallways suggesting war or aggression or intelligence, just a fairly messy if broad office that could have housed an insurance company or a newspaper or a driver’s license agency. It had no spy-movie-cliche clubbiness and never did. This was way before the age of computers, and we had not gotten electric typewriters in; everything was on paper, paper was the fuel that we fed into the flames of the Cold War.

Win, being a senior staffer, had a cubicle with three walls of privacy, which made my task somewhat easier, not that it wasn’t easy to begin with. Only a few staffers lounged about, none of them paying much attention to a familiar figure such as mine, and I opened his drawer and found my report and removed it, then pivoted slightly, opened two more drawers, and found what I was looking for in the second one, TOP SECRET/EYES ONLY meaninglessly stamped askew over the title PHONE TRANSCRIPTS/MEX CITY/SOV EMB and a ref to master file RP/K-4556-113M. I slipped this document behind my own legal document, locked everything up, and went back to my desk. I eased it into my briefcase for study at home, but not before seeing for the first time the name that would become so indelible to the lens of history in such a short time. And thus I met LEE HARVEY OSWALD.

My first encounter with him that night, after Peggy and I had enjoyed an old-fashioned and put the boys to bed and she retreated to her boudoir and I to my study, was not compelling. It was, in fact, repellent. I read through the interview transcripts recorded September 27 and 28, 1963, at the Soviet embassy, rm. 305G, at 1130 the first day and 1315 the next.

KGB: And why do you wish a visa?

LHO: Why, sir, I renounce capitalism and wish to raise my family in a society that values the teachings of Marx and the struggles of the workingman.

KGB: But you spent 21/2 years with us, Mr. Oswald, and you seemed at a certain point to have your fill of the teachings of Marx and the struggles of the workingman.

LHO: Sir, that was not my fault. I was undone by jealous people who hated me for my intelligence, for marrying the most beautiful woman, for the heroic will they sensed within me, as the great Lenin and Stalin were envied and hated by petty rivals!

I recognized almost everything I despised in a man. He was arrogant, which, combined with his manifest stupidity, made him particularly appalling. He was pugnacious, bellicose, yet quick to retreat and start sucking up aggressively. To watch the crude ploys of his personality over the play of the interview with Boris and Igor (in Agency argot, all Russian operatives, even if their names were known, as these were, went by the noms de guerre of Boris and Igor) was somewhat dispiriting. He’d throw himself at one until he ran into resistance, and then he’d throw himself at the other. On and on it went. They didn’t have to play Mutt and Jeff with him, only Mutt and Mutt.

From what I gathered – not having seen our files on him or the FBI’s – he was some kind of epic failure, having bungled every job ever handed to him, having offended every boss who ever hired him, having betrayed every friend who ever reached out to him. He had that classic ineffective personality, all front and bluster backed by nothing of substance, bravado for show, cowardice for content, a braggart and a phony, and I guessed that all he claimed for accomplishments would turn out to be lies, as they did. Throw in some other defects: an inability to concentrate, an exaggerated sense of grievance, an IQ that would be classified “dull normal,” no outstanding compensatory talent, and the little man’s classic resentment of all things in the universe larger than himself. He would be both a bully and a coward, a liar and a cheat, without charm or charisma, prone to true belief in nonsensical goals; in all, a human wreck waiting to happen. That would be my department.

He explained to them that his goal in life was to get to Castro’s Cuba, but the Cubans, sensibly, had declined. They had left him with a proviso that if he could get a visa from his good friends the Russians, they would allow him entrance on that document for a limited amount of time. Here he was, giving himself up to the maw of history in order to achieve the greatness he knew as his own and to claim his place in the socialist firmament.

It was a tough sell, particularly on the second day, by which time Boris and Igor presumably had been in contact with KGB Moscow, had seen synopsized accounts of LHO’s unspectacular two and a half years in Minsk and the no doubt unflattering comments on his personality and work ethic from so-called jealous people, and had reached the proper conclusion.

The reds are familiar with this oddity of the American system. It produces men who can move mountains, build industries, win global wars, and break the speed of sound. It can down MiGs over Korea at a six-to-one ratio. At the same time, perhaps inevitably, it produces a small number of malcontents, of ambitious dreamers who lack the skills or the diplomatic grace to achieve anything in life, and rather than face their own inadequacies, they blame some amorphous structure called “the system” and look for its opposite, where they believe they will shine. Then they spend their dream lives imagining themselves as secret agents, destined to bring down the larger apparatus and be rewarded by its opponents, whose conquest they have so wonderfully lubricated.

These odd birds know history superficially and never notice that the first thing a socialist totalitarian state does when it takes over is round up all the secret agents who have worked so hard in its interests, cart them to the Lubyanka by Black Maria at midnight, and plant a bullet behind their ears. Reds cannot tolerate traitors, even traitors who have aided their own cause. Ask the Poumistas of the Spanish revolution, who made that discovery while standing at the execution wall in Barcelona.

Oswald knew or cared for none of this. He was determined to be a traitor, though he had nothing of value to offer his new friends, failing completely to master the nuance that treason was a negotiation and that it takes two to trade, and had failed miserably at his first attempt. Little mongrel. How I loathed him that night, sitting in my study in Georgetown, listening to the midnight crickets and enjoying a splash of vodka.

Then came the key exchange, late on the second afternoon, after they’d already given him their negative decision and before calling in the goons to eject him from the property forcibly when he’d come back to protest.

I gathered that neither Boris nor Igor was there, and this new fellow – we’ll call him Ivan – was a little higher in the KGB tree. He seemed wiser, smoother, less awkward in dealing with the screwball American. Ivan tells him, “Mr. Oswald, it is our conclusion that you would not be happy in the Soviet Union a second time any more than the first. My own recommendation is that you could most appropriately serve the revolution from within your own borders, pursuing these activities you have mentioned, such as passing out leaflets for the Fair Play for Cuba Committee and arguing passionately in private with American citizens on the merits of our system versus yours.”

LHO: Sir, do you know who you’re talking to? I am not some stupid pamphleteer, not by a long shot. I am a soldier of the revolution, I am a man of action.

KGB: Here, now, Mr. Oswald, please settle down, we do not need an incident.

LHO [crying]: No, you listen to me. On April 10, I was the sniper who took the shot at General Walker, fascist, traitor, bully, would-be tyrant, enemy of the left, of socialism, of Cuba, of the USSR. That was me in the dark, with my Eye-tie [?] Mannlicher-Carcano six-five. BANG, I had him dead center, I just didn’t see the window frame that deflected the shot. Me, I, me, I went to war for us and for you. I risked prison, the electric chair, I–

KGB: Mr. Oswald, please, get hold of yourself, there’s no need–

A few minutes later, he would pull a gun and begin to gesticulate wildly, then break down, sobbing on Mr. Big’s desk! It ended with him deposited in the Mexico City gutter. What did he expect? How deep could his self-knowledge have been? He had no awareness that the nakedness of his needs and the tragedy of his incompetence were the signals he broadcast the loudest; he had no idea of the ocean of space between the ideal image of the self he wished and pretended to be and the tragic, limited, feckless little twerp whom he forced the world to see up close and instantly. He was a mess.

The worse he was, the better for me. It took no genius to see the path by which he could be manipulated into anything, and such a ploy was easily within my capabilities. The plan formed perfectly, with no need of revision and only a little required preparation. It would be so simple – like giving candy to a baby.

To make certain of my own intentions, I applied the New Criticism to my plan, laboring intensely to occlude personality, opinion, immaterial knowledge, or rogue or random feeling from consideration and concentrate entirely on the text that was Oswald, understand its dynamics and dimensions without regard to outcome or hope or past indignities or whatever it was that formed the twisted creature he was. I must say, although this sounds egotistical, I felt somewhat like a great white hunter with many tusks in his lodge on the track of a titmouse. I was so overgunned for this safari, it seemed a little obscene, so I made a pledge to myself that though I would use Oswald, even as I loathed and despised him, I would make a tiny effort to see the humanity that lurked underneath, to understand what forces had so warped him, and try to reach somehow the soul in him, and touch it with a gesture that, in whatever larger context of manipulation and betrayal it arrived, had a whisper of authentic human feeling.

I had tasks to be done. First I had to conjure up a fantasy operation and code name so I could liberate black funds to pay for my instantly conceived Oswald-Walker operation, which involved selling Cord on a fiction. Sure, I had enough money from Uncle Colt and his co-uncles Winchester, Smith, Wesson, and Remington, to say nothing of the Du-Ponts, the five marques of General Motors, and the whole industrial cash box that sustained my portfolio, to pay the limited expenses this thing would cost on my own, but in case it ever came back to me, any investigator would go to finances on the first day and learn that I had spent a hundred grand of my own dough on a mystery project in November 1963. I could swindle the money from the Agency far more easily than I could swindle it from myself, and it would be protected in perpetuity by our Agency’s larger mandate to keep all things secret. (It has not been uncovered to this day, nearly fifty years after the fact!) Generations of case officers enjoyed this privilege, some corrupt and for their own benefit, some pure at heart and laboring in the hope that they were helping win the war. As for my pitch, it would not be difficult; I enjoyed high status in Clandestine Services, as the recent removal of Mr. Diem from both presidency of the Republic of South Vietnam and occupancy of Planet Earth was conspicuously viewed as a victory for our side and had found its origins in a classified report I authored entitled “U.S. Interests in RSV: An Assessment for the Future,” which made me a star in factions of the Agency far beyond my own. (More on this later.) Second, I had to secure the Oswald master file, as indicated on the transcript, an assignment any third-rate secret-agent-man pretender ought to be able to bring off.

For the record, I will summarize, with apologies to any of you reading this account who haven’t a taste for sober explication and prefer the rush of narrative; I cannot, however, let the narrative rush without satisfying myself that I have fulfilled the expositional requisites, if only for the one reader in a hundred who requires such a thing.

As for the fictional operation, I named it PEACOCK and sold it to Cord without a hitch, establishing a hundred-thousand-dollar budget out of the Bank of New York, shielded by accounting ploys so subtle that only a few men, none of whom worked for the government, were capable of penetrating them. PEACOCK, I claimed, was meant to look at the possibilities of identifying young Harvard-Yale-Princeton-Stanford-Brown-UChicago-and-other-elite graduates who had writing talent and seemed headed for the powerful Luce publications or the New York Times or the upstart Post properties that had just acquired Newsweek (Cord’s wife’s sister was married to a prominent Newsweek fellow, to show you how small and cozy the world was in those days), with an idea to nurse them in their careers with secret deposits of information, not money (they would be offended by money), so as to accelerate their climb and at the same time make them indebted to us, although they’d never know who “us” really was. PEACOCK was named for vanity, as I assumed such fools would be morally vain and easily manipulated. I would write Cord a monthly report on what scouts I had befriended in the thickets of academe and what I had offered them and what we could expect from them. It was wonderful, as it was entirely unsubstantiable. No actual journalist would know he was being manipulated by us and could never squeal, and no one could look at a particular piece and say, Yes, the tip came from us or No, it didn’t. That’s how the old Agency was: it worked on a trust I was only too happy to betray in search of a larger contribution.

As for acquiring the Oswald paperwork, again, not terribly difficult. I memorized the master file number as referred to on the transcript jacket, then went to Records at a particularly busy time – Monday, 1030, when all the girls were overworked with juniors who had been requested to pull files for this or that Invasion of Italy or Nuclear Detonation over Moscow scenario. The place was chaos and anguish, as I expected, the girls overtaxed and bitter because they were too smart for their jobs and too connected to be treated this way by Mrs. Reniger, head of files, in one of her perpetual menstrual flare-ups. The wheels were definitely off the cart, so I pulled Liz Jeffries aside. She was Peggy’s older sister’s daughter and my niece by marriage. I said, “Liz, Cord’s on a tear, I need this fast.”

“Oh, Hugh,” the wan beauty replied, distress making her more lovable than usual, “we are so behind.”

“Liz, it’s my tail on the line.”

She knew who had gotten her the job, with its glamour opportunity to marry a spy, a much better catch socially than a diplomat or a legislator, so she said, “Look, you know the system, just duck back there and pinch it; don’t let Reniger see you.”

“Thanks, sweetie,” I said, and gave the child – she was a few years younger than I, but she seemed from a different generation – a peck. It was a common enough thing, so no eyebrows were raised. I slipped back, sliding by a busty young thing in one of the aisles and being careful to make no “accidental” contact with her breasts so that she wouldn’t remember me, found the file, opened it – the files were controlled by a series of master locks that old bitch Reniger, an OSS London vet, opened each morning at 9 and closed each evening at 5 – and slipped out the Oswald file and the one I had requested, hid Mr. O’s inside the covering one, and dropped my file request slip in the box for recording.

That night I made further contact with LHO. I will not bore readers with intricate accounts of one of the most overbiographized men in the world. The details are depressingly familiar. A chaotic childhood ensued upon the too-early death of the father; the strange, domineering, and slightly crazy mother, Marguerite, hauling the family all over America in hopes of finding a place to stay, marrying twice, wrecking both marriages, hauling Lee and the other two boys from school to school, state to state, poverty to prosperity and back to poverty in a single year sometimes. No wonder he was so screwed up: he was always the new kid.

In New York, his growing malfunction was spotted by an alert social worker who wrote perhaps the most penetrating prose ever – little did she know three thousand authors would eventually come into competition with her, yet never best her – and alone in the world seemed to worry about where this sad bean would end up. She was underwhelmed by the narcissist Marguerite as mom and the incoherent wandering as lifestyle, and thought the boy had it in him to do great harm if not put into some kind of treatment quickly. In the whole mad circus that was the life of Lee Harvey Oswald – and I am speaking as his recruiter, his betrayer, and indirectly his murderer – this brave lady alone did a job we can take pride in as Americans. Too bad for LHO and JFK nobody listened; Marguerite snatched him away from the do-gooders and hauled him back to Texas or was it New Orleans before anything official could be done.

Influenced by his older brother, little Lee, like many a small man who dreams of toughness, joined the Marine Corps immediately out of high school (from which he did not graduate). Like everything he attempted, it came to nothing. The marine years were wholly undistinguished, and anyone who trusted him to guide an airplane to its landing strip – his official job – must have had rocks in his head. I saw that the marines didn’t let him do much of that sort of thing, as they always had him on noncrucial duty. Somehow he managed to shoot himself in the arm. What a dimwit!

It was in the service where he first proclaimed himself a Communist, to the irritation of all around him in his various postings. You wonder why some fellow PFCs didn’t beat the hell out of him and spare the world the tragedy that ensued. It’s one of the few times the United States Marine Corps has failed in its duties. It won the Battle of Iwo Jima, but it lost the Battle of Lee Oswald! And once he was out, his first move – another hastily considered crusade – was to defect to the Soviet Union. Our first notice of him came via the State Department after he’d gotten into Russia on a student visa and refused to leave. Sensibly, the Russians didn’t want him either – nobody ever wanted him! – and for a while State and KGB fought to see who would inherit him as a consolation prize. He spent two and a half years in the Soviet Union, mostly in an electronics plant in Minsk, mastering the intricacies of cheesy transistor-radio assembly. He met and married a young woman who seemed quite attractive in the photo; I wondered in my study that night if the poor gal knew what a damaged package she’d hooked up with.

He burned out in Russia and managed to talk his way back into the United States. I am well aware that some in the conspiracy community – “conspiracy community,” God, what an appalling concept! It was both loud and wrong for half a century! – have maintained that the CIA’s fingerprints are all over this strange sojourn. Good God! The only fingerprints on it were mine, and I knew paper didn’t record fingerprints, so I was safe. What I saw was what real life produces, as opposed to the dark master planning of the spy conspiracy believers: the shaggy, shapeless, pilotless, planless bumble of luck, circumstance, and opportunity, as this weasel of a man tried to get two giant bureaucracies to pay him the slightest bit of attention. Agh, you could feel their lack of enthusiasm in the slow grind of their cogwheels as, eventually, while the long dreary months passed, this nobody was allowed to reclaim citizenship in a country he loudly despised.

From that point on, we got a new narrator, a much beleaguered FBI agent named James Hotsy, who inherited Lee – I will call him Alek from now on, for that is his Russian nickname, and Marina and I both called him that – when the fellow came back to the United States from Russia. He was known to the Bureau as a “suspicious person,” given his well-documented love affair with the reds. Poor Hotsy, of the Dallas field office, overworked and underloved, had Alek added to his immense caseload, and it was my privilege to read his reports in photocopy, because at that low level of security, the two agencies happily shared data. Hotsy’s picture of him more or less confirmed mine, although the hostility he received after Alek’s return added a particularly unpleasant new pathology, the chronic whine. Hotsy could find nothing he’d done that was illegal, only in poor taste, which should be a crime, I’ve always believed, but who listens to me on these matters? Hotsy’s intensity picked up when he discovered that Alek had been to Mexico City in late September and visited the Cuban interest section and the Soviet embassy, and soon he was interviewing Marina, her friend (but never Alek’s) Ruth Paine, and anyone else who had knowledge of or insight into Alek. Again, he could come up with nothing substantial, because Oswald himself was not substantial. He was, as they say in Texas, all hat and no cattle. Nobody had any need for him, not even Marina, for Mrs. Paine passed on to Special Agent Hotsy the bad news that Marina frequently displayed bruises on her arms or swelling around the eye. Alek was up to his tricks again.

I do not have one here before me, as I sit in the sunlight on the veranda, scribbling and merrily riding the vodka express to the amazement of the servants, watching the slow progress of shadow across the far meadow, awaiting a call on my satellite phone that will inform me whether my current threat is finished or has grown more complicated, but I do know that at that time I had a photo of Alek.

That face was soon to be burned into the consciousness of the world. I expect it will never be forgotten. At the time, who could know, who could anticipate? What I saw was American working-class sui generis, remarkable in its unremarkablity. It was an old shot taken by a newspaper when our self-proclaimed Communist hero (Ma, call the papers!) returned from Russia to proclaim the glories of Marxism but the folly of communism (only a Trot could appreciate the nuances; it’s unlikely Alek did). The camera reveals truths, things that Alek did not know about himself and would not learn. The thickness of his nose, his most prominent facial landmark, revealed or at least represented his pugnacity. He had a thickness to him in many respects, both physically and mentally, a kind of fixation on a goal or object from which he could not be stirred. His eyes were beady and small and squinty, and any Hollywood casting director would see him as a Villain No. 2, a minion who administered the beatings or the knifings but had no grasp of Mr. Big’s vision and simply took it on trust. He had a small mouth that gave him an unattractive piscean quality, his face somehow “pointed” as it reached its end point in the surly orifice surrounded by thin lips. His receding hairline and overbroad forehead seemed to suggest the same motif, and all of these features together created a typology, as amplified by the perpetual shroud or grimace of annoyance he wore. He looked exactly as he was: surly, obstreperous, self-indulgent, charmless. You knew he would be tricky to deal with, to command; he would be a resenter, a creep (a wife beater!), a natural traitor, an obdurate whiner, a too-quick-to-measure quitter. I don’t know if he was a little monster because he looked like a little monster or he looked like a little monster and so he became one. I doubt if any of his three thousand chroniclers do either.

In any event, I stared at that picture, committing its nuances to memory. Sometimes a man in life can look so unlike his photo, you can hardly believe one is the record of the other. I sensed with Alek this would not be a problem and that when I saw him first in the flesh, I would recognize him right away. I can remember lying in bed, listening to Peggy’s even breathing, to the night rush of wind, and knowing that my boys were down the hall as secure as possible with futures fixed before them, and thinking of little Alek, pawn and creep, lynchpin and sucker, upon whom the weight of my plan would pivot, and I hoped he was up to it.

That was when I realized, that very night, he wasn’t.

It turned on shooting.

Alek was a “trained marine marksman” – whatever that meant, and I suspect, in those dreary peacetime years, not much – yet he had missed a target, according to news reports, who sat at a desk forty feet away, with a rifle that had a telescopic sight! Good God, even I could have made that shot! I realized that shooting wasn’t just shooting. He had done his rifle work in the marines with that old warhorse, the M1 Garand rifle, a heavy, steady, accurate semi-automatic that had served from the halls of Montezuma to the shores of Tripoli with distinction. He could not have had a Garand rifle at his disposal in Texas for his try at the general. He’d called his gun “An Eye-Tie [?] Mannlicher-Carcano six-five,” a circumlocution so baffling that our poor typist had no idea that “Eye-tie” was argot for “Italian.” If it was Italian, it was probably some piece of surplus junk with a squishy trigger and a vino-swilling peasant’s intrinsic precision, which is to say none at all, and that would be his weapon of choice, and ours too, as it was linked to him by paperwork, witnesses, and circumstance, for the job I had in mind. Then there was the larger issue of incompetence. He had failed at everything he’d ever tried, and this meant part of him expected failure, and the expectation became the father of the event. Could I trust him? Could I risk my whole career and good name, to say nothing of a long stay in a Texas penitentiary, on this idiot? It had to be clean, smooth, crisp, efficient, professional, not a bumbling, staggering mass of twitches and mistakes.

I don’t think I slept a bit that night, or the next either, and I began to doubt the wisdom of a course that depended on first-class work by an idiot.

That’s how Lon came into it, and because of Lon’s presence, it made a whole universe of other possibilities real and unleashed my imagination in ways that astonished even me.

CHAPTER 14

Swagger summarized his findings for Nick at a meet in a Dallas coffee shop.

“He’s not tracking you?” asked Memphis.

“Maybe he hasn’t made the leap. Maybe he doesn’t know who I am. Maybe I’m off his radar so far.”

“Maybe he doesn’t exist.”

“Then who’s trying to kill me?”

“Bob, you’ve made a lot of enemies. It could be anyone, right? I’m just playing devil’s advocate here.”

“The same hired killer got James Aptapton.”

“Fair enough. You got him, I got a feather in my cap, we took a bad actor off the street forever. Nice transaction all around.”

“Any word on this Krulov? The oligarch who’s supposedly in with the Izmaylovskaya mob?”

“Yes and no. It turns out that through his many companies, Comrade Krulov has many official contacts with American corporations, such as Ford Motor Company, McDonald’s, 3M, Procter and Gamble, and on and on. To investigate, we’d have to get Justice Department approval and convene a task force with subpoena powers and begin a massive effort. Do you think we have enough to take it to Justice?”

Swagger knew the answer. “Of course not. What about, I can never remember the name, Yecksovich?”

“I-x-ovich.”

“That guy. Owns a gun company. Weird name, you’d notice that name.”

“The name turns out to be a nickname, means nothing. His father was named Aleksandr, and when he was a kid – the father, I mean – his little brother had trouble pronouncing it, so he called big brother ‘K-s,’ pronounced ‘Ix.’ Ix stuck, the guy goes through life as Ix, he grows up, has a kid, and since he was a successful goon, he gave his son the patronymic Russian middle name of Ixovich, that’s all. Dimitry Ixovich Spazny. Spazny is hard-core KGB, in line when Yeltsin dumps communism and gets all kinds of breaks and becomes a billionaire. I have his businesses, and he’s invested all over the world like the rest, and as with Krulov, I’d need a federal task force to begin to make a dent in his affairs.”

“That’s not going to happen?”

“Afraid not. It’s just me, an SAIC on the outs with D.C., and you, a contract undercover. I can finesse some backup and nurse you through the system with as little exposure as possible. I can’t fund you. I can’t make a major issue of you. If that happens, our wiggle room goes away, and already I’m getting odd looks from my second, who’s not sure what’s going on. What’s your next move?”

“I have to make contact with Richard Monk again. One way or another, he’s a sure conduit to whoever’s pulling strings. I can play him and see what happens.”

“The Swagger investigation method: shake the tree until hired killers come out. Hope you can kill them first. Then learn what they knew. Never fails. Loud, dangerous, but sure.”

“I agree with you and my wife and daughter. I am too old for this shit. But I don’t seem to have another choice. Except maybe to go away and let old Hugh alone.”

“You could never do that. Even if he tries to kill you again.”

Richard was just sitting there. His usual breakfast – Egg McMuffin, hash browns, coffee, and OJ – and suddenly, there Jack Brophy was. He slid in next to Richard with a cup of coffee.

“Hey, Richard,” he said. “Long time no see, friend.” He shook Richard’s hand, and Richard sort of choked, had to swallow, and said, “Jack, I’m glad you’re all right. The way you disappeared.”

“Oh, that,” Bob said. “Family crisis. Had to take care of some unexpected issues.”

“Jack,” Richard said, “there was a shooting. On the night you left, near the street where you disappeared. A man was killed. Trying to kill someone else, they say. Somehow I worried you were involved.”

“Me?” said Swagger. “No sir, I’m a rabbit. I love the guns, but only when I’m shooting at some faraway fuzzy animal or on a nice, safe firing range.”

Swagger laid some stuff on Richard about how he’d done some experimenting back in Idaho, and he was convinced that whoever shot JFK used what he called a “hybrid” of some sort, two calibers mulched together, but Richard couldn’t stay with it. He didn’t see how two bullets could fit in the same, er, bullet. Or two shells in the same bullet, or two cartridges in the same shell. Something like that.

Then Swagger went off on the Dal-Tex Building.

“Still on Dal-Tex?” Richard said. “The angles are right, but it was a huge public building full of people coming and going; it’s almost impossible to believe anybody could be brazen enough to get in and get out. Plus, the cops sealed it off within three minutes. You’d need to have a sniper going in the front door and out the front door, unseen, in the middle of a mob scene. I don’t see how it could be done.”

“You used the right word. Brazen. I figure these boys were top-of-the-line pros, the kind of guys who don’t make mistakes and have nerves of steel.”

“Mafia hit men!” Richard said. “That ground’s been trod over and over again, and nobody’s picked up anything but craziness.”

“I didn’t say Mafia. Fact is, I don’t have no theory about who yet. I’m still working out the how. If I get the how, maybe I’ll find the who.”

The gist of it turned out to be that Jack wanted Richard to help him find some old guys who remembered how Dal-Tex was in the old days. He had to build a case that getting in and out that day was feasible. He swore Richard to secrecy within the community. He declared himself the sole owner of valuable intellectual property.

Richard said he’d look into the possibilities, but discreetly; because of the value of his intellectual property, Jack told Richard he was afraid of a claim jumper or someone beating him to the punch. He’d be the one to contact Richard in a couple of days. He told Richard, “If you don’t know where I’m staying and you’re captured and tortured, you can’t give me up.”

Ha, ha. Not very funny, Richard thought, but being a nice guy, he laughed anyhow.

“Okay,” said Nick, “initial contact made. Now we’ve rerun Richard Monk. I was able to slip that one through, and that guy Jeff Neal, the computer genius, I had him do the actual search. He’s the best, and if he can’t find anything, there’s nothing to be found. Or it’s been buried by super-pros. At a deep level, we can say once again we come up with nothing. It’s the same as it ever was. Brown graduate, twenty years U.S. Army CID, mostly in Europe. Good record.”

“He retired as a major,” said Bob. “How can that be good? Any fuckups?”

“Jeff got his records. Fabulous fitness reports all the way through, even reading between the lines. The problem is that after 9/11, all the military intel branches clogged up with careerists who saw it as a fast way up the ladder. By the very fact that was what they did, they made it a slow way up the ladder. Plus, Monk was in Europe, a specialist there, and nobody wanted to move him to Baghdad. He’s on record as making many transfer requests. But he was too good to let go. So they fucked him for his excellence.”

Bob snorted. “Sounds like typical service shit.”

“He stayed in Germany while the connected career boys got to the sandbox and soaked up all the promotions. He was never going to make lieutenant colonel, so he took the out-at-twenty and went to Washington and eventually connected up with that lefty foundation that pays him well and sent him to run their show in Dallas. We can find nothing untoward about him except the Japanese porn collection and the Bangkok vacations.”

“Man,” said Swagger, “the way this is going, I may head out to Bangkok too.”

This is the hard part. I knew I’d have to get to it sometime. I suppose it might as well be now. Pardon, a shot of vod. Sometimes I call it Vod the Impaler. Yes, impale me, Vod, impale me!

Ah, that’s better. Poor Lon. He is the tragic figure in what happens. It was a shame to watch it happen, it was worse to have made it happen. He was given so much and it was taken so cruelly; he soldiered on heroically, without ill will, doing the best he could. Then I used him and turned him into an official monster. The years passed and he never betrayed me, he never quit on me, he never resented me, he never violated his pledge. He just had to be alone for a while. He was an honorable man, so I used him again, and this time I got him killed. At least he died as he never believed he would or could, with a rifle in his hands, in the intense rapture of a manhunt.

In any event, and for the record: Lon Scott was my cousin on my mother’s side, his mother being my mother’s sister, the family Dunn, old money, maybe older than mine. She married a man who was far richer than she; Jack Scott, Texas oilman, Connecticut gentleman farmer, big-game hunter, champion rifleman, aviator extraordinary, war hero (fifty missions in a B-24, including the nightmare that was Ploiesti), and the father who paralyzed his own son.

Lon was born to be a hero, and he genuinely achieved that status young. At fourteen, he shot and killed a wounded lion as it charged him, his father, and a professional hunter in what was then called British East Africa. His reflexes were the fastest, and when the beast came out of the high grass at fifteen yards, Lon stepped in front of the older men, took the charge, and put two .470 Nitro Express solids into it as it leaped, and when it hit him and knocked him down, the animal was already dead. As for Lon’s character, that was a story he never told or wrote (he was a fine writer; see his classic Hunting Africa in the Fifties, which I believe has been reprinted recently); it survives only because others told it of him so frequently. It made the later tragedy even more tragic.

Lon was born to wealth and rifles. The former he used modestly, never bragging, never splurging, always generous to family and causes. The latter became his life. I suppose he got it from his father, but there is a genius gene for the firearm that does not respect class or race or economic circumstances, it simply descends and enlightens once every generation or so. I suppose the great gunfighters of the West had it, possibly a few thirties desperadoes (Clyde Barrow, for one, possibly Pretty Boy Floyd), and a few great lawmen. The great snipers have it, a few of the great hunters. Lon had it.

From the time he laid eyes on a rifle, that was his life. In those days – this would be the early thirties – there was no opprobrium attached to such a fixation, and in his circle, it was celebrated and encouraged. His father gave him his first .22 before he was five years old, and by the time he was ten, his skill with the firearm had made him a legend. He spent summers on the Texas ranch, where he became a damned good cowboy, I’m told; by the time he was eighteen and left for Yale, he’d filled a bunkhouse with horned treasures as well as the lion and three rhinos, two Cape buffalo, and a dozen or so antelope species from his adventure in East Africa. That being a randy part of the world, I’m sure his nobility, grace, and courage earned substantial reward between silk sheets during the many evenings in Happy Valley where all the exiled Brit nabobs and their grumpy but beautiful women gathered to smoke, drink, and fornicate in abundance.

His real passion was for thousand-yard shooting. He won his first Wimbledon cup in ’50, had an off year, then won again in ’52 and ’53. It is an extraordinarily demanding discipline that brings all the shooter’s skills into play, not only his stamina to hold his position for great lengths of time but his ability to dope the wind and reload ammunition skillfully to get the maximum accuracy for the range, the rifle, and the conditions. He was, at the time, an honors graduate of Yale and unspeakably handsome. It was thought in some circles that he would follow the path of another great shooter, the national prewar skeet champion Robert Stack, and eventually move into movies. His grace with a gun in hand – then a necessity in the American movie industry – spoke well of his chances, and his high IQ, which made flash memorization a trifle (as in scripts), and his intense empathy, which marked him as a charismatic young man, all suggested such an outcome. He was better-looking than Rock Hudson, not a homo, smart as a tack, and could hit a running target offhand at a hundred yards ninety-nine times out of a hundred. He was already famous by ’55 and was just waiting for the next big thing to happen to him.

On October 11, 1955, when Lon was thirty, his father shot him in the spine.

He fell to the ground and never walked again.

Characteristically, Lon never made much of it. It happened, that’s all, let’s get on with it. Of course, the thousand-yard shooting was out, most of the hunting was out, so he devoted himself to the newer sport of benchrest and its application in the fields, varmint hunting, and he spent most of the summer at his place in Wyoming, killing vermin at distances up to a thousand yards off a bench and experimenting with the best ways to get this done. He learned a lot, and it could be said that at one time, he knew more about long-distance shooting than any man on earth. He remained on good terms with his father. The official story: it was an accident. A Model 70 in .30-06, a prime hunting weapon, was dropped and it went off, though the safety was on. Nothing could be done except get Lon to the emergency room fast, which was what his father and other shooters on the line did; Lon’s life was saved, but his mobility from the waist down was not. He spent the rest of his life in a wheelchair.

No one ever said a thing. What could be said? The act had no meaning except for the tragic randomness of the universe, its cruel whimsy. What’s the line: Whom the gods destroy, they first make interesting? Possibly I made that one up. Or possibly it’s Vod speaking. But in outline, anti-Oedipal dynamics are visible. The father, so long thought a great man, sees his usurpation in his young son. He loves the boy, but a serpent of ego whispers into his subconscious: He will replace you. He will steal your memory. You have given him everything, he will take everything. you are soon to become a supernumerary. Thus the gun falls from the hands, thus the safety is perhaps not forcibly off but wedged gently into that no-man’s-land between on and off, thus by freak mischance or the weird imposition of evil will on a falling object, the muzzle is lined up for one tenth of a second on Lon’s lower spine, and the rifle discharges.

He was lucky, I suppose. It was S4. No quad, no respiratory problems, no iron lung, no electric wheelchair or writing with a paintbrush by mouth. Muscular and athletic, he adapted well. He could drive, he could prepare food, his mind was intact, he could dress, drink, laugh, read, watch, work at his bench. S4, so much more mercy than C2. Still. .

What is his subconscious making of all this? Perhaps he has felt the hate under the love, perhaps he has heard a whispered resentment in all the lavish praise, perhaps he knows his father a little better than the father knows himself. He suppresses. He conceals his feelings. As I’ve said, he gets on with it. Who knows what snakes have been released into his mind, what need to strike and kill fathers universally or fathers symbolically or sons who, like him, were created by their fathers and then surpassed them. No one knows any of that, least of all I, but it may explain why, at some level, Lon was okay with the monstrosities I pitched him and kept the faith to the very end. In fact: he died of the faith.

In late October 1963, none of this could be imagined. I told myself I had a question for Lon that needed answering, perhaps denying to myself the inevitability of the course I had set up. I did know that I couldn’t be affiliated by record in phone contact from house or office, and I was aware that nobody knew whom that devious busybody James Jesus Angleton was or was not wiretapping. My solution to this was to drive downtown on a Saturday afternoon wearing suit and tie, park around Fifteenth at N, walk up N, and stride boldly into the office building at 1515 upon whose facade the words “The Washington Post” were emblazoned in some sort of ancient Gothic typeface. In those days, newspapers were wide open to the public, especially if the public looked as Official Person as I did, in dark tie, dark suit, white shirt, horn rims, and natty little Princeton haircut, as it was called. I strode in, nodded at the ever-sleepy Negro guard, and took the elevator to the fifth floor, where the newsroom was sited.

It was hardly a tenth full, as a skeleton crew watched teletype machines or took dictation from far-flung correspondents on the rare breaking-news stories. I sat down at Marty Daniels’s desk, aware that I looked a little like Marty, who covered the Defense Department for the Post, and rifled through the pink stack of messages that had accumulated. I hoped Marty called Mo back, and I hoped he avoided the angry fellow at the West German embassy, and I hoped that Susan didn’t call to cancel lunch or anything more interesting, and then, lazily, I picked up the phone. As a senior correspondent, Marty enjoyed direct access to long-distance, and I quickly dialed Lon’s number.

I got Monica, she put me through to Lon in the shop, and I said hello.

“Hugh, how’s my favorite secret agent? Have you caught Dr. No yet?”

“The slimy bastard changed lairs on us again. He found a new volcano. And how’s my favorite cripple?”

“You know, Hugh,” said Lon amiably, “I thought I felt a sexual impulse below my waist the other day, but it turned out to be a house falling on my knee.”

We both laughed. I had followed his steps to Choate and Yale. He was five years older, and I’d gone down to New Haven my senior year to watch him on the football field, where I took great pleasure in the way he left the Harvard Bambis smashed and bloody in his wake. That was his strength deployed in righteous fury!

“Seriously, how are you doing, Lon?”

“I’m fine except for the ulcers on the leg. They don’t hurt, but they’re a little annoying. I’ve got a piece due for the Rifleman at the end of the week, and I’m going to a conference on combat-oriented pistol matches next month that looks to be interesting. You?”

“Just spying away like a busy little beaver,” I said. “Spy, spy, spy, all day long!”

Soon enough, our jocularity out of the way, I progressed to issues. “Lon, something has come up on the job, and I thought I’d run it by you.”

“Good Lord, Hugh, I’d think if anybody’d have experts on this sort of thing, it would be you fellows.”

“I’m sure we do, but it’s the weekend, nobody spies on weekends. Plus, it will take three days to go through and three days to come back via channels. You probably know more than they do, anyway.”

“I’ll do my best.”

“I’ve come across a reference to” – I pretended to withdraw it from memory – “something called an ‘Eye-tie Mannlicher-Carcano six-five.’ Now, I am a professional intelligence officer, so I have been able to determine that ‘Eye-tie’ probably means ‘Italian.’”

“Excellent, Hugh. I feel we are well protected.”

“Indeed. But the rest, other than the fact that it’s from the firearms world, is gibberish.”

“Well,” he said, “I don’t know too much about it. It could refer to the rifle or the cartridge, depending on context. Or both. Anyhow, the rifle was the Italian service rifle beginning in 1891 and running through the late fifties. It was probably the worst service rifle of its generation, less effective in every respect than the German Mauser, the British Lee-Enfield, our own Springfield, even the French Lebel. But they kept making ’em in various iterations, including a short cavalry or ski troop version.”

“I see,” I said. “How would an American get one?”

“Very classified. Buy a stamp. That’s the secret. When the Italians joined NATO, they converted to our arms – you know, the garand, the .30-caliber machine gun, the carbine, the .45 automatic – so they sold off a billion or so of the Mannlicher-Carcano rifles in various formats as surplus, and a great many of them came into this country, where they are being sold as downmarket hunting rifles by mail-order gun houses. I see ads for them all over the place. These guys put a cheesy Jap scope on them and sell them as deer rifles for the workingman who can’t afford a Winchester Model 70.”

“So it’s no sniper rifle?”

“It’s basically a piece of junk. Barely accurate, shoddily made, ugly as sin, with a cranky bolt throw. It shows that the Italians never took war seriously, particularly when you compare it to a brilliant piece of engineering like a Mauser. Now, the cartridge it shoots is more interesting and probably deserved a better rifle than the Mannlicher. It’s a mediumbore, flat shooting round, meant for battle at more or less longer ranges. The bullet is heavy for its size, with a thick copper coating to hold it together on those rare occasions when Italian marksmanship prevails. It’s a viable round for just about any thin-skinned game animal up to and including a whitetail. I’d use it on a man before I’d use it on a bear.”

“If you hit a man in the head with it?”

“Good-bye head, assuming a relatively short range, out to two hundred meters.”

“Hmm,” I said, by which utterance I meant information received but not processed.

“What have you got in mind, Hugh? Is this about some kind of Cuban invasion operation because you have a line on ten thousand Mannlicher-Carcanos real cheap? If so, I’d strongly suggest that you avoid the temptation. There’s a lot better rifles available in surplus than pieces of junk manufactured by people who eat spaghetti for lunch and take a nap every afternoon.”

“Thanks, Lon. Let me ask you this – what can you do with it?”

“Do with it? Kill out to two hundred or so meters, small-game animals, human beings, possibly rabbits if you could hit them, which is doubtful. Shoot targets unsatisfyingly. Grow annoyed at the roughness of its action and the sloppiness of its trigger. Cut it up for firewood. That’s about all. But I’m a snob, don’t listen to me.”

“No, no, that’s not what I meant. I suppose I meant could you – uh – counterfeit it?”

“You mean build a fake one? Good God, Hugh, that’s ridiculous.”

“I’m not explaining myself well, because I don’t have the vocabulary. I’m thinking about forensics, about the clues guns leave that identify them. It’s not something I know anything about except from Perry Mason. Here’s what I think I mean. If you knew you had an agent who was going to shoot somebody with a Mannlicher-Carcano, but you didn’t trust that person to make the shot, could you do something so that somebody else who was a much better shot could shoot the person with, I don’t know, the same bullet or the same kind of rifle at the same time, but it had been fixed so that no investigator would ever figure out that the second gunman with the second rifle and the second bullet was there? Counterfeit in that sense, I mean.”

“Is this for your next James Bond novel, Hugh?”

“I wish I were that clever, Lon.”

“Well. . let me think, okay? I’m guessing another requirement would be a silencer. It’s really called a suppressor. You know, so the real assassin’s shot doesn’t draw attention.”

“They have such things?” I asked. I was so naive then.

“Yes, it’s not just a movie gimmick. Hiram Maxim figured it out over sixty years ago. Any clever machinist can handle it. It’s just a tube with baffles and chambers and holes in it. I’ll look into it and call you back and–”

“No, no, let me call you back. When, a week, next Saturday, will you be available?”

“Hugh, I live in a wheelchair. I’m always available,” he said cheerily.

I sold Cord on a scouting trip to Boston for PEACOCK, had Travel book me, moved five thousand dollars from the PEACOCK account to Larry Hudget’s FOXCROFT account, knowing he hadn’t bothered to master the finances and would never find it, drew a check, and cashed it in a small bank in the Negro section of D.C. where I’d done some business and could trust Mr. Brown to be discreet. The next day I flew to Boston, checked in to the Hilton in Cambridge, then took a cab to the airport and paid cash for a ticket to Dallas, TWA. In my grip was a suit that I had bought in Moscow in 1952, which fit as well as a shirt I’d picked up in Brno a few years ago, and a black tie I’d bought from Brooks Brothers when I had to attend Milt Gold’s father’s funeral. I figured even a genius like Alek wouldn’t notice the difference in tailoring quality between the Brooks tie and the GUM suit, which looked and fit as if assembled by chimpanzees.

I checked in to the Adolphus, rented a car, and put on my Russian monkey suit. It felt odd to walk across the hotel’s pretentious old-oak lobby with its Harvard eating-club flourishes, dressed like a kulak afraid he was about to be arrested. Nobody noticed. It was Texas, after all. Nobody notices anything down there.

An hour or so later, I parked my rental car across the street and watched when the downtown bus dropped off its passengers at 5:38 p.m. on the corner of Zane and North Beckley, in the suburb (across the Trinity River aqueduct) called Oak Cliff. It was probably November 5, 1963, maybe the sixth. I had no trouble spotting him. He wasn’t cut out for any kind of undercover work, because if any cop or agent were searching for a spy, they’d pick Lee Harvey Oswald out of any crowd. He was more substantial than I expected. I thought he’d be a feral little rat, quick and shifty, ready to pounce on any morsel of cheese. But he was thick, solidly muscled, stumpy rather than fast, solid rather than limber or light on his feet. You couldn’t miss him.

He looked miserable. His charmless, uninteresting face was set on grim to the highest number; he looked around sullenly as if waiting for the FBI to arrest him already; and he radiated a leave-me-alone frequency at its highest pitch. About four people got off, and the three others knew each other and were joshing and talking, the way guys do the world over, and Alek just blew through and by them, head down, walking steadily down North Beckley. It wasn’t far, because his room-inghouse, at 1026 North Beckley, was just a few houses down from the Zane – N. Beckley intersection. Nevertheless, he passed within five feet of me on the sidewalk, completely oblivious, and I got a good look, not that there was much to see. Head slumped forward, shoulders slouchy, he plodded along in cheap workingman’s clothes that probably wouldn’t be changed that week. He wore a pair of gray chinos, black Oxford shoes of inferior manufacture, and a green jacket – not a sport coat, a kind of golflike jacket – over a brown shirt, all nondescript. I watched as he turned in to the roominghouse, a run-down dwelling as nondescript as he was.

I moved the car to the next block and, through my rearview mirror, watched and waited. In forty-five minutes he reemerged, his hair wet from a quick standing bath, but otherwise dressed the same. This time he walked more jauntily to the bus stop, climbed aboard, paid his nickel, and sat halfway back. I followed a few car lengths behind, saw where he was dropped, waited until he went into a building, and then parked and moseyed in. It was the Dougan Heights branch of the Dallas Public Library, and I quickly checked the meeting bulletin board and saw that in room 4, the Soviet-American Friendship Society had convened. The prospect of spending a couple of hours with a crowd of American Commies whining about capitalism plus a few bored FBI agents nauseated me, so I drove to a good restaurant, had a steak, and got to bed early.

The next morning either I was early or he was late. But I saw him coming down the street to the bus stop finally, after missing the 8:17 and the 8:33. I was again wearing my GUM suit, and I’d done a little purposely bad buzzing with my electric Remington, giving myself that raw, poorly barbered look seen all through the East bloc, where tonsorial grace had not yet penetrated. Did I think Alek would notice these things? Probably not consciously, but one never knows what the unconscious picks up and how that contributes to frame of mind, receptivity, trust, and malleability. If I had been able to come up with Russian underwear on such short notice, I’d have worn it too.

He paid no attention to me as we passed on the sidewalk, made no eye contact, but as our shoulders almost brushed, I said in Russian, “Good morning, Alek. Kostikov sends his greetings,” and continued on.

“Hey,” he said in fractured Russian, after having chewed the information over for a few seconds, and processing the information that I knew his Russian nickname, and that I had evoked the name of the KG Bwho had interviewed him in Mexico City, “Hey! Who am you?”

I turned and watched him eat me up with his ratty eyes, trying to decipher the strange figure before him.

“You should say ‘Who are you?’” I corrected. “You’re still unclear on your transitive verbs, eh, Alek?” Then I smiled and hurried on my way.

I thought he might run after me and knock me down, but he didn’t. He came a few steps in my direction, and then I guess the bus rolled in and he was caught in the dilemma and at last decided on the bus. I heard him run to it; when it passed, I felt his eyes on me as I walked along, seemingly uncaring.

I gave him a restless day, a sleepless night, and another restless day – I used the time to recon the area of General Walker’s house, to check his public schedule, to visit a gun store in Oak Cliff with the absurdly Texas name Ketchum and Killum on Kleist, and to buy three white boxes of Mannlicher-Carcano 6.5 ammunition and actually hold the thing that some cowboy tried to sell me, telling me it was the best damn rifle on the market for the money. It seemed like a piece of junk to me, though I had been prejudiced by Lon. It was nothing like the fine, sleek rifles that I had seen Lon shoot when we were boys. I thanked him but politely declined.

That evening I watched Alek get off the bus, check around nervously for whatever his imagination had prompted him to suspect, then start walking. I pulled up next to him before he could turn in to the rooming-house. “Comrade alek,” I called in Russian, “come, I’ll buy you a vodka for old times’ sake.”

He looked around nervously, then dashed to the car. “You am might be seen,” he said.

(At this point I cease to replicate his horrid Russian. I will recount in standard English as if he spoke in standard Russian, simply because I grow tired of mangling the language to no real effect. You get the picture.)

“No, nobody will see us. Agent Hotsy is watching his son play Little League in Fort Worth tonight. We have the world to ourselves. Direct me to a tavern, please. I don’t know Dallas.”

He muttered something, and more by body language than words did he guide me to a god-awful Dew Drop Inn or some such, and we invaded the dark, crummy insides. It wasn’t crowded and was garishly lit in one corner by a jukebox, which an idiot had primed to play hillbilly music. We found a booth more or less isolated in the rear.

“I don’t really like vodka,” Alek said in English.

“Good,” I answered in Russian. “It was a manner of speaking. I wouldn’t order anything out of the way in a place like this, as one of these men might remember us talking in a foreign language, drinking Stolichnaya. I would also speak in English, but I speak it with a New England accent, and that would probably be more remarkable to them than Russian.”

A sluggard came over, and we ordered Mexican beer. When he brought the frosty cans, the waiter also brought chips and some kind of tasty red sauce. It was my first experience with Mexican food, and I was surprised by how much I enjoyed it.

“Who are you?” Alek said, leaning forward and fixing his beady, suspicious eyes on me.

“You’ll never learn my name. Security.”

“But you’re from–”

“I’m from your friends.”

“You know–”

“I know Hotsy, the police agent who bedevils you. In the Mexico City embassy, I know Kostikov, I know Yatskov. I have talked to the first Russian woman you loved, Ella German. I have spoken to your wife’s former lover Anatoly Shpanko. I have talked to your wife’s uncle, Ilya Prusakov, the MVD colonel. I have discussed you with your comrades in the Minsk electrical appliance facility. I will say that all of them have one thing in common: they have a very low opinion of you, Comrade.”

I took a slow draft of the beer, enjoying it immensely, watching a whole dictionary of emotions flash Across alek’s dim little face: anger at being reminded of his mediocrity, his many failures; defensiveness, as he tried to quickly construct his battlements against the truth; fear that someone was here for him; pleasure that he had been noticed at last by what he perceived as the Apparatus; bliss that someone, somewhere, somehow thought he was special.

Finally, he said, “I made mistakes, but only of trying too hard. I believe too hard. It makes some people hate me.”

“It seems they all hate you.”

“They resent me. People always resent me.”

“Do you know the term ‘projection,’ from psychology?”

“No. But I’ve studied Marx, I’ve studied–”

“You’ve studied everything but yourself, which is why nobody cares for you, Alek.”

He looked gloomily into the distance. An actual tear may have formed in one of his eyes. He started to speak, but I cut him off.

“In the whole world, nobody believes in you. To all you are negligible, a failure, a man without a past or future. You beat your pregnant wife and terrify your dear little baby daughter, Junie, you are the shame and scandal of the Russian-speaking community in Dallas. You go to the Cuban embassy and they throw you out, and you go to the Soviet embassy, pull a gun, break down sobbing, and they throw you out. No one in the world believes in you, Alek. Oh, wait. I just remembered. There is a man, probably a fool, who thinks you might amount to something, who thinks you can be saved.”

“Who?” Alek asked.

“Me,” I said.

I had a few more of the chips with the tangy red sauce. Delicious! I loved the crunchiness of the chips, with a vigorous salty aftertaste, subsumed in the fiery yet not unsubtle blast of the sauce, clearly by color tomato-based, yet not sweet, like so many tomato derivatives, the whole thing suddenly going nuclear to the taste when the pepper component detonated, then ameliorated by the tidal thunder of the cold, cold beer. A fellow could get used to such a thing.

I looked back at Alek. “Say, these chips are swell. I don’t believe I’ve ever had Mexican before. Why don’t we order some dinner? Go ahead, you’re the expert. Call him over and order for us. I think I’d like another beer, please.” I held up my empty can. It was called Tecate and had a lime slice wedged into the opener puncture. Why had I never tasted this before? It seemed not to have made it to Georgetown yet. I made up my mind to search out a Mexican restaurant in D.C. and take Peggy and the boys. That would be an adventure.

Alek waved the waiter over and ordered something from memory; as we waited for the food, I made small talk.

“So, tell me, when did you begin to notice that socialism in reality was considerably different than socialism in theory, and that working on an assembly line anywhere in the world is pretty much the same?”

He wouldn’t engage for a few seconds but then lurched on sullenly. “It wasn’t the work. It wasn’t the guys, they were okay guys. Some of them liked me. I just start thinking about reality and lose my concentration.”

“You messed up. That’s all it was.”

“No. I had big thoughts. I just couldn’t get them out. But somehow–”

“Your type will always locate a ‘somehow.’ Somehow this, somehow that, it’s never your fault, somehow it’s always someone else’s fault. Maybe you should for once in your life forget about somehow and concentrate on one thing, do it well, thoroughly, completely, and not give a shit about what happens somehow to you. Then, if you know you did your best, possibly soon enough they will know, and there will be no somehow.”

He brought out the Dale carnegie in me.

“I tried to, I tried to,” he protested.

Thankfully, the food came – thinking about it now, I realize it was enchiladas, rice and beans, and a taco on the side – and we were spared more chatter as we put it down with another beer. Again, it was a good meal, and I was happy, for the rest of my life, to enjoy Mexican whenever the chance arose. That much I owe Lee Harvey Oswald.

We finished without much chatter, and I paid, and out we went to the car. It was dark now, and twenty minutes had passed since we had spoken. His face was knit tight, I guessed partly in fear of saying something stupid, partly in confusion. He could not meet my eyes.

When the car doors were closed and I’d pulled out into traffic, I finally said, “Alek, you know how it works, don’t you?”

“Sir?” he said in English.

“That is, the organization I represent.”

“I suppose so. You find people who–”

“No, no, not the idealized, the propagandized, version. I mean the reality. That reality is that it’s a big organization and it has many subunits, many departments, many cells, all of them driven by ego, fear, ignorance, full of average men attempting to curry favor with supervisors, attempting to be supervisors, out of nothing more than petty ambition. Some work at cross-purposes to others, some work at purposes that have no relationship whatsoever to the purposes others work to accomplish, and the communication between them is at all times inefficient, even weak.”

“Yes sir,” he said.

“Kostikov and Yatskov, for example, they’re in a division that is charged with servicing and monitoring our embassies abroad. They watch for spies, they try to recruit spies, they also have responsibilities for vetting defectors, dealing with walk-ins, this and that. Their hope is to get through thirty-five years without making a bad mistake or offending a superior; if they accomplish that, they get a medal, a nice but hardly remunerative stipend, and possibly a small dacha outside Moscow in one of the less fashionable districts. If so, they can consider themselves heroes and successes, you see?”

“I do.”

“To them, you are simply a problem they do not care to deal with. Imagination is not their strong suit. Career-wise for them – and there is no other concern – it’s best you go away fast and forever and not upset or reroute the Kostikov Express to a dacha.”

“Yes sir.”

“But I’m in a different department. When news reaches me of the crazy American who says he took a shot at General Walker, I’m not annoyed, I’m fascinated. I have to learn more. My department has use for people like the crazy American; we’re charged with actually accomplishing something, not merely maintaining a security perimeter.”

Alek nodded.

“We occasionally do what’s called ‘wet work.’ Can you guess the meaning of ‘wet’?”

“Underwater,” the idiot said.

I sighed. “Try again, Alek.”

“Oh. Blood. You kill people.”

“Rarely. Sometimes. It’s always a tricky decision. It’s not like there’s a double-oh license or anything and we can go about blasting people with burp guns. But yes, sometimes, when necessary, say a defector, a murderer of one of our people, a particularly loathsome political opponent, then we may kill people.”

We reached his neighborhood. I pulled up a few doors down from his roominghouse, because I had no way of knowing if people there knew him and might remember him getting out of a car driven by a stranger.

“Alek,” I said, “I have a present for you. It’s in the glove compartment. Please reach in and get it.”

He opened the glove box and took out a white box of Western Cartridge co. 6.5 mm Mannlicher-Carcano ammunition. He held it in his hand, jostled it, felt its considerable weight. His eyes lit up.

“Bullets,” he said. “For my gun.”

“You know Kostikov and Yatskov thought you were making up your story. So did everyone in the apparatus. Except me. I thought: Perhaps this man, who lies about so much and has not finished one thing in his life, nor impressed one person, perhaps he is telling the truth about the shooting. That’s why I had to know you, Alek, I had to look into you. That’s why the travel, the investigation, all the interviews. But not till now, this second, have I confirmed for myself that yes, you are the rare man who believes in the cause so much that he will do the wet work for it. It’s easy to hand out flyers and go to meetings with homos and Negroes and federal agents. It’s easy to defect if you get to marry the sexiest Russian babe and begin fucking her right away. It’s easy to tell people that you’re a red, that you believe in the workingman, and that changes must be made, because you like the attention it gets and the ruckus it causes. The campuses and beatnik cafes are full of such worthless scum. But rare, truly rare, is the man for whom the revolution is worth dying for and worth killing for. He would be the man of action, an ideal. I believe you are such. Now get out, go home, go to bed, and prepare for another day of glory boxing books on the sixth floor. I will contact you again after these matters settle in that tiny little rathole you call a mind.”

“But I–”

“GO!” I commanded, and out he scooted.

CHAPTER 15

A week passed before Swagger dropped in on Richard again, this time intercepting him at a pharmacy where he was picking up prescriptions. “Damn!” said Richard, jumping visibly when his old pal Jack Brophy showed up from nowhere. “You are tricky,” he declared.

“I’m paranoid as hell,” Swagger said. “I’ve done some work and have made some progress. Don’t want any of those other boys knocking me off.”

“You might be better off to relax and let me introduce you to some people who might be able to help you.”

“Too shaky for that, Richard. You mean well, but I’ve got spiders in my mind telling me every-goddamned-body is spying on me.”

“I got it, I got it. Well, how about this – I think I could help you, no one else involved.”

“How’s that?”

Richard laid out his plan. He knew someone in the Dallas Association of Nursing Homes, which put out a weekly bulletin. His idea was to run an ad requesting that anyone who had worked in the Dal-Tex Building in ’63 and wanted to share memories with a researcher contact Richard. Then Richard, with Jack along, would interview. That way they could at least get a sense of how likely it was that a brazen penetration like the one Jack envisioned had happened.

Swagger thanked him, thought it over, watched him surreptitiously for a number of days, then okayed the idea.

The next week they visited three homes and talked to three old gadflies, two of whom said it was possible, one who said it wasn’t.

“The building was particularly deserted that day,” Mrs. Kolodny recalled. “We all rushed down at noon to get good spots to see the president. And afterward, who wanted to go back to work? I didn’t go back to work until Monday. It was so sad.”

Mr. O’Farrell disagreed, primarily because, it turned out, he was an amateur assassinologist.

“If you look, you’ll see that the Houston Street side of the building had a fire escape. And there was a bunch of people sitting there watching the president. Now, if someone fired a rifle shot, they’d be the closest, they’d be the ones who’d hear it and testify that a shot came from just forty or fifty feet above them. Yet there’s no testimony to that effect, goddammit. So how could it be?”

Swagger said, “Possibly they used a silencer.”

“Silencer, shmilencer,” said the old guy. “Hollywood crap! That’s what you get from TV and the goddamn movies! No silencer really silences. You can’t make a sound that loud and sharp go away. It might be lowered somewhat, but if he was shooting out the window, they’d feel the shock wave and they’d hear something damn suspicious. The only thing any of those folks heard was what everyone else heard, which was three loud cracks from the rifle of no one other than Mr. Lee Harvey Oswald.”

Swagger knew this not to be the case absolutely, as the sound itself could be modulated by a variety of techniques, primarily the efficacy of the suppressor and its location in an otherwise sealed room. A savvy shooter would place himself well back from the narrowly opened window, containing much of the sound and much of the shock wave. Unless the people beneath were listening for it and had experience with the vibratory patterns of suppressed weapons, it was unlikely that any lower-floor fire-escape sitters noticed a thing, what with so much else going on simultaneously.

Swagger ambushed Richard at the Palm over his weekly steak and martini.

“Mind if I join you?” Swagger said, appearing from nowhere just as Richard had finished his meat and put in an order for coffee and Key lime pie.

“Man,” said Richard, “you were in the spy business. I know you were. You move too silently, you follow too well.”

“Ain’t true a bit,” said Swagger. “I picked up my skills by being worried about Communist guerrillas in the mountains of Ecuador. Had a run-in with the same mob, different race, in Malaysia. Those were men who wanted us exploiters of the wonderful peasants dead. I developed a sixth sense for danger, and I learned how to disappear in plain sight. I was once three feet away from two guerrillas with AK-47s and went so still, they looked right past me, and here I am to tell the tale.”

“You could have fooled me.”

“Anyway, I wanted to tell you about something I discovered on the Net that’s interesting to me. A lot of it is shit, but this gal seems to know a thing or two.”

Swagger went on for a few minutes about the discovery. Some researcher had noted that when the FBI expert Robert Frazier had talked about the relative zero of the Hollywood scope on the Oswald rifle, it was clear that Frazier, a distinguished high-power marksman, was unfamiliar with scopes and unaware that if a scope is miszeroed, it will shoot groups in the same spot on the target relative to its miscalculated aiming point, altered only by the geometric progression of the range. If it’s an inch low and an inch to the right at fifty yards, it will be two inches low and two inches to the right at a hundred yards, and three inches low and three inches to the right at 150 yards, out until the distance where gravity and falling velocity have a larger influence than the scope misadjustment.

“The point is,” said Bob, “how can this guy say the rifle is accurate if he doesn’t know the most fundamental thing about the physics of the scope? How can he say a scoped rifle is easy to shoot? He doesn’t know enough to make either of those judgments, but those are key factors in the commission’s conclusion that Oswald was capable of making the third, longest shot at the smallest and most quickly moving target.”

“It’s not really my thing,” said Richard. “I guess I get it, but it would be helpful if you could show me some of this stuff.”

“I will, I will,” said Swagger. “When I’ve got it all put together, I want to fly you out to Boise and take you to my range. You’ll see it. In the meantime, please be thinking of ways I could package this or someone I could write it up with.”

“Oh, all this on the rifles,” Richard said, as if a new thought had kicked its way into his head. “It reminds me. I’ve been meaning to mention this to you. Ever hear of a guy named Adams? In the gun world, I mean.”

“Nah,” said Swagger. “Can’t say – Oh, wait, there’s a guy named Marion Adams, a writer. Does these big fancy picture books on, say, Ruger or Winchester, like corporate histories or historical collections. That the guy?”

Richard handed him a card. “Marion F. Adams,” it said. “Firearms Historian and Appraisal Expert.” It had a cell number, an e-mail address, and a little picture of a seven-and-a-half-inch Colt Peace-maker.

Richard said, “He came by a couple of weeks ago. He told me some story about his theory of the case – I hear a lot of those, you know. But his was very gun-centric. It was sort of like yours, I thought, having to do with some Winchester gun firing bullets meant for the Carcano at a much faster speed.”

“Shit,” Swagger said. “Goddammit, that’s my theory. It’s my intellectual property. You’re telling me another guy who–”

“No, no, wait a sec. Here’s the deal. He said he was way behind the curve on what did or did not happen in the event, and he could never catch up. The websites gave him a headache. He’s not a Net guy. He wanted to shortcut the process. Did I know an investigator who was conversant with the facts of the assassination, the state of the art of assassination research and theory, and firearms. Does that sound like somebody we know?”

Swagger didn’t say a thing. His face darkened as if his mood were tanking fast. His eyes narrowed. Finally, he barked, “It took me years to get where I am. I sure don’t want to give it away to some fellow with fancy friends who writes the words nobody reads in picture books. It’s my intellectual property. It’d be like giving away a piece of land with a mineral claim on it.”

“Jack,” said Richard, “I see your point. Don’t let it upset you. I didn’t get the impression he was too organized or anything.”

“Did you tell him about me?”

“Not by name. I told him I had a guy in mind who would fit the bill perfectly. And I’ll get back to him and tell him you’re not–”

“Hold off on that. If he’s published, it means he knows publishers, I mean, real New York publishers, like Simon and Schuster and Knopf and Random House, the big guys whose books get noticed by everybody. I had an idea that if I got it together somehow, I’d take it to them, even if they’d probably steal more than the little guys.”

“What do you want me to do?”

“Oh,” said Swagger, going a little over the top on the angry-proprietor thing, “hold off a bit. Let me look into this guy. I’m not a writer, I’m an engineer. Maybe he could help me, I could help him. But goddammit, don’t tell him no more about me!”

Memphis got Agent Neal working again, and the results came back quickly enough. He summed them up for Swagger a few days later, in their weekly coffee-shop meet at a randomly selected Seattle’s Best in the suburbs.

“Okay, once again, we get a clean read,” he said. “Marion Adams, fifty-nine. Born into gun aristocracy. His father was CEO of a now-defunct Connecticut gun valley company that mainly produced .22 target pistols of very high quality. When target shooting got small in the late sixties, the company folded. But Marty, as he is called, knew everybody, he was, er, connected, and he was able to forge a career as a writer and consultant. He’s published nineteen books, many on the big-ticket manufacturers. His connections get him in the doors, he writes whitewashed company histories, he knows everybody, and he produces what many people consider technically beautiful volumes.”

“I’ve seen ’em,” said Bob. “May even own a few.”

“He seems to service the high-end gun trade. You know, the big-dollar guys who go on safaris with gun-bearers and hunt doves in Argentina with Purdey shotguns and pay fifteen grand for a painting called Ducks on a Chesapeake Morn.”

“Got the picture,” said Bob, knowing the kind of huntcult gent who was secretly in love with the traditions of thirties big-game hunting, and yearned to tramp the savannah with Hemingway and Philip Percival at his side, and would have cocktails with the memsahib under the lanterns before dining on linen every night in camp, while the boys did all the work.

“He makes most of his money advising these guys on what and what not to add to their collections. It’s a tricky market, and the main problem is counterfeiting. Turns out that counterfeiting a rare gun is much easier than counterfeiting a thousand-dollar bill or a Rembrandt. Marty works both sides of the trade: he matches collectors to guns, gets a fee from both sides of the deal, and ‘validates’ the authenticity. You don’t want to spend two hundred thousand on a rare early Colt and get it home and hold it to the light and find ‘Made in Italy’ stamped on it.”

“No,” said Swagger, “you don’t. It does seem like a world where a crook could make a ton of loot.”

“That’s why someone of Marty’s integrity is valued. Now, there have been rumors. It’s so psychological. Guy buys a big-dollar piece on Marty’s recommendation, but his buddy says, ‘Hmm, looks fake to me,’ and the guy who was proud and confident is now full of doubts, and he says something and it gets repeated. But nothing substantial that we could find. Like Richard, he seems on the up-and-up, and there’s no record of contacts with exotic operators, no hint of criminal malfeasance.”

“Got it,” said Bob.

“Are you going to meet with the guy?”

“Absolutely.”

“I think it’s the right decision. I can find no suggestion that anyone here in Dallas is on to you. Those two exvice PIs are out to pasture, there’s no underworld interest, and our random intercepts never turn up surveillors; everything is looking like Hugh or whoever he is has either lost interest or hasn’t picked you up yet.”

Swagger nodded, albeit a bit grimly. “That’s what every man I ever killed thought one second before the bullet arrived.”

I am fully aware that as I write, I am being hunted. I await word from the various agents I have afield, confident that my disguises, my barriers, my fortifications, my confusions are impenetrable. I am sublimely confident. Hmm, then why am I drinking so much Vod?

Anyhow, let us return to the far more interesting past and my courtship of the fool called Lee Harvey Oswald. After our dinner meet, I let him stew a day or so. Let him think it through, get himself ginned up, not force too much on him at once. I spent the next day in West Dallas, trying two more Mexican restaurants, truly enjoying each one. I read the Times at lunch, thoroughly, as was my custom, noting yet another White House conference on the Republic of South Vietnam, which was disappointing everyone in its military’s lack of improvement in the wake of the coup that killed Diem a few weeks earlier. I don’t know what they expected, and it began to make me mad again, not merely that my report had been twisted to nonproductive ends but that another parade seemed to be forming, and I fancied I could hear the drums drum-drum-drumming and the bugles blow-blow-blowing. I had spent six months there, from October ’62 through March ’63, and I saw little in the place worth dying or killing for. The Southerners weren’t a warlike people, and without a great deal of aid, they’d never stand up to a Soviet-fortified and Soviet-advised North Vietnamese army. I was long gone by the time of the coup, which seemed to me a clear doubling-down on an unwinnable bet. But I heard reports and could imagine the look of fiery anger on Captain Nhung’s face after he’d shot the Diem brothers in the head, in the back of the armored personnel carrier, on the way to general staff headquarters at Tan Son Nhut. I saw the picture that circulated in Langley: President Diem, a pleasant enough fellow in my dealings with him, with his head blown in at close range.

Anyway, I tried to put my anger aside and pursue my true goal in Dallas, to look around at a cocktail lounge called the Patio a few miles north of downtown, in another dreary suburban neighborhood. The place had little appeal to me, but it was said to be a favorite of General Walker’s, where he loved to sit on the outdoor platform and drink margaritas, whatever they were, with his staff. He was slated to give a speech at SMU November 25, and having spent some time with the Dallas Times Herald, I knew it was likely that he and his “boys” (a few years later, though I was out of the country at the time, he earned the quotation marks around “boys”) would head there for the hooch. It didn’t take much time for me to figure where to put Alek so that he couldn’t miss, although he would, and where to put whomever was shooting backup so he wouldn’t miss. Yes, I had a pretty good idea who that would be, but that lay in the future at least a week.

I made notes to myself, considered angles, heights, and so forth, tracked getaway routes, and although the planning of sniper assassinations wasn’t one of my strong points, I satisfied myself that late on a Monday evening, with vehicular and pedestrian traffic low, Alek could easily cut through the alleyway across the street, hide his rifle, then cut through backyards to a pickup spot. Meanwhile, if needed, our real shooter would have undisturbed escape by vehicle; all that would take place in the four minutes that in those days was the norm for Dallas Police Department response, again according to the Times Herald. I felt we could probably do it in two with practice, maybe even one. Within a day or so, everything would be back to normal in cowtown, and a certain nasty piece of work would trouble nobody, least of all the United States of America, again.

I think I should say that committing to this murder made the next murder seem not so great a reach. In Clandestine Services, we had a culture of leader killing. We had done it before; we would do it again. As I have said, a few weeks earlier, the APC had clanked into Tan Son Nhut with its bloody cargo aboard, and everybody was convinced the killer had done the right thing and was willing to assume the mantle of murderer for the sake of his country. There were others, a red puppet in Africa, a series of strongmen in Guatemala, an appalling boss in the ever-troublesome Dominican. Des FitzGerald was, by rumor at least, currently planning the removal by violence of Fidel Castro. That’s who we were; that’s what we did. There wasn’t all this weepy nonsense about the sanctity of life, the preciousness of each human soul. Someone had to do the man’s work, and we were the men who did it, took pride in it, felt righteous about it. Orwell never said it, I am told, but whoever did must have worked for Clandestine Services in the fifties and sixties: “People sleep warm in their beds at night because rough men do violence on their behalf.” We were the rough men, although we had very smooth manners.

That night he got off the bus and started down North Beckley again, and I pulled up.

“Good evening, Alek,” I said. “Possibly some vodka tonight? Agent Hotsy’s son has another game.”

He looked either way, then jumped in, and off I sped.

He didn’t wait for me. “I’ll do it. I’ll help any way I can. It’s my duty, I’ll do it.”

“Congratulations, Alek,” I said, “three complete sentences without a grammatical error. You’re learning quickly.”

“This time,” he said, “there won’t be not any mistakes.”

“There goes the record,” I said.

“Anyhow,” I went on, “let us move beyond grammar. I take it you have understood what I have not yet stated but only inferred, and what it is I require of you. I mean not just your heart and mind and body, your faith in revolution and the righteousness of our way, but what in the practical sense it is I want you to do.”

“I do.”

“I have to hear you say it, Comrade.”

He took a big breath, and broke eye contact. He knew he was leaving shore, sailing off again on uncharted waters to what he hoped would be his destiny.

“I will this time succeed. I will shoot and kill General Edwin Walker, for crimes against peace and the revolution. I can do it. I can be the assassin. There won’t be any mistakes.”

“No, there won’t be any mistakes. Because this time I have drawn up a plan, an approach route, an escape route. We will time things to the second, we will measure the distance, we will know that there are no impediments to shooting. Our intelligence will be sound, our preparations thorough. We will do this professionally.”

“Yes sir.”

“Now, tell me, Alek, why is it we’re doing this?”

“What? Why? Because you asked me.”

“Forget that part. I mean politically, strategically, morally, what is the purpose? This is murder we’re talking here. It’s not to be done lightly, on a whim, or for shabby psychological needs.”

“He’s a bad man. He needs to die. That’s all.”

“And that’s enough for you?”

“It is. It isn’t for you?”

“Not for authorization. In my memo to authority, I argued that General Walker applied rightist pressure to President Kennedy, and Kennedy wasn’t politically able to stand up to it after failures at the Bay of Pigs, Vienna, and the Cuban Missile Crisis.”

“I thought America won that. I was angry.”

“Propaganda. Khrushchev traded him Russian missiles in Cuba for American missiles in Turkey. We won, as our missiles were far less valuable than yours. Kennedy knows this and is spoiling for a fight, and General Walker is shoving him into it. Wherever he chooses to fight, it will be a mistake. Possibly the Republic of South Vietnam, possibly Cuba, possibly somewhere in South America, perhaps even Europe. Walker’s popularity squeezes Kennedy, and something tragic for both our peoples happens, because of Walker’s insanity and Kennedy’s weakness. So we take Walker out of the equation. By taking one life, perhaps we save many.”

“I agree, I agree,” said Alek, his face lit with inner zeal. Again I thought I saw a tear.

Why did I do this? It is odd. I’m not sure I know. Alek was an easy mark; I could have gotten him to wear ladies’ clothes in Times Square, shouting “Long live Russia,” if I had wanted to. I think I was arguing with myself and using him as a surrogate. I wanted to hear the arguments said out loud, and I thought in some way, I might speak from my subconscious and say something more honest than I intended. I might learn something of my own true motives, as opposed to the policy mumbo jumbo by which I justified the killing, knowing that policy is malleable and that it could be used to justify anything. I suppose I was also preparing for upcoming seductions, knowing I would have to convince the man who would act as backup shooter to do so, and he was far smarter than Alek and might have come up with unexpected counterarguments.

In another sense, I felt I owed it to him. He was the expendable one, the sacrifice. If it happened, he would be left to burn to death in the Texas electric chair, screaming of red agents who’d given him orders straight from SMERSH. I doubted if the officials who executed him could keep a straight face during the operation. I wanted to give him at least an idea of where it fit in in the grand scheme of things and the belief that he had somehow made a contribution. It might help get him through the long night before they turned the switch.

“In a few days, I will contact you again. At that meeting I will present you with a plan and a map. I want you prepared; do not get in any arguments, do not read any papers, do not trouble your mind with new information. I want your mind unagitated. Since you’re a fighter and a yapper, I know that’s hard for you, but do your best for me. I want you ready to read and commit to memory, do you see? You have to concentrate for me, because you cannot possess the plan on paper. If things should go wrong, you cannot be found with a plan written in Russian. It would cause problems. Security, do you see?”

“I do. But what should I do if I’m caught?”

“You won’t be caught.”

“I know, but plans can backfire. It could happen.”

“Then be patient. Say nothing. We will get you out somehow. Possibly a prisoner trade, possibly a breakout, I don’t know. We always get our people back, that’s our reputation. If it goes sour and you keep the faith, we’ll spring you, and you’ll spend your life in Havana as a valued citizen who sacrificed for the Revolution. We’ll even work out a way for Marina and Junie and the new child to come to you.”

“I knew I could count on you, Comrade,” he said.

“Okay, now go. I will get you the plan, you will memorize it. You have the ammunition; do you have the rifle?”

“It’s with Marina in Fort Worth. She doesn’t know I still have it. I can get it anytime.”

“Excellent. Leave it there for the time being; concentrate on concentrating. In all likelihood, you will do this thing, get away with it, and in months to come, possibly we will find other wet tasks for you to do. You will help the Revolution. This is what you want, correct?”

“I will show you.” He reached into his shirt and pulled out an envelope that he had been careful not to fold. He pulled a photograph out of it. “See,” he said, “this is who I really am.”

I pulled to the side of the road and turned on the light in the car. The photo later became world-famous when it appeared on the cover of Life magazine and a thousand crazed conspiracy books. You’ve seen it. Alek in black, holding his rifle across his body, his pistol tucked into his belt, and in his other hand copies of the Daily Worker and the Trotskyist International – he had no idea that these two organs, like the parties they represented, were in blood opposition to each other – staring forthrightly at the camera lens in poor Marina’s hand, wearing that eternal smirk of the sucker who thinks he’s figured the game as the game is figuring him. I could see that it was a kind of romantic image of the red guerrilla that animated his deepest fantasies, like something out of the 1910s, an assassin, a bomber with a bowling-ball explosive and a long, sparkling fuse, a Gavrilo Princip, a figure out of Conrad. I felt sorry for a man who could be so deluded even as I said, “Yes, Alek. That is it. That’s the spirit we need!”

I spent the next few days holed up, working on The Plan. I went back to the operational zone a couple of times, I took public transportation to and from, I walked the distances, I charted the police activity, I noted the mileages to the police stations, I had margaritas at the Patio so I could determine whether Alek’s movement on the roof or my shooter in the car where I would place him would be particularly visible. I even climbed up on the roof in old blue jeans and boat shoes, Yale poof playing Jedburgh commando! I got a good look at Alek’s shooting position and tried to imagine his actions.

I knew certain things. First, that the immediate result of the shot would be a frozen moment of fear followed by absolute chaos. As I saw it, my shooter would have the general zeroed and be well prepared for Alek’s shot. If Alek missed, he would fire a silenced shot (I took on faith that Lon would solve all problems), finishing the issue. But witnesses would remember it differently; some would say there came a shot and the general’s head exploded, and others would say there was a shot and the general’s head exploded a full second later. What if Alek missed and the bullet was recovered? That would be dicey, yes, but it would be so confusing to everybody that no one would get it. There would be – assuming Lon had worked it out – no record of a second bullet existing. Since the Patio was brick, the building behind it stone, there was a good chance that a miss by Alek would shatter on a hard surface. In any event, the worst-case scenario seemed to amount to confusion, conflicting theories, an eternal mystery, a suspicion that there was more to know – but nothing substantial leading to our plot, except a theoretically captured Alek’s crazed insistence that the reds had made him do it.

The difficult part wasn’t the plan itself but reducing it to easily remembered components. I tried to find a mnemonic device that would help Alek’s pea brain retain the information. I came up with APPLE: approach, position, patience, liquidation, escape. I knew that “liquidation” was weak, but I had to get a known word out of the puzzle. Since it was a word associated in the popular imagination with old NKVD practices and employed frequently by the patron saint of agents, Ian Fleming, in his Bond books (which Alek had read devotedly), it was okay but not optimal. I thought that authorities would consider it the kind of hokey nonsense a fantasist like Alek would come up with.

Each letter had further information associated with it. APPROACH had a set of numbers, 830 15-33-15, which meant 8:30 bus no. 15 to Thirty-third Street, fifteen-minute walk down Thirty-third to target area.

And so forth and so on, very secret agent-like. I thought Alek would enjoy the primitive spycraft, and if I got his imagination fired up, maybe he’d apply himself.

I sent him a postcard, knowing in those days of postal efficiency, it would be delivered the next day. It simply said, “Texas Theatre, 8 p.m. show.” That was the movie house a mile or so from his roominghouse, where, ironically, he would be arrested on November 22.

That night he showed up. The movie was absurd, something about teenagers on a beach, and I could not stand it. I’d noted him when he came in. I went, sat next to him for a second, and dropped the plan (in an envelope) in his hands.

I whispered, “Take it home, commit it to memory, and copy it in your own hand. Do not destroy it. It must be returned to me when next I make contact. Every night study it until you know it by heart. Run through it one night and be sure you can make all the connections. I will be back in contact in ten days or so, the week of the eighteenth. Our target date is November twenty-fifth, that Monday night.”

Then I left. You must remember, in those days there were no easily accessible copying machines. Xerox had yet to take over the world, there was no fax, and the only “copiers” were extremely expensive photocopiers of the sort that produced negative imagery, to which Alek, in his reduced circumstances, would be unlikely to have access. I knew that making a copy of it was beyond him.

I left him in the Texas Theatre, while silly California girls did the frug and the monkey on-screen, and disappeared into the night. I had become an expert on Dallas transportation, so I walked a few blocks west and caught a bus downtown. The next day I flew back to Boston and then back to D.C. My next mission was to see what Lon had come up with.

It took most of the day to get back from Dallas. I had to pay cash for the flight to Boston, take a cab to Cambridge, sneak upstairs, come down and check out of the hotel, take another cab back to Logan, then the flight to National. The only problem was the checkout, where the clerk said, “Was everything all right, sir? We noticed you didn’t seem to sleep in the bed.”

I said, “Yes, it was fine. Look, if anyone should ever ask, it’ll be my wife’s private detectives. So take this” – I winked and handed him two twenties, after having considered the whole flight back to Boston how much to pay, twenty being too little and apt to annoy him and fifty being too generous and apt to prove memorable – “and remember to forget that I never mussed the sheets.”

“Yes sir,” he said with a smile. “And I bet the housekeeping reports disappear too!” In those days, all us “wolves” hung together; manhood was a national adultery culture, possibly under the influence of Playboy magazine, which made such activities hep, like jazz and hi-fi. I never once cheated on Peggy, but many was the time I used the pretense of such a thing to help me out of a tight one.

I called Peggy from National and told her I was back, I’d be home, but first I wanted to run to the office. It made sense, because once I was on the GW Memorial Parkway, it was just a few exits beyond the Key Bridge, and I was at our big shiny new campus.

I went to my office – it was more than half empty because I arrived around 5 – and quickly typed up a fictional report on my PEACOCK adventures, what young writing stars I had talked to, which of them were likely to go into journalism, which would waste their lives writing movies or potboilers or even, God help them, television. I should say as an aside that after Dallas, I moved PEACOCK from its fictional guise to an actual existence, and it was one of the Agency’s enduring successes. I made friends through PEACOCK who served me the remainder of my years at Langley, particularly in Vietnam, when I ran Phoenix and wanted to get the Agency’s side of the story told in the right papers; it exists, in slightly different form, to this day.

I also checked on three operations I was in charge of that seemed to require no immediate influence and whose details will only bore the reader, as they would bore the writer; I sent inter-office notes to a few colleagues with updates, questions, requests, to get back into the flow of things and make sure my absence hadn’t been noted.

Then it was home by 9; Peggy had a highball waiting, and before I had a sip, I visited each of the boys to find that the pattern was the same. Jack had missed me and showed it and gave me a big hug; Peter, my middle boy, never had much use for me and more or less communicated his indifference (yet I am told he gave the most passionate oration at my “funeral” in 1993); and Will hadn’t really noticed, as he’d had games or practice on all the days when I was gone. Peggy and I had a late supper, and she went to bed and I poured another highball and told her I’d be up in a bit, I just wanted to check the mail.

I’m glad I did. Mostly, it was bills, but there was one strange, rather large envelope without a return address. Hefting it, I suspected it contained some kind of tabular matter; it had the weight of heavy paper. I noted that it was postmarked Roanoke, near Lon’s place in southwestern Virginia.

I opened it up. It was a copy of a magazine called Guns & Ammo, and it was full of pictures of various firearms and articles on such things as “Remington’s New 700: A Challenger to the Model 70?” and “Llama’s Big .44 Mag Makes Its Point Loud and Clear,” whatever those things meant. Flipping through it once, I noted nothing. Flipping through it a second time, I noted that one of the center pages seemed heavier or less flimsy than the others. I looked closely and realized that pages 42 and 43 had been glued together. I peeled them apart, and a letter fell out on the floor. I had to laugh; Lon was playing cloak-and-dagger tricks on me, to his own merriment.

I picked it up and read the salutation:

To: Commander Bond 007

From: Technical Department

Re: The Assassination of Dr. No

Disposition: Burn After Reading

Good old Lon. Ever the cheerful gamesman, and it was in that vein he began.

Commander Bond, I have given much thought and some experimentation to your requirements and believe I have just found a solution. Put a pot of coffee on because you’ve got a long night or afternoon ahead of you, much of it boring, unless you’re like me and find the arcana of firearms and ballistics fascinating in and of their own. But since that’s about .0001 percent of the population, I wish you luck.

I should hereby give the same admonition to the reader. Henry James’s explication of the prose narrative – “Dramatize, dramatize, dramatize!” – will hereby be put aside and replaced by “explain, explain, explain.” For you to understand how we managed to fool the world for half a century, you must steel yourself to the assault of the details.

After reading Lon’s letter, I burned it in the fireplace. Probably a week hasn’t gone by in the fifty years since that I haven’t thought of it, for it made, as I knew it would, what happened possible. It was the fulcrum of the event. I think I remember it pretty well, so I will now give it to you as I got it from my great and tragic cousin Lon:

Let me begin by narrowly defining the technical requirements. You, James Bond, have been assigned to eliminate one Dr. No for his multifarious crimes. Yet you cannot be caught, and there can be no evidence of your involvement or the British Secret Service’s involvement. Fortunately, you have a handy patsy, Felix Leiter of the American CIA, that dunderheaded American would-be intelligence service. Poor Felix: you can manipulate him into almost anything because he so wants to be like the debonair, suave, bunny-bagging Commander Bond. So you have easily conned him into taking a sniper shot at Dr. No. Alas, he has only one weapon available, and that is a surplus war rifle of Italian vintage, namely a Model 38 6.5 mm Mannlicher-Carcano carbine with a dreary Japanese telescopic sight of questionable utility. You worry that Felix is incapable of making the shot, so you have arranged for a backup shooter of much higher ability to be present at the moment of the killing. If Felix, as is probable, misses, the agile backup shooter will take the kill in the next second or so. But all ballistic evidence must point at Felix; he is the Judas goat in the operation.

I will not worry here about firing angles, getaways, placement, any of that stuff. That is your department. I will not worry about the disposition of poor Felix; that is yours as well. Mine is simply the technical: how can backup Shooter X put a bullet into Dr. No’s cerebellum and leave no trace of his existence so that the apprehended Felix Leiter is held responsible for the shot, as proved by the ballistic forensics scientifically applied by experts. It’s the case of the bullet that never was.

This is what I would do. First, I would provide Felix with the ammunition he is to use, having previously secured an example of it myself [this I had already done, basically on instinct, so I was ahead of the game]. So we give Felix a box of 6.5 mm Mannlicher-Carcano ammunition manufactured by the Western Cartridge Company under contract from the Italian government, declared surplus by the Italians, resold to American wholesalers, and packaged in a nice white box. The bullet Shooter X fires is basically identical to Felix’s and off the same cartridge-manufacturing line at Western’s St. Louis manufacturing facility.

We have before us one of those cartridges. Let us examine it. It is blunt-tipped with a copper-coated bullet protruding from its brass case that has an unusually exaggerated length given the overall size of the cartridge. It doesn’t look like a missile so much as a cartridge case with a cigar stuck in it. It is a heavy, dense item for its size, speaking eloquently of its seriousness of purpose.

You are aware, Commander Bond, that firearms and ammunition are not the stolid, imperturbable things they seem? They are plastic; they may be altered, customized, improved, their tasks changed, their performance envelope shifted, all kinds of magical tweaking and petting may be applied to them. That is what we are going to do with our 6.5 mm Mannlicher-Carcano cartridge.

(If you’ve forgotten or never knew: a cartridge is composed of several units. It contains a bullet, which is propelled down the barrel to terminal effect. The bullet is powered by rapidly burning – not exploding – powder, which is contained in a brass vessel often called a shell or a case. The rear of the shell, called the head, contains a rim which is machined to fit tightly, held in perfect alignment by cleverly machined grooves on the bolt, thus locking it into the chamber of the rifle. The head also contains, wedged tightly into its center, a magic gizmo called the primer, a chemically potent nubbin of specific materials that becomes a spear of flame when struck by the hammer, lighting the powder and producing the expanding gas that propels the bullet down the barrel and into history. Not that it matters, but the cartridge is an extraordinary device, so efficient and well designed that it has not been replaced in over a hundred years and will not be for another hundred years. But back to our cartridge, our 6.5 M-C.)

The first thing we do is pull the bullet from the shell, easily done with a common reloading implement. We throw out the cartridge case, full of powder, with its primer. Don’t need ’em. This is about bullets, not cartridges. Now let us examine (as I have done at length) what is before us. It is 1.25 inches long. It weighs 162 grains. It is copper-covered, and its copper covering is somewhat thick, thicker than normal, as it is designed to be a hard object that does not deform when it strikes flesh but penetrates deeply. The copper is wrapped around a lead core, which can be seen by looking at the base of the bullet, observing the lead interior where the copper hasn’t covered.

We put this bullet in a vise, upside down. Or we put it on a lathe, horizontally. Any advanced hobbyist’s shop has one or the other. We drill a .200-inch tunnel through the latitudinal (lengthwise) center of the bullet, that is, through the lead from the base, up toward the nose of the bullet, though we stop at 1 inch depth, leaving the nose of the bullet intact.

Now what have we got? We have a bullet that weighs probably 20 grains less than it did originally but has been substantially altered in terms of its performance, without sacrificing any of its accuracy.

Next we return the bullet to the vise and we carefully saw or file off about an eighth of an inch of its blunt nose, removing enough copper to open up the lead (which is much softer) to the impact point of the bullet.

It is now substantially more volatile than it was, and instead of being counted upon, by virtue of its structural integrity – its hardness – to penetrate and stay more or less together on penetration, it may be counted upon to disintegrate when it strikes a living target, particularly if it strikes the skull or other bone structure. That is because of two dynamics: first, the nose of the bullet, which is now soft lead, will rupture on impact, peeling backward, almost blooming like a flower. Second, from within, the bored-out center has left the whole far more fragile; it will atomize in the violence of the explosion. Expect massive brain damage if the round hits the brain.

Next we take that doctored bullet and reload it in a case for shooting at Dr. No. But wait! We threw out the Mannlicher-Carcano case and its powder. Why, we have a dressed-up bullet with no place to go. Or do we?

Here’s the key: we reload that bullet into the case of a cartridge called the .264 Winchester Magnum!

How is such a thing possible? Stop and think, Commander Bond. The 6.5 mm Italian cartridge is simply measured in metric-system terminology: 6.5 mm equals .264 inches diameter, or close enough for government work, like assassinations. The Carcano bullet fits neatly into the .264 Win Mag case and produces a new cartridge, the hybrid .264/Carcano, which slides neatly into the chamber of a .264 Winchester Magnum rifle. In the interest of making this less boring, I simplify. You might have to make slight adjustments to the hybrid cartridge or the rifle to get it to fit. The actual diameter of the 6.5 is .267, three thousandths of an inch larger than the barrel diameter of the .264 rifle. That might make a difference in the cartridge fit to the chamber, but it doesn’t require surgery to fix, only minor alterations. For example, you might turn the Carcano bullet on a lathe against a hard blade held at a precision measurement and whittle it down three thousandths of an inch. Or you might “neck turn” the cartridge casing, meaning you mount the shell in a fixture and rotate it by hand against a blade set to a particular depth. Benchrest shooters do this all the time, because manufactured cartridge shells are frequently inconsistent in their neck thickness, and in that game, regularity – ZZZZZZZZ! Wake up, Bond! More coffee, damn you! – is the key to accuracy.

What have you accomplished?

First of all, you’ve made the bullet, now explosive, much more lethal. So what? It was lethal to begin with, as any object that strikes a human skull at over 3,000 feet per second will result in death. The subject, I assure you, won’t notice the difference. He won’t be deader with one round than the other. There is no deader than dead.

More important, you’ve made the bullet more accurate. Not in itself, but now it can be fired in the Model 70 Winchester with, as mine has, a Unertl 10X Vulture scope, one of the best, if not the best, rifles currently manufactured in the United States (of course the idiots are changing it next year!). And absolutely the best scope. The reasons a rifle is accurate have to do with a variety of factors, all of which the Model 70 enjoys and the Mannlicher Model 38 does not: the precision fit of metal to metal and metal to wood; the crispness of trigger pull; the fit of the rifle to the human body; the precision with which the scope has been mounted to the receiver; the quality of the rifling in the barrel and the kind and grade of metal used in the barrel; the quality of the glass in the optical system. Maybe there are others that I have forgotten, but you get the picture: the shooter with the Model 70 has extraordinary technical advantages over the shooter with the 38, and this is before the quality of the shooters, their experience, their natural levels of talent, their strength, health, stamina, and mental preparedness, are factored in.

You’ve made the bullet invisible. You say, do you not, Commander Bond, sir, You’re mad! I am not at all.

Here is another key point: by making sure the bullet explodes upon striking the skull and renders itself into fragments and powder eviscerating the cerebral vault, you guarantee that it cannot be read for rifle signature! That is, no piece will be recovered that will bear any marks from the lands and grooves on the interior of the barrel it was fired through. It cannot reveal its fraudulence. It cannot be linked to Felix Leiter’s barrel, but it cannot be linked to any other barrel either. From the physical evidence available, there is no suggestion or inference that you, Commander Bond, were firing your fine Model 70 at almost the same time poor Leiter was firing his Eye-tie eyesore.

Don’t the witnesses hear two shots when there was only one?

Not at all. You’ve seen – good God, Bond, you’ve starred in! – movies with silencers, no? Of all the Hollywood gun gimmicks, those devices are the most accurately portrayed. No, they do not work on revolvers, and no, they do not sound like a midget sneezing. But a suppressor – the real name – can blunt and diffuse the sound of the report considerably, so that people around it are unable to associate it with a gunshot and equally unable to say from what direction it emanated. Your Yank colleagues in the war, the OSS, fixed them on High Standard .22s and Thompson and Sten submachine guns and used them creatively; you Brits had a gizmo called the Welrod pistol, same thing. I’ll spare you the long description, since I know you’re drifting, drifting, drifting, but a bolt-action rifle is admirably suited for such a device, which consists of a tube attached to the muzzle. That tube contains a series of baffles or waffles within it, a series of chambers and holes so that the expanding gas is slowed down as it wends its way through the thing, until it escapes with a fizzle rather than a pop. Any competent machinist can put one together for you in a day; or you can obtain a professionally manufactured item, as they’ve been available to certain markets for a long time. It so happens that in my collection, I have a Schalldaempher Type 3, the 8 mm silencer the Luftwaffe paratroopers used during the war. They’re pretty rare, but a friend of a friend wanted to move one he’d brought back and. . you can guess the rest of the story. Out of curiosity and enthusiasm, I went ahead and machined a steel application to fit it to my Model 70 so that affixing the German device was a snap, even with supersonic ammunition, which emits a crack downrange but not at the shooting site.

Oh, I sense your suspicion. It all turns, does it not, the deception, the getaway, the mission itself, on that bullet. How do you know the bullet will explode? In gun events, something always goes wrong, something anomalous or untoward happens, nothing can be predicted with 100 percent confidence, it’s too big a risk, and on and on and on.

I left the best for last. This .264 Winchester Magnum isn’t just any cartridge. It’s brand-new from New Haven, a cartridge designed specifically for western plains game shooting – that is, long-distance shots at antelope and mulie way out beyond the briar patch, possibly in the next county. It shoots flat, it shoots fast. It shoots faster – I’m talking about bullet velocity – than any bullet known to man. The metallurgy of the Model 70 is such that, unlike the 38, it can stand up to the highest pressures of modern chemistry that the geniuses at Olin can conjure. That means our doctored bullet will strike Dr. No not at the velocity of a Mannlicher Carcano, which is just under 2,000 feet per second, but at the full vel of the .264, which is over 3,000 feet per second. It will explode! It is guaranteed by the laws not of man but of God: that is, the laws of physics.

And still more. If it leaves any trace amounts of metal in the destroyed head of Dr. No, and the autopsy doctor manages to salvage them, the only possible test will be metallurgical. By looking with an electronic device, they will be able to determine by comparison with other metallic samples what kind of bullet felled Dr. No. It will prove undisputedly that Dr. No was shot with a 6.5 Mannlicher-Carcano bullet manufactured by the Western Cartridge Company and no other.

I’ve appended a drawing to chart these developments.

I want a nightful of martinis for all this labor, Bond, and the sooner the better.

There was no signature, of course. I read it over and over, then burned it and its envelope in the fireplace, having committed the salient points to mind. I had trouble sleeping, I was so excited, but eventually, the long day of travel caught up with me and I drifted off.

The next morning at breakfast, I said to Peggy, “Sweetie, I think we should take a weekend in Virginia. I haven’t seen Lon in several years, and I’m feeling bad about it.”

Peggy said, “But Will’s team is playing Gilman in Baltimore on Saturday. He’ll be so disappointed if we miss it.”

“Oh, gosh,” I said. “Oh, I hate to disappoint him. On the other hand, Lon is family also, and I feel that we haven’t seen him in too long. It’ll be okay with Will; he’ll understand?”

Peggy knew when I had my mind set on something, and she also knew my defying her was so rare that when I did so, it was for a purpose. She relented. Such was the rarely deployed but nevertheless uncontested power of the husband, father, and provider in those days. I called Lon that afternoon – it was an easy call from cousin to cousin, sure not to rouse any suspicion from Mr. Angleton’s theoretical eavesdroppers, so no subterfuge was required – and told him we’d be down for a visit and dinner on Saturday. That night I had a man-to-man with Will. He was never a rebellious or resentful son. He understood, and by that time, the boys were old enough to be left alone, so there were no difficulties with last-minute babysitters.

I had one last task other than convincing Lon to join my little crusade. That was to recruit a third member to the team. If Lon was to handle the shooting and I the driving and logistics as well as running Alek, I needed an action guy who could navigate us out of trouble’s way and handle with aplomb any unseen difficulties or tough stuff that could come up (though I had planned assiduously to avoid that) while Lon and I concentrated on our task. I needed someone who was a field agent’s field agent, slick, quick-thinking, tough, with a burglar’s guts. Naturally, I chose a burglar.

I will call him Jimmy Costello, not his real name, because he has sons alive in the Washington, D.C., area, all, like mine, prosperous and well-regarded members of the community. I want no shame affixed to them on account of their father’s deeds. Years later, I wrote the middle one a letter that got him in to Yale; it was the least I could do for Jimmy Costello.

Jimmy was in his forties by this time and well known in the intelligence trade. Though we assumed he had learned the trade on the far side of the law, he had somehow turned to the side of us angels and now worked strictly for the Agency or the Agency’s friends, some other agencies, and a number of divorce lawyers. He may have been the best burglar in Washington. He could get into any place because he had a natural genius for locks. I’m guessing he was raised in the locksmith’s trade, as no one could pick up so much any other way. He simply looked at a lock and understood how it worked, and carried with him always a set of picks and, in a matter of seconds, could spring any secured door. Safes took a little longer, but not much. He had no fear of heights or of walking at midnight along the precipice of an embassy roof, gymnastically lowering himself to a window under the eaves, hanging by one hand from a gutter and with the other popping the lock, then propelling himself through the open orifice. Our embassy section used him to plant microphones and wire, and with his nimble fingers, he could loot an inner sanctum of its secrets in a matter of minutes, then be gone and leave no trace of having been there, and from that night on, we were a third party to any discussions between Igor and Boris and their supervisor just in from Ye Olde Country. I don’t know if we used the intelligence cleverly or not, but we got it cleverly. The FBI used him against both Sov agents and the Italian mafia; divorce lawyers against wealthy philanderers, so that after the proceedings, they were not so wealthy. He could have stolen the recipe to Coca-Cola for the Pepsi people if it had come to that, and he could have gotten us the bomb diagrams if we hadn’t beaten the reds to it.

The best thing about Jimmy was his loyalty. He could be counted on. He was a stand-up guy; all you have to do is look at the history of the Irish to understand how that attribute ran in his veins. He would have kept mum to the point of torture; it was bred into him by long centuries on the bog plotting against my ancestors, and leaving them dead more often than not, and never snitching when caught, out of fear of facing the eternal hell of the traitor. That he would never be; that he never was.

His other skill – it goes with his profile – was his charming brazenness or possibly his brazen charm. He had that Irish gift of conviction, and when the sneak wouldn’t do, bullshit would. He could talk you out of your underpants and send you home happy. I suppose he was a complete psychopath, but he was our psychopath, and that was exactly what the proposition demanded.

I met him in the bar of the Willard, where he hung out every night when he wasn’t working.

“Jimmy, me boy,” I said in my phoniest movie brogue, a joke between us.

“I am,” he said, affecting his own version of a brogue, which he’d probably learned from Bing Crosby movies, “and how’s his eminence Mr. Meachum?” He always called me Mr. Meachum, as if I were of the castle and he of the cottage, and no amount of argument could convince him to do differently.

“Don’t know about his eminence,” I said, “but I’m fine.” It was an old line, but he pretended otherwise and laughed.

We exchanged banal chitchat for a few minutes, each consciously eyeing the room to see that no known adversaries happened to be there. When we were satisfied that we were publicly in private, we proceeded to business.

“Might you have a few days toward the end of the month for your old pal Meachum?”

“I might, though I am busy this time of year. Is there any flexibility?”

“Alas, no. My sales plan is cued to something I cannot control. It would require your presence in the city of Dallas, Texas – our expense, of course – from the nineteenth to the twenty-fifth. We’ll stay at the Adolphus–”

“A first-class joint.”

“Indeed, it is. I need a trusted fellow at my side while I deal with problems as they may come up. Someone smart, tough, fast. He’s not available, so I thought of you.”

He laughed. “They do keep James Bond busy these days, do they not?” James Bond was on everybody’s mind then.

“Never have trusted the Brits, Jimmy,” I said. “Wouldn’t take him if I could have him. Give me a son of the auld sod, with a twinkle in his eye and steel in his fists.”

He liked the compliment, even if we both seemed to be playing movie roles. “So, Dallas?” he said. “Not your usual sales area, Mr. Meachum.”

He was drinking Glenlivet on the rocks, myself Pinch and soda.

“Duty takes us where it takes us, Jimmy. I’d rather it were Paris myself. I do pay well, and if there’s hardship involved and some schedule shuffling, then I’ll pay for that; a kind of schedule-rearrangement bonus, as it were.”

“Well, Mr. Meachum, yours is my own favorite firm, and continuing in their favor is definitely in my interest, so aside from travel expenses, I’ll not charge more, and I will see you where you want me in Dallas at any time on the nineteenth.”

Simple as that, I got Jimmy, and as with Lon’s genius and talent for rifles, what happened could not have happened without his contribution. He was always a rogue and hero, the bravest of the brave, the truest of the true. You see, we weren’t monsters. I suppose that’s the lesson. You’ve been taught that if we existed, we were the vilest of the vile, snatching greatness from the young prince and sending our nation on its way to hell. But to us, we were professionals, patriots, and men of honor. We weren’t in it for the money, or to sell more Bell helicopters and McDonnell-Douglas fighter jets, but to save lives and lead the nation through the swamp to the hilltop. Besides, we were only going to kill a screwball right-wing general.

CHAPTER 16

As I said, Sergeant,” said Harry Gardner, “Dad was a man of literature, really. So his books, his private books, were all fiction.”

Swagger once again stood at the threshold of Niles Gardner’s office, that book-lined cave where the CIA’s famous Boswell had tried for thirty years to write novels and failed. He could see the Red Nine lying undisturbed on the desk and the four ceramic bluebirds and the illustration of the six green elm trees on the shelves.

“Well,” said Swagger, “as I say, it’s a long shot. But I noted that beside the pistol, which is sometimes called a Red Nine, there’s that collection of bluebirds, four of ’em, and that picture of elm trees, six of ’em. It occurred to me that somehow the phrases ‘Red Nine,’ ‘Blue Four,’ or ‘Green Six’ might have had some meaning to him, like in some private way he was commemorating them.”

“Wow,” said Harry, “you know, that’s remarkable. I noted those things too, and I thought them strange, but it never occurred to me to put them in a pattern. They were so unlike Dad. He was not a sentimentalist, and those bluebirds in particular are so kitsch that I can’t understand why they’re there. Let’s look at the picture.” He took it down from the wall, handed it to Swagger, then took it back. “Dime-store frame. Let’s see what the picture is.”

He turned it over, unfolded four soft copper flaps securing the mounting board, and shook the board free of the frame. The picture fluttered to the floor. Bob picked it up and discovered that it was folded in such a way to display the six trees, but it was actually an illustration from a Redbook short story entitled “Passion’s Golden Tresses.” Unfolded, it showed a handsome young man chastely embracing a beautiful young blonde against a forest backdrop. The subtitle on the story was “Her Hair Was Beautiful, But Was That All David Loved?” The author was Agnes Stanton Phillips.

“Good Lord,” said Harry. “Now, there’s your classic fifties kitsch!” He turned to Swagger. “You’ve introduced a strangeness to my father that not even I knew existed! What on earth does this mean?”

“It connects with nothing of your father, or his mind, or anything that you can think of?”

“Nothing. I’m astonished. Where’s this going?”

“I found the pistol odd too, in its way. I noted those other things, all with the numbers attached to colors. I thought: Radio call signs, agent names, map coordinates, some kind of color code, all of which could have some connection to intelligence work and might have some bearing somehow on the fake name he cooked up for Hugh Meachum.”

“In other words, if you can decipher the pattern, maybe it’s the same pattern that connects to Hugh. Or the same principle of pattern, is that it?”

“Something like that. I know it’s thin, believe me.”

“Thin or not, it’s fascinating but way beyond me, Sergeant.”

“It could also be nothing. He liked bluebirds. He liked trees. He liked Mausers.”

“But he didn’t like trees. He didn’t like Mausers. He most certainly didn’t like bluebirds, that I can guarantee you, particularly ceramic ones. So maybe you are on to something.”

“If so, I ain’t smart enough to figure it out.”

“I’ll tell you what. You feel free to dig around here. As I say, I’ve been over it all, and I can guarantee you: no porn, no hidden notes from mistresses, no decoded instructions from his secret masters in the Kremlin, no movie scripts, nothing that anyone but a son would find interesting, and even his son didn’t find it that interesting. I am going to leave you alone with Niles Gardner, and if you find anything, more power to you. Do you need coffee, beer, bourbon, wine, a sandwich, anything like that?”

“No sir.”

“The bathroom is down the hall. Feel free to use it.”

“Thank you, Mr. Gardner.”

Bob turned and faced the mind, or at least a portion of it, of Niles Gardner. He found it intimidating. It was all books, and most of them Bob had never heard of. But starting at the top left-hand corner of the top left-hand bookshelf – the book was A Death in the Family by James Agee – he began to methodically pull each one out, flip the pages for inserts, bookmarks, underlines, whatever, and work his way through the shelves, going from the As to, finally, the Zs.

It took over three hours, and from the well-thumbed, well-worn condition of the volumes, Swagger could tell that Niles Gardner was a man who loved his novels. Hemingway, Faulkner, Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Orwell, Dickens, Wolfe, Wells, Bellow, Friedman, Golding, Brautigan, Pynchon, Fitzgerald, Crane, Flaubert, Camus, Proust, Wharton, Spillane, Tolkien, Robbins, Wallant, he read passionately and catholically. A classic in a Modern Library edition was apt to be found next to something by Jim Thompson. Kurt Vonnegut and James Gould Cozzens and Lloyd C. Douglas and Herman Wouk and Bernard Malamud and Robert A. Heinlein and Norman Mailer and Anton Myrer and Nicholas Monsarrat and John le Carre and Howard Fast and Irwin Shaw and Robert Ruark and Franz Kafka, all were equally displayed and beloved on the long feet of floor-to-ceiling shelves. On and on it went, and there was no relief from the weary task of unshelving, flipping the pages, reading the comments, then replacing. Occasionally, something would fall to the floor, some kind of long-ago bookmark, like a dry cleaner’s slip or a folded index card or someone’s business card or whatever, and each would indicate a stopping place or a passage of brilliance that Niles had awarded an exclamation point.

Finally, Bob was done. He had come across no oddities, no irregularities, no anomalies. It was just a serious reader’s collection of the best his species had done at the ridiculous effort of telling a long story in prose.

“How’re you coming?” asked Harry, leaning in the doorway.

“I suppose it was a game try, but I didn’t learn a damned thing I didn’t already know, except that the world is sadly full of books I’ll never read.”

“This room makes me feel the same way. I–” He paused. “This probably has nothing to do with anything,” he went on, “but I did find one book hidden away when I was searching. It was nonfiction, old, a first edition. It was strange for Dad to have, and he’d hidden it in the bedroom, in his nightstand, under a pile of magazines. What did I do with it?”

Swagger waited as the internal drama played out in Harry’s head.

“I thought it might be valuable, so I set it aside for an appraisal and then never–” He snapped alert. “Wait here. I put it in the attic, where I have some of Dad’s old suits that I’ve been meaning to give away.”

He turned, and Swagger heard the echoes in the old house as the man bounded up the stairs two flights, then bounded back.

He walked in with his trophy.

“Some kind of obscure Victorian science book, though the author’s name is slightly familiar; I can’t remember from where.”

He handed the heavy volume to Bob. It was The Visions of Sane Persons by Francis Galton. It weighed about three tons.

Swagger turned to the title page and saw that it had been published in 1884.

“It’s got a bookmark,” said Harry.

Swagger cracked the old volume to the page that, sometime in the distant past, Niles Gardner had designated as of special meaning, and found himself at the intersection of pages 730 and 731, where he began to read Frances Galton’s comments on numbers and colors.

I’ll spare you details on the weekend and the pitch I made to Lon and his eventual acceptance. As you may have gathered, I would make a later, tougher pitch to Lon, and that was the dramatic one. I’ll detail it at the proper time.

To sum up, Peggy and I got there around 5, had cocktails, and took him to dinner at his country club, where all knew and loved him. The food was excellent, and he was in good spirits. I could tell the intellectual exercise of solving the problem had energized him. The next morning, he and I went out to his range, and he showed me the rifle he had prepared and the ammunition, and convinced me that it was fine, that it would work. I suppose he knew what would come next. He displayed no surprise at the course the conversation took.

Lon was a big man. That’s why he played fullback; ask the Harvard pansies, they know him well. He watched his weight and worked out his upper body with dumbbells regularly, but he was always fighting the pounds; they seemed to creep on him like fog and cling like putty. He had a square American face, wore wire-rimmed glasses, and kept his hair short, like all of us did without question in 1963. He favored corduroys, chinos, and crewneck sweaters, all well worn, so that he looked like an English professor – again, like we all did in those days. You were an English professor in a rumpled sport coat or an IBM salesman in a sharp dark suit and black tie. That was all there was.

His face was so lively and intelligent that people oftentimes didn’t realize he was moored in that hateful steel chair, S4 forever. He’d gotten awfully good with it over the years, and he may have been the one who invented the wheel ring of smaller circumference than the rubber tire he used to propel himself. He could probably climb a mountain in the thing, or rob a bank, or go up or down stairs. But it got to him, I know it did. His vitality crushed into that metal framework, his liveliness anchored by the great dead wastage of his lower body, his talent frustrated by his immobility.

It took a bit, as it always does when you recruit a solid citizen to go against all that he’s been taught, but I had advantages. I knew he read Lippman in the Post and admired Murrow on CBS and had what might be called “enlightened” social ideas about Negroes and Jews, and while he wanted to destroy communism, he didn’t particularly want to kill anyone doing it, especially not millions of innocent Russian peasants. We all felt that way. And he hated, as did most Ivy League people, General Walker, who seemed part of a long tradition of recent American troglodytes, from Martin Dies to Joe McCarthy to Richard Nixon to the John Birch Society and the Ku Klux Klan, men who saw Commies everywhere and made it much tougher on those of us charged with fighting real Commies, men who hated Negroes and wished them to stay backward and pathetic and never equal under law or in opportunity, men who still hated Jews and thought they secretly controlled everything, men who just hated because that was all they had been taught to do.

When I explained my fears that Walker’s right-wing pressure might force the callow and decadent JFK into doing another stupid thing, this time a stupid tragic thing, and assured Lon there was no chance whatsoever of being caught and laid the plan out for him, he finally agreed. Let it be known here and now that he never asked for a cent, he never got a cent, he never discussed a cent. He did it because I convinced him that it was the right thing to do, and he believed in me.

There was some logistics planning to be done, but that’s always a task at which I excel. I got a big chunk of operating funds out of the black budget by my usual means, bought each of the tickets at a different travel agency, paying cash, booked rooms for us from the nineteenth to the twenty-sixth at the Adolphus under fake names – easily done in those precomputer days – used a fellow in the gray economy who did a lot of intelligence trade work to put together fake driver’s licenses for the three of us, and made sure everything was delivered and nothing was written.

I had my own career to tend to, so I worked extra-hard in the meetings and at appending notes to reports and keeping Cord up-to-date on PEACOCK and the like. I was busy, or at least I gave the impression of being busy. My one worry was that Kennedy would make another mistake and we’d find ourselves on crisis footing and stuck in weeks of eighteen-hour days while the grown-ups at State worked out ways to prevent him from ending the world in fire. I guess those midweeks in November, he was busy screwing Cord’s ex-wife, Marilyn, Angie, and everybody except poor forlorn Jackie, when he wasn’t plotting his next campaign. He didn’t seem to do much except think about his career and wait for things to happen. It was that hunger that killed him: the trip to Dallas was strictly politics and had nothing to do with his actual job as president.

In any case, I sold Cord, who had seemed hazier and more morose of late and perhaps was drinking more than he should, as his nose was turning into a big red blob, on another PEACOCK trip – this time, to make it easier on myself, to the south. The idea was to hit the prestige North Carolina schools, like Duke and Wake Forest and the University of NC, and spend a week trolling for talent down there. For some reason, North Carolinians always did well in prestige journalism circles, possibly because, although they were Southern, they weren’t too Southern. From my point of view, the hop to Dallas from Raleigh and back was much easier and less exhausting or time-consuming than the one to Dallas via Cambridge.

The night came when Lon, Jimmy, and I met as a team for the first time. It was November 19, 1963. I had rented a Jeep Wagoneer, and the three of us drove from the Adolphus, a grand hotel that bathed in the red glow of the neon pegasus atop the Magnolia Petroleum Company next door, out to the Patio and got acquainted, first with one another and second with the field upon which our operation would transpire. It was a good trip. Jimmy and Lon bonded instantly, and it was understood, without having to be explained, that Jimmy would be the action guy, the assister, Lon’s special friend. Lon would shoot; he was the artist, the special talent, who made the thing work. I would supervise, though discreetly, more by studiously considered suggestion than direct order; I would also handle everything organizational, logistically and strategically. It was a good healthy dynamic. There is no I in “team,” or so they say, and for the three of us, it was true.

I drove, Lon was in the back where he’d be a week hence, and Jimmy sat next to me. We had not much trouble negotiating the Dallas traffic. I can remember only a little about the drive over to the neighborhood: the colors of the early 1960s. Somehow, in the soft air of that time and place and season, they were lighter. I can’t put my finger on it, and no words may exist, at least within my reach, to describe it, but everything was less urgent, less hard-edged, and more light filled the air. The great Nabokov could probably conjure it in two or three words, but I grope and babble. It was as if America was too comfortable for primary colors; they would come later, after the event I engineered, during Vietnam, during the huge change in demographics as the ignorant generation whose fathers had won the war took over. But not then, not yet. Everything was softer, lighter, quieter. I don’t know how else to make you feel it.

Speak, memory. Now I remember pulling into a parking space about forty yards down from the Patio and sitting there for a bit, letting it soak in.

“This is where we’ll be?” said Lon. “Suppose we can’t find parking.”

“The two nights I visited, there were ample spaces,” I said. “I can’t imagine we’ll have trouble late on a Monday night.”

“Where’ll the other guy be, Mr. Meachum?” Jimmy asked.

“See the alley directly across from the restaurant? I’ve told him to take up a position, entering from the rear. We’ll place some wooden crates there so he can get a good braced position. We’ll have to walk the range, but I’m guessing it’ll be about seventy yards.”

“And you want me there?”

“This guy is such a jerk, I’m not sure how he’ll do. If someone confronts him, if he gets confused, if he loses confidence – in all those circumstances, you may have to intercede. You’ve got a slapper?”

That was a cop’s blackjack, a flat, flexible piece of leather with about a pound of buckshot sewn into it; a master could whack a man to unconsciousness with one quick blow.

“I do, and it’s saved my bacon more times than I can remember,” Jimmy said.

“That would be your move. It’s messy, but we can’t kill any private citizen; we just have to get Alek out of there cleanly. Do you see any problems, Lon?”

Lon grunted. “This is sort of like The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. I’m John Wayne. I do the real killing. I must say, Hugh, I never thought I’d get a chance to play the John Wayne role.”

We laughed. We were all John Wayne fans.

“Technically, it’s an easy shot off a rest. I am worried about a deflection. It appears I’ll be shooting through some bushes.”

“If you want, Mr. Scott, I can visit some night late and discreetly trim what needs to be trimmed. We’ll take that worry off you.”

“Great idea,” I said. It was. I hadn’t thought of it. I’m glad Jimmy, ever practical, had.

“Then our patsy falls back through the alley, cuts between two houses, turns right, hides the rifle under the Forty-fifth Street Bridge, takes off his galoshes, climbs up to Forty-fifth Street, and takes a bus home. Can he do that?”

“That’s why I want you with him at a discreet distance. It’s possible he’ll get scared in the dark. If he turns the wrong way at the river, he’ll be miles from a bus stop. It’ll all be different in the dark. He was supposed to do it in the dark to familiarize himself, but he’s such a disorganized twit, I don’t know.”

“I’ll lead him by the nose if I have to.”

“Good man, Jimmy. Now let’s go into the Patio, get a table, and try their margaritas.”

So we did, three merry murderers having a good time on the patio of the Patio, which would soon be the scene of our crime. Since the duty day was done and we were on to the bonding aspect of the operation, I passed on the tequila drink and knocked back three vodka martinis, and Lon kept up with me, though he was a bourbon guy, and Jimmy sipped beer, regaling us with stories of his youthful run-ins with a Sergeant O’Bannon of Boston’s Fifth Precinct in the North End of town, where it was still more a suburb of Dublin than Beacon Hill. He told a funny story in perfect dialect. There was hardly anything Jimmy wasn’t good at.

I arose early, took the Wagoneer to Alek’s neighborhood, parked well down from his roominghouse, and waited for him to emerge. He was late, as usual. (The idiot was on time for only one thing in his life, the murder of JFK.) I let him turn the corner on the way to the bus stop, then pulled up to him. No one was close enough to hear us in Russian.

“Good morning, Alek. Hop in, I’ll run you downtown.”

He got in, and I took a U-turn to avoid driving by the bus stop where a few commuters waited, in case any of them happened to notice the highly unusual spectacle of the grumpy Lee Harvey Oswald being picked up in a large American vehicle.

“Tell me what you’ve been up to, Alek,” I said.

“I memorized the plan. I went to the Patio twice, walking it, getting used to the lighting. I will make a good shot.”

“Excellent,” I said. “Earlier that night, we’ll move in some old wooden crates. You can use them for support so you don’t have to try any fancy positions.”

“I’m a Marine Sharpshooter.”

I knew that Sharpshooter was a relatively easy distinction to attain in the Marines; he had not made Expert.

“I have complete faith in you. And you have walked your escape route? You won’t get lost in the dark? I worry about you being arrested, going the wrong way home, and singing like a canary.”

“I will die before talking, Comrade,” he said fiercely. “You can count on my love of socialism and the working fellow to get me through any ordeal the fascists have in mind!”

“Well said,” I replied. “That’s the kind of spirit we need.”

There was nothing particularly memorable about the discussion. He had a kind of morose personality and didn’t seem agitated about what lay ahead. We just went through the details rather dully, without much sparkle at all.

“Any more visits from the FBI?”

“Nah. Maybe Agent Hotsy is bored with me.”

“How’s Marina?”

“She’s fine. I’ll see her this weekend and Junie and new baby Audrey. Also, I’ll get the rifle.”

“Any problems getting it out of the house?”

“No sir.”

“You know she’ll look for it when the news comes, and not seeing it, she’ll conclude you went back on your word and murdered him.”

“She won’t talk,” he said. He held up a fist. “I am the king of my house, and the wench” – he used a cruel Russian word, devushka – “knows better than to betray me.”

He guided me through traffic, which thickened as we drew near to Dealey Plaza along Houston Street, after crossing the river. In a block or so, we were there, and I had my first look at Alek’s place of employment, with its Hertz sign set on the diagonal above. I cannot say I paid it much attention, because at that point Dealey Plaza and the Texas Book Depository were utterly meaningless to me. I had no revelation, no surge of heartbeat, no epiphany. The structure was a big, ugly building on the edge of a municipal park of no particular charm, brick, six or seven stories tall, completely without character. The cars whizzed by it, all the other buildings were equally uninteresting, even the triangle of grass that constituted the plaza lacked feature or interest. I regret many things I did over the next few days, and among them – not the first but up there nonetheless – was that I made the Book Depository eyesore a historical shrine, never, ever to be demolished.

“That’s it,” he said.

“Okay, I’ll turn here so nobody sees you get out of this car. Oh, I wanted to get the diagram from you.”

He reached into his jacket and pulled it out, the only article except for the box of cartridges I’d given him that both of us had touched. I knew I’d burn it at the first opportunity.

I dropped him at the corner of Main and Elm, then turned left on Elm, passing under the shadow of the Book Depository as I headed down the slight slope of Elm to the triple overpass a hundred yards ahead. I came within sixty or seventy feet of the even more famous grassy knoll on the right. In all the years that followed, I always had a smile – perhaps the only one the operation ever produced on my face – at the expense of the lunatics who believed that the little green lump explained everything.

I found a way to reverse my direction, got back to Commerce, and in ten blocks or so reached the Adolphus. There, I made phone calls to Jimmy and Lon to set up a real-time run-through that night, as we would do for the next six nights, to get used to the routes, the patterns of the shadows, the rhythm of the traffic, the different hues of darkness as the conditions altered the nighttime weather.

That night after dinner, I had a moment of happiness and calm. I was doing something big that I thought would help my country at the cost of one small, worthless, ugly man. It did not feel wrong at all to me, and I had no doubts, no qualms, no reservations. I was going to make a difference. I was going to change history.

The next morning, Wednesday, November 20, 1963, I woke, ambled groggily to my door, opened it, and grabbed the newspaper, the Morning News I think it was, and before I sat down, I saw the headline: “JFK Motorcade Route Announced.” I had not known Jack Kennedy was coming to Dallas on the twenty-second. But as my eyes ran down the story, I saw the names of streets I had driven the morning before: “. . Houston to Elm, Elm under the triple overpass. .,” and I knew in an instant that I had been given a chance few men have. Circumstance had bent itself to offer me an opportunity that was not only the logical outcome to my ruminations, but almost a moral obligation. Who could say no to such a possibility? Not Hugh.

Ah, Vod. So dependable. Such a friend, an ally. Vod always has my back, my best interests at heart, my happiness paramount in its fermented little potato brain. With Vod at my side as well as in my blood, I launch into the final act, which would leave me, theoretically at least, history’s most abominable man. I slew the prince who was the king. I widowed the goddess of all our dreams; I made Ari Onassis possible. (There’s one I know I’ll never be forgiven for!) Oh, and I orphaned those two little so-cute-it-hurts-even-now kids. Bad Hugh. Hugh, you bastard. Vod, a little help here, please.

I knew I had to convince three people to help me tilt Operation LIBERTY VALANCE a little bit, so that instead of shooting General Edwin Walker on November 25, 1963, we would shoot John Fitzgerald Kennedy on November 22, 1963, two and a half days hence.

The three people were Lon Scott, Jimmy Costello, and myself. As for Alek – Lee Harvey Oswald – I knew the glory pig would take zero convincing. The idiot would be like a rabid dog pulling on a leash. He might have come up with it himself if he’d read the paper. It was everything his fetid little sewer-Commie mind demanded and had dreamed about for years. His eagerness would surely get him killed and everyone else electrocuted. But I felt I could control him and improvise a new plan so brilliant that even he couldn’t screw it up too badly. I would see him tonight at the bus stop.

As for me: Did I believe in what I was about to do? And if I didn’t, how could I convince the others? I tried to apply the dictates of the New Criticism to the ethical issue, as if it were a poem demanding the most rigorous attention to detail, untarnished by the excesses of biography, assumption, sentimentality, lugubrious emotionalism. Read the text, I told myself: read the text alone.

Here was the text I read, trying to ignore the young president’s glamour, his vitality, his beautiful children, his strangely beautiful but beautifully strange wife, his brood of brothers, cousins, sisters, parents, whatever. No room for sailboats, touch football, movie stars, no thought of parochial politics (we were both Democrats), all that out. Lyndon Johnson, whoever he was, out.

My clinical reading of the text that was JFK demanded only one answer: what were his intentions in the Republic of South Vietnam? I didn’t give a damn about Castro or Cuba, I didn’t see much that could be done in Europe except minor maneuvering for minor leverage, a missile base exchanged here or there, a spy betrayed, a minister blackmailed, all of it, in the long haul, meaningless.

But what of that steamy glade, with its ravishing jungle and mountain landscape, its little yellow people who wanted nothing in life except to be left alone to raise their rice plants ankle-deep in water and shit? The issue was: would JFK get us into a big shooting war there? If so, who would fight it? The tiny yellows he cared nothing about – they would die in the hundreds of thousands, for sure – or a generation of college kids unlikely to care to risk a war to save a country so far away, whose rise or fall meant so little to them and would not be worth dying for. Left to their own devices, neither of these demographics would vote to let slip the dogs. It wasn’t like the Vietcong had bombed Pearl Harbor, much less Winnetka. No, it would happen only if JFK willed it to happen by inventing reasons to send our troops over there. He’d already begun, and I’d seen them, tan, lean young men with the close haircuts and narrow eyes of highly trained professional military, the so-called Green Berets, yearning for a war they thought would be quick and glorious, with a nice sniff of powder to it. I knew there were a lot more of them there than the Times had reported, and I knew also that despite my report and Cord’s passionately earned and argued reluctance, there were those in the Agency who’d smelled the treasure of career enhancement hunting Pajama Charlie for a year already.

To me it was shit. The place was infinitely more complex than anybody in Washington suspected, and it had the kind of suction that could drag us down to ruin in its whirlpools of deceit and danger, its anthropological conundrums and village traditions, its cruelty; our enemies would degrade us, but not as much as we would degrade ourselves in fighting them.

I took, as I said, the recent murder, under our auspices, of Diem as doubling down on a bad bet. We knew Diem was so corrupt that his military was incapable of winning a war, and that the reigning tactical concern for field and general-grade officers, much less administrators and bureaucrats in Saigon, would be filling their own secret bank accounts in Paris. We had decided to wipe that corruption off the face of the earth, to encourage new, younger, American-trained (and American-allied) officers who would win the war. If they proved unable, we would begin to send more than “advisers”: we’d send divisions, we’d send our new helicopter-borne army, and the general slaughter – as well as Eisenhower’s feared “land war in Asia” – would be on. There was no telling how many would die, theirs, ours, the unfortunate peasants caught in the middle, and for what? One piece on the board, said to be a domino but maybe just a piece on the board.

That JFK was a philanderer, that he was screwing Cord’s wife (among the many), that he came from a family as narrow and clannish and narcissistic as any Tudor or Hanoverian, all these I tried to discount. That his heroism in the Pacific was greatly exaggerated, that he received the Pulitzer for another man’s work, that his father bought him every election he ever won, all that I tried to push aside. I don’t know if I did. But in the end I made up my mind, and once I’d done that, it was on to the others.

I called Lon.

“No, Hugh,” he said. “Not a chance.”

“Lon, please–”

“I will be on a flight to Richmond by three if you say one more word, Hugh.”

I let the conversation simmer off into silence for a bit. Finally, I came back with what I knew was the weakest of propositions. “Just let me make the argument.”

“My mind is made up. As soon as I saw the paper, I knew how that devious little insect that you call a brain would set its antennae to twitching, its mandibles to grinding, its pincers to snapping, and I knew exactly where you’d go. I know you better than you know yourself, Hugh. Anyhow, what’s the point of listening to the argument? There’s only one argument, really. You believe you can pull off the biggest coup in history. You would call it an ‘operation’ in your spy-novel lingo, so as to distance yourself from it, as if it’s scientific or medical. It’s hubris, Hugh. It’s just hubris.”

“Lon, you are–”

“I know you, Hugh. I know you.”

“If you’ve made up your mind, how can it hurt to hear my argument? I assure you, it has nothing to do with me, my needs, any of that. The psychology involved is yours, Lon. I will make you see how it has to do with your needs, and you will see your duty clearly.”

“Oh, right. Oh, that’s rich. Hugh, you are a bastard.”

“That’s what they pay me for. The things I’ve authorized, you wouldn’t believe, the things I’ve seen. Please, Lon, meet me in the lobby in ten. We’ll go for a little walk.”

“Agghh.” He snorted, signifying surrender.

I pushed him in silence across the street from the hotel. I didn’t head south, down Commerce toward Dealey, but north, and then I turned east down a street I don’t remember. It was November 20, 1963. The sun was out, and true fall, as we New Englanders would recognize it, had yet to begin. The leaves were still green. In late November! We arrived after a block or two at a small park that seemed to be dedicated to some glorious Texan or other who had triumphed at the Battle of Squashing Mexicans or some such. That’s what we did in the Agency – if not Mexicans, some other little brown tribe, anyone who got in our way. That’s what I helped us do. We were in the empire business, after all, and I was paid to make sure that empire stayed strong and lasted forever, and anyone who opposed us got squashed. If the empire was to fall, it wouldn’t be on my watch.

We sat in the sun. Should I say birds sang, the wind blew gently, the sun was bright, the world seemed full of hope? Maybe all that is true. I have no idea.

“Get on with it, goddammit,” Lon said. “I don’t have all day.”

“I just have one question,” I said. “Request, actually. Then I’ll shut up.”

He waited.

Finally, I said, “Lon, tell me about the chair.”

“The what?”

“The chair. The one you’re sitting in. It’s made of steel. I can see a label; I think it was manufactured by Ridgeway Medical Equipment Company, Rahway, New Jersey.”

“Don’t be ridiculous. I don’t talk about such things.”

“No, tell me. You’re a goddamn noble Roman, Lon. I know you too. You’re sick with honor. You’ll never complain, you’ll never cease to maintain the code. Stoic, dignified, without complaint to the end, a study in Protestant rectitude and Western heroism. You’re braver than John Wayne, Gary Cooper, or–”

“They’re actors,” said Lon.

“Audie Murphy, Neville Brand, I don’t know, the boys who raised the flag on Iwo, Robert C. Scott, Cord Meyer, Bill Morgan, Joe McConnell, Major Darby.”

“It’s nothing to do with courage. It’s the practicality of acceptance and resignation. It’s doing the best you can with what you’ve got.”

“Tell me, Lon. You’ve never told anyone, probably not even yourself. Tell me.”

Lon waited a bit. Then he said, “All right. S4 is lousy. It stinks. It’s no fun. It’s better than S3, it’s better than any of the Ts, it’s much better than any of the Cs. But still: it’s lousy. I get sores on my legs, and I don’t even feel them. But the pants are smeared with blood and pus and have to be thrown away because no dry cleaning gets it out. I shit in my diapers and don’t know I’ve done it, and I have to somehow deal with the diapers on my own, in my room at night, a truly repulsive job. I worry that there’ll be a leak, that I’ll offend, that something humiliating will happen. I get bruises on my spine, and sometimes they climb above S-4 and I get tremendous pains. I sometimes remember my legs in my dreams, remember walking, feel the experience, and almost believe that, by some miracle, I’ve – But then I wake up, dead from the waist down. Psychologically, that’s hard to take, particularly the seven hundredth time or so. I have nightmares about Dad. He had a look on his face for a split second, before the horror came over him as he saw what had happened. I saw it as I twisted around to see what the hell had happened and saw him standing there with the rifle on the ground before him. I think about that look. Was it a smile? It could have been a smile! I – I don’t know. There was something there, a kind of, I don’t know, satisfaction or something. Dad was great, considering. Until he died, he did everything he could to make my life livable. He spent a fortune, he was with me nearly every single day. I know that he hated himself for the accident, and that it took twenty-five years off his life, but still. . That look. A father’s worries about usurpation. His inability to get totally behind somebody who will replace him.”

He was silent for a while, gathering wind. He had never spoken of such things.

“The women,” he said. “I don’t know if it was better to have had a decent amount of intimacy before or to lose your sexuality as a virgin, because then you’d never remember, never know what you were missing. I have no policy position here. But I smell women’s perfume, I see the crease between their breasts, I see the tops of their stockings. It happens all the time, because around me they’re not so guarded in their body movements; they know I’m out of the game. They’re not being cruel, it’s just their nature. They love to put out the sniff of sex, but they hold it back until the wedding night to make sure he shows up at church. That whole ritual guardedness, the flash, the tease, the lean-over, the crossed legs, that’s all missing around me, because, absent a working penis, I’m one of the gals. That’s what happens to us S4s. So I see breasts and even thighs all the time. And I remember, and it makes me crazy, and I have to get through it on what I suppose is Yankee grit or something. But I hate it. I hate them, yet I yearn to be around them, to smell them, to see them smile, to make them laugh, to know that except for the one thing, I would be with them. Instead, I’m the witty eunuch in the chair, the gelded stallion, so charming yet so unable to satisfy and give to them what they desire, children and dick. So yes, Hugh, the chair is no fun. I’m guessing you probably already deduced that with your spy’s keen powers of observation. What the hell does this have to do with anything?”

“Lon,” I said, “Kennedy is going to send thousands of young Americans off to a war we cannot win. He’s going to do that because he wants the reelection, and he can’t be called soft on communism. We were going to correct that problem by eliminating a fellow who called him soft on communism the loudest. Now I see it. We have a chance not to ‘correct’ but to ‘eliminate.’ To erase totally.

“I directed you to the chair you ride in all day long because thousands of boys will come back from the war in those chairs. At some point or other, all of them will wish they had been killed. Because they won’t have your strength, your heroism, your ‘Yankee grit,’ as you call it. They’ll have nothing and they’ll get nothing. You command the gun world with your shooting skills, you have extraordinary resources of intelligence, charm, and will, to say nothing of a considerable personal fortune. These poor boys will have none of that. They’ll just have the chair. You hate the chair, but you have managed to transcend it. They won’t have that chance, Lon, and you know it. The chair will turn their lives into daily torture. Forever and ever and ever, which is how long they’ll feel their lives lasting. So that is why I ask you to do this, Lon. Not for my hubris but for yours. Keep those boys out of their metal chairs. Endure, publically if you get caught or privately if you don’t, the mantle of regicide, the man who killed the king. If you can bear the chair, you can bear that easily enough.”

He laughed.

“Ever hear of an Argentine writer called Jorge Luis Borges?” I said.

“No. Hemingway’s as far as I go.”

“He writes stories in the form of fictional essays. Conjectures on this or that, always astonishing in their brevity and their insight. In one, he postulates that the true son of God was Judas, not Christ. Anybody could be Christ, suffering and becoming immortal. But it took a strength of character that only the son of God could muster to make the crucifixion possible, by the betrayal. That was the true heroism, the true sacrifice, for without it, there was nothing. He didn’t bear the pain of the cross for a day, he bore the pain of hatred, exile, universal loathing, all that, forever. That was strength.”

“Sounds crazy to me,” he said. “Your Bor-haze, or whatever, carries no weight with me. How do you know you’ll prevent this war? Maybe this Texan, Johnson, maybe he’ll wage the same war.”

“He won’t. He’s a New Deal Democrat forged in the crucible of thirties Washington. He has no interest in military adventurism, nothing to prove, because he’s an older man with plenty of mistresses and an ugly wife. He’ll use his time in office to siphon money off to Texas and his cronies in the party; he’ll give a lot to Negroes so Lippmann will write well of him; he’ll build dams and highways and buildings with his name on them. Like all of them, he’ll screw everything in heels. He has no interest in foreign affairs. I’ve looked at it carefully. Internationally, he’s as sober as Eisenhower; domestically, he wants to be the next FDR. He’s FDR with ants in his pants. The last thing he wants is to go off on a crazy crusade in a foreign swamp. It’s way too expensive.”

“This thing, this ambush? You don’t even know if it’s possible.”

I suppose I knew I had him then. He’d gone in a single breath from the strategic to the tactical. He didn’t realize it, but he’d surrendered on the strategic. Now it was a matter of details.

“We’re so close, Lon. We’ve solved the ballistic issue, we have the best rifle shot in the world, we have a silenced rifle, the most advanced assassination tool in the world, we have a prime patsy who will, I say again, will take the blame for us, the poor dummy, and we have the best breaking-and-entering man in America. And we have JFK in an open-top limousine parading by at twelve thirty p.m. the day after tomorrow. We have one thing yet to do, and it’s something that should be within any case officer’s reach. We have to find a place to shoot in reasonable proximity to Oswald’s at about the same moment, and while everybody is going after him, I will push you away in your wheelchair, and we’ll have martinis and steaks that night.”

“It’s not a joke, Hugh. Killing a man, a young beautiful man, no matter the reason, it’s not a joke.”

He was right. My foolish attempt at levity had sabotaged the moment.

“I overplayed that hand, I know. It was stupid. I apologize to you, Lon; you deserve better from me. No, we won’t celebrate, we’ll mourn along with the rest of America, and we’ll never boast or tell. But we will save thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands, of lives.”

“Damn you again, Hugh. You are so willful, so convincing.”

“Let me sell Jimmy and see what he comes up with. If he comes up with something that’s workable, then make up your mind. If you still don’t want to do it, fine. I suppose I did my best. We’ll go back to the Walker thing, as we originally planned.”

That was how we left it. I pushed him back, and he retired to his room for a nap. I called Jimmy. There was no answer.

I saw him get aboard the bus near the depository, and I followed it across the long aqueduct over the Trinity River all the way back to Oak Cliff, through the late-afternoon Dallas traffic. I wasn’t interested in the bus so much as in who else was interested in it. I looked for black Ford coupes, maybe with antennas, G-man cars. Neither the Bureau nor the Secret Service was there or shared any interest in Comrade Oswald; they were, as usual, profoundly asleep on the job. I could almost hear them snoring. Zzzzzz-zzzzzz.

In Alek’s neighborhood, I watched from across North Beckley as he got out; again, no other cars were parked on the street, and the two other men who got out at the same stop disappeared in another direction. Alek walked by me, oblivious to all in the fading light, his details hard to make out.

Even from the few lines the declining sun revealed, you could read him: he was like a figure out of Walt Kelly or Al Capp, a caricature of grumpy hostility, a stumping, glaring, shabby figure, all lines in face and body pulled down as if by overwhelming gravity, broadcasting the message DO NOT APPROACH OR YOU WILL BE FIRED UPON. No wonder the idiot was friendless, always getting in fights or bitter arguments, a trial to those few who had decided to let him into their lives, a wife beater, a jerk. Yet he became the ball bearing of history. How utterly strange and unpredictable.

I flashed my lights. He looked up, startled, recognized the Wagoneer by shape, and came over and got in.

I pulled away. “Good evening, Alek,” I said.

“Good evening, Comrade,” he said, “I’m set,” or something similar in his garbled Russian. “On Friday evening, I will go to Fort Worth and return Monday morning with the rifle for–”

“Alek,” I said, “I take it you haven’t read today’s paper. Or talked to coworkers in the plant?”

“I read papers a day late. It’s cheaper, I get them from the garbage. As for coworkers, they are not worth–”

“All right, all right. Time is short, the stakes are high. Now listen to me carefully. Don’t say a thing. Don’t react or have a bowel movement or begin to hip-hooray. The situation has changed radically.”

I felt him turn. “The ears are all of me,” he said, his clumsy literal translation, I’m guessing, of “I’m all ears,” for which there was no Russian equivalent.

Idiot! Agh. Anyway, I went ahead. “On Friday, at around twelve thirty, a motorcade will pass in front of your building on Elm Street. In an open limousine will be the president of the United States. Alek, can you alter history for us with one shot of your rifle? It is a great opportunity, so great that one must suspect the laws of the universe are turning in favor of our moral insistence on progress. Alek, can you do this thing for us? Are you the man who has been sent to do this thing?”

I heard his breath being swallowed, I heard him gulping. I couldn’t bear to look at his face, for I knew I would see a cavalcade of madness, narcissism, greed, and ambition and that his beady little vermin eyes would burn hot and fierce. The worst are full of murderous intensity, I thought.

“Comrade,” he finally said, and then he blurted off into English, “Jesus Christ, yes, goddammit, I have waited my whole life for this, oh, I will in one strike change the course of history, I will show the world the magnificence–”

“Settle down, you fool,” I said. “You’re carrying on like a schoolgirl. Get ahold of yourself and listen to me, all right?”

“Yeah, yeah, sure,” he said, still in English.

“In Russian. I insist, all discussions of this matter must be held in Russian.”

“Yes sir.”

“This is the sort of thing we do reluctantly, but we do not want this young man sending troops off to invade Cuba or anywhere, and he shows signs of instability, poor judgment, downright imbecility. He is too easily influenced, too desperately ambitious. He has no moral character. He is the kind of sparkler who could start an atomic war. He must be stopped, and a responsible leader put in charge of your nation. Alek, you must understand, in pulling that trigger, you are not destroying, you are building.”

“Yeah, yeah, I get it,” he said.

He didn’t, of course, and I was fooling myself, really, throwing a last grenade into my own lingering defenses; I was arguing with myself.

“Alek, if you are to do this thing, you must do it under our absolute discipline. We will provide you with an escape route. We will get you to a safe house, we will get you out of the country, we will get you to your glory in Havana and your rightful place among the revolutionary fighters. In a year or so, we will get your wife and children to you. But this can be guaranteed only if you submit and trust absolutely our rules, do you understand?”

“I agree, I agree. I hear what you’re saying. If it comes to it, I won’t let them take me alive. I’ll have my pistol with me, I’ll go down shooting, as I am willing to die for–”

“No, no, no,” I said, fearing this idiot on a shooting rampage in downtown Dallas, “you must not bring your pistol. Believe me” – I struggled for the appropriate fiction to disabuse him – “if you kill the president on a policy issue and because of your own sense of idealism, however warped they may think it, you will be reviled but respected. You will have a legacy of courage and dignity. If you also shoot some postman or some housewife, you become another punk Negro murderer, and your electrocution will be cheered by your own children, and you do not want that. Believe me, leave the pistol at home; swear to me you will harm no one except your target. That is the discipline we demand. We are not butchers, we are scientific Marxists.”

“Yes sir,” he said.

“Tell me how you would proceed.”

He laid out the obvious. He’d have to go home tomorrow night – Thursday – to get the rifle; he would break it down so it could be disguised and carry it into the building in a brown paper bag. Nobody would challenge him. He would go to the sixth floor, which was largely deserted, as it was pure stock storage area. He would situate himself overlooking Elm as it passed by Dealey Plaza on the way to the triple overpass, and he would shoot the president as he passed by.

“Which window will you shoot from?” I asked.

“What?”

“Which window? You have your choice of any; which window do you chose?”

“Uh, I guess the one in the middle.”

“Why?”

“It’s in the middle.”

“Excellent reasoning. You are a genius. Where on Elm will you shoot the president? That’s the determining factor on the window. You cannot make these things up on the spot. You of all people cannot make things up on the spot, because you will do it stupidly.”

“Where should I shoot?”

“You know the building at the street.”

“I – I don’t know. It doesn’t seem to make any–”

“Idiot. You want him where he’s closest and slowest. Any map should give you the answer. Where will he be closest and slowest? This is why you’re such a failure, Alek. You don’t think. You just make things up!”

His face knitted in shame. Then I saw a bulb go on behind that dull face, those dim eyes. Bingo! Eureka!

“When he’s turning the corner. He has to turn the corner from Houston to Elm. It’s very sharp.”

“Excellent. It’s a hundred and twenty degrees. The car is big, it will pivot slowly. For all intents and purposes, he will be standing still. His chest will be open to you at a range of about seventy-five feet. An idiot could make the shot.”

“I’m not an idiot,” he said. “Sure, I make mistakes, but everybody–”

“Which window, Alek?”

“The corner window. The closest window to him. If I planned to shoot later, as he went down Elm, then I would move to another window down Elm.”

“Excellent,” I said, glad that he had figured out this elementary riddle (though no conspiracy theorists did, I might add) so that I could praise him and raise his spirits. “You shoot him when he’s closest, when he’s stillest. One shot, center chest, easy to make.”

“Fish in a barrel,” he said in English with that dreadful smirk.

“After shooting,” I instructed, “you will have little time to make your escape. The police will be in the building within minutes. Drop the rifle, walk, do not run, downstairs, being careful not to acquire oxygen debt so you are swallowing for air. Look no one in the eye, but do not shirk either. Your face is neutral. Exit the building and slip off into the mob. It will be chaos outside. Proceed down Houston Street one block to the corner of Houston and Pacific. You will see this car, though I might not be driving, and it could be anyone, a couple, an old lady, a Mexican, a hepcat. Climb in the back and lie down on the floor. Commit yourself to a long, boring drive. In a few hours we will have you at a safe house, and at that point, you can relax, eat, drink. The next day, or really the next night, we will move you out of the country. These will be an arduous few days demanding stamina, commitment, attention to detail, and obedience. Trust us, Alek, will you? Can you?”

He said yes.

“I wish we had time for run-throughs, for rehearsals, for shooting practice, for all of that. Can you hit that easy, almost stationary target under seventy-five feet away?”

“I’m a good shot. I won’t miss,” he said.

“All right. We must make do with what has been given us. For some reason, history has chosen you. You have to justify that choice. I believe in you, Alek, as no one else has. You owe me, you owe your true motherland, you owe history. You must not fail.”

“Comrade, I swear to you–”

I cut him off, as we were a few doors down from his house, and I gave him a Russian hug, smelling the body odor of a man who seldom bothered with hygiene, fastidious New England priss that I am and always will be.

“Now go, little Alek, and become a hero.”

He stepped out of the door, and I pulled out, leaving him behind.

You’re thinking: Okay, Hugh. Call your friend Jack Ruby and set the second part of the plan in operation. Tell us about Jack, how you manipulated him, how far back you old buddies went, your underworld ties, the implicit sponsorship of the Mob, particularly the Trafficante connection, running through the attempts on Castro that your own section, Clandestine Services under the great Cord Meyer, had set up.

Hah. The joke’s on you, friend. You shouldn’t be thinking about Jack Ruby, unless you sloppily missed the Warren Commission detail that he’d sent a Western Union moneygram to one of his strippers a full forty minutes after the announced transfer time of Alek to a more secure locale; he didn’t show up at the station basement until a full hour after that designated time, so he could have had no idea that Alek was in the building. Though that is the sort of thing the conspiracy hucksters always fail to mention, it destroys any possibility of Ruby as anything but a random mote of dust adrift on the currents of history, being blown this way and that.

For the record, I never heard of Jack Ruby until shortly after he finished poor Alek and took over the story himself. I suppose this may be counted as several of the immense strokes of good fortune that Operation LIBERTY VALANCE enjoyed, though perhaps it was meaningless in the end. The truth is, I planned to betray Oswald to the police; I expected him to be picked up and eventually electrocuted.

I didn’t think it mattered. His personality – I am no psychiatrist, but I’d studied him enough and been around him enough – had the smell of disintegration. He was a crackpot to begin with, with enormous mental disorders that had afflicted him his whole life. The outward manifestations were hotheadedness, empathy with outre causes and policies, lack of attention to details, sloppiness in all manners of being. He was a man at war, though primarily with himself. I suppose, inside, he hated his absent father and his overbearing, vulgar, disorganized mother; he hated himself for his continual incompetence and his total inability to engage people at any level; for his utter intellectual mediocrity. He worshipped the god of communism, knowing little about it. He had a streak of melodramatic vainglory – more than a streak, it was perhaps the largest part of his identity. I do think that he genuinely didn’t care if he lived or died; he was willing to risk his own life in an attempt to fulfill his most urgent need, which was to matter and no longer be a marginal loser detested by all. Loved or hated, it made no difference to him; that his name would be on the world’s lips with this opportunity, it was an aphrodisiac that his dull-normal mind and undisciplined lunacy could not have resisted. I believe he would have taken those shots whether or not we existed.

Most important, I believed if he was captured, he’d find the pressures too much, and in time his mind would fall apart. He wouldn’t be able to recall his own truth. First he’d claim he alone authored the deed and cling to that for months because he wanted the glory, the notoriety, the fame. Finally, he’d tell them the “truth,” as he imagined it, that he’d been picked up by a Soviet agent, coached and prepped for a mission against General Walker, and at the last moment diverted to the president as target when that opportunity revealed itself. Dutifully, the FBI would check out the tale and find no evidence of it. No one would remember seeing Alek in the presence of this agent; someone at a desk near mine in Langley – maybe it would even be me! – would be given the mission of discovering if there had been any remote possibility of Soviet involvement and, using sources, networks, leverage, penetration, and analysis, would produce a report in a year that, aside from the idiot’s attempts to secure a visa from the Russian embassy in Mexico City in September, there had been no record, no rumors, no traces of Soviet contact with Oswald.

If Oswald went through photo albums of known agents in order to ID his mysterious mentor, he’d come up with nothing, for in truth I looked far more like Dave Guard of the Kingston Trio than I did Vassily Psycholosky, KGB killer and goon.

If all went well, there would be no physical evidence – no fingerprints, no footprints, no jimmied locks, nothing slightly out of the ordinary, nothing ambiguous in meaning; the clincher would be the ballistics, which, as I have explained, would suggest his rifle and his rifle alone.

As I drove away, he receded into the shadows. I would see him only one more time – the closest our plot would come to discovery. I quickly headed downtown to the Adolphus, where I still had to talk to Jimmy, to convince him, and where we had a great deal of planning to do.

When I got back to the hotel, I was not surprised to see Jimmy waiting for me in the lobby.

“Hi, Mr. Meachum,” he said, rising, smiling in that Irish way, “how about letting me buy you a drink.”

“Sure,” I said, and like two cronies from an Oklahoma vacuum-cleaner manufacturer, we trundled off to the dark Men’s Bar, not the Adolphus’s famous Century Room, where a Rosemary or a Gigi or a Maryanne was singing. We found a table well away from the few other drinkers left, ordered up our poison, and waited for the girl to bring it and then to depart. For the record, in those days Texas had insane drinking laws, and we’d had to “join” the club in order to receive our own private bottles.

“So, Jimmy,” I said, “I’ve been trying to reach you. Have you spoken to Lon yet?”

“No, I haven’t. I thought I’d let the two of you work things out between you today. It seemed like a good time to take a little break.”

“Actually, it was. From what you’re saying, I guess you’ve figured it all out. That I want to change the nature but not the purpose of the mission. Same operational principles, different target. Lon, to be fair, is not so sure. He didn’t sign up for what I’m proposing. Neither did you. Neither, come to think of it, did I. But it’s here, it won’t go away; I believe it can be done. I also believe it should be done. It’s really just a continuation of the original idea. Do you want the full nine-ninety-five sales pitch or the bargain-basement four-ninety-five version? It’s getting late and I haven’t eaten yet, so I suppose the five-buck version will have to do.”

“Mr. Meachum, you don’t have to break a sweat. I get it. If you say it needs doing, then I’m the one to do it. Loyalty. You boys in your outfit, you got me out of prison and got me a new life doing what I do best and doing some good in the world. Never thought I’d have a shot at a house in the suburbs and two boys in private school, which is what I have today. I’ll sail with you to hell or the edge of the world, whichever comes first.”

“You’re a good man, Jimmy.”

“Plus, I hate them Castle Irish. Always putting on the airs, always carrying on like they weren’t bog-slogging peat burners like the rest of us. My father hated them, his father before him hated ’em more than the English. You’re doing me old dad a favor, and he’s smiling in heaven.”

“You’re a great man, Jimmy. Knowing I have you along means I know we can do this thing.”

“That we can. Do you know what I did today?”

“Of course not.”

“I was all over a joint called the Dal-Tex Building. ‘Dal-Tex,’ know what that stands for?”

“Dallas, Texas?”

“Dallas Textiles. It’s the heart of what passes as the garment trade in Dallas. Office building, a warren of offices, you’ll find fifty of ’em in every city in America. Full of rooms with desks and telephones and secretaries. What else do you need to make a buck in America? That and a good case of business smarts. This one is worth exploring because it’s located behind the Texas Book Depository on Elm Street. It has at least twenty offices that give a good look down Elm Street from almost the same angle as the Book Depository.”

“You’re way ahead of me, Jimmy.”

“You know me. I’ve got a natural talent for mischief of all sorts. There’s a fair number of buildings on the plaza that would give Mr. Scott an angle, but the only one that’s a few degrees off from the Book Depository is the Dal-Tex Building. I don’t see where else we could run the operation from without running the risk – too big, in my mind – of leaving an obvious clue that some other birds, that is, us, were involved. They’re going to investigate this one up the ass, with all the national experts and the best techs the Bureau has. If anything’s wrong, they’ll sniff it out. Something you never heard of, like arterial spray pattern or skin stretch marks or powder dispersal pattern or something subatomic that not even Dick Tracy has thought of. We have to minimize everything that differentiates our shooter from the little red nuthead. It’s a much higher threshold than with General Walker. That’s what makes it a puzzle and, frankly, for this boyo, great fun. I love to match wits with the best, that’s for sure.”

“Glad you’re so excited,” I said.

“We have to get in and out of that building, find a shooting position, all within a few minutes, and over the last part, it’ll be screaming and panic. It’s no easy thing.”

“I suppose it’s too late to rent an office. We don’t know if one’s available, but it would attract a great deal of attention if we contacted the management and put down a deposit tomorrow.”

“No, they’d tumble to that right away.”

“Are there any bathrooms or deserted offices where we might set up?”

“No bathrooms, boss. They always put bathrooms on the interior side of the corridor, because they get more rental dough for a window. One or two of the offices I saw looked empty, but there’s no way of telling how they’ll be the day after tomorrow. It’s a tough one.”

“We’re two bright boys. And I see a gleam in your eye. I think you’ve already found a way.”

“That I have, boss,” he said with his total-mischief smile.

And then he told me his plan.

CHAPTER 17

Marion Adams, gun expert and official lounge lizard to the monied collector set, had an insidious charm. It was easy to see that he was one of those gifted enablers who helps the big tall rich get what they think they want with a minimum of fuss. He was tall, fair, rather flitty, serious only about himself, hiding behind square black glasses and a suit so dowdy that it had to be expensive. He could have been an embalmer, and in a sense he was, masterminding the transfers of dead guns soaked in formaldehyde for a profit.

He insisted on high end all the way, no casual tamale and beer joint for him, and so the three men met in the French Room at the Adolphus, a Texas fantasy of high Louis XV dining, where every item on the menu boasted its own apostrophe and some two or three.

Marty, as he was called by all who knew and could afford him, held the floor, as he always did. It was the divine right of blowhards. It turned out he knew a great deal about apostrophes, French dishes, wines, art, politics, just about everything, and even Richard yielded to the torrent of knowledge; meanwhile, Swagger picked at the morsels of overprepared food, wished he’d ordered the chicken, and worked at keeping a look of polite interest on his face. Finally, Marty turned to business, over coffee.

“I am not a conspiracy ‘nut,’” he said. “In fact, like millions of others, I accepted without question the Warren Commission report and was willing to let it go at that. But I do make my living telling gun stories. I was born into the business, really at its high-water mark. My father was a manufacturer and his father before him. Connecticut gun people. I had the gene too, but from a slightly different angle. I had the hunger to know and chronicle, not manufacture, not shoot, not hunt. I’m the amanuensis of the American gun culture. I’ve written books on all the major manufacturers, I consult at the country’s finest auction houses, I am a registered appraiser in thirty-nine states, and I advise many of the nation’s most distinguished collectors on the guns they are about to purchase. I assume you have checked my background and found it satisfactory.”

“Nobody has a discouraging word about you, Mr. Adams,” said Swagger.

“Nor you, Mr. Brophy. I’ve checked too. You seem to be a man who’s handled crises all over the world.”

“I seem to have come out okay. I am a lucky son of a gun.”

“May I ask you, respectfully, for a brief account of your life?”

“Sure,” said Swagger, launching easily into a colorful spin on the mining engineer’s life, the risks, the near-misses, and the long nights alone with books.

He finished on Brophy’s fictional JFK obsession. “Some years ago, I got hooked on JFK’s death. More I read, more I questioned. Read some conspiracy crap and was not impressed. Read Warren, and it seemed ragged. Started thinking hard about it, using my engineer’s brain. Realized a couple of years ago, I had enough money to last several lifetimes and two or three more wives, so I decided I was tired of sleeping bags and would prefer to spend the rest of my life going into this thing in eighth gear and seeing where it would take me. Always loved guns, so that was a start, and I guess ’cause I’m mechanical by nature, my approach has always been through the guns. Interesting. Somehow I came up with some ideas that I don’t believe nobody has, and I’m trying to push forward from them. Not for money, not for fame, just because of a goddamned stubborn streak. If I dig a shaft, I like to have something to show for it. Is that enough for you, Mr. Adams?”

“Excellent account, Mr. Brophy. I’m going to make the first move here and divulge a portion of what I’ve found out. You see if it squares with what you know, and we’ll see where we are at the end.”

“Go to work, sir,” Swagger said.

“All right, here’s my story. I am always looking for subjects for the next book. Some months ago I got interested, quite innocently, in the life and career of a great but tragic American shooter named Lon Scott–”

Swagger’s eyes stayed modestly interested, his breathing smooth, his lips unlicked. He gave away nothing and made certain not to choose this moment to break off eye contact and take a sip of coffee.

“Lon Scott. Interesting fellow,” Adams continued. Then he went ahead to issue the specifics on Lon Scott, the bright youth, the safari heroics, the football stardom at New Haven, the extraordinary run of national match successes in the years after World War II, the tragic accident in ’55 at the hands of his father, his father’s suicide, his reemergence as a writer and experimenter in the late fifties, and then his own death in 1964.

“Sad story,” said Bob as at last Marty had to take a breath and left a gap in the noise. “I hate it when someone so talented gets cut down young. Fella had a lot more to contribute.”

“Yes, it does seem so,” Adams said. “Then I made another interesting discovery.”

He went on to tell how, in the early seventies, a fellow named John Thomas Albright emerged as a gun writer and ballistics authority and soon became a revered if mysterious figure in gun culture. He had an excellent career until he was killed in a hunting accident in 1993, at the age of sixty-eight. “I learned by accident that he was also disabled, wheelchair-bound. You’d never know it from his writing. I checked for pictures, and none existed that I could find. I went to Albright’s home in rural North Carolina and learned that he was a mystery there as well. I began to wonder: could Albright and Scott be the same fellow? If so, why would Lon contrive his own fraudulent death in 1964 and reemerge as John Thomas Albright? What was he hiding or hoping to distance himself from?”

The question hung unanswered for a moment or two, and Bob glanced at the grim countenance of Richard, the third member of the group, and then answered. “I suppose you’re referring to our point of common interest, a certain event in November 1963.”

Adams, versed in upping the dramatic ante on his tale, paused an artful second or so, then nodded. He waited another second.

“Of course. So I decided to look into the life of these two men more carefully. I discovered that while, obviously, Lon Scott never published an article after 1964, John Thomas Albright never published one before 1964. I acquired copies of all their articles and first by myself and then with the help of an academic who specializes in forensic reading, we made a line-by-line comparison and found deep organizational similarities as well as dozens of turns of phrase that were similar. I found three cases where Albright made reference to discoveries that Scott had made as if they were his own. I discovered that the documentation on Scott’s death was very, very thin, as if contrived by an amateur. I could go on with the irregularities, but the point is obvious: Lon became John. The question is, why?”

“You’re in areas I haven’t even gotten to yet,” said Swagger. “You’re coming at it from a different angle. See, I’m on the how. The way an engineer’s mind works, there’s no point in proceeding until the how is answered. But you’ve started on, or you’ve advanced to, the who.”

“You can see what I need,” said Adams. “I need that how. Just like you need the who. So what I’m looking for, basically, is a theory. It’s one thing to put together a biography full of mysterious elements that might circumspectly suggest that Lon Scott, a great rifleman and ballistic experimenter, was involved in the Kennedy assassination to some degree. But a lot of people, if the data is manipulated and selected carefully enough, could fit in a similar template. What I need is somebody of extreme capability to put together a coherent narrative, based on what I can uncover about Lon Scott in 1963, as to the how part of his engagement. Where would he shoot from? What would he use? How would he get in and out? Who helped him? Remember, he’s in a wheelchair, so he needed allies. Here’s a provocative fact: I learned that he had a first cousin named Hugh Meachum who was some kind of CIA star at the time. He too died in 1993. But the connection of Lon and Hugh in 1963, if it can be documented, is titillating. But see, it’s all meaningless without that first part. How did they do it?”

“You don’t have any idea?”

“Well,” said Marty smugly, “I can’t reveal how I know this yet, but there is some suggestion that another rifle is involved, and it was a Model 70 Winchester. It’s more than Lon’s engagement over the years with Winchester. I’m talking about a specific Model 70, caliber as yet unknown. I got to thinking: what could you do to either a Model 70 Winchester or a Mannlicher-Carcano to make them compatible? Somehow interchange parts? Take the barrel off one and–”

“Trust me,” said Bob, “you are now in my pea patch, and there is a way of doing just that. That’s where my thinking is taking me. I’m looking at some kind of deal where a .264-caliber bullet from a Carcano shell was fired from a .264-caliber casing, say .264 Win Mag, 6.5 Swede, maybe a wildcat like a .30-06/6.5, in order to get enough velocity so the brain-shot bullet self-destructed.”

“Excellent,” said Marty. “Oh, this is so exciting.”

“There’s an issue of timing, but the reloading angle is interesting. And you say you can link it to a Model 70? That would really tie the bow on it.”

“That’s it,” Adams said. “I’m hoping the answers are in sync with the Warren Commission, not crazily opposed to it. You have to know the hard facts of the Warren Commission. And it all has to fit in that time frame. Nobody has ever come close to that.”

Swagger went all engineer on him, hard and practical. “I can see this might work. But what’s your pitch?” he asked. “What is it you want from me?”

Adams said, “Well, I’d like to hear your ideas, though, please understand, I’m not forcing you. Your theory is your intellectual property. I am not trying to pry it from you. You decide if you care to share somewhere along the line. What I am suggesting is that we explore working together. I’d get a lawyer to draw up a contract so that each of us is protected. I know you’re a cautious man. When you’re satisfied, we should have a working session and a frank exchange of evidence. I should also tell you – I alluded to this earlier – I may have a piece of evidence that could nail this absolutely. I won’t tell you what it is or where I got it, but it could astound the world if it’s what I think it is.”

“Is it this mystery Model 70?”

“When I explain it to you, you’ll understand what I’m talking about. I can’t say more until we’ve signed contractually. I should add that I have a very good agent in New York, and we are talking about a book as the end product, are we not? I will write it, you will vet it. We may have to bring in another, better writer at some point, properly vetted and legally obligated by contract to us. Is this satisfactory?”

Swagger squinted hard. “I never move fast on anything. You have your lawyer draw up that contract, I’ll have mine look at it, and we will see where we are then.”

“That works for me,” said Adams.

“If that happens, I will settle down and write – I ain’t no writer, so ‘scratch out’ is a better term – all the stuff that comes out when I have a late-night thinking session. I think that will do better than any yakkity-yak session. You’ll see that it’s taking you where you think it should. We’ll proceed from there.”

“Absolutely,” said Adams. “I don’t want to apply pressure, but I think we should have as our goal, going public, by either book or other media, by or on November 22, 2013. The fiftieth anniversary. There’s going to be a groundswell of attention then, so we might as well cash in on it. It never hurts to think about marketing.”

The next day, Swagger issued his report over expensive coffee, amid prosperous moms and boho kids and various cino-machines, to Memphis.

“Blew me away when he pulled Lon Scott out of the hat.”

“It is possible that he came up with Scott independently, without knowledge before of Hugh or 1993. I mean, Lon was real, he left tracks, traces, and that is the area in which Marty Adams is known to be an expert researcher.”

“It is. I ain’t saying it ain’t.”

“He seems to be clean. We’ve looked hard at him. I will direct Neal to look hard again.”

“Appreciated. Even a paranoid like me has to admit, though, there ain’t no signs of a game.”

“Before you go anywhere with Marty, I will have everything on him except his colon X-rays.”

“If you get them, I don’t want to see them.”

“I don’t want to see them either. I’ll have an intern go over them. That’s what interns are for. Meanwhile, where are you? Investigation-wise, I mean. Still having fun?”

“I’m tussling with Red Nine. It’s got me up nights. And then when I get real depressed over that, I think about the other riddle I have made no progress on, the deal on the timing. How they did it so fast, how they got Oswald into play when nobody knew until three days before that, by fluke, JFK was going to be driven under his window. Man, they were good.”

“Or lucky.”

“Or even worse: both.”

In this business, bad days are an occupational hazard. I spent several under intense artillery fire at a forward operating base in Vietnam when I was running Phoenix. An Israeli rocket buried me in rubble for six hours in Beirut, ruining a perfectly fine suit. I was detained in 1991 by some obnoxious Chinese border guards for what seemed like years but was only hours. I thought they were going to beat me up because I was Russian, although I wasn’t, and if I’d told them who I really was, they would have beaten me up twice as hard, plus allowed me to rot in their prison system for half a century. It was frightening, coming close to melting my phony sangfroid and tarnishing my Yalie style. Incroyable!

But no day of my life has been as bad as November 21, 1963. It seemed to last forever, and at the same time it seemed to be over in split seconds, and the next one, although we all had fierce doubts, was upon us so quickly, we couldn’t believe it.

We were a grim-faced bunch. I don’t think any of us had come to terms with what we were about to do. Some doubts you never put away, and those haunt you – all of us, I mean – for years and years. Now is not the time for the postmortem; I can say only that I plunged ahead on the faith that the change would be for the better, that it would save lives in the hundreds of thousands, white, yellow, north, south, theirs, ours, that it would forestall the anarchy and chaos that I quite rightly had predicted, that I was and we were reluctant assassins, that we believed ourselves to be moral assassins.

Nevertheless, the day was spent in a kind of existential dread, a clammy dryness of breath and persistent wetness of body. Food had no taste or appeal, liquor had too much taste and appeal (and was therefore avoided), and to quote a line from, I think, James Jones in The Thin Red Line, “numbly [we] did the necessary.” (I trust my posthumous editor will have the energy to run the quote down.)

Alek was out of my control, if he’d ever been in it. There was nothing that could be done at this point. He would do what was required of him well enough to enjoy the success that had eluded him in life, or he would not. I suppose it was possible, and I confess it never occurred to me, that he could have called his “friend” Agent Hotsy of the FBI and turned me in, as part of a scenario by which the red spy (he thought) was nabbed and JFK’s life was spared. He’d be a hero then, and money and fame would come of it. In retrospect, I’m glad I didn’t concern myself with such nonsense. In the first place, he didn’t have the imagination. In the second, truly, he didn’t have the disposition: he was a born Dostoyevskian or Conradian subversive, a hard-core assassin or mad bomber. In another century, he’d have carried a bowling-ball bomb with a fizzing fuse under his cape. He wanted to destroy; it was his destiny. He wanted to reach out and atomize the world that had relegated him to bug status, cursed him with reading difficulties, attention difficulties, a sluggish mind, an obsessive streak. It never occurred to me that such a figure would betray me. I was his only hope, his true believer.

My fears about Alek, instead, were practical. Would he remember the rifle? Could he sneak it out of Mrs. Paine’s house without either her or Marina seeing it? Could he sneak it into the Book Depository the next day without dropping it in the lunchroom with a clatter, sending its removed screws all over the place? Could he reassemble it, or reassemble it correctly? A black comic vision came to me of him having done everything perfectly, the sight exactly on the target, the perfect trigger squeeze achieved, and SNAP! nothing, because somehow he’d dropped the bolt and hadn’t noticed the firing pin fall out on the floor. Or maybe his ride into work on Friday morning would catch a glimpse of the front sight, and the fellow would say, “Lee, what the hell is that?” and Lee would panic and jump out of the car. With an idiot like him, any number of screwups were possible, and I have to agree with a number of anti-conspiracy commentators who, after the fact, said that no intelligence agency would trust such a moron for an important assignment. They were right, but for the fact that operational necessity sometimes compels gambling on a disreputable character.

I tried to put aside my doubts on poor Alek and proceed with business that I could control.

We met that morning after room-service breakfast in my room. Not a bunch of happy fellows, as I say. Jimmy had things to do: he had to get business cards printed, he had to figure out and fabricate some way to smuggle Lon’s silenced rifle into the building, which, among other things, would involve buying a voluminous overcoat whose sleeves would have to be tailored so they didn’t hang down ridiculously beyond his fingertips, like a clown’s. He wanted to go through the Dal-Tex Building again, to reaffirm his impressions, to memorize all the stairwells and floors and sequences of offices, to check out the locks, to conjure escape routes and hiding places, though if it came to hiding, the jig was already up. Basically, he wanted to apply his professional expertise and mind against the site of the crime again, so there’d be no surprises during the operation. I sensed he had to be alone for that, and also that he wanted to be alone. He was always the lone-wolf type, God bless him.

Off he went. Lon and I decided we should get a good look at Dealey Plaza. I pushed him over to Main, and we traced what would be the president’s route, turning right down Houston, flanking the plaza, then halting at Houston and Elm for a good look at Dal-Tex and its big windows with their excellent vantage over the plaza. We then crossed Houston and headed down the gentle slope and curve of Elm in front of the Book Depository. It was all pretty empty, for the plaza wasn’t a tourist attraction; why would it be? It offered no grace or beauty, as a Boston or Connecticut or Washington, D.C., park would, no grand leafy trees, just a few stunted oaks, no brilliant gardens, no ponds with swans and ducks. It was basically banal, a greensward plopped absurdly into the middle of nowhere, a rough triangle of grass between three streets, with, for some bizarre reason, a little annex to the north where the civic fathers, in their infinite wisdom, had thrown up some mock Roman Coliseum-style pillars in a semicircle atop a little rise, as grotesque and misguided attempt as any I’d seen at classical grace. Sure, it was Texas, but why didn’t they hire an architect, for God’s sake, not the mayor’s wife’s drunken brother or whoever perpetrated Dealey upon the world. It was less a park or a plaza than an abandoned field.

We didn’t say much, and I didn’t want to linger. I was being careful; maybe someone would recall the strange Ivy League prince and his wheelchair-imprisoned pal and report that to the feds, and who knew where that would lead. Or maybe Alek himself, taking fantasy shots from the sixth floor, would catch a glimpse of me, though would he recognize me in a gnarly Brooks Brothers tweed jacket and dark slacks with a pipe in my mouth and my horn-rims firmly in place when all he knew was a fellow in a lumpy GUM suit with sleeves of mismatched length because Natasha had been asleep at her sewing machine in hour fifteen of her sixteen-hour shift back in ’55 when she sewed the suit parts together on a Soviet sewing machine the size of a Buick. Then I relaxed. Today Alek would be in Pretendville, riding down the Malecon in Havana in the rear of a well-waxed ’47 Caddy next to his god Fidel, waving at the adoring crowds.

I pushed Lon down the street.

We followed the Elm sidewalk down the slope, and I had to pull against the wheelchair to keep it from getting away in gravity’s grasp. Lon saw a chance for a joke. “Don’t let me slip away, James Bond, and get creamed in traffic. You’ll be one pathetic Danger Man tomorrow.”

I was glad to hear the humor in his voice, even if it was sardonic. “Pip-pip, old man, I shall do my duty, as Yale instructed me,” I said in priss-soprano, kidding the blueblood-agent stereotype of which I was almost a pitch-perfect example.

I didn’t get Lon killed, and we passed the Book Depository off on the right, got down the incline, and I stopped us about halfway to the overpass, just past the idiotic Roman folly on the right, and turned Lon 180 degrees back so that he could see Elm Street, the rise of the hill, the two buildings that commanded the angles, the depository and the one from which he’d be shooting – we hoped – the Dal-Tex Building a little behind it across Houston. We were alone on the sidewalk, with the traffic whizzing by us.

“I make it about a hundred yards,” I said.

“To which building?” Lon asked.

“The one in the rear. The one we’ll probably be in.”

From that angle, you couldn’t see all of Dal-Tex, only the wall along Elm, though at an extreme angle, and a stretch of the Houston Street facade. Another completely ugly, graceless building. I think it was trying to be “modern.” Ugh. It changed personalities after floor two and went to soaring archways encompassing the windows, a flourish that registered as completely idiotic to me. What did they think that did for them? These Texans!

“Suppose we don’t get in?” Lon said.

It was as yet unsettled, and it worried me too. I couldn’t let that show to Lon. Cousin or not, I had leadership responsibility and had to represent clear-voiced optimism.

“Oh, he’ll do it. Jimmy’s the best. He’s very clever. And if he doesn’t, you’ve had a nice trip to Dallas at government expense and gained a story so fascinating, it’s a shame you’ll never be able to tell it.”

“I can’t believe I’m here, looking at this, talking about this,” he said.

“I can’t believe it either. But here we are. Do you see any difficulties in making the shot?”

“No. At that range, with a velocity a little over three thousand feet per second, it won’t drop an inch. The downward angle won’t play because it isn’t far enough, and the buildings as well as the dip will cancel any wind effects. Fish in a barrel. It’s technically point-blank, except you don’t know what ‘point-blank’ really means, and I don’t have much interest in explaining it now. Trust me. The bullet will hit what it’s aimed at, and it will destroy what it’s aimed at, even as it destroys itself. And then we enter the Lyndon Johnston era, God help us.”

“Johnson. Not Johnston.”

“Is this a quiz?”

“No, I’m being a jerk because I’m nervous.”

“Let’s get out of here. I’ve seen enough. Can you push me up the hill, or shall we wait for a cab here?”

“I’m fine.”

I pushed him up the hill. November 21, 1963, sunny but breezy, in the fifties, two men in jackets and ties, one pushing the other up a slight hill in a wheelchair. And that was that for recon, planning, rehearsal, and psychological preparation. We dealt with the issues as they came up, that was all, and improvised our way past any obstacles.

That night we had a final meeting in my room. Both Lon and I were eager to hear what Jimmy had been up to.

“I got this overcoat” – he held up a tan gabardine model, single-breasted, light, perfect for the weather and so banal that it would fit in anywhere in America – “and had a Chinese lady shorten the sleeves. Here, look.”

He threw the thing on. It hung well, even if the shoulder seams were a little off the shoulder, a few inches down the arm. Who would notice? More important, you could hide a tank in its folds.

“Okay,” he said, “here’s the interesting part. Question: how do we get a forty-inch, eight-pound rifle with scope and silencer into a building without anyone noticing it?”

“Something more sophisticated and more secure, please, than wrapping it in a paper bag,” I said.

“You’re going to have to break it down, obviously,” said Lon. “And I’m going to have to show you how to reassemble it. It isn’t just screwing in screws. You’ve got to set the three screws at a starting point, then tighten them three turns apiece in order, to a certain total for each hole. You’ve got to line up the slots with a piece of tape. That way, you preserve my zero.”

“He’s good at doing things,” I told Lon, nodding to Jimmy. “If you show him how to do it, he’ll do it exactly that way.”

“Mr. Scott,” said Jimmy, “I think I can manage. I’m not as stupid as I look.”

“It’s okay, Jimmy,” Lon said. “I didn’t mean anything snotty. I’m just nervous.”

“Me too,” said Jimmy, who looked as nervous as a stainless-steel rat trap, and we both had a tension-breaking laugh over such a ridiculous concept. Jimmy could talk his way into the Kremlin if he had to. “I also had the Chinese lady make me this,” he said.

He took a roll of material out of the coat pocket and unfurled it on the bed. It was about six feet long, four inches wide, and the woman had sewn pockets at either end, with crude but robust stitching meant to support weight.

“I throw it around my neck like a scarf,” Jimmy said. He did that so each end hung down the side of his body. “Now, in the left pocket, I slide in the rifle stock, with trigger guard and screws Scotch-taped in place and also the silencer. In the right pocket, I slide in the action, barrel, and scope. The pieces are hanging down my sides, halfway down my thighs, the metal parts a bit heavier than the wood, the whole thing awkward but secure. The lady was a good seamstress. Then I throw the coat on, and the coat being much longer than the ends of the scarf are, to my knees, it covers both completely. It’s so voluminous that nothing shows through the material. I just look like a businessman about his job on a coolish fall day in the great downtown trading center of Dallas, Texas. As long as I don’t run, squat, bump up against anybody or anything, I’m all right. Remember, my exposure will be short. Just the walk over from the car, the elevator upstairs, the walk down the hall, and one second to get in. I can get the rifle together in thirty seconds, you boys arrive, we open the window. Then we leave and go home and watch the rumpus on the television.”

“You must have brass balls, Irishman,” said Lon.

“Learned in the bog, sir,” said Jimmy.

“Tell me the rest, will you?” Lon said. “I don’t get it. I need to believe in it, and bloody Hugh here was so gung-ho and excited, I couldn’t follow him. I’m jumpy. I have to hear it from its author and know it’s going to work.”

“Yes sir, Mr. Scott,” said Jimmy.

“It’s a very good plan,” I said. “But we do need input. We need to know what to look for.”

Lon shook his head sadly.

“Tomorrow morning,” explained Jimmy, “around ten, I’ll show up at the Dal-Tex Building dressed in my best suit, my hair all pomaded fine-like, my eyes twinkly, my demeanor all charming Irish boyo. I will go into six offices on each of the fourth, fifth, and sixth floors of the Dal-Tex Building, those that front Elm as it nears Houston, and those on Houston as it looks down Elm. From any of those offices, Elm, as it passes the Book Depository and Dealey on its way to the triple overpass, is easily reached from the angle we need.

“In each office – I know what they are, I’ll spare you the details, but they’re garment wholesalers who move goods to Texas retailers in and around Dallas, some ladies’ lingerie, some men’s haberdashery, a tie specialist, two shoe lines, the rag trade, in short – and I’ll introduce myself to the girl and present her with my card.”

He reached into his pocket and pulled out a stack of cards.

JAMES DELAHANTY O’NEILL

“JIMMY”

REPRESENTING

PREMIERE FASHIONS, BOSTON, MASS. 02102

DA9-3090

TELEX 759615 PREMIERE

“Then I hit her with my patter. Jimmy O’Neill, down from Boston, representing Premiere Fashions, purveyors of fine suitings, ladies’ wear and lingerie, and gents’ haberdashery. There is such a place, all will know it, but it’s not in this market. My pitch: we’re thinking of expanding, going national with the fine economy we’re experiencing, and I’m on a look-see tour to gauge the interest and was wondering if I could get a minute with the boss man to see if he’d be likely to take on a new line. In all instances, the answer should be no, not today. The reason is that the president’s coming to town, and we’re closing down the office from noon till two to go out and wave at the great young fellow. Darn, I say laughingly, my luck! I’ve seen him a thousand times in Boston, even in bars and restaurants, but I pick a day to come to Dallas, where nobody’s seen him, when he himself is here. She laughs and ushers me out.

“Of course, I’m scouting. First, will the office be closed? Second, how good is the angle to the street, particularly since we’re guessing the idiot will find some way to miss his first shot at the corner and Mr. Scott will have to pick it up as the limo goes down Elm and that little hill. Third, how big is the staff, in case there are any Republicans who might stay behind because they’re not about to admit a Democrat Irishman has become president. Fourth, what kind of lock’s on the door, and will it be easy to pop if I come back. Fifth- What’s fifth, you tell me. That’s what I need to know.”

“The windows,” said Lon. “We couldn’t tell from the street how they opened. We need an old-fashioned sliding window, up and down. No foldouts, because their hinges don’t let them fall low enough to be out of the line of fire.”

“Very good, sir,” said Jimmy.

“Books,” said Lon. “I’ve got to stabilize the rifle on something other than my lap. A heavy board that slides across and is supported on the arms of the chair would be best, but I can’t ask for that, I know. You’d never get it in. The best thing would be some heavy books to pack onto my lap. I’ll rest my elbows on them. That’s a request, not a demand. If it comes to it, we can secure the chair, and I can make that shot offhand. I still shoot offhand, sitting offhand, and I’m damned good, but the books would be helpful.”

“Books it’ll be, then,” said Jimmy.

“Finally, you said fourth, fifth, and sixth floors?”

“I did.”

“I’m thinking fifth is the preferable by far. I need as little angle downward as possible. Not for the shooting but for my placement in the room. If I’m on the sixth floor, I’ll have to be close to the window and maybe projecting the muzzle of the rifle beyond it in order to get the low angle. Not good, especially as it lets the muzzle of the suppressor out into the air, and the sonic boom won’t be contained in the room.”

“Is that it, Lon?” I asked.

“I can’t think of anything else,” Lon said.

“All right,” said Jimmy, “let me sum up how I see it happening. I find the most suitable of the offices that matches everything or nearly everything. I tell you by telephone which it is. Then I go back to the hotel, and around noon, I slip the rifle in its straps about my neck and cover it with the overcoat. I amble back through the crowds heading to the plaza to see the young president, head down Elm, and casually dip into the Dal-Tex Building. Should get there around twelve ten. No problem, though there is a busy sheriff’s station to the right of the lobby, but it’s a fine public building of commerce, with constant, unmonitored, in-out. I take the elevator to the proper floor. I’m guessing the place is largely deserted. I get to the office, pop the lock, slip inside. Quickly, I break out the rifle parts and assemble the rifle as Mr. Scott has shown me.

“You fellows hit the building at about twelve twenty. By that time most of the crowd has gathered and is awaiting His Highness. Mr. Meachum pulls Mr. Scott’s chair up the three steps and into the lobby, and again takes the elevator to the proper floor. Down the hall to the office. It’s open, and you slip in, time about twelve twenty-five. No need to rush, but we all know what’s got to happen. I’ll have cleared a space near the window and the rifle, loaded and assembled, will be there.”

“By the way,” said Lon, “the cartridge is too long to feed up through the magazine. You’ll have to carefully thread the rim into the bolt, then slide it forward. Only one. No need or time for a second. I’ll show you later.”

“Got that, sir. Then Mr. Meachum pushes Mr. Scott to the shooting position, and I pile and arrange the books in his lap. We hear the roar of the crowd as the motorcade comes down Main a block over, turns down Houston, then turns again down Elm. Mr. Meachum raises the window–”

“Say,” I said, “maybe it would be better if you opened the window first thing. That way, there’s no chance of somebody across the street being attracted to the moving window and then seeing evidence of the shot. I’m guessing even with the silencer, there’ll be some burst of gas.”

“That’s good,” said Lon. “It won’t be much, and it’ll be so light that I doubt it’ll be observable, but why take the chance?”

“So be it,” said Jimmy. “The second the job is done, down comes the window.”

“Shouldn’t he do that last?” Lon asked. “Anybody who hears a trace of the noise might have oriented to Dal-Tex and could catch the motion.”

“That’s good, sir,” said Jimmy. “Consider it done. Anyhow, I remove rifle and books from Mr. Scott, and Mr. Meachum wheels him out, down the corridor, and I’m guessing out of the building within two minutes, well before the police can have gotten over to seal it or investigate, though I’m sure they’ll be concentrating on our friend in the next building who’s making all the noise. In any event, it’s a man in a wheelchair and his attendant, who’d suspect them of mischief? Off you go, in whichever direction seems feasible, until you’re well clear of the mess. Possibly you stop off for lunch. Then back to the hotel.

“As for me, I break down the rifle, repack it in the whatever-you-want-to-call-it, throw on the coat, replace the books, close that pesky window as mentioned, and slip out, using my toys to lock the door. I’m out of the building a few minutes after you.”

“I thought of one more thing,” said Lon. “It just occurred to me. I don’t think it matters in the hallways, because there’s a lot of traffic, but if you can, the office has to have linoleum or bare wood. See, I’m a heavy guy, and the wheelchair leaves tracks. If they get back tomorrow and someone notices these mysterious wheelchair tracks on the floor, again, questions may be raised, maybe, I don’t know how investigations work, maybe–”

“It’s good,” I said. “The tracks, that’s very good. Jimmy, also try to find an office with thirteen-year-old Glenlivet Gold. Not the Glenlivet Red, but the Gold. I might want a highball during the–”

Everybody laughed, and so for the first time, I felt slightly optimistic.

I didn’t feel like breakfast that morning, but after a sleepless night, I had to get some air. Around 8 a.m. I left the hotel and took a little walk around downtown. It was dowdy, even shabby, since the miracle of Dallas with its steel and chrome skyline was years off. Absent the glow of the flying red neon horse fifteen or so stories up the Magnolia Oil Company building, it just looked crummy. The sky threatened rain, but the fresh air felt good to my lungs. The temperature would rise a bit, into the high fifties or low sixties, and these trees, at least, had lost most of their leaves, which blew about in the skittish wind. In those days, everyone raked their leaves, then piled them at the curb and burned them, so the odor of burning leaves was ever-present during the autumn; I tasted it as well, enough to give the air texture and remind me of boyhood days before I got myself into the president-killing business. (Remember the coup in Saigon? I’d killed other presidents.)

I stopped at the Walgreens soda fountain, read the Dallas Morning News over a cup of coffee, and listened as the Texans all about me gibbered excitedly about the president’s upcoming visit. The main thrust seemed to be whether or not to go to the parade route and see the handsome young man and his beautiful wife. There was also some annoyance at an ad that had appeared in the morning paper, in which someone accused the president of being soft on communism. The Texans in this corner of Dallas found the ad in poor taste, and more than a few of them groused about it.

I kept to myself, engaging no one, even if my tweed sport coat and red tie made me stand out a bit from them. They were so excited, they didn’t notice. I thought I had a white shirt left in my room and decided to change into it, and to a duller tie. I wished I’d brought a dark Brooks Brothers suit, but I’d not given much thought to wardrobe when I packed for the trip.

I walked back to the hotel, though chance took me by a hatter’s, on Main, a few blocks over. I went inside. I looked around, and a fellow came to wait on me. We had a pleasant chat, and I bought a mild little cowboy hat, gray for fall, with more brim than I was used to and with slightly more dramatic curl. I knew I would feel foolish in it, but the trick to wearing a hat is to pretend that you are not wearing a hat. The idea was to lower my profile and fit into the hat-rich Dallas culture, where a short-brim fedora, as I usually wore, would be far more noticeable than the demure cowpoke’s lid I now capped my head with.

Feeling more camouflaged, I walked back to the hotel and went upstairs and lay down for a bit. There’d been no calls. I was assuming Jimmy had already left and was doing his jobs, and that Lon was resting. I also assumed that our pigeon, Alek, had managed to get out to Mrs. Paine’s, retrieved his bag of “curtain rods,” gotten back to Dallas without spilling them all over the highway, and was on his way to work. I was never a praying type of fellow, and it seemed wrong to invoke celestial support for a deed so foul, but I couldn’t help myself from looking skyward and muttering a little something in case someone was listening on the upper floors.

At 10:45, I showered (again!), changed into my white shirt and dull brown tie, and sat and waited. And waited. And waited. At 11:18, the phone rang.

I picked it up.

It was Jimmy.

“Got it!” he said. “A little high, but everything else is perfect. Office 712, the seventh floor, right turn from the elevator, take the only left, and it’s on the right. Great lines down Elm.”

“Got it,” I said, and headed downstairs, pipe in mouth, horn-rims on, junior-cowpoke headgear firmly mounted. Lon was waiting, and I nodded at him.

“Nice hat,” he said.

It turned out we had little to say to each other beyond that exchange. If I looked as bad as he did, we were in trouble, hat or no hat. Then again, I had the normal Lon to use as baseline, the ruddy, vivid, sometimes outrageous paragon of stoicism and mordant humor, not this pale, solemn corpse. I could feel myself in the same colorless shroud of skin, with the same dryness of breath, the same sense of dread and doom all about, the presentiment of failure, tragedy, utter destruction of self, and all the self-love he had built. Plus, I was wearing a stupid hat! I was so damned heroic, I made myself sick! I pressed on, noble Yale champ that I am.

I had decided to spare myself the agony of pushing Lon to the site, a twelve-or-so block ordeal made more difficult in those unenlightened days by the absence of ramps or rails for the disabled. But getting Lon into the cab was never easy. You had to sort of roll-push him from his chair to the seat and wait until he squirmed and pulled himself upward; then you folded the wheelchair, slid it into the front seat, and went around to the other rear seat. For some reason, he seemed especially heavy that morning; perhaps he was involuntarily resisting me, willing himself into sheer deadweight, above the waist as well as below it.

“Where to, gentlemen?” asked the cabbie when, huffing and puffing, I finally got in.

I gave him the address of a medical building on Poydras, just beyond Main.

“You know, there’ll be traffic there,” he said. “JFK’s in town, he’s coming down Main in a motorcade, and it’ll all be jammed up with viewers.”

Damn! I hadn’t thought of that! Fool, jerk, dolt! Agh! What a ludicrous end to the operation if the assassins got stuck in traffic.

“I realize that,” I said. “That’s why we’re early. Jim’s appointment isn’t until one.”

“One-thirty,” said Lon, picking up on the game.

“Off we go, then,” sang the cabbie. “No problem.”

The cab whizzed along, did seem to slow almost to a stop on a main stem, but the driver cleverly plotted a new course and got us to Poydras well in advance of our time. I never even breathed hard during the trip.

He pulled up outside the building, and I got out to unload the wheelchair and Lon. The driver called, “Need any help, sir? Glad to pitch in.” They are so polite in Texas.

“Thanks, I’m used to it,” I said.

Indeed, Lon somehow willed himself to be lighter. I don’t know how he managed to vanquish the laws of physics, but it seemed he had obliterated a good twenty pounds of matter from the universe, and I fairly tossed him into the chair. Then I paid the driver, $1.75 plus a quarter tip, and turned to wheel Lon up the steps to the North Dallas Medical Arts Building. Damn, the driver seemed to linger, waiting for me to call for help to pull Lon up the steps, but then another fare slipped into the cab, and off they went.

I wheeled Lon the half block down Poydras and turned him left – that is, west, if it matters – and slowly down Elm a block to the Dal-Tex Building. Meanwhile, the threat of rain had cleared itself up; a broad, cloudless Texas sky vaulted overhead, full of brightness. In the opening between Dal-Tex and the County Records Building on our side of the street, I could see the crowd gathered in front of the Book Depository; it seemed like they were three or four deep already, and there were batches of people across the street, on the grass of the plaza. I wonder if it was as merry as it seemed or if that’s my memory playing tricks, filtering through the knowledge of the event that I knew was about to occur.

I suppose that was one America there, gathered gaily in the sunlight. You could hear indistinct crowd noises, a kind of purr or mutter from the breast of the mob, somehow fueled by happiness, glamour, hope, good thoughts of self and president and country. I knew I was about to take all that away and didn’t feel particularly great about it, but I felt – I say this over and over, do you think I’m overcompensating a bit? – I felt that in the long run, when things settled down, even if we never healed our wounds over the young man slain, our collective future would be brighter and fewer boys would come home in boxes or wheelchairs.

“Hugh,” Lon said, “I’ve got a great idea. Let’s not do this. Let’s take a cab to the airport and fly to Tijuana. We’ll spend the next six weeks drinking margaritas and screwing whores, even if I can’t screw anything. How does that sound?”

“You can’t screw whores because of a tragedy called paraplegia, and I can’t screw whores because of a tragedy called marriage,” I said. “Even if we both dream of whores, that’s the end of that.”

“You’re right. I guess we ought to go ahead.”

“Besides,” I said, “we can’t find any cabs. This isn’t Manhattan, you know.”

At Elm and Houston, we got a good look at the celebration. More and more people seemed to be gathering and spreading across the grass of the plaza as if it were some racecourse infield or county fair. The sun was bright, and I could see hats, cameras, and sunglasses and feel those positive feelings in the air. From pop music: “good vibrations.” It felt more like a circus or ball game than a political event, but I suppose that had to do with the unique identities of Jack and Jackie, who were more like movie stars than politicians.

When the light changed, I pushed Lon across Elm, then we turned up the street, to the entrance of the Dal-Tex Building. I checked my watch. It was 12:07 and felt a little early. But it wasn’t easy going up Elm, with the crowd continuing to rush down to get a good place to view the Kennedys, and a few times I had to pull back or turn sharply to avoid colliding with anybody.

When I got to the three broad steps that led to the entrance of the Dal-Tex Building, it was 12:15. I turned Lon outward and pulled him up the steps, then, evading this fellow and that, pivoted him and steered him to the main entrance. Luckily there were no revolving doors, a royal ordeal for anyone in a wheelchair. Someone held the door for us, and I slid into the dark lobby. To the right, behind a thick window and illuminated from within by fluorescent lighting, full of bustle, was an office of the sheriff of Dallas County. I could see a few uniformed deputies inside, but mainly, it was women at desks with typewriters, talking on phones or filling out official documents. There was a receiving counter, and a few people stood in line to be waited on by a sergeant. No one in there showed the slightest awareness that in a few minutes, the president of the United States would come by in a Lincoln limo, waving happily to the folks, breathing the sweet air, and enjoying the lush sunshine one last time.

I got to the elevators, punched up, and waited till a door opened. A few late stragglers were there, and I pulled Lon to the side to let them out, as they straightened hats or pulled ties tighter or shrugged into jackets against the slight chill in the air. When the car was empty, I backed Lon in, and the doors were just about shut when a woman ducked in. She smiled, punched – ah – three, and turned and asked me for a floor. “Six,” I said, because lying was natural to my state of being. Again: overcaution, a sign of paranoia, fear, lack of confidence.

The three of us rose in silence, and she got out at three, smiling, turning to say politely (as usual), “Good afternoon,” and I think we both muttered something. Then I quickly hit seven to make sure the elevator continued its ascent after the stop on six.

At seven, I pushed Lon out. The hall was darkish, empty, with no sign of human buzz or hum anywhere. Most people had gone to the plaza to see President Kennedy.

I pushed Lon down the hall, watching the signs on or at the doorways slide by, watching the numbers climb, until at last we came to an intersection and turned to the left, down another, better-lit corridor (the offices to the right, behind opaque glass, had exterior windows).

FUNTASTIC FASHIONS

MARY JANE JUNIORS

712

I pushed the door and stepped into the two-room office suite that was the headquarters of Funtastic Fashions, apparently, from the idealized pictures on the wall, some kind of line for naive young women whom you might find in the farm belt, all wholesome gingham and flower-patterned jumpers and dresses in heavy patterns, as worn, in the artist’s sketches, by pictograms representing the perfect, happy, well-adjusted junior miss. Odd how some details stick in mind: in one, Our Heroine was running with a dog, and the dog reminded me of a neighbor’s dog from some distant past. I could remember the dog, though not the neighbor or the city or the year. But the dog rang a bell.

I pulled the door softly shut, hearing it click locked, and pushed Lon across wood flooring beyond the secretary’s desk. The name on the door to the boss’s office was simple: Mr. Goldberg. It meant nothing to me; nor did the pictures on the wall of a middle-aged fellow who looked to be Jewish, with a wife and three children, all five beaming at the success Mr. Goldberg had made in Dallas, Texas. I slid Lon into the boss’s office, a square, high-ceilinged wood-floored room full of light, with an overhead fan rotating sluggishly with a slight hum. It was dominated by two large windows, and immediately across the way, I could see the upper floor of the Texas Book Depository. I pushed Lon to the window, and as we approached, the angles widened and revealed, in all its detail and seething mass of witnesses along both curbs, the spectacle of Elm Street trending left as it descended the gentlest of inclines, shielded at our end by the canopy of a few oak trees, yielding to the broadness of the plaza, green in bright sun, dotted with last-minute scurriers trying to get into at least the third rank along the curb for maximum proximity to the glamour couple. From our vantage, we could not see the grassy knoll, we could not see the amphitheater, the pillars, the marble benches, all the flourishes of Athens on a good day in 300 B.C., that the Texan city fathers had constructed there. But we could see every square inch of Elm Street once it emerged from the trees.

Jimmy had assembled the rifle, raised the window a few inches, and laid out a few large swatch books on Mr. Goldberg’s desk for Lon’s lap. I glanced at my watch. It was 12:24.

When I pushed Lon to the place where he’d determined to shoot from, we had our inevitable crisis. What do they say – no plan survives contact with the enemy?

The issue was height. In order to assure that minimum noise would escape from the room, Lon told us we had to be as far back from the window as possible, even with the German suppressor jerry-rigged to the muzzle. If it extended beyond the window, it would admit the report to the outer atmosphere and might attract attention, or at least curious eyes. The point was to contain as much of the attenuated report as possible within the confines of the room, where it would be deadened by the noise-absorption qualities of the walls and furnishings and by the buzz of the ceiling fan swishing away overhead. Lon would shoot from his chair but as far back from the window as possible while still having vantage on the target. The problem: at no place in the room would Lon be high enough to get the necessary angle over the sill!

We stood stupidly. Brilliant Hugh had fouled up again! It never occurred to me, nor had it occurred to Jimmy, why the fifth floor was preferable. It was too late to get down a floor or two, where the angles would have been more welcoming.

“Can we get you standing, Lon?” I asked.

“Not without my knee braces, which are in Roanoke.”

“We have to raise him,” I concluded.

It was Jimmy who remembered the swatch books originally destined for Lon’s lap. At least three inches deep, they contained fabric samples. He brought four of them over. “We can lift him up on these,” he said.

He set two down, and we labored to lift the wheelchair’s right tire, not an easy task, though Lon helped by shifting his weight accordingly. Then the other one. Lon plus chair was really heavy, and this lift was no picnic. I could feel my veins bulging with blood as I gave it all my strength, but it was probably Jimmy who did the bulk of the work. Lon was up high enough.

“Yeah,” he said, “good angle. But it’s crooked. The left one is higher than the right one. I can compensate, but–”

“I got it,” said Jimmy.

Quickly, he peeled off his nice new overcoat, folded it into quarters, and bent to the wheel. I did my part, again using all of my muscles, and Jimmy got the coat wedged between the rubber and the book. I saw that the tire had left a black mark where it pressed into the gabardine.

“Dry cleaning’s on me!” I said.

“Much better,” Lon said. It brought him to the level where he had the angle above the sill but beneath the bottom of the window. “Lock the brakes.”

As I bent to do so, we heard a rise in sound; it seemed that the motorcade had hit lower Main a block away, and when the magic Lincoln passed, it unleashed a roar of inchoate human energy, cheers and yells, yes, but also the collective sighs and deep breaths of the enchanted. Their prince had come. I knew that Kennedy was but a minute or so away.

“Here,” said Jimmy, handing Lon the rifle. It was a long, sleek thing, not like Alek’s piece of battered military junk, not like the dangerous army guns, the carbines and BARs and tommy guns I’d seen in Vietnam, not like the red burp guns, with their ugly, ventilated cooling housings and their Mob-style drums featured in every statue in Russia. I had to say that the rifle had an aristocratic grace, and in some odd way, it seemed appropriate to the young prince’s demise. Lon had told me it was a Winchester Model 70, and I knew that he and his late father had enjoyed a long and mutually satisfying relationship with the company. At one point, Lon’s father had been presented with a rifle called the Tenth Black King, in some awesome caliber, called that because the American walnut of the stock was so bloodred that it looked black in certain lights, and when Winchester wanted to give “Presentation Guns” to some who were prominent in the gun world, they had their custom shop build an edition of ten, all called Black Kings. Both Lon’s father and Lon used that rifle – which turned out to have unusual powers of accuracy – to win or place highly in national rifle competitions.

This one was not customized, at least not by Winchester. Lon had done some work on it, lightening the trigger, “bedding” the action, which I understand to be coating the interior, where the metal of the action sits in the inlay of the stock, with a kind of fiberglass or epoxy so that the contact between the surfaces is 100 percent even, and no odd stress from irregularities is transferred to the rifle, affecting the accuracy. On the whole, the thing was beautiful, a graceful orchestration of tubes supported in a slice of burnished wood, with a slight streamline that seemed to have it leaning forward, like a thoroughbred at full extension, muscles cut and the entire beast captured in a kind of forward bound.

A long tube, black and shiny, was secured to the action above the bolt by two stout metal rings, and at a point on the scope’s length between the rings lay an administrative housing, the site of a vertical and a horizontal turret by which the scope could be tuned for maximum accuracy. I was close; I happened to note the white lettering above the horizontal turret, and it read simply J. UNERTL. What distinguished this rifle from any other I’d seen was the German suppressor, the Schalldaempfer Type 3, as Lon called it. It too was tubular, and locked over the muzzle by means of a pivoting lever cranked to the closed position. The genius of German engineering! It was surprisingly stubby, under a foot long, looking like a steel water bottle screwed to the muzzle, and much discolored and tarnished from military use.

Lon handled the gun with extraordinary ease, I must say. His face deadpan, he accepted it and mounted it to his shoulder, one hand at the comb, the index finger suspended on the stock above the trigger, not touching the trigger. His other flew to the the end of the stock, which he acquired and used as leverage, thrusting the rifle back hard to shoulder, now supported by two elbows. This was the holding position. Because we’d used the swatch books to elevate him, they were not available for lap duty. He’d have to shoot offhand. I thought, For want of a nail, the shoe is lost, for want of a shoe, the horse is lost, for want of a horse, the battle is lost, and imagined the chain of catastrophe that could undo us.

Nevertheless, he was an elegant construction, slightly canted, the rifle and man solid, immutable, bent forward a bit under muscular tension as if in sprinter’s blocks, the slight vibration of his slow and easy breaths the only sign of life. The rifle was locked in his arms, which were resting on his elbows on his dead legs.

I positioned myself at the window, immediately adjacent to the opening. Craning to the left, I could see the Houston-Elm intersection as I heard the roar rolling toward us like a wave. I saw a Dallas police sedan and then. . nothing. I guessed he was some sort of advance car a half mile or so out. It seemed a minute passed, and then a white sedan came down the street, leading the parade. Three motorcycles followed, then five more in some kind of formation, then another white sedan, and finally, the large black Lincoln, with its cargo of imminent tragedy open to the crowd. It was flanked by motorcycle policemen, and we watched as it pulled wholly into view. It looked more like a black lifeboat than a car, a huge thing, with a driver and guard in the front seat, then behind them, though considerably lower, as if squatting, a male-female couple I took to be Governor and Mrs. Connally, and then Jack Kennedy himself, and next to him, in a pink pillbox hat, his wife.

His reddish hair glinted in the sunlight. Even from almost eighty yards and without binoculars, I could make out the ruddiness of his skin and could tell that all the lines of his face were pulling his mouth up into a smile, and at that moment it incongruously struck me that he was quite a handsome man. He was waving with one hand but only intermittently, and if I read his body posture in that split second, it was one of relaxation. The man was campaigning and happy.

The limo reached the hard left turn onto Elm from Houston just below me. At that point, it was out of sight to Lon, but I leaned forward and pressed my forehead against the pane. I watched as the car slowed almost to a halt and began its slow, majestic pivot toward its new direction. I could not breathe. This was Alek’s shot, his moment to enter history and send us all home absolved of any guilt.

Nothing happened.

I don’t know what the idiot was doing up there, but it wasn’t shooting. Silence. Obviously, some kind of failure, as per all anticipation. That put us right back on the fulcrum of events, the little creep with his cowardice, his incompetence, his stupidity. Agh!

The great car turned slowly left and began its descent down Elm, sliding down the slight undulation that led to the triple overpass, which moved it left in Lon’s sights, but gently, not radically. The public feet away on either side, all madly waving and cheering, you could see the excitement, the sparkle or glitter of crowd passion that you see at key moments of big ball games. The car was fully oriented toward Elm but just feet beyond the axis of the turn when Alek managed to fire his first shot.

We heard the crack! In my peripheral, I saw Lon react, not a jerk or a spasm but a tight, controlled lurch. He kept his discipline, though, and didn’t lose his hold on the rifle, which was still. He seemed calm. I knew he would fire at a specific point, in seconds, waiting for the target to climb into his crosshairs, and would make final mini-corrections before coordinating his shot with Kennedy’s arrival at the point of impact designator.

I locked my eyes on Kennedy and the car. Nothing stirred, no reaction, no sudden dive for cover, nothing. Had they noticed? I thought: Maybe it’s not Alek, maybe it’s a backfire or firecracker.

Then a second crack! rang out, and though the car had traveled a good twenty-five yards or so in the interval between shots, I could make out no reaction this time either. Possibly some movement, but nothing radical or reflexive as a bullet impact might have unleashed.

The fool missed twice. Of course! Idiot! Idiot! A burst of rage knifed through me. The little moron! God, what a fool he was; never did anything right in his life. He was struggling to catch up from the blown easy shot, was rushing, shooting poorly.

“He missed. Lon–” I said.

Again I pivoted instinctively, enough to see the fluid grace with which Lon raised the rifle, right elbow locked up for maximum support, canting the living part of his body slightly against the dead part, his head utterly still and locked on the opening in the telescopic sight. He was a portrait of stillness in motion, a discipline acquired over a hundred thousand rifle shots, the ball of his finger exquisitely balanced against the blade of the trigger. The next two, three seconds seemed to hang in eternity, although possibly that’s a conceit I impose from memory, for dramatic purposes, to make the tale more compelling, even if the only soul I’ve ever told it to is myself.

Feu.

The rifle leaped, but only slightly, in his hand, while his head stayed immobile to the scope and his trigger finger followed through to pin that lever to the back of the guard. It produced an oddly attenuated report, something like a book being dropped on a wood floor with weird tones of vibration, maybe a poke and a buzz to the inner ear but nothing sharp and percussive like a gunshot. You would expect more, would you not? It was a phenomenon of vibration, this key moment in history, a thrum or cello note extended by a master bowman. Yet in the instantaneous aftermath, I thought I heard Alek’s third shot. Could they have been simultaneous? No, because then I wouldn’t have heard both. It was as if Alek had fired a few hundredths of a second after Lon. We didn’t realize then, but it was the biggest break we were going to get that day.

Jimmy, unperturbed, was in charge in another second. “All right, fellows,” he crooned, “out you go now, while I tidy up here.”

Lon, stone-faced, handed the rifle to Jimmy as I knelt and raised the two brakes. It took another second for Jimmy to single-handedly ease Lon’s chair from the swatch books and pull the coat off, and then I had him turned around and was beelining to the door.

“Don’t rush, sir,” called Jimmy. “You’ve nothing to hide, remember.”

I took a quick peek back and saw that Jimmy already had the rifle half disassembled and was working on the third screw. Then the door closed, and I was in the outer office. I sped to that door, and it locked behind me with a click and we were in the hallway. I pushed down it, trying to control my breathing. Finally, I had to ask. “Good hit?”

“Don’t ask me what I saw through the scope, Hugh. Ever.”

We reached the elevator, I punched the down button and waited an eternity for it to arrive and the doors to open. I shoved Lon in, hit 1, and listened as the doors closed behind me.

When the elevator doors opened and I pushed Lon into the lobby of the Dal-Tex Building, it was as if we’d entered a new America. I say that knowing how trite it sounds, and then I worry again that my memory is playing tricks on me and has added a drama that wasn’t there.

Maybe. I still say it was like a massive change in the weather. I’ll argue till death that the color had been drained from the day and the atmosphere had turned sepia. I’ll claim that all the human specimens we observed were in a state of stunned shock, mouths and faces slack, posture discipline unhinged, a tone of disbelief bleeding toward numbness and shutdown everywhere. It was only about ninety seconds after Lon’s shot, and no one had processed what happened yet, although all knew, almost instantaneously, that something, something horrible, had transpired.

Then, as we watched, it transformed instantly into panic, buzz, dread, gibbering, stupidity. People couldn’t shut up. An insistent yammer began, a mutter with high notes, inflections, voices piping or breaking or losing steam in a flood of phlegm. The lobby was not crowded, but everyone began yapping at each other, along the lines of “He was shot?”

“In the head?”

“Oh my God, is he dead?”

“Who the hell could have done it?”

“Was it the Russians? Did the Commies get JFK?”

“Where did the shots come from?”

“The Book Depository? Are you kidding? The Book Depository!”

“Who would do such a terrible thing?”

Nobody paid the two of us any attention, and I pushed Lon to the door, rotated 180 degrees to back out and pull him through, got that done, and emerged into sunlight, heat, panic, incredible motion, pandemonium everywhere, random, brain-dead movement, and people talking insanely among themselves.

I saw only one man moving with purpose, a Dallas policeman who raced to the building, almost knocking me down getting by, and bulled his way inside. He was quick, that man, and I don’t know if it was by official directive or his own decision, but he’d understood that if the Book Depository was the probable origin point for the shooting, other buildings with access to Elm Street should be sealed for investigation.

He’d missed us, or perhaps scanned us from afar and dismissed us because of Lon’s disability. As for Jimmy, still inside, I felt confident that he could outthink and outmaneuver a Dallas policeman any day of his life.

I gingerly pushed Lon to the edge of the steps and began the ordeal of easing him down into the roiling crowd, which, drawn to tragedy exactly as had been the thousands who’d lined up to see the bullet-riddled corpses of Bonnie and Clyde, surged toward the plaza to see, to know, to feel, to bear witness, to be a part of what all felt was a calamitous day for our country.

I was trying to figure which way to go, as fighting the crowd with Lon wouldn’t be easy. I’d pretty much decided to get across Elm, divert to Houston, hit Main, and head up until the crowds had thinned, then cut to Commerce to get us back to the hotel.

Then the left wheelchair tire caught on something on the middle step. I bent awkwardly to see what it was (a chunk of loosened cement that had worked out of the joinery between the stone slabs) and was readjusting the chair by pulling it back a couple of inches when, in my peripheral vision, I saw Alek.

I happened to be tilted away from him; I was looking down and hunched and twisted to jigger the chair free, and perhaps that is why he didn’t see me. Was that luck? I suppose. The other truth is, he probably wouldn’t have recognized me under the cowboy hat I wore and under the pall of doom he wore.

He was the betrayed man. For an instant, but only an instant, I felt a mote of sympathy for him. He’d been looking through the scope, trying to get on target for his third shot, when he’d seen what only Lon had seen – though within months, thanks to Mr. Zapruder, the world would see it. Alek, with his low, weaselly cunning, would know in that instant he was tricked and abandoned. Stupendous fury must have overcome him, replaced in seconds with abject, sickening panic. Along with thoughts along the line of: Fucked again, failed again, now I’m really cooked. Or maybe there’d been a twinge of ego gratification in what had to be his impending destruction: at last he was important enough to betray. His paranoid fantasy had at last come true. He was that crazy. Somehow he’d gotten downstairs and out of the building before it was sealed. Now he had no place to go, he had no escape plan, he knew the Wagoneer wouldn’t be waiting at Houston and Pacific, that it wouldn’t be long before a canvass was taken at the depository and his absence was discovered, a few minutes beyond that when his FBI record was connected to his name. He knew he was about to become the most hunted man on earth.

He already looked it. He knew he was the patsy. He was grim, hunched, angry, churning ahead with menace and dread in his beady eyes. His skin was ashen, his hair was all messed up, his cheeks were hollow, his jowls set hard, as if he were grinding his teeth. Though muscular, he had his hands jammed into his pockets, which narrowed his shoulders and gave him an almost negligible slenderness. He was the quintessential man of the fringes, aware that the bright glare of the world’s attention was to be focused on him. No trained clandestine operative would have presented such an obvious profile to the world, but nobody else was paying much attention either. He fought against the human current that gushed toward Dealey and the scraps and fragments of hope that filled the air. I heard them too.

“Maybe he’s okay. Head wounds bleed a lot.”

“They got him to the hospital in minutes, maybe seconds. These days, docs can do anything.”

“Maybe it was a grazing wound, you know, splashed some blood but didn’t do any real harm. That happened more’n you’d think in the war.”

“A guy that vigorous, he’ll be up and about and playing touch football in a few days!”

Impervious, head down, clothes ever grubby and attitude ever surly, Alek bucked ahead, ducking, stutter-stepping, evading, and soon I lost sight of him. His destiny lay elsewhere.

I got Lon all the way down to the sidewalk and joined the human tide. Everywhere I looked, small scenes of grief played out: a Negro woman had collapsed and was shrieking violently, there seemed to be cops everywhere, children cried, women wept, the men had that grave, glaring war face that I’d seen and would see again in Vietnam. The pedestrian masses overspilled the streets, and traffic was at a standstill. We could see more and more police cars converging on the scene, though trapped in the amber of people and vehicles, going nowhere. Guns had come out, and I think federal agents had arrived with their tommy guns, or maybe it was Dallas Homicide with all the firepower. I don’t know who they thought they were going to fight; maybe some red sniper nest defended by machine guns on the sixth floor of the Book Depository.

That was the focus of the attention. It was surrounded by policemen and cars and earnest federal agents who’d taken out their badges and pinned them on the lapels of their dark suits. Many had pistols out too. At the same time, the television trucks – remember, TV news was in its infancy then, and the camera equipment was cumbersome – had somehow bulled their way through, gotten their cameras out, and set up shots. I could see, every which way, earnest reporters addressing the tripod-mounted eyes of the networks and the locals. (I think Dan Rather was there somewhere.) Farther down the hill, I could see armed officers on the grassy knoll that would become such a feature, and all across the green emptiness of Dealey, small groups of people stood, many pointing, first at the looming Book Depository, then at the grassy knoll. Nobody pointed at Dal-Tex.

And the noise. I can’t quite describe it, but it was as if, involuntarily, every one of the thousands of folks there had started to moan or snort or breathe too heavily. A persistent murmur filled the air, not the surge of joy I’d heard from Dal-Tex 712 but something guttural and low, animalistic. No one person contributed that much, but it was the voice of the collective unconscious expressing its horror and grief and regret. I’d never heard before and would never again hear anything like that.

I got Lon across Elm and we began to push our way up Houston toward Main. People stormed by us, late to the party but intent on joining. Nobody gave a damn about us except for one cop at the corner of Main and Elm, who noted me waiting for the solid stream of traffic to break to get across, and when I was about to give up and go up Main, he took command of the traffic, whistle and attitude at full blast, and cleared a space for us to get across. I nodded thanks to him, and he nodded back; that was my only encounter with law enforcement that day, and I’ll bet in ten seconds the officer had forgotten all about it.

I continued down Houston until I reached Commerce and started up it. The Adolphus was ten or so blocks away. Then, miraculously, I was able to flag a cab. I gave him the hotel and got Lon in. The driver couldn’t stop jabbering.

“Did you see it?”

“No,” I said, which should have been sufficient, but like any guilty man, I overexplained. “We were at the doctor’s for my brother’s checkup.”

He didn’t notice. His mind was obsessed with what had happened ten minutes ago. “Man, I can’t believe it. Can you, mister? Holy cow, it’s such a tragedy. He was such a handsome young man. And that wife. God, what a dish. She was Jean Simmons and Dana Wynter combined with a little Audrey Hepburn. Oh, Lord, what she must be going through. I heard on the cop channel, they drilled him square in the head and there wasn’t anything left and–”

“Is it official? Is he dead?”

“I don’t know. God, what a mess.”

It took some time to fight our way up Commerce – it was as if the city had shut down everywhere except Dealey Plaza – but eventually, we arrived at the Adolphus. The doorman, solemn as was everybody, helped me get Lon out of the cab seat and into his chair. I could see he had been crying.

The crying continued inside, where a few old ladies of the flowery Southern-gentlewoman sort sat in a corner of the lobby, two of them in tears, the other two ministering to them with white hankies. I heard someone ask if the show at the Century Room would be canceled that night.

“I need a drink,” said Lon.

“Good idea,” I said.

I wheeled us through the lobby, past the Grand Staircase and the elevators, and into the dark Men’s Bar, surprisingly crowded, surprisingly quiet, dominated by a large black-and-white TV above the mirror at the center. We found a table with a good view of it, requested that the waiter turn it up, and went through the Texan idiocy of the bottle club.

“Jenkins,” I said, giving my official cover name, under which I was registered. “I have a bottle of bourbon, J.B.; could I have a shot straight and a glass of ice water?”

Lon remembered his own nom de guerre, laid claim to his bottle of Southern Comfort, and ordered his own straight shot, with ice on the side.

“Bring both bottles, sirs?” the waiter asked.

“Yes,” I said, “I think we’re going to need them.”

I checked my watch. By now it was 1:39. Evidently, Walter Cronkite had just announced, then taken off his glasses and pinched his nose, that JFK was gone. Someone said something wise, and someone else closed him down fast Texas-style with “Shut up, Charlie Tait, or dadgum, I will shut you up myself.”

We sat there all afternoon in the dark silence, watching the images float across the screen. We watched the discovery of Alek’s rifle and the three cartridge cases, we heard of the swearing in of Lyndon Johnson, all without comment. The news came shortly thereafter that a cop had been shot to death in the Oak Cliff section of Dallas, but nobody knew whether it was related to the president’s death except me. Alek’s roominghouse was in Oak Cliff; it had to be him, and the description of the assailant – young white man, five-ten or so, muscular build, under thirty – had to be him. At the time, I thought, Damn, I told him not to bring a gun, and the bastard disobeyed me! I knew I never should have counted on him and cursed myself doubly for springing such a dangerous incompetent on the snoozing world. Later, I realized he’d gone all the way back across town to retrieve the pistol, so he had at least stayed under discipline until he understood that he’d been betrayed. That was all I could have asked of him.

I said a prayer for the policeman. Hypocritical, no? But hypocrisy is one sin I cannot evade; it is, after all, the core of my profession, a demure churchgoing dad and Yalie by weekend who plots murder by weekday. I was quick to come to terms with it. I concluded in the end that I had done all that was possible to ensure such an outcome would not happen. It did anyway because of the intractability of the piteous Alek. It is a misfortune but not a tragedy. All operations of force – we were to learn this in spades in the coming decade – involve risk of collateral damage. The policeman, like the president, made his career decision based on a cost-benefit analysis, took his chances, and his number came up. That is the wicked way of the real world, morally justifiable if the ends themselves are morally justifiable. So it goes.

“I don’t think I can take any more of this,” Lon finally said.

“You okay?” I said.

“I’ve felt better,” he replied.

“Remember,” I said. “The long view.”

“Easy to say,” he said. “Not so easy to do.”

“I’ll push you,” I said, and started to get up.

“Hugh, I’ve had enough of you for one day, all right?”

He wheeled himself out of the bar, and I watched him propel himself across the lobby to the elevator, where another guest had to punch his floor. He rolled into the car, the brass doors closed behind him, and off he went.

I went back to the bourbon and the television. I watched Air Force One take off with the new president, the body of the old president, and that poor crushed rose of a woman who was, just two hours ago, the glamour center of the world.

At about 3:20, it came. It signified the beginning of a new phase, one in which I was extremely vulnerable, as was the agency for which I worked (and which I loved), whose reputation and possible ruin I had risked.

This from Dallas. The police department arrested a twenty-four-year-old man, Lee H. Oswald, in connection with the slaying of a Dallas policeman shortly after President Kennedy was assassinated. He also is being questioned to see if he had any connection with the slaying of the president. Oswald was pulled yelling and screaming from the Texas Theatre in the Oak Cliff section of Dallas. .

It didn’t take long for them to round him up, did it? About two hours, and in that time he’d managed to kill a policeman. What a complete fool he was. Again it made me sick, and I took another bolt of the hooch, which hit like a mallet, driving me further into blur. I think I phased out after that, as the bourbon took over, and I fell into a stupor. I was not behaving well. This was not in the “Pip-pip, onward and upward” tradition of the agency and all its Skull and Bonesers. The event had reduced me to alcoholic stupor.

I don’t remember going upstairs to my room or taking a shower. Or climbing into my pajamas. I don’t remember going facedown on the bed.

I do remember waking up around midnight. And I remember the panic I felt.

Where was Jimmy Costello?

CHAPTER 18

These strange ‘visions,’ for such they must be called, are extremely vivid in some cases but are almost incredible to the vast majority of mankind, who would set them down as fantastic nonsense. Nevertheless they are familiar parts of the mental furniture of the rest, whose imaginations they have unconsciously framed and where they remain, unmodified or unmodifiable, by teaching.”

Bob squinted, feeling his brow crunch in pain. So wrote Francis Galton in the late nineteenth century, and Bob thought: What the fuck?

If he understood it, and he wasn’t sure he did, Niles Gardner had been fascinated by whatever thing it was that Sir Francis had noted 120 or so years earlier, some “fantastic vision” disease or condition. It had to do with colors showing up when cued by encounters with nothing of color. A letter could have a color to it or, in this case, a number.

He seemed to be saying or acknowledging or somehow having fun with – there was an unidentifiable sense of lightness to it, humor, almost a joke – how he saw certain things in color. He would always see the number four as blue, which was why he had four junky ceramic bluebirds on his shelf, and the number six as green, which was why he had a magazine illustration from the fifties that incidentally displayed six green elm trees. Most provocatively, he saw the number nine as red, which was why he had a Mauser 96 pistol lying around, one of the few Mausers designated by the numeral 9 engraved in the grip, then painted red, and known forever after as Red Nines.

Swagger sat in the business office of the Adolphus, where he was again staying in Dallas, and banged his head against the enigma at a computer monitor that the hotel provided its guests. Outside the door, prosperous men seemed to push to and fro; by extreme happenstance, the hotel was that weekend the site of some sort of JFK Assassination Research meeting.

Swagger had ridden down in the elevator with a batch of them, mostly heavyset white guys in sport shirts who hung together.

“Y’all interested in the assassination?” he asked one.

“Mmm,” said the man, looking off, as if he had some big secrets cooking and couldn’t share them with an outsider. Maybe he was the guy who realized that the Commies had not one or two but three Oswald clones in play on November 22.

Swagger looked back at his notepad, where, in childish script, in an attempt to keep it straight and orderly, he had inscribed some notes that anyone else might see as insane.

“Blue = 4, Green = 6, Red = 9,” read one line.

“Maybe numbers not as significant as colors?”

“Maybe sequence isn’t important?”

“Maybe it’s not a code, it’s just what he sees?”

“Why would Hugh have anything to do with 4, 6, or 9, or blue, green, or red?”

That was a stumper. He was, he realized, on the second step, but only on the basis of fragile assumption. That assumption: that Hugh’s last, best, lost work name was a reflection of Niles and Hugh’s love of Nabokov, and that it involved a pun, possibly cross-lingual, that could be noted only by someone who knew it existed.

So: what linked them?

But: there was no direct link between the three numbers, the three colors, and Hugh.

Except: the pistol, as his son noted, stood for espionage. It had to. It was exactly the implement any spy in the twenties or thirties might have carried if he didn’t have a Luger. What were its advantages over a Luger?

More firepower, ten rounds to seven.

Longer barrel, meaning more accuracy.

More ergonomic, because its weight was ahead of the trigger, not above it, as in a Luger.

More psychologically threatening to an opponent.

More flexible, as it could be mounted to a shoulder stock and used for longer-range shooting.

It did have disadvantages.

Bigger, heavier.

A little harder to load, with a stripper clip that demanded fine motor control to mate with the interior magazine lips, rather than a magazine, which, by gross motor movement, could just be shoved into the Luger’s grip.

Harder to conceal, maybe very difficult to conceal, because it was bigger.

Yet these were the sort of things a Bob Lee Swagger would consider, not a Niles Gardner. Niles, after all, was a lit guy, not a gun guy. He wouldn’t be thinking tactically but symbolically, and in his brain, the glamour and the romance and the vividness of classical prewar espionage, back when it was called the Great Game, was just as easily conveyed by the Mauser as by the Luger.

Maybe the meaning of the gun as tool was of less importance to Niles than the meaning of it as symbol. In his mind, it could and probably would be his image of his friend the heroic (three tours in ’Nam!) Hugh Meachum. After all, Hugh was the man Niles could never be but would always want to be. The gun, solid steel, precise, deadly, able to destroy at long distance, concealable under a Burberry trench coat, the indispensable leverage that enabled its possessor to control any dangerous transaction, was a perfect projection into objective reality that expressed all the Hugh traits that Niles didn’t have.

As Niles’s mind had to work, Hugh was the Red Nine. It had to be that way. Maybe the assumption wasn’t so small after all. The “Red” association was another buttress in the argument, for it conjured up Russia, which, after all, had been Hugh’s primary target, the Vietnam tours being mere diversions. It all fit together.

But it went nowhere. It didn’t connect to Nabokov, it didn’t connect to the Agency. It just sat there, an old pistol on a dead man’s desk, its secrets locked away, only a glow of hopes or fantasies about it, its sole uniqueness the Red Nine on its grip.

I wish I had a drink. I wish I had a cigarette. I wish I had a whore. I wish I had a mansion by the sea.

No, he didn’t. He didn’t wish he had any of those.

I wish I had an answer.

He thought that maybe that answer lay somewhere within the work of Sir Francis Galton, cousin to Darwin, Victorian polymath (Bob had to look up the new word).

He Googled Sir Francis.

The Wikipedia entry came up first, and he absorbed the info quickly.

Eugenicist. Another word to look up.

Hmm, seems to believe smart people should breed and dumb ones shouldn’t.

Fingerprints.

Hmm, noted the uniqueness of fingerprints, classified them, and thus invented the forensic discipline of fingerprint index, and thus, in one sense, was the father of scientific crime investigation.

Heredity.

Believed passionately in the power of genes (obviously, eugenics and fingerprints) and that talent clusters could be associated with certain families, i.e., those of the “superior” English upper class, into which he was born.

Synesthesia. It was something he had been the first in the world to note clinically.

But it was another new word.

Bob Googled it.

Synesthesia.

Alek’s grubby face stared at me from the screen. Same surly demeanor, same anger, same radiant negativity and self-pity, undercut with toxic defiance. It made me sick.

I staggered to the TV set and changed channels, but no matter where I turned, there was Alek, with some demented commentator spewing out the sordid details of his life. Russia, Marine Corps, attempts to defect, poor employment record, marriage to a beautiful Russian girl, father of two baby daughters, known for temper and abusive, explosive behavior. There was a fuzzy film of him handing out pro-Cuba pamphlets in New Orleans: really, what did he think that would accomplish?

Now and then they’d cut to film of his wife as she carried the two babies to a car amid a swarm of reporters and cameramen. I remember being struck with how pretty she seemed, but also how confused and vulnerable. I hoped she had somebody good to take care of her and was later gratified to discover the ministrations of the angelic Ruth Paine on Marina’s behalf. Thank God for the good people of the world, to somewhat ameliorate the pain caused by teams like Alek and Hugh.

It took a while, but I was more or less sober when I got around to assessing my position. Of Alek, even in police custody, I had little fear. What could he tell them, and when would he tell it? Listening carefully to the reports, I concluded he’d not yet made any wild charges about Russian agents guiding him. Rather, he’d been indicted only on the murder of Officer Tippit, for which he had no alibi and no defense and for which there were plenty of witnesses hungering to send him to fry in the chair. He was probably enjoying the attention and plotting how to spin it out for years and years and years. That he would die at the end was at this point meaningless; he was having too much fun being famous at last.

Every time the coverage shifted to Washington, to tracking the grief and shock of the capital city, to images of a weary LBJ arriving home, of Jackie returning alone to the White House, I changed channels, and by one had turned the damn thing off. I knew it was the beginning and that it would go on and on, and we’d have to get the reaction of each family member, each intimate, each acquaintance, we’d attend the funeral and the burial and the. . It was too much. So much for tough guy Hugh, the New Critic of politics and policy, not letting emotion or sentimentality get in his way.

When the tube was dark, that left me alone with my biggest fears, concerning Jimmy Costello. I checked my watch again. I stole down the hallway to knock on his door softly and got no answer. (I paused at Lon’s too and heard the regular breathing of merciful sleep, though now and again he’d stir uncomfortably.)

Back in my room, I tried to think things through. Suppose they’d nabbed Jimmy and the rifle? Suppose they’d offered him a deal, no execution if he rolled over fast. Though it was against his principles, maybe he’d seen that taking the rap alone was no bargain, so he’d talked.

It went on. Maybe even now, police raiders were assembling to swoop us up, men with tommy guns and shotguns, hell-bent on justice and retribution. I wished I’d brought my .45 with me. The best thing, under those circumstances – though tantamount to an admission of guilt – would have been the swift application of 230 grains of hardball suicide to the head. But that would leave Peggy and the boys and poor Lon to face alone the mess I’d made. I knew I couldn’t do that. If caught, I’d also have to absolve the Agency of any blame, make certain all knew it was my ploy and my ploy alone, that I’d coerced Lon into it against his will, that I had done it for what I believed were sound moral policy reasons, confess, take my sentence, and face my executioners with dignity and grace, leaving a legacy for my sons and the Agency.

There was nothing to be done. I called the desk to see if the bar was still open, and it was not, and inquired if I could have a bottle sent to my room and was told it was too late. So I just sat there, waiting for – Godot, I suppose. The knock on the door. The explosive entry of the raid team. Mr. Dulles, so disappointed? Cord, even more disappointed. I saw myself saying, “But Cord, it was your wife he was screwing,” and Cord answering, “He was the president of the United States, you fool!”

Then there was a knock on the door, soft but firm.

Oh, Jesus, I thought, for it was the climax to the day. Live or die would be decided upon the opening of the door. I glanced at my watch. Good Christ, it was nearly five.

I walked over.

Smiling sheepishly, Jimmy Costello, with something wrapped and bundled in his suit coat, was standing there. “Sorry I’m late, Mr. Meachum,” he said. “Hope you wasn’t worried.”

“I only had three heart attacks and finished my bottle and tried to order another.”

“Very sorry.”

“No, no, God, man, not your fault, mine. I should have been tougher. The leader hangs together in the bleak moments, and I didn’t. Thank God for that Irish rascal Jimmy Costello. Bet you’ve got a story to tell.”

“No heroics. Just me sitting in the dark for twelve hours until the night became wee and I was able to make a dash.”

“Tell me.”

“Sure, but can I go to my own room first and get myself my own bottle?”

“Absolutely. Enough for a glass for the boss?”

“Count on it, Mr. Meachum.”

He laid the bundle down on the bed, where it fell open. I was happy to see the rifle, in parts, still in its odd canvas holster straps. The man himself returned in a few seconds, undid his tie, poured us each a couple of fingers, and commenced with the tale. I can’t capture the trace of Irish brogue that underlay his account because it was more a thing of rhythms and lightly alternative syllabic emphasis, so I won’t even try. It would be blarney. But here’s the gist of it, as I recall.

“You leave, I get the gun disassembled and holstered, I snatch up the coat and I’m out the door maybe thirty seconds after you. I hear it click and head down the hall when I remember the damned window. The window. I give it a second. Maybe the old man won’t notice his window open where it was closed before. But he’s a Jew, smart as a tack, with a gift for details if he’s in the garment trade, because that’s the biggest of big business games, so I duck back, pop the lock, flee across the outer office to the inner, and get the window down as it was. So I’m maybe a minute and a half behind you as I hit the hallway, and lo and behold, ahead of me, the elevators open and a couple of birds pop out. They’s all concerned about the president, but more so about not being able to leave the office because of that damn cop. What, did he think a haberdasher gunned down the president? They were so taken with it, I know they didn’t pay a hair’s attention to me, so I figured I was okay.

“But when I get to the elevator and push down, the doors didn’t open. I figure there’s been another call and check the indicator above the doors and see both cars are downstairs in the lobby and ain’t budging. I figure that means the cops have put the kibosh on them for a bit while they check out the real estate.

“I go to the stairwell and can hear commotion on the flights below. Not sure if it’s cops coming up or citizens going down, whatever, but it’s not good. I slip off my shoes and, in my stocking feet, head up a flight to the top, me with the death rifle hanging around my neck, heart beating like a drum.”

He took a pull of his bourbon, and I joined him.

“I make it up and then run out of building. I’m hard against the roof. Fortunately, the stairway does lead up to a door set horizontal in the roof. Using my picks, I pop the door in a second, roll to the roof, and let the door slip shut behind me, hearing it lock. I look about. The roof is empty, and no building stands taller to give vantage. The only structure would be the elevator machinery house twenty-five yards away. I ease my way to it, feeling naked as a jaybird and worried about helicopters or low-flying planes, but the sky is empty too. I’ve got my jimmy keys and I’m in in a flash. I squint and can see there’s not much but space for the greasy lifting and lowering machines. I get past the machinery to the far end of the house, where some quirk in design has left a platform in the wall so it forms a shelf or space or something.

“Fortunately, Jimmy’s a strong boy, and he gets himself up there and wedges himself way back to the wall, so he’s not visible to flashlight beam from the doorway. A searcher’d have to come by the motor works, go to the rear, and shine a beam directly in.

“I squeeze this way and have to do some squirming to get more or less comfortable, pushing my coat this way, fixing it so I’m not lying on the gunstock, or got a lump of coat under my ass, because I’ve decided my best bet is to stay still till the middle of the night, then ease out. I committed myself to the long haul in the dark.

“A few hours later, I hear noises, and sure enough, the door into the machine room is opened, lights are turned on, and I hear a couple of detectives and a janitor. The janitor is saying, ‘See, nobody’s been up here since the last inspection in July. Besides, you got the guy.’ The cop answers, ‘We have to check everything, bud.’

“I hear them poking around, and some light beams shoot around the machinery. Nobody wants to go in any farther. They dip out in a second, and that’s that for another twelve hours.”

“Very good,” I said. My Jimmy! I knew he could outsmart a couple of buckram Texas detectives.

“Well, not so good,” he said. “I haven’t told you of my problem.”

“How can it be a problem, Jimmy? You’re here, poor Alek has been nabbed, and everything’s as it should be.”

“I’m hoping so. Anyway, here’s what happened. I lay flat after that and let the time pass. After a bit, they okay the elevator, and so I’m close to the huffing and humming of that motor and can hear the cables winding and unwinding, the whole elevator cycle, the doors opening and closing, the cars going up and down and on and on. By ten it’s settled, and by eleven it’s gone away. I figure a few more hours. But around two, I’m suddenly smelling something, and I don’t recognize it. Acrid-like, industrial, for some reason I’d say it smells brown, if that makes any sense, smells of machines and such, and here’s the funny thing, I know I’ve smelled it before, but I don’t know where or when.

“The smell continues, and I realize it’s rising out of my own clothes. I feel around with my fingers and come across a spot on my overcoat upon which the rifle has lain, and it’s damp, and I bring it to my nose, and that smell nearly knocks me out. I’ve got the picture. Somehow I arranged myself in a certain position, and the rifle action had slid out of its pouch a bit. It laid on its side over a long time, and whatever Mr. Scott used in cleaning and lubricating it–”

“Hoppe’s 9,” I said. “It’s a bore solvent and lubricant. He uses it to clean, then he lightly coats everything with it as a lube. Yeah, it’s pungent.”

“That’s it, then. Anyhow, this stuff has to obey gravity. It begins to seep downward, and it starts dripping out. This happens over and over as I’m lying there, and a stain is spreading. Fortunately, from the way I’ve got my things arranged, it’s all on the overcoat and none on the suit coat, which I’d pushed back so it didn’t get lumpy on me.

“Now I’ve got a problem. It’s not just the stain but it’s the smell. Suppose, as I’m heading back to the car, I’m stopped. The cops are sure to be about. I can talk my way out of anything, and I’ve got my James Delahanty O’Neill card and Massachusetts license to get me out. But that stain’s standing out like a bull’s-eye on my chest, and maybe these Texas coppers know guns and can ID the smell. Not good.

“After I climb down, I take the coat off and fold it. It turns out they used that shelf to store carpeting, so I slide the coat into the carpeting so that it’s covered by a lot of weight. I smooth the carpeting over it. You can’t tell from looking at it that the old carpeting pile contains a coat, and it’s so heavy that I’m thinking it’ll contain that smell forever, at least until it evaporates.

“That leaves me with only my suit coat to hide the strap with the rifle parts, and it’s not long enough. I figure I can make it out of the building unseen, and then I’ll dump the rifle behind some garbage cans. I’ll go to the car, come back, drive around a bit to make sure no cop car is patrolling, and jump out and secure the rifle. That’s my plan, and that’s what I did, and I didn’t have no problem. It seems there’s lots of folks out, they keep going down to the depository, which is all lit up, and they’re placing wreaths and bunches of flowers on the hill. Anyway, sir, that’s the story.”

“I think we’re okay,” I said. “They’re so convinced it’s Alek and only Alek, and he’s probably beginning to think that way himself, they’ll never do the kind of search that would uncover the coat.”

“Possibly in a year, when all this settles down, you’d want me to return and revisit and remove that piece of evidence.”

“I wouldn’t do it too soon, Jimmy. I’d wait to see how the trial goes, I’d wait to see if the investigation stays with Alek or they tire of him and branch out. If the government commits to Alek and history commits to Alek, nobody’ll ever look any further. It could lie there for fifty years and never be seen and never tell its story. In the meantime, get some sleep, and I will too, and there’s nothing left for us to do here except make a low-profile exit from Dallas and return to our lives. You’ve done great, Jimmy.”

I shook his hand. For the first time in twenty-four hours, I felt the weight of dread come off my shoulders, and the air tasted clean on the way down. I took a last sip of the bourbon and this time enjoyed the mallet. It amplified the feeling. I realized then: we’d done it.

And that’s the way it happened. I have to laugh anytime I encounter the “deep plot” theory with various government (ours, theirs, anybody’s) manipulating forces, making exquisite plans based on surgical precision and split-second timing (the clandestine operation on JFK’s body on the tarmac at Andrews being the most hilarious). It happened the way everything happens; it was part of the world, not an exception to it. We had a plan for something else, and from that basic text we improvised, we adapted, we bluffed and lied and risked, and we brought it off. We were given an opportunity and maximized it, but we couldn’t have done it if we weren’t already there, on the ground, in midoperation, on another mission. It changed its essence and the scope of its ambition, seizing on the one-in-a-billion happenstance that put JFK seventy-five feet outside the Book Depository, and even that opportunity Alek the Idiot blew. Still, we prevailed. It was, like everything, ramshackle, clumsy, full of mistakes, and unconscionably lucky. We threw it together, that’s all, because it seemed right and moral, at least to me, and because it was, I believed, my duty.

I won’t argue the morality and I won’t – can’t – argue the strategic outcome in the next years. I will say this: as espionage, it was a masterpiece.

CHAPTER 19

The lawyers – Adams’s in Hartford, Connecticut, and Bob’s, actually a recruited FBI surrogate in Boise, Idaho – dickered for a couple of weeks on issues that lawyers find fascinating: share of profits (equal), share of expenses (equal), no first-class travel (a major concession for Marty), equal exposure in the case of lawsuits for libel, misrepresentation, the expropriation of intellectual property, and so forth.

Meanwhile, Swagger heard from Kathy Reilly in Moscow that his friend and ally Stronski had been released from the hospital, with no charges filed, and had promptly disappeared, figuring he was on an Izzy hit list. A day later, Stronski himself checked in: “Am fine, brother. You saved my life. One second later on that shot, Stronski is dead. I owe all. See you soon.”

Then word came from the “lawyer” that the contract, basically boilerplate with a filigree or two, was okay. Swagger arranged to have it sent to him at the Adolphus, where he stayed in the open as Jack Brophy. Richard was witness to his signing, and it was sent off to Marty for countersigning along with Bob’s hastily written notebook, recording all his late-night ideas, for Marty’s perusal.

The word came back quickly, via an e-mail.

“This is brilliant. Much more than I expected, and it seems to dovetail exactly with what I have suspected but was unable to articulate. I especially like your focus on Oswald’s behavior in the two hours of freedom he had left. It seems you’ve noticed things nobody else has, and all point to a conspiracy of the sort that could easily involve our friends, the happy cousins Hugh and Lon and maybe a few others. Let me come to Dallas and meet with you, and I will tell you what my contribution to our cause is to be. I think you’ll be impressed. French Room again. On me! No need to split expenses on this one, I’m so happy!”

They met in the French Room three days later, ate more sliced carrots, filigreed celery, thigh of rabbit marinated for three weeks in squid broth, and plum-banana tart under a glaze of honey and strawberry, all to Marty’s narration, which was complete to all apostrophes and something he called an apercu. There wasn’t even a Richard Monk along to absorb some of Marty’s excess attention and keep the conversation from becoming too Marty to bear.

Finally, Marty relented and got to his tale over the last morsel of bunny.

“Suppose,” he started, “Lon Scott – after all, not a sociopath or natural-born killer by any means – returned to his home in Virginia on November 24, 1963, with two pieces of luggage. One contained clothes. The other contained a Model 70 Winchester rifle that he had used to put an exploding bullet into the head of John F. Kennedy.

“Like any man who’s never killed, Lon feels contrition, regret, doubt, self-loathing. This can but double, triple, multiply grotesquely as the week wears on, and after it the months and the years, and the man he’s killed is declared in the popular culture a secular saint, a martyred king – Camelot! – and, finally, a demigod. Lon cannot bear to confront the instrument by which the deed was done, for that is to acknowledge that he was the one who did it; and so he commands a servant to stuff it in a closet somewhere. There it sits and sits and sits.

“Let us consider such an object, the case in which the rifle is stored. It’s leather, possibly from Abercrombie and Fitch, about a yard long and half a yard wide, able to contain the two parts of the rifle, stock and action/scope, plus the tube of the suppressor, in parallel on velvet cushion. There’s plenty of room for the bolt, for the screws, maybe a two- or three-piece cleaning rod, a pack of patches, a brush, a small container of Hoppe’s 9, a small bottle of lubricating oil, and a rag or chamois for mopping up.

“Maybe in the case as well are two or three extra rounds, that is, of the counterfeit iteration on which you have such provocative insights. Suppose, further, a metallic residue could be removed carefully from the uncleaned barrel, and that residue, by neutron-activation hocus-pocus, would link it to only one kind of bullet at the exclusion of all others, the Mannlicher-Carcano 6.5 manufactured by Western Cartridge Company in the mid-fifties. That’s the point, if I understand it, right, Jack?”

“That’s right, Marty.”

“Let us further allow that in those days they always put a luggage destination tag on every suitcase, which one can fairly guess bore the initials of the ultimate destination – in his case, Richmond – and wrapped it around the handle, and there was some kind of adhesive or stickum by which the two ends were joined. And suppose they were always dated. And Lon’s name and address would have been validated by another tag.

“We have this object, linked by dated tags to Dallas, November 22, 1963, never opened, because Lon never again used or touched the rifle. It is physical proof that Lon was in Dallas that weekend; Lon, one of the greatest shots in the world. We have physical proof that he had a rifle capable of firing a bullet into the president. We have several samples of the cartridge, possibly with Lon’s fingerprints. We have the rifle itself with his fingerprints or DNA traces on it. The barrel of the rifle will contain metallic traces that can be linked metallurgically to the bullet that assassinated the president. Your Honor, I rest my case: whoever has possession of that case has physical proof of the conspiracy to murder the thirty-fifth president of the United States and, by fair inference, the identity of the man who pulled the trigger. Such a discovery would force a reopening of the case, and reopened, the case would lead straight to wherever it would lead, perhaps to the CIA cousin Hugh Meachum. The jig, as they say, would be up. Do I have your interest yet, Jack?”

Swagger stared at Marty intently. His mind was abuzz. Was this bullshit, a setup, or had the silly fool stumbled on exactly what he’d said and had the key to the whole goddamn thing?

“It’s very interesting,” said Swagger. “Are you saying–”

“Let’s continue. As I’ve said, Lon doesn’t like to look at it, so it’s stuffed away somewhere, in a closet or a storage room. In a few years, his paranoia gets the best of him, and he does some research and then clumsily fakes his own death and takes up a new persona. He’s not a professional, and that’s why it will be easy for anyone to learn that ‘John Thomas Albright’ is Lon Scott, cousin to the mysterious Hugh.

“After he ‘dies,’ a lot of Lon Scott’s shooting material – his beautiful rifles, his notebooks, the drafts of the articles he wrote for the gun press, his reloading and experimental records, all that is left to the National Rifle Association, and some of it is displayed in the National Firearms Museum, first in D.C. and later in Fairfax, Virginia.

“As for the gun case, it is incriminating, so he wouldn’t give it to the NRA. When he ‘died’ and became Albright, he took that with him, unopened. It was at his new very fine home in North Carolina when he died for real, this time as Albright, in 1993.

“To whom would he leave the case? He had no living relatives, no children, there were no women in his life; maybe Hugh? Maybe a faithful servant? A loyal lawyer? Another shooter? Another shooter’s son?

“Hmmm. Let’s go with that one. Maybe this son dumped it in an attic, having no interest in it but unwilling to dispose of it. Some years later, he was contacted by a writer. Not a real writer but one of those fellows whose obsession with the arcana of firearms impels him to pen volumes like Winchester, An American Tradition and The Guns of Ruger and so forth, and they are such beautiful volumes and he has such great connections in New York that he can get big firms to publish them. Maybe this writer has tumbled to the fact that famous shooter Lon Scott, mysteriously dead in 1964, became John Thomas Albright, famous shooter, who lived another thirty years before dying in a hunting accident in Arkansas. What an interesting life the fellow had, even absent the minor detail of November 22, 1963, in Dallas, Texas. He’s decided to write the biography.

“As I say, this writer contacts the son of another shooter who has unwittingly inherited all the John Thomas Albright material, and he sells the young man on his project. The young man agrees to turn over all the stuff – the gun case, a few other rifles, the Albright manuscripts, whatever is left, everything for and by and of John Thomas Albright – for research purposes. The deal is that when the book is published, the stuff will be returned to the son, he will donate the papers to the NRA, and sell whatever other goods remain at auction, and the provenance of ownership by Albright/Scott will make the stuff very valuable. Everybody wins: the writer gets his book, the son gets the profits of the sale, John Thomas Albright/Lon Scott gets his place in history.

“The writer is in receipt of the material at his domicile, and the first thing he does is make a catalog. That’s when he discovers the gun case, unopened, and he’s about to tear into it when he sees the date on the tag and the originating city. Ding-dong! Something goes off in his head. He puts it down, his own mind racing.

“He thinks and he thinks and he thinks. He sees how Lon Scott, later known as John Thomas Albright, could have been the Kennedy triggerman. That would explain the otherwise baffling, clumsy midlife identity change. He’s sitting on the scoop of the century. But he doesn’t know enough. He reads books, he tries to master the gears and flywheels of the event, he tries to figure angles and so forth. He realizes he needs help. So he goes to Dallas and discreetly looks around. He locates Richard Monk, who is, after all, a responsible figure in the assassination community, and after they bond, the writer tells him his story and admits he can’t handle it himself, he needs a better investigator, someone he can trust, someone with practical ballistics knowledge and experience, etc., etc. And that is where we are right now.”

Swagger said, “Wow. That’s a lot for one bite.”

“Oh, there’s more,” said Marty. He reached under the table to remove a briefcase, opened it, and produced two items. The first, unrolled, was an X-ray. It clearly delineated a Model 70 broken down into action and Monte Carlo stock, a tube that had to be a Maxim silencer, a disassembled cleaning rod, a few spare brushes, two small bottles, and three cartridges of oddly blunt configuration. The second was a photograph that displayed the sealed travel tag in close-up, with its inscription dated November 24, 1963, and its Braniff DFW-RIC route indicator and Lon’s name and signature and phone number, MOuntaincrest 6-0427.

Swagger’s response was explicit. “Do not open it. Do NOT open it.”

“Of course not,” said Marty.

“Is it secure?”

“It’s in my gun vault in Connecticut. In the country house.”

Swagger thought, feeling overwhelmed: Is this it? Does this idiot actually have it? He could only come up with security-arrangement questions. “Is the house guarded professionally?”

“No, but it’s locked in a vault that guarded my mother’s diamonds and my father’s rare guns for sixty years without a problem.”

“Okay,” he said. “This could be big. This could be it. We have to proceed carefully now.”

“I agree.”

“I think you should hire a security company to patrol your house. Or move it to some highly protected site.”

“Jack, I’m in the middle of nowhere. And nobody knows a thing except the two of us. No one is going to steal it, I guarantee.”

Swagger nodded. “You’re right. I do get paranoid.”

“Understandable. This is exciting.”

“I have to see it. I just have to look at it, to have a sense of it, so it’s settled in my own mind that it’s there. Oh, wait. Let’s get a handle on all this. Have you examined the provenance? Can we determine that the gun itself is linked to Lon outside of the case?”

“Doesn’t his name on the case make that point rather eloquently?”

“Yes, but if we could link the gun going to Lon, Lon possessing it, via an outside confirmation, the argument is so much stronger. Any idea where Lon got it?”

“This is the sort of practical detail I never think of. No, it didn’t occur to me. I’ve just kept it, trying to figure out my next step.”

“Aren’t the Winchester records all at the Cody Firearms Museum?” asked Bob.

“Yes, but no. There was a fire in the Winchester plant, and all the modern records were burned – among the casualties, all those on the Model 70. But Lon didn’t get his rifles directly from Winchester. He got them from the Abercrombie and Fitch gun room on Madison Avenue in New York City, where all the American swells got theirs. Teddy Roosevelt and his sons, Richard Byrd, Charles Lindbergh, Ernest Hemingway, Clark Gable, Gary Cooper, probably through Lyndon Johnson, all the fancy big game hunters who went to Africa for short happy lives in the fifties. Abercrombie was purveyor to the aristocrats, the celebs, the nabobs, the millionaires for nearly a century. They went bankrupt in ’77, and the current outfit just has the brand name.” Marty snorted. “Now it’s a mall clothing company for twenty-year-olds with actual abdominals.”

“But the firearms records?” asked Bob. “Were they destroyed?”

“No,” said Marty. “Now that you mention it, they’re in a warehouse in Rutherford, New Jersey. Too valuable to throw out, I suppose, yet not valuable enough to catalog, index, and display.”

“Can we get in?”

“I do happen to know Tom Browner, who was the last manager of the room. Though he’s old and retired, I know he has some sway still. But Jack, it’s not like you can give a name to a clerk and he comes back with the files ten minutes later. It’s a bloody mess, years dumped into other years, shipping documents spread everywhere, correspondence half there and half not. Finding Lon in that mess would be like cleaning the stables.”

“I have cleaned some stables in my time,” said Swagger.

“I see it would make you happier to try. Maybe you’ll succeed. All right, I’ll call Tom Browner tomorrow and see what he has to say. When will you go?”

“Ah, better leave it open. Sometime soon. Early next week, say. Rutherford, New Jersey. Anyhow, when I get back, I’ll call you.”

“Do you want to make it one trip and go from–”

“No, New Jersey will wreck me for a week. I’ll need recovery, believe me. So we should set up a date for me to see the case in a couple of weeks.”

“Excellent,” said Marty.

“It was your idea to go to New Jersey?” asked Nick, in Seattle’s Best number eight, this one in Oak Cliff.

“Yeah,” said Swagger. “But it could easily be anticipated. It would have to be done sooner or later. You’d think Marty, with his connections up there already, would want to do it. But he let me come up with it and volunteer to do it, because he wants me to believe in the authenticity of the thing on my own. If I find anything in the Abercrombie files, that nails it.”

“On the other hand, it commits you to a known place and time, and if this is a setup, that’s where it could go down. Jack Brophy walks out of the warehouse into four guns, and that’s the end of Jack Brophy.”

“Sure. But my call is that neither Marty nor Richard have the stone cojones to get involved in a hit. Not their part of the forest. I don’t think they could hold it together mentally, setting something like that up. There’d be tells all the way through. Marty’d be sweating like a pig, and Richard couldn’t stop swallowing, licking his lips, avoiding eye contact. They’re not suited for the violent end of the game.”

“Maybe they don’t know. Maybe whoever’s pulling the string is lying to them, telling them it’s some other kind of scam; maybe they’re expendable to this guy, who, after all, is fighting for his life, his legacy, his family name, if he’s who you think he is and has done what you think he’s done.”

“But how can I not go? If I’m who I say I am, I have to go, or the whole deception falls apart and we’re left with nothing and I have to sit around and wait for Hugh to find me.”

“You tell me what to do.”

“I have no suggestions. Pray for luck, how’s that?”

“Okay, then I’ll make a suggestion. You set up your appointment. On that day, I’ll have a team from New York in the parking lot. No big deal, plainclothes, but with enough signs of serious operators on-site. Overcoats concealing long guns, vests under the coats, snail-cord earpieces, tactical shades, bloused boots, that sort of thing. If Hugh has people, the last thing he’ll want is a gunfight in the parking lot. They’ll take a powder fast, and there won’t be any action.”

“Okay,” said Bob. “It sounds good. You can pay for that?”

“It’s under the James Aptapton investigation and the Sergei Bodonski investigation. Capping Bodonski wasn’t enough; we have to find out who let the contract. It’s legit law enforcement initiative.”

“Great,” said Swagger. “I’m appreciative.”

“If we can take down the contract taker and he’s someone big, maybe even a once-dead Hugh Meachum, then we don’t have to go to JFK up front. And once we bag him, we can work for proof, and eventually, it gets out.”

“Not bad,” said Swagger. “There would be your career finisher. Your – what do they call it? Your capstone.”

“Just,” said Nick, “so it’s not your – what do they call it? Oh, yeah. Your tombstone.”

Like many Americans, I’m not sure if I saw Alek get his in real time, live on the network, or if I saw it a few minutes later, when the other networks ran the tape. I suppose it doesn’t matter.

I’d missed his brief encounter with the press Friday night, since I’d been ingloriously passed out. But I’d seen it on tape, as they had to fill the time when nothing was happening, and what I’d seen had seemed classical Alek. He was scruffy, as usual, hair a mess, and the shiner from the punch in the eye he’d taken earlier that day from a Dallas cop hadn’t subsided. He was surly, squint-eyed, radiating animus. The cops shoved him up on a riser, and immediately, a surge of newspeople surrounded him, shoving mikes in his face, yelling questions. Bulbs flashed; he winced and got to speak only a few words before the cops hauled him up to Homicide.

“I didn’t kill anybody,” he said, or words to that effect, and I suppose to him, it made perfect sense. He had to know he hadn’t fired the fatal shot. It would be a while before I worked out what had happened to him up there, but he must have seen the president’s head take its hit, and he knew in his feral way that there was a game going on, that he’d been played for a sucker and was now somebody’s prey, and off he went.

That’s why his cry of “I didn’t kill anybody” as he was taken away haunted me. What you heard in that plaintive tone was self-belief. He knew he hadn’t murdered anybody – it follows that if he was a setup, he had concluded that his shooting of the Dallas police officer was pure self-defense – and you hear it in that yell.

The next morning, after an alcohol-free, somewhat redemptive sleep, I returned to the television. It seemed all the TV people were grouchy too; they’d been working long hours without sleep, chasing witnesses and rumors, dealing with bureaucratic recalcitrance and ass-covering, shoved this way and that by defiantly unempathetic Dallas cops, being screamed at for being slow by network headquarters and screamed at louder for getting things wrong. What a life. I wouldn’t give it to a dog.

As I fought for clarity with my first cup of room-service coffee, I could sense the irritation everywhere. We were now in the basement of the police station, to witness Alek’s transfer from the supposedly vulnerable jail to one that offered more protection. To that order, an armored car had been arranged, so that only a bazooka rocketeer could kill Alek, and not even in Texas were bazookas legal.

But the transfer had fallen behind schedule. Things almost always do, don’t they? The reporters had been milling around listlessly for about an hour, and when anyone “reported,” it was time-filling banality, updates on the timing of the transfer or explanations on why it was late. Occasionally, they’d cut to Washington, where again, nothing was happening. They might run some old tape, to remind us what this was all about, not that we’d ever forget. Nobody did or could distinguish themselves under those circumstances, and I stayed with it only because it occupied all the channels. I’d decided to take a shower, get up, go for a walk, find a nice restaurant, head back, maybe watch some football – the NFL had decided, amid much controversy, not to cancel its slate of games. Tomorrow I’d fly back to somewhere under my fake identity, then to Washington under my real one, and rejoin the human race and my family.

Suddenly, on the television, it was as if a wave of energy had crackled through the black-and-white image of lolling, sullen reporters. Our correspondent – I have no idea who it was – informed us that Lee Harvey Oswald, indicted for the murder of Officer J. D. Tippit and the only suspect in the murder of John F. Kennedy, was on his way.

Why do I relive this incident? Surely any who read these pages will have seen it for himself. There’s no suspense; it turns out the same each time the tape is run, and as movie special effects have gotten almost too realistic, so the almost chaste, bloodless death by gunshot of this appalling man is of little consequence to anybody. That is the view from a comfortable perch in our present. Then it was all different: nobody knew what the next big twist in our giant American narrative would be. Nobody could have predicted it, not even I, who had made the unpredictable happen two days earlier. Nobody had any idea that Mr. Deus Ex Machina was about to introduce himself.

I saw the surly Alek emerge from a door at the rear of the crowded room. He was shackled to a cartoon figure out of the old west, some sort of gigantic cowpoke in a smallish Stetson – it was like mine, though light where mine was gray – and what had to be called a westerner’s suit, apparently khaki. It was Captain Fritz of the Dallas Homicide Squad, but he looked to our uneducated eyes like a foursquare avatar of Texas Ranger justice. He stood out in a sea of dark suits and snap-brim hats, as if intent on representing the best of Texas to a shocked world. Next to him, Alek jauntily, perhaps even smugly, set the pace. He’d been allowed to clean up and change clothes and wore a black sweater over some kind of sport shirt. He grasped his hands at his waist and, for some reason, projected a “Mr. DeMille, I’m ready for my close-up” sense of self-possession.

I have to say that the quality of the broadcast was exceedingly fine. Every detail stood out, almost as if iridescent; the lines were bold and sharp; the depth of the image was startling. I don’t think I ever saw anything so clearly in my life.

Alek never knew what hit him. Deus ex machina hit him. Fate hit him. Retribution hit him. The fellow Ruby stepped from nowhere and jammed the pistol – a gangster’s snub-nose, so appropriate to a strip club owner – into his side. I don’t think there was a flash, but the report was enough to carry the news.

The famous photo almost does the scene a disservice. It freezes and therefore distorts. You can see Captain Fritz bending backward in surprise, Ruby hunched like a boxer who’s delivered a solid gut hit, and Alek, mouth open in pain, eyes wincing. In reality, it was so damned fast, like a man slipping under the waves in the grasp of an undertow; he’s there and then he’s gone in the flashing of a nerve synapse.

Then chaos, disbelief, the whirls of spinning figures, as people fled the shot, Alek pulled Captain Fritz down with him, and various officers leaped on Ruby and shoved him to the ground. If the famous cry “Jack, you son of a bitch” was uttered, I missed it in my disbelief. I sat back and watched the melancholy play end. Alek, uncuffed, slid onto a stretcher and wheeled out, fast. Ruby pulled away. The reporters tried to make sense of it, interviewing each other to make certain the gigantic plot twist they’d just seen had actually happened.

I got a glimpse of Alek’s colorless, expressionless, perhaps breathless face as they wheeled him out and knew he was a goner. You don’t come back from that one, for I’d gotten a good fix on the bullet’s diagonal trajectory through innards, and I knew the violence it would do to the sweetbread of mysterious but crucial organs that the middle of the body conceals.

Perhaps you’ll think better of me for it, but my first thought was sadness at his death. Another man dead of violence in America, as if I hadn’t been the one who killed the last man dead of violence in America. It seemed like a contagion. You sow the wind, you reap the whirlwind, and I had to wonder when my whirlwind would come.

I’d known him and loathed him, as all did, while at the same time understanding that he was nevertheless human, like the rest of us. Did he “deserve” it? I suppose so; Jack Ruby thought so, and a few days later, I’d hear my oldest son say, “I’m glad they got him.”

Alek was a jerk, he was a fool, he was utterly incapable of doing a single thing right, but he was human and died as all too many humans do, alone, in pain, abruptly.

It wasn’t until that night that it occurred to me, amid the hysterical news reporting, that again we’d caught another gigantic break. Luck does favor the bold, no question of it. Now that Alek’s lips were forever closed, there’d be no crazed stories of manipulations by cynical red spies who set him up and played him as a sucker. A myth wouldn’t spring forth – others did, of course, all patently incorrect – to tantalize the imaginative for decades to come. Books wouldn’t be written, not about the Red Master at least, nor movies made, nor TV series commissioned. All Alek’s secrets would be buried with him, and the narrative would shift its focus to this apparition out of Chicago Confidential, this fireplug-like gunman with his titillating connection to the demimonde and women with improbably large hair and breasts and arcs of eye shadow. I thought, You know what? I don’t have to learn a goddamn thing about Mr. Jack Ruby, and that’s okay with me.

I viewed the end of Alek in solitude, because Lon and Jimmy had already left, both of them early on Sunday the twenty-fourth.

I saw Lon before he was gone. I gave him Jimmy’s report and delivered the rifle. I watched him put the parts in the gun case. He seemed dolorous and depressed; I got little out of him. Jimmy awakened and came by, and the two embraced. Then Lon was gone, and Jimmy was off to pack for his later flight, and I was enmeshed in the Oswald denouement.

Jimmy always got it more than Lon did, and he was too professional to let it affect him. I couldn’t have known then that within six months Jimmy would be dead. Another Clandestine Services colleague enlisted him to do a routine wiretap insertion on an East-bloc embassy in Canada. It was a low-level, routine thing. But somehow he was spotted – a first – and a Mountie, of all people, saw his shadow in the alley and drew. Jimmy knew he couldn’t surrender and testify; it would embarrass too many people. He turned, and the Mountie fired one shot and Jimmy fell dead on the streets of Ottowa, the death addressed as “mysterious,” as in “Why was an American businessman messing about in the alleys behind the Czechoslovakian embassy, and why did he flee the Mountie?” Requiescat in pace, good friend, loyal operative, hero.

As for Lon, I knew I wouldn’t hear from him for a long time, until he worked some things out. If you are thinking, Danger Man, he was the only one who knew, why didn’t you have him eliminated? you’ve seen too many movies. The answer is, I don’t eliminate. I don’t even like the euphemism “eliminate” for “kill”; it sounds like cheap fiction. I am a moral murderer. I can kill only for policy. I cannot kill for personal reasons, such as to deter threat or to earn money or for the pleasure of removing one of the world’s annoyances. What will come will come, and I will accept it. If Lon went mad with guilt and decided to confess, then I would accept that decision and ride the horse where it took me. But the world wasn’t worth living in if you didn’t trust the people you loved, so I let it go at that, and that is what happened; I didn’t see him again until 1993, when he had a different name and a different identity.

I stayed in the hotel until Monday the twenty-fifth, ironically, the day we’d planned the General Walker job. I stayed even though I was anxious to get home to Peg and the boys and help them through the emotional crisis that they couldn’t have suspected was my invention. But I couldn’t hurry, because I didn’t want anyone associating my coming and going with events in Dallas, the overcaution of an overcautious mind. I returned, took a day off, then went back to work in an effort to impose workaday normality on the inchoate grief that was everywhere.

Since this is memoir and not autobiography, allow me to skip details of the healing of the family, the stunned disbelief in Clandestine, the sorrow of even Cord Meyer, the lugubrious mourning of Washington, D.C., that seemed to last through winter and into spring. You’re familiar with the iconic images of the period, no doubt, the lasting one for me being the prancing of the riderless horse, Black Jack, with its single boot mounted backward in the stirrup. If I suggest, horribly, that I felt grief for the man I had murdered, it’s still the truth. Never did I feel joy except that one moment when Jimmy showed up and I knew we had done it, and that was a professional’s pride in craft, not a hunter’s exhortation of bloodlust after the kill.

I should not have been surprised, moreover, at the way in which Kennedy, a mild failure of a president who had shown a little promise and the barest possibility of intellectual growth, immediately became a symbol of greatness and his time in office christened “Camelot” and held up to the popular imagination as a bright and shining moment of moral excellence, star glamour, vivid beauty, and so forth. Yet I was not sickened. It happens that way, and in my mid-thirties, I was barely mature enough to get it. Nothing makes the heart grow fonder than a nice bloody martyr’s death, real or imagined.

Dully, I soldiered on. I lost myself in the Agency and began working the terrible hours that I later became famous for. I wasn’t escaping guilt or voices in my head or the sad faces of my family upon my return or anything like that. I didn’t feel that I owed anything or that redemption was in order. It just seemed the way to go, and if I wasn’t already the section star, I shortly became one, and in time a legend. It’s amazing what a little hard work can do.

God love Peggy, who stayed true as an arrow’s flight through it all, the travel, the intensity of the effort, the distraction. She was the real soldier. She raised three fine boys through difficult American teenage years almost on her own, though when around, I did try to get to the football and lacrosse games. I owe a great debt of gratitude to my forebears, who had the perspicuity to invest wisely so that we were always comfortable, which helps immensely when the father figure is absent. Nobody ever wanted for anything, and I also hope and believe I taught by example that dedication to task is its own reward, even at some personal cost. I’m happy to say that each son surfed through the horrors of the sixties without a major wipeout – no drugs, no binges, no criminal misdemeanors, no bombs planted in police stations – and each has prospered off the work-ethic lesson that was their real inheritance from me. My deepest regret is that in my present circumstances, I’m not able to enjoy the pleasures of grandfatherhood.

It would be a time yet before we realized the obvious: that my attempt to game history was an utter and inglorious failure. You might say the patient died, but the operation wasn’t a success. Who on earth would have guessed that the pea-brained egomaniac Lyndon Johnson would have wanted, as I’d predicted, his domestic revolution at the same time, as I had not predicted, that he decided to win a major land war in Asia? No one could be so foolish, but he – egged on by the slippery, weaselly opportunings of the Kennedy hotshots he inherited (until they deserted him, as was easily foretold) – proved himself equal to the task. No vain murderous folly has ever been more obvious and more unstoppable. Many is the time I wished I knew where Lon was and that Jimmy was alive so the old unit could go into action on LIBERTY VALANCE II.

It was madness, and by ’66, at least, it was obvious that the American future in Vietnam was bleak and bloody, that countless boys would die or come home in that dreadful steel chair for nothing beyond the vainglory of a stubborn old man hellbent on proving he was right. The more the Kennedy slime deserted him, the more stubborn he became. The pusillanimous Robert McNamara was the worst, in my book, later stating that he stayed long after he had quit believing, thus sending men to their death for no other reason than his own reputation in a cause he cared nothing about. When it was over and he grew tired of not being invited to the good parties on the Vineyard, he mea culpa’ed his way back into the good graces of the liberals who’d abandoned old LBJ years earlier. It was truly scoundrel time in America, and with my peculiar burdens of guilt and responsibility, I found the going difficult.

My answer was to offer myself up to the war gods. It was to taunt irony, which those gods do seem to enjoy a good deal, and let them kill me in the war I had committed blasphemy to stop. I suppose I felt I owed it to my sons, and that better I go and die than one of them, though by the time the eldest was fodder for the draft, Nixon had ended it, the one thing I thank him for.

As for me: three tours, each of a year’s length, the first running agents and supervising operations, 1966-’67; the second, 1970-’71, overseeing psywar ops against the North from a bunker inside Tan Son Nhut; and, as I have stated, the third as head of the murder program, Operation Phoenix, 1972-’73. I tried hard to get myself killed, and the North Vietnamese tried hard to kill me, even putting a reward on my head and coming damned close enough times to turn my hair gray, but even they, clever little devils, were never able to bring it off. I am proud to say that within Langley, I was known as the coldest of the cold warriors and the hottest of the hot warriors. Though I was a murderer, I made it clear to any who cared, and that would probably be only myself, that I was not a coward.

Here I leave off personal narrative only to say that after Vietnam, I was able to return to Soviet affairs, my true calling, and again I prospered. I grew a reputation for ruthless rationality – applying the precepts of the New Criticism again – and developed keen judgment; a vast network of sources inside Russia; savvy, superb reflexes; and a taste for vodka in the Russian style, neat in a peasant’s glass. I could drink that stuff all night, until Peggy finally objected, at which point I quit cold and didn’t take another drop until after her death, when, you might say, I made up for lost time. I’m still making up.

In September 1964, after employing hundreds and working eighteen-hour days, the Warren Commission released its report. You might think I’d gobble it up, but I didn’t. I read the news coverage in the Times and the Post and realized that no matter how diligent the eight hundred investigators had been, they still hadn’t a clue what happened. I left it at that and continued my total immersion in Agency affairs.

I can’t say I was surprised, but at the same time, I was annoyed when the first of the anti-commission books came out in ’65, Mark Lane’s Rush to Judgment. My annoyance had more to do with the temerity of Lane: how easy it is to sit back and carp and bitch at the efforts of people who work so hard under a mission mandate to find out the truth and allay national fears; how easy to make a fortune out of nitpicking. It seemed likely that the report contained errors, as anything run by the government on so large a scale and compiled at such breakneck speed is bound to. What was called for was a second edition with a few corrections, not the initiation of a culture that would swell grotesquely and display its leftist tendencies and true agenda, which was to protect the left from any involvement in spite of the fact that Alek was created solely in the hothouse culture of screwball Commie crackpotism, and to sow general distrust of a government bent on winning its war in Asia, damn the cost in treasure and lives.

I watched from Washington and even abroad as the conspiracy theories metastasized into a huge tumor on the body politic, all of the conspiracies shamefully absurd and manufactured out of nothing more than occasional coincidence or good-faith errors in the rush, all of them driven by animus and the profit motive. I detested them: lefty scavengers picking at the bones to make political points and dough. Did I read them? No, but I read the reviews assiduously to see if anyone came close. I did see the Dal-Tex Building mentioned here and there, usually as a shooting site in either the four-rifle theory or the seven-rifle theory. I noted that the police did apprehend a fellow there, though they let him go the next day. Still, it was clear that we’d pulled it off, as all the theories and speculations remained comically off the mark. They seemed to think it was a “big” conspiracy, because only a huge governmental agency would have the wherewithal to make such an event happen, which included secretly influencing the Secret Service and the White House and poor Alek in a concerto of such exquisite timing and psychological acuity that it resembled a Swiss watch set to music by Mozart.

I suppose I should temper my contempt with a little understanding. After all, I knew things that no investigator did. For example, it was possible that the down-range sonic boom caused by Lon’s shot, obeying some unpredictable acoustical logic, rebounded weirdly in the echo chamber that was Dealey Plaza and caused a pressure spike or a reverberation or even a report-like sound, which would strike many ears as coming from the grassy knoll. Perhaps it was that confusion that spawned the thousand-odd theories.

As well, I knew that the extreme velocity of the bullet Lon fired could have easily unleashed a fragment that would travel another three hundred feet and draw blood from James Tague, situated at the triple overpass. Mr. Tague’s facial wound has long baffled and tantalized theorists because the Mannlicher-Carcano, grievously underpowered and slow-moving, wouldn’t have had the oomph to reach out and touch a person so far away. The detonation of Lon’s bullet, moving at close to three thousand feet per second, could have easily accomplished such a trick.

Anyhow, we succeeded exactly because we weren’t a government operation, despite my connections. It was my op, and the team was bound in blood and loyalty, working without pay, risking all for a belief system. It was the kind of highly professional, small-scale enterprise that is the only hope of success, that needed no documentation, no vetting committees, no senior supervisors, no cliques with their concomitant resenters and traitors, no office politics, no budget, nothing. It could be betrayed only from the inside; no detective could unravel it because there wasn’t one clever enough to read the signs in the dust, which were too subtle. We were too smart for them, for at least fifty years. The next few days? We’ll see.

Anyhow, back from my first tour in Vietnam as a kind of hero, with a few empty weeks to fill before a tour in Moscow, I decided it was time to read the damned report and see what they had learned. By that time, my own internal turmoil had settled and I felt I’d be able to confront the findings in a more or less rational manner. My conclusions were mainly that the operation had succeeded brilliantly, particularly Lon’s solution of the ballistics issue. If you recall, our problem was to shoot a man with a bullet that would leave no trace of itself except in tiny metallic residue that could be traced only to a specific bullet identified by category and lot but not to any particular rifle. (I suppose if Lon’s rifle were located, traces of the same metal might be found within its barrel. But Lon – though we never discussed this, I’m sure it’s so – would have destroyed the rifle so that no such discovery was possible.)

That is exactly what Lon managed: the head-shot bullet exploded dynamically when it hit the skull, leaving no fragment large enough to be tracked to Alek’s rifle and therefore no fragment that could be ID’d as not from Alek’s rifle. The investigators did locate two fragments in the limousine large enough to examine under the electron microscope, but clearly, they were not from the head shot. They were both pristine, without any contamination by blood or brain tissue, as the FBI expert explained in detail during his testimony. He also testified that, although fragments are generally hard to relate to a particular rifle, these two, one twenty-one grains, the other forty-four grains, did bear marks that related them to Alek’s rifle. The only explanation for their presence is that they were fragments from Alek’s first missed shot.

As I see it, he fired wretchedly, coming off a mistake that I will describe shortly, and the bullet (other testimony buttresses this argument) hit the curb immediately behind or adjacent to the limousine. Since the angle of refraction is always less than the angle of reflection, when the bullet tore itself to pieces against the hard stone, its “cloud” of fragments was projected in a conelike shape that almost perfectly intercepted the vehicle a few feet away, all of this in micro-time. Some think that one fragment hit the president in the scalp, stinging him. Maybe so, maybe not, but one hit the windshield from the inside, cracking it, and that fragment bounced downward and to the left, where it was found the next day by FBI searchers. Another fragment also landed there, but no one can identify the trajectory, other than to say that the energies released by explosions are madly random.

We know the two frags found in the car couldn’t have come from Lon’s rifle, because of the rifling marks already mentioned, but also because of the geometry of the head shot. It is not particularly enjoyable to focus on such a morbid topic, but in the interest of truth, I shall go onward. The detonation took place in the upper right-hand quadrant of the president’s skull, above his ear (suggesting, among other things, the left-to-right axis of Lon’s shot, given our position to the left of the sniper’s-nest corner; LHO’s theoretical shot would have created a necessarily right-to-left axis, which would have exploded out of JFK’s left-hand quadrant, maybe above his left eye). The salient point is that, given the physics of the “explosion,” all those fragments would have spewed at high energy from the right-hand upper quadrant of the skull along that axis, carrying metallic debris and brain tissue to the right, out of the car; there’s no way the widely documented head shot, as witnessed eventually by the whole world, would have deposited fragments radically twenty full feet to the left, and downward, no less, to the carpet near the pedals, where those two pieces were found.

My one criticism of the report is that its investigators quickly came to believe in the single-gunman theory. Lane was right about one thing: it was a rush to judgment. Though they worked hard and honorably, that precept framed their findings, shaping them, perhaps only at the unknowable subconscious level. Had they remained open to theories outside their own invented box, they might have seen indications, subtle but persistent, in Alek’s behavior that suggested strongly there were other players on the field.

Therefore, I shall walk you through Alek’s last hour or so of freedom. There were developments that baffled the commission’s investigators and continue to baffle the amateur assassinationologists, so let me lay out, for the sake of history, exactly what I think happened between 12:30 p.m., when Alek fired the first bullet, and 2:17 p.m., when he was nabbed in the Texas Theatre.

I doubt he was nervous. He was too exuberant, too happy, too coursing with energy. I can see him, crouched and hiding behind the fortress of boxes he’d arranged on the sixth floor of the Book Depository, his eyes beady, his face tight with the characteristic smugness that so exiled him from his fellow man, presidential assassin or no, thinking not What if I miss? but Hurry up, hurry up! He must have been hungry for his destiny, for his entry into history. He wasn’t giving escape or survival a thought, but concentrating entirely on getting the job done to the best of his meager abilities. Consider his mind at the moment: he was about to strike a blow not merely at the United States, which he claimed to loathe, but at all those who’d seen him as he was – a fringe man clearly unable to hold a job, much less have a career, a life of normalcy and contribution – and insisted on reporting the bad news: You are nobody. You are not equipped to compete. Your destiny is nothingness. So this was his moment: to all of them, he was saying I exist! in thunder. But do not abjure the political for the psychological: he was a true believer, so true that he could and would kill for his principles. That puts him at the very end of the spectrum of political behavior, though it does not push him off it. In some fashion that he probably could not articulate, he thought he was birthing a new socialist world, and his idealism loaned him the self-esteem nothing else had provided for him. Then there was greed, the treasure at the end of the rainbow. That was the idealized image of himself as hero of Havana, in the ’53 Cadillac convertible with Dr. Castro on the Malacon, waving to the throng. That was a risk worth dying for. He must have been, all taken into account, one of the world’s happiest men in the split second before he pulled the trigger.

As we were, he was alerted to the approach of the killing moment not by his watch but by the roar of the crowd as its crescendo followed the motorcade down Main like a human wave. He saw it emerge, the long boatlike vehicle, with its bounty of politicians and wives, as it turned for its one-block run down Houston. I’m guessing it was here that the rifle flew to his shoulder and he edged closer to the window, not caring if he was seen (several witnesses noted him all but hanging out of the frame). The car reached its 120-degree turn at Elm, rotating slowly to the left. Question: why didn’t he fire then? Car hardly moving, Kennedy as close as he would be, probably under seventy-five feet, head-on, pivoting slightly as the automobile pivoted; plus, instructions from his Russian control that this was the moment. Why would he go against his own instincts as well as orders from a superior whom he feared and loved? Again speculation: the safety? He pulls, ugh, nothing happens, so he breaks his line of vision through the scope, unshoulders the rifle, finds the safety – a poorly placed button half under the protruding rear of the firing pin assembly – and struggles to get it off. Perhaps his heavy sweating occluded the scope, and he saw nothing and had to quickly clean it with his shirt collar. Whatever, it was already going wrong for him, one tenth of a second in.

Desperately, he frees the mechanism, throws it to his shoulder, and fires the first shot in haste. True to form, a clean, clear, almost comical miss. I hold with many that the bullet, sailing along at that leisurely two-thousand-feet-per-second velocity, broke apart on the curb, depositing only its wan spray of fragments into the limo. He rushed, his trigger squeeze was a mess, the target was lost in the single tree that stood between him and his quarry, and the first shot, the closest shot, was a complete failure.

The man is haunted by folly. Now he’s in a panic, having missed pitifully, given up his position, fair game for counter-snipers (there weren’t any that day, though there would be evermore), and he hasn’t even hit the car!

He labors through the cocking motion, the rifle jerked from his shoulder by the raggedness of the manipulation, and he comes back “on target.” His finger lunges against the coarse grind of the pull, and my guess is that the crosshairs weren’t anywhere near the target when he fired, for the simple reason that he hit it.

Or did he? Yes, according to the commission, he did, with the famed magic bullet that drilled through the president’s upper back and exited his throat, its angle adjusted slightly by the muscle tissue through which it had traveled, which also cost it enormous velocity; then, spinning sideways, it hit Governor Connally in the back (its impression recorded indelibly in scar tissue), sliced through his body, exited much damaged (despite claims to the contrary), and drilled his wrist and his thigh. Then it tumbled, spent, hot, mangled, to rest in the folds of his jacket, to be discovered by a technician that afternoon at the hospital on the governor’s gurney after the governor was removed. Oh, what a bad boy that bullet was! The mischief it unleashed! What grist for the mills of the ignorant, the malicious, the embittered lefty proletariat-intellectuals! Yet I knew then and I know now that the bullet did what Arlen Specter said it did. It is beyond dispute.

What isn’t much thought about is the next issue. Alek thought he missed! I have seen a fair number of men shot. It’s not usually like the movies, which instruct us to the theory of the instant, spastic reaction, the firing of all nerves simultaneously and the twitchy-legged death tumble to Earth. It can happen that way. It happens other ways too. Often men don’t even know they’ve been hit. They think it’s a punch or they’ve bumped into a door or they notice nothing at all, and not until they look and see blood welling (and sometimes it doesn’t even well!) do they comprehend after putting two and two together that they’ve been shot. It cannot be predicted. Each wound is different, based on a thousand or so factors from velocity, bullet shape, angle of strike, muscles and/or bones encountered, vitality of target, blood pressure, speed of target, target’s relationship to solidity on Earth (standing, sitting, moving, whatever), weather, barometric pressure, and on and on and on. There is no knowing, so anybody who tells you what should have happened – and infers, from the fact that it didn’t happen, something is amiss – is a bald-faced liar.

Let us not concentrate on what was happening. Let us concentrate on what Alek thought was happening. What he saw through the fuzzy optics of his Hollywood – the brand, not the town – Japanese scope was. . nothing. Look at Zapruder’s film. We don’t see the hit because the president is behind the sign, but when he emerges, the only thing that’s happened is that he’s begun to lean forward a bit, and his hands have come up, which are probably not visible to Alek, if he’s looking at all, and he’s probably not because he’s lost in the drama of cocking the rifle for the second time. When Alek returns to the scope, Kennedy’s head and posture may be incrementally degraded, but that’s too subtle for Alek to note.

In his mind: utter panic, complete self-loathing. Physiology: fingers bloated with blood, oxygen debt, woozy vision, yips coursing through his arms and trunk, sweat sliding down his face and flanks, presentiment of doom. Target: small, getting smaller as the vehicle pulls away (though it doesn’t speed up), slight left-to-right movement produced by the angle of the street relative to the position of the shooter.

Our boy is not in a good spot to make the next shot.

He tries to steer the scope crosshairs onto – where? Having missed twice – from his point of view – he has no idea where to hold for a killing shot. He has no idea of the index between point of aim and point of impact, he’s in a shooter’s no-man’s-land, even as he’s taken the slack out of the trigger and sustains it right at the tipping point between shot and no shot.

Suddenly, the president’s head explodes.

Alek is so startled that his own trigger jerks and he fires his third bullet, but his jump at the sight of the destruction of the skull is so intense that his third bullet goes sailing off to the general southwest, presumably landing in some distant Oz beyond the triple overpass, never to be noted or found. It was an awesome break for us; it meant that witnesses saw him fire his third shot, it squared all accounting of bullets, shells, and wounds, it forever connected Alek to the event, lacking any tangible, empirical evidence of our existence, and it cemented all investigative effort to the Book Depository and to Alek. Cops are predictable; they want to put things in a box, and the sooner and tighter it fits, the happier they are, and the more outsiders tug and pull and poke at the contents of the box, the more stubborn and angry they become. It’s all personal to them.

Back to Alek, for whom the world has just changed mightily.

Given to paranoia anyway, he sees in that second that a conspiracy against him does exist, that he is a patsy, he is a chump, a fool. He’s been set up to take the fall, and that reality becomes instantly clear. (Let us also postulate that his narcissism is secretly pleased; he is important enough to destroy!)

He realizes that all he believed in was false, that there was no Russian agent, he is not working for KGB, there’s no escape car awaiting him, he will not be hustled away and secreted to Havana and the loving ministrations of Dr. Castro. Instead, he’s the sucker at the center of every James M. Cain novel, every film noir, lost in a nightmare city as forces so vast he cannot imagine them grind into position to crush him.

It occurs to him that his life might be in danger. He knows the sixth floor is empty only because it always has been empty, but that wisdom is no longer operative; it is from a different world. It occurs to him that his death is absolutely necessary for the new narrative. It may be that a detective, a security guard, an armed citizen in the know might already be there, hiding behind his own clump of boxes, ready to step out and issue the coup de grace and become both the hero of America and the secret lynchpin of the plot against Alek.

He does what any man in such circumstances would do.

He cocks the rifle, throwing another shell into the chamber, finger to trigger, slack removed, weapon at the ready, and like a patrolling infantryman in an ambush area, he hastens the ninety-five feet diagonally across the empty space to the one stairway down, ready to respond to any emerging attackers. Nobody’s there. And no bullet comes crashing through the windows to snipe him as he sought to snipe the president.

He pauses at the head of the stairs, hating to relinquish his weapon. But he knows that he can’t emerge into society at the site of a presidential assassination with a rifle in his hands. So he stuffs the rifle between two book crates at the top of the stairs, where it will be found an hour later by a detective. That is why it wasn’t found abandoned in the sniper’s nest; that is why it was loaded and cocked.

He heads downstairs, and his adventures in the building, back in society, have been well chronicled. He slides into a chair in the lunchroom, is accosted by a policeman and identified by a coworker, and once the policeman heads upstairs, Alek zips out the front door.

Now what? He knows there’ll be no pickup awaiting him at the corner of Houston and Pacific, and there may be ambushers. Instead of heading north up Houston, where we were nominally waiting to pick him up, he turns east and heads up Elm, past the Dal-Tex Building. That is where I see him as I am pulling Lon out of the lobby while we beat our own hasty retreat from the seventh floor.

Alek continues to surge up Elm for another four blocks. Let us assume it is in this period that he more or less returns to his rational mind. He knows it’s a matter of time before they locate the sniper’s nest and the rifle, take a canvass of employees at TBD and note that he’s the only one missing, though he’s been noted earlier as present, so they’ll know he left right after the shooting. Possibly that’s not paramount in his mind. He thinks he’s being hunted by his own co-conspirators, and he remembers my warning him against bringing the handgun, because I was gaming him into being the easy prey that would be the exclamation point on our operation.

I don’t believe he thinks he can get away, as in escape to a new life. Impossible. He wasn’t stupid, just incompetent. But at that point in his life, I think the one possibility of victory he saw, the one glimmer of hope, was to defend himself against his murderers, not the police or FBI. If he could shoot one of them and bring the bag to the cops, it would be proof of sorts that he’d been manipulated, though he hadn’t worked out the allegiance issues and didn’t know who had used him.

Again, as for any man on the run, his first impulse would have been to get a gun, which explains why, after walking away from the site of the assassination, he climbed aboard a bus headed down Elm Street back to the site of the assassination. No one has bothered to work out the destination of that bus: it was to the Oak Cliff section of Dallas. He wasn’t fleeing crazily, as so many have stated; he was going to get the gun.

Soon enough, the bus is moored in traffic a block east of the assassination site. Time is ticking by, he knows that the police effort is grinding along, possibilities are being examined, questions asked and answered, the winnowing process begun, and that it will cast him up quickly.

He vaults from the bus at the corner of Elm and Lamar and heads south down Lamar for two blocks and goes to. . the bus station! Does it occur to him to buy a ticket on the next bus out of town, to put distance between self and pursuers? He has seventeen dollars with him, which can get him as far as San Antonio or Lubbock or Midland or Austin. But his brain is not working that way; he is thinking, Get the gun. He hails what will be known as the only cab he took in his life. He’s in the cab at 12:45, in Oak Cliff, a block or two past his house so that the cabbie won’t associate his passenger with the soon-to-be-announced address of the suspect. He dashes into his house, goes straight to wherever he’s hidden it, snatches up his revolver, stuffs it into his waistband, throws on a jacket – to cover it, which shows he’s thinking tactically – and is gone in seconds.

Consider how dangerous a move he’s come up with. He knows they’ll know who he is and where he lives. He risks capture in a daring attempt to get back to the roominghouse because that’s where he left his S&W .38 snub-nose. The gun is more important to him than his life, and he takes an awesome chance to get it, because he knows that without the gun, he has no chance against his pursuers, who aren’t the cops but the members of the conspiracy who’ve betrayed him. He does this rather than, say, take the cab to a suburban bus station or train station and try to catch a ride or hop a freight out of town before the authorities can throw out their manhunters’ net. Time isn’t of the essence; the gun is of the essence.

Alek heads back down Beckley in the direction he’s come, diverts at Crawford to take a diagonal going nowhere, turns down Tenth, again seemingly arbitrarily, reaches the intersection of Patton and Tenth, and notices in horror that a black Dallas police car has just pulled over. The officer beckons him.

Now comes the tragedy of Officer Tippit. Had I known that the monster I created was capable of such violence, I would have put a .45 into him and walked away. That said, I must also say that I should have put a .45 into my own head as punishment for the mayhem that was about to transpire, which was entirely my own invention. What is the point of claiming responsibility if you don’t act on it? There is no point. I tried to use my sin as a motive for redemption and, over the years, gave my life in toto to Agency and country, knowing that I hadn’t the guts to punish myself as I should be punished. Perhaps my punishment lies ahead.

Poor Tippit. By accounts no genius, but a decent ex-GI who loved his job and did it well, content to be a patrolman forever, he was on the cusp of the biggest bust of the century when it all went bad on him. Moved from a farther patrol area into Oak Cliff as a precautionary measure and to stand by for orders, he had been alerted three times on his radio of the age, weight, height, and hair color of the suspect. He spies such a man walking down Tenth Street in Oak Cliff. Who knows what other tells Alek the idiot was broadcasting: walking too fast with his face screwed up in anguish, almost running, radiating the don’t-tread-on-me animosity that was his stock in trade, refusing eye contact while looking cautiously over his shoulder now and then. It could have been any or all of them.

No identification of Alek by name has yet been given over the radio, and none has linked him to Oak Cliff and the Beckley Avenue area. It’s just that his appearance is so right. That’s why Tippit tails him for a block or two and then pulls over. Yeats: “It’s old and it’s sad and it’s sad and it’s feary.” Yes, it was, especially “feary,” that is, fearful, horrifying, tragic. Had I but known. But I didn’t. Guilty, guilty, guilty.

Alek sees the black vehicle slow up and pull over. He realizes he’s been nabbed. He ambles off the sidewalk to the vehicle, where the officer, window rolled down, awaits him.

What could they have said? It’s pointless to imagine, and it was probably a banality, a cliche, nothing memorable. Witnesses – there were several, some close – report no hostility, no harsh words, no threats; it wasn’t an altercation, it was an exchange, and Alek may have gotten away with it for a second, for then he broke contact with the seated officer and turned to go on his way.

Tippit isn’t done with him but at the same time hasn’t made up his mind to make the pinch. He climbs from his squad car, gun definitely not in hand, and possibly calls to Alek.

Alek turns, walks around the car to place himself in range, draws, and fires three times point-blank. All three hits from close range are solid mortal blows, careening through center mass, upper body, blood-bearing organs, and as soon as he is hit, Tippit is down, bleeding out if not already dead.

Why?

After all, Alek is not without his verbal faculties; he’s a debater, an arguer from way back, a guy who’s always got an answer. That’s how he defines himself, part guerrilla warrior, part dialectical soldier. Why doesn’t he at least try to con his way out? The performance isn’t beyond him, and his intellectual vanity that he’s smarter than some cop would surely be in play.

From Alek’s point of view, the fact that the cop is already there – it’s only forty-five minutes after the shooting, and chaos and confusion reign – is proof that the man is part of the conspiracy. Whoever set Alek up either informed the authorities of his address or hired a professional killer dressed as a cop to ambush him when he returned home. Perhaps Dallas is full of professional killers in search of Alek, already equipped with his name, address, description, and likely whereabouts. That would be an easy intellectual leap for a man with Alek’s tendencies toward paranoia and conspiracy.

So Alek thinks the cop is a hit man. His rage, his paranoia, his violent nature, his fear, his self-hatred, and his other hatred were in full bloom in that single instant, and that and that alone can explain his next move, which utterly violates any principle of self-preservation.

If Alek has just shot a cop to escape, his next move has to be to turn and flee, race down alleyways, cut across yards, throw off any followers, catch a bus, get out of the area, fast.

Instead, he walks over to the downed Tippit and shoots him in the temple. From the autopsy: “[The bullet] is found to enter the right temporal lobe, coursed through the brain transecting the brain stem, severing the cerebral peduncles surrounded by extensive hemorrhage and found to exit from the brain substance in the calcarine gyrus to the left of the midline.” Of course he wasn’t shooting Officer Tippit; he was shooting me.

His vengeance expressed, Alek mutters, “Poor damn cop,” as he empties the shells from his cylinder and quickly reloads, then turns and heads up Patton, down Jefferson, cuts through a yard and dumps his jacket, then cuts back to Jefferson, which, in a half mile or so, will take him to the Texas Theatre. His absurd incompetence comes to the fore again. So lame is his attempt at escape and so ignorant is he of what’s going on around him, he is followed by a number of citizens. One of them has called the murder in to headquarters on Tippit’s radio. Two men snatch up Tippit’s revolver and begin to hunt Alek on their own.

In a brief while, a matter of several blocks down Jefferson, trailing trackers, Alek comes to a small commercial district. He’s consumed with evading his killers (even though he hasn’t bothered to look behind him), and his main thought is to get off the street. To the logic of his twisted brain, he seeks refuge by dodging into the Texas Theatre on that street. I suppose he thinks his killers will eventually be driven off the streets by the excess of Dallas policemen who will flood the zone in hours if not minutes. Perhaps he imagines a surrender, the revelation that the “cop” was a Mafia hit man, and some sort of redemption as he proves he never killed the president and he was manipulated by shadowy “others” of indeterminate origin. He might see himself as a hero, the subject of an admiring movie. In those ten minutes in the movie theater’s private darkness, he must have comforted himself by self-delusion. Facing the reality, for a man whose resources were so fragile, would have been too much.

And then the lights came on. His vacation had lasted ten minutes, and cops were closing in from both sides.

I first heard the name sometime in ’74 or ’75. I was in Moscow, working undercover in one of several well-documented Soviet identities. I was in and out of Moscow in those years under a variety of guises, and I have to say they were great years, maybe the best of my life. We knew we were getting somewhere and doing some good, and the economics and the demographics were breaking in our direction, so we were filled with hope and optimism. Moreover, Vietnam was managing to wind down without killing me or any of my sons, for which I was eternally grateful.

We were under pressure from Langley – or from the Defense Department by way of Langley – to come up with a gun. It was a new Soviet-issue semi-auto sniper rifle that bore the seemingly but not actually melodramatic name of Dragunov. It sounded like the SovMil had gotten all Hollywoody and called the thing the Dragon. No such luck. Soviet military nomenclature has always featured the name of the designer, which is why Sergeant Kalashnikov became world-famous, as did, in an earlier age, Comrade Tokarev, whose stubby little pistol snuffed out so many lives in the cellars of Lubyanka during the Great Purges of the thirties. In any event, although it seemed absurd in a world where giant rockets carrying nukes could obliterate millions in minutes, everyone in American military culture was in a frenzy over this Dragunov, and it went without saying that he who obtained either plans or working copies of the thing would be awarded a gigantic feather to be stuffed into his cap. I meant to get myself that feather. Petty ambition; I am diminished by the memory.

But Bob Lee Swagger beat me to it.

Can you imagine a name like that? What a moniker to conjure with. He was every Ole Miss quarterback, every NASCAR driver, every tiny-town police chief or state trooper rolled into one. He was actually a gunnery sergeant in the United States Marine Corps, with an intelligence background, as he’d worked with another Agency jamboree, called the Studies and Observation Group, on an earlier tour. That was particularly dangerous duty; it consisted of leading indigenous troops up near the Laotian border to run interdiction missions against the North Viet supply line. Lots and lots of combat, lots of shooting. The talent pool consisted of aggressive senior NCOs from either army special forces or marine infantry outfits, and they had themselves a dandy war amid the mountains and swamps of the Laotian border.

It was his third tour as a sniper in which he snatched up Comrade Dragunov. At a forlorn fire base somewhere in the jungle, he and his spotter worked a ruse, with an Agency team and the marines in full co-op mode, that resulted in our acquisition of the first Dragunov in Western hands. That rifle today is at the Agency museum on the first floor of the main building in Langley. Before it was put on display, I had a good hands-on experience with it at the Langley technical directorate’s shop. The very same one!

His twenty years after Vietnam were the most banal of hells. It seems sad that a man of such gifts should suffer so basely, but what are you going to do? Men of such dark fury and skill frequently turn it on themselves, as Pilgrim Swagger did, and the record is beyond melancholy and well into squalor. Alcoholism, business failure, brushes with the law, car wrecks, a failed marriage, a whole litany of messages to God requesting annihilation, since reality was too painful. God must have been busy that day, or perhaps he was saving Swagger to punish a real sinner, such as moi; somehow the sniper retreated to the woods, acquired a trailer, and rebuilt himself. Despite his many feats of arms, this was probably his greatest, bravest accomplishment. He became a reader, curious as to what had caused Vietnam and, beyond that, what had caused so much pain, from his traumatic wound and from the losses he suffered, his first Vietnamese wife and then his spotter. Swagger, I tried to save you from all that. I knew as early as ’63 that it would come to no good end and your story would be written in blood and pain a million times. Kill me if you can, goddamn you, Swagger, but I committed the crime of the century to save you. You should love me as you press the trigger, if that’s what is in store.

Alone in Arkansas except for a dog and a brace of rifles, he gave himself over to the history of the Vietnam War and then the history of war itself, which after all is paradoxically the history of civilization. He educated himself in the ways of a world he served but never knew. His mind refined itself, shed itself of childish notions like pride and bravado and domination, and became wise. He stopped talking, he started listening. He shot and shot and shot and turned his grade-A talent into something almost beyond knowing. He retrained himself for a mission, and at last one came along. I should know. It was my mission.

In ’93, I was sixty-three years old. I was a hoary old eminence grise, beloved by the younger men, known for steady advice, unquenchable rationality – I had never abandoned the New Criticism – and superb technical skills, especially at planning and funding black ops. I was Mr. Black in Agency lore. I was in high demand. Though I spent much of my time on Russia – it was I who put together the money train that enabled Yeltsin to take over after Gorbachev, and I don’t think he or anybody else ever knew I was an American, much less an American agent – I oversaw or advised on projects in other spheres as well.

That was how El Salvador came into my life. God-awful place, never want to go back. It reminded me of Vietnam, though the food was all mealy and saucy, nowhere near the level of the Mexican that Alek had introduced me to.

This need not be a long tale, and I will spare you details and dramatization. I begin with a personal note, although my memoir is by design professional, not personal. But the personal intrudes on the professional. In 1992 Peggy died of breast cancer after a six-week ordeal. It was a terrible thing to see, a woman so vital, so intelligent, so beautiful, so loyal, so terrific, the best of all her peers and the source of whatever strength I had, as well as an extraordinary mother to the boys, eaten alive by the crab. The boys and I were at her side when she passed, and she lived long enough to see them through college and through their own well-established careers and families. It was a devastation for me, one that hurt and hurt and hurt. I am not making excuses; I am merely explaining why I was not at my best in what followed. I made bad judgments, mistakes, my concentration slipped; it was far from my proudest hour. I was lucky to escape alive, even if I didn’t.

Let’s speed this up. Time may not be on our side, thanks to Mr. Swagger. It became necessary to eliminate a man, and it occurred to me to replicate Operation LIBERTY VALANCE. Same method: a patsy sniper, a real sniper, a ballistic deceit, the patsy caught during the op and eliminated, the home team getting away clean. The details are forever sealed in Langley’s files, but again I cast Lon as the real shooter; it turned out he was hungry for the adventure, having become bored stiff by his self-decreed “retirement.” I cast Swagger as Oswald.

Bad career move, as they say.

Swagger, unlike poor, stupid Alek, escaped, and it became a race and a chase. We had to get to Swagger before the FBI did. This was Shreck, my main operative’s, task, and Swagger outsmarted, outfought, and outshot him at every turn. My first mistake: not realizing he would have made a better shooter than patsy. Neither Shreck nor I saw until too late that the plot we had engineered for him generated not his death but his rebirth. He reentered the world he had abandoned stronger, smarter, more guileful, more cunning, and braver. All along, we weren’t hunting him, he was hunting us.

A final ambush was painstakingly set. I urged Lon to be the shooter, and I do think he enjoyed the whole thing. It was better than rotting away in a wheelchair in a secluded estate in the North Carolina countryside. For his heroism, his effort, his high morale, he was awarded a bullet in the head. I should regret this more than I do, but after all, given his tragedy, Lon enjoyed an interesting life because of my importuning. Better he passed that way than via decay. Shreck, for his part, was unhappy to discover that a shotgun slug could penetrate a bulletproof vest. He wasn’t as unhappy as his number two, a stumpy little ex-NCO of extremely violent tendencies named Jack Payne, who made the same discovery, but not until Swagger had blown off his arm with the same shotgun. Swagger: the best man I ever heard of in a gunfight, bar none.

Even then he had surprises. He was captured, and our deeper trap seemed to still be in place, by which he would swing for murder.

Oops, I say! He’d outthought even the great Hugh Meachum. He’d subtly disabled his rifle before the whole thing happened, so it was impossible for it to have fired the fatal shot. As far as I know, they’re still looking for the person who did, but it was at this point that Hugh Meachum decided to die.

Again I pull the screen of discretion between the reader and the details. Let me say that it should be beyond the ken of no professional intelligence operative – and I was one of the world’s best – to arrange a convincing fiction for his own death. I was, after all, a superb planner, a manipulator of documents and secret funding, and had long since made the necessary preparations for such a contingency. It helped that I lived alone and there was no spousal difficulty to contend with. It helped also that I was still under discipline, and I knew that once I made the break, I made it permanently: there could be no going back, no farewells, not a minute crack in the facade.

I put the operation into action on a Wednesday, and by Friday I was gone. I left without saying good-bye to the boys and their children. That hurt. That still hurts. But I knew them to be secure both financially and emotionally and that the lessons of labor and loyalty, as well as the dividends that Colt, Winchester (now FN), Smith & Wesson, and so forth and so on provided, would continue to comfort them against the rude buffeting of circumstance.

I enacted a certain computer code meant to eat all my files in the Agency database. I suppose that was overkill, but one can never be certain. It was doubtful that anyone would go trolling that deep in the distant past, particularly in a world that was changing as rapidly as this one, but safer is always to be preferred over sorrier.

And thus Hugh Meachum shuffled off this mortal coil.

As for the real me, he went where he went and became what he became. I prospered. I had been quietly looting money from the Agency for some years – if an old spy doesn’t look out for himself, who will? – and the ample fund in a Swiss bank account made my new life one of comfort. I had some contacts, I knew some things, I had some documents: in time, I improved my station, for my mind was still sharp. In time, I did more than improve; I became wealthy, even filthy wealthy. I lived in splendor.

In my new life, I developed a taste for flavors of decadence. I reacquainted myself with the nuances of delight that alcohol provided. I discovered the pleasures of sex with younger women, especially when amplified beyond the power of the man himself by drugs in all their variations. I found I excelled in business manipulations that produced munificence for me and all who sailed with me. I had fought so hard for capitalism, it seemed appropriate to enjoy its fruits. I became an entrepreneur, a builder, an investor; I devised layers and further layers of supernumeraries between myself and reality.

It has come to this: I live in a mansion hidden behind a thirty-foot steel wall off of Ulysse Nardin drive, in an area patrolled by a special battalion. I sit out on my veranda in the warm weather, and all I see is mine to the river a mile away. I am totally secure. I have mistresses and masseuses and chefs and sommeliers. The world has been kind to me, which I take as proper recompense for the efforts I put into my crusade to secure freedom and peace for the largest number of people, and which, despite some setbacks, I believe I accomplished.

What could possibly go wrong?

The answer came one night deep in sleep, when I was feeling most safe. I don’t know why it chose that moment to announce itself, but it did, and while I can’t say it changed my life (at least not yet), I will say it gave me a lesson in paranoia from which I’ve never recovered, and that is why my security arrangements are the most impenetrable in the world.

The coat.

The goddamned coat.

I hadn’t thought of those days in the ten years I’d been building my new life. It was so far behind, and all the players were dead. But I awakened in the middle of the night in a cold sweat, remembering.

Jimmy Costello had hidden in the elevator machinery house on the roof of the Dal-Tex Building for a long sixteen hours, and during that time, the bore solvent from Lon’s Winchester collected and migrated and ultimately seeped into the garment, soaking its breast from the inside, forever cursing it with the smell of the murder weapon. Even before that, it had been placed on the stack of swatch books we used to elevate Lon to the proper height, leaving a tire tread on the back.

Jimmy had wisely decided not to get it out of the building, in case he was stopped by a policeman who’d recognize the penetrative odor. He’d left it there, folded, as I recall, inside a pile of carpet remnants on a dark and deserted shelf in that little-visited area.

It seemed unimportant at the time, and Jimmy had said he’d come back at some point, reenter the building, and destroy it. But he had been killed prematurely, and in my grief over his passing, my mourning for Lon’s exit from my life, the press of my career, and whatever residue of subconscious guilt and regret remained from LIBERTY VALANCE, I had forgotten until that moment.

The next morning I dealt with the problem. My first thought was that I buy the damned building and tear it down and throw in a parking lot. It was well within my means. But I realized such a radical decision might attract more attention than necessary, the building having been declared officially “interesting” by too many who thought they knew something about architecture, and that a prudent first move was to determine the situation on the ground. Through the various levels of administrative anonymity I had arranged, I ordered a discreet Texas private investigator to penetrate the building and examine the room in question. In a week or so, the answer came back: the elevators had been completely modernized in 1995, and that machinery room demolished, and a new one constructed on its spot. All well and good. But also all sick and bad.

I had no idea of the coat’s disposition before the demolition. Perhaps some workers simply dumped the pile of carpeting remnants down a chute, and they’d gone into a Dumpster and thence to the landfill or the enviro-chummy reclamation plant. Yes, that was probably it.

But. . what if? What if someone had discovered it and remarked upon the oddity of such a coat with such a bounty of evidence being found in a building overlooking Dealey Plaza, and moreover, dating from sometime in a past easily as ancient 1963? Suppose this nugget of info, by some whimsical path, had drifted laterally and entered assassination lore? Given the hunger of the conspiracy theorists for new theories, new provocations, new possibilities, new evidence, such a tidbit could easily inspire a new area of research, a new book, a new focus.

Maybe with this new framing theory – a gunman in Dal-Tex – a brilliant investigator could rearrange the old evidence, find some new evidence, engage in brilliant speculation, and see into the heart of the thing. Could I be located? Highly unlikely. After all, I had disconnected myself from that possibility by conveniently dying in 1993.

But suppose someone got as far as Hugh Meachum? That would be far enough. My legacy would be destroyed, my memory in the minds of children and grandchildren, family members from mine, Peggy’s, and Lon’s family, even Jimmy’s. That presented a possibility I could not live with happily.

I arranged – through supernumeraries, layers of buffeting, clever financial manipulation so that the source of the funding could never be tracked back to my address – for a man to relocate to Dallas and join the “assassination community.” His announced career was to “solve” the Kennedy assassination mystery, so he had to be studious, highly intelligent, labor-intensive. He also needed delicate social skills, for I wanted his penetration to be aggressive enough that he could acquire a network of informants, all of whom had no idea they were informing, to keep him apprised of the latest in the theory and practice of the ongoing investigations.

To fit in with the culture down there, he needed one more salient attribute: he had to be insane. Despite his evident intelligence and charm, he would be seen as harmless. His “theory” would harm no one because it was so manifestly absurd. He had to put together a scenario that sounded rational until it reached a point and then twisted off crazily into the ether of the impossible, and he had to sell it with earnestness and passion, not estranging his allies.

I feel we did well in recruiting and am satisfied, even gratified, by his employment and performance and creativity. His name is Richard Monk, and he is a former major in army intelligence who retired honorably after his twenty with no sign of disgrace. His assignment: if anyone on the Net or anyone in Dallas shows an undue interest in the Dal-Tex theory of assassination, that subject is to be engaged at a deep level, his theories, his evidence, his capabilities all assessed for further monitoring. Ultimately, after reports are filed and analyzed and passed along, the information will arrive to me, and I will make a judgment as to disposition. Subtle methods will be explored as a means of dissuading the subject, but if it comes to that place, I will authorize, and have set up a structure to execute, a kill order.

I do not kill for money, I do not kill for anger, I do not kill for pleasure. I kill to preserve my legacy and the legacy of the institutions and people I served. That is enough. People have killed for a lot less, for pennies, or, more worthless, for pride.

The first victim was an amiable writer whose specialty was guns and the men who use them. I assume it was his analysis of the firearms issues that brought him to Dallas. As he explained to Richard Monk, he had come up with a theory that was suspiciously like the actual one Lon created all those years ago. And he had picked the Dal-Tex Building as his shooting site. Those two developments alone doomed him. Nothing personal.

Some months later, real trouble started.

CHAPTER 20

The records of the great Abercrombie & Fitch seventh-floor gun room were a mess, a disgrace, a disaster. Evidently, when the new owners acquired the corporation after its 1977 bankruptcy, they knew the future lay in jeans for kids, not Westley Richards .577 Nitro Expresses for Nobel Prize-winning writers. This trove was part of the property they acquired, along with the long-term lease on the warehouse facility in suburban Jersey. That lease had ten years to run, so no idea toward disposition was necessary until that time.

The vast room of ruin and confusion afforded one pleasure to Swagger, and that was escape from the enigma that was synesthesia, which he had learned was a freakish affliction – ability? gift? curse? – in the brain by which cues mix and produce something called “responses in differing modalities.” Most commonly, it meant that a letter or a number, for some odd reason, appeared not as it was objectively but in a peculiar color. So to Niles Gardner, the number 9 was red, the number 4 was blue, the number 6 was green. If he saw a headline in a newspaper, “Most pro careers last 9 years, study finds,” he would see the numeral in the color his mind told him was there, not the smudgy black of newsrag ink.

Swagger had made one further connection, but not to Hugh; it went down in the chain of linkages, not up, and anyway, what the fuck did this have to do with anything? No idea. Not even a whisper. It seemed another dead end, and the discomfort of it, like an undigested clot of food in his stomach, created great anxiety.

So the files, in their chaos, represented relief from that anguish. They were real, occupied space, could be manipulated, and were on a medium with which he was familiar, that is, paper. He happily confronted them.

Many other researchers had already pillaged the room, notably, Hemingway and Roosevelt biographers. That perhaps was why Bob found no documents for the great writer or president: all filched, sitting in files in Princeton or the University of Illinois or someplace. There were few pickings for other great men, though Bob did find an invoice for the .38 Colt Detective Special that Charles Lindbergh carried through every day of the Bruno Hauptmann trial. But that was a random, rare find.

As Marty had promised, the files had more or less imploded, collapsing into themselves like one of those buildings brought down with a minimum of strategically planted explosives so that it seems to disappear into a hole full of rubble. The bound books of firearms sales, required by the ATF since 1938, were casually distributed through the mess. Some of the shipping invoices were filed in boxes, some of which were labeled by years, some of which weren’t; other clumps of invoices lay here and there on the damp cement floor of the corrugated tin structure that from the outside was just another cottage-industry headquarters and manufacturing joint in a seemingly endless complex out by I-95. No one was on-site; Swagger had to pick the keys up at the real estate management company in downtown Rutherford after instructions and permission from corporate headquarters in Oklahoma City, under Marty’s good auspices through the intervention of Tom Browner, whoever he was. Swagger had been smart enough to bring a can of Kroil to lube locks that had grown stiff and unaccustomed to the penetration of keys. Now he crouched on sore knees, trolling in the disaster under bad light, in the acrid odor of metal that corrugated tin gives off.

It unfolded before him, a cavalcade of American high-end sporting rifle and shotgun life. Big-game guns, elegant British shotguns for upland birds, the occasional accidental invoice for a rare, expensive sort of fishing tackle (fishing tackle had dominated the firm’s eighth floor, a floor above the guns, and on the roof there was an artificial casting pond for the trout-fishing swells to try out their technique). That it was a vanished world meant little to Swagger by this time, though at the early going, he felt a twinge of something when he came across a shipping order for three boxes of Kynoch .470 Nitro Express to an “R. Ruark” of “Honey Badger Farm,” RR 32, Kingston, S.C. Mostly, it was long-forgotten members of the bourgeois moneyed set ordering ammunition, mundane guns for domestic hunting, and the like. Despite the gun room’s fancy clientele and worldwide fame – that was marketing – its bread and butter lay in servicing the nonfamous dentists, lawyers, doctors, auto-dealership owners, and cotter-pin and plastic glass manufacturers of the unphotographed, unsentimentalized American small-town elite, many from the South and the West.

There was no other way to proceed than this straight-ahead plunge through stuff. Chronology, compartmentalization, geography, brand-name, all the retail categories by which a large mass of documents could be organized were pretty much shot. So many had gone through, grabbed their treasure, and left without repacking the boxes, much less resetting them on the shelves, that methodology seemed useless. He’d spent three hours going through the boxes tipped sideways on the floor, to no effect. He’d examined clumps aisle by aisle, trying to find such elemental regulators as year, manufacturer, destination. No effect. It was a maze of random paperwork, abandoned, most of it facedown, goddammit, on the cold concrete floor. He’d moved on to the boxes on the shelves. So far, to no effect. Just to make it more unendurable, the fluorescent light in this sector of the warehouse flickered on and off, making visibility more difficult. Why hadn’t he brought a flashlight? Or better yet, to free up both hands, one of those lights you wore on your head, so he could see clearly what was before him.

It bothered him immensely that outside, four really good FBI operators lounged, going on coffee and doughnut energy, as his bodyguard team in the crowded parking lot, putting out the message to all observers, Do not fuck around here. Didn’t these highly trained guys have better things to do than guard him and suck down caffeine and calories? Shouldn’t they be busting cribs in lower Manhattan, freeing sex slaves in Chinatown brothels, or serving high-risk warrants on button men on the Lower East Side? Nah. They just lounged in their Cherokee, joking and smoking and talking sports.

Finally, he was finished, six hours and two bruised knees and an oncoming cold later. Nothing. Not a goddamn thing. It was like synesthesia all over again. Under better circumstances, he could have brought a team, they could have indexed and sorted as they went along, and when they were finished, they would have bucked up the mess considerably and restored some sense of coherency to the chaos. Not this time, which had represented a once-over-lightly approach, in hopes that something would turn up on the surface. It hadn’t. Time to let the feds get back to busting chops and him to his life on the assassination beat.

It wasn’t the last unit of shelving, but nearly so. Three boxes lay on their sides, placed knee-high on the second-to-last unit. They’d been ripped open, some material removed, some stuffed back in, some left on the floor. He bent and brought his eyes up close to examine the labels on the boxes.

Whoa, mama.

What have we here?

One read:

MANAGER’S CORRESPONDENCE

June 1958 – August 1969 (Harris)

He moved the box to the best light, pulled the lid off, and found himself looking at approximately three hundred carbons, stuffed in indiscriminately, clearly having been looted for Hemingwayania and restored haphazardly. They were roughly chronological, though when a clump had been pulled out, it had been stuffed back in at the easiest point, which was toward the end of the carton. It was so tight, each piece had to be pulled out delicately one at a time.

He glanced at his watch – 4:15. Too much time already wasted.

Do it, he ordered himself.

He found it at 5:18.

July 23, 1960

Lon Scott

Scott’s Run

RR 224

Clintonsburg, Va.

Dear Lon,

Hope this finds you in good health. The last time I saw you, you still looked like you could crack the Harvard line for a first down just about any time you wanted. Hope you’re as chipper now.

Anyhow, you’ll be getting three packages from us in the upcoming weeks. Or if not from us, at least under our power of suggestion. You’ve probably heard that New Haven is introducing a new model in a new caliber in the fall. The rifle is called “The Westerner,” and it’s in the new belted .264 Winchester Magnum. The cartridge was developed with a lot of conversation from retail – rare for New Haven, I know! – and has terrific potential. It’s designed as a flat-shooting plains cartridge, perfect antelope or mulie medicine, meant for those long tries over the flat prairies or across the valley. It delivers about 1,680 pounds of muzzle energy at 300 yards, off an estimated drop of only 7 inches (200-yard zero). Muzzle velocity, in the factory load, will be about 3,000 feet per second. We heard from too many hunters who failed to connect at over 250 yards because they underestimated the drop in their .270 or .30-06s and hit nothing but dirt 50 feet in front of the target. Dirt, as you know, makes a pretty poor trophy.

Put a nice Unertl or Bausch & Lomb tube up top, and you’ve got a super hunting machine! To us, at least, it looks like a real winner, and believe me, the industry needs a winner! It fills a definite niche.

You’ll get one of the first .264 Westerners off the production line. I’ve asked them to select a nice piece of wood. Hard to believe anything coming from Big W with figure in the wood, but miracles do happen! Play with it as long as you want. If you want to return it, no problem; if you want to keep it, I’ll get you a wholesale invoice, and you can send a check at your leisure.

That’s the first surprise. The second two are also as per our suggestion, with New Haven’s heavy hand behind the tiller, so to speak. Roy Huntington will be sending you a set of his new .264 Winchester Magnum dies, and Bruce Hodgdon will be sending you a five-pound canister of their H4831, which looks like it should get even more range, velocity, and muzzle energy and less falloff when fully developed.

Naturally, what we’re looking for somewhere down the road is a column in your Guns & Ammo “Reloading” column, on finding the full potential in the new offering. I think if you play with loads and the Sierra or Nosler Partition .264 140-grain bullet, you’ll be impressed with what can be done.

By the way, Lon, this is a definite exclusive. We’re not sending similar kits to Warren or Jack. It’s yours and yours alone, because we know that Lon Scott has the market clout to launch a major success, where the others don’t. You can’t get Jack to shut up about his pet .270 anyway!

Sorry to send you off to the railway station for so many pickups, but I think you’ll find it was worth the effort.

Best,

Charlie

Charles Harris

Manager, Gun Department

Abercrombie & Fitch

Madison Avenue

New York, N.Y.

CWH: mlb

“Maybe we ought to switch to Starbucks,” said Nick. “This stuff is beginning to taste like swamp water.”

“I think I saw a snake in mine,” said Bob, putting down his cup of Seattle’s Best. Around them hummed suburban Dallas mall life, all of it at hyper-speed and lubricated by smiles, unction, and beauty in the paneled English Department milieu of the joint, with its fancy frappo, cappo, and whatever-else-cino machines, its pastry cabinets groaning with frilly sugared bombs. Mainly, it was moms in here, with the odd lonely salesguy on break; the servers all looked about twelve.

“Okay,” said Nick. “Let’s get to it. First off, I got a good team into Richard’s while he was having his Friday-night steak. They did the house top to bottom, came up with nothing. These guys can find anything. Plus, I’ve had a wire team on Richard, not every second of every day but enough to get a fair picture. Van parked down the way, different camouflage. Again, goddammit, nothing. No microwave transmissions to satellites, nothing. A little suspicious, if you ask me. He’s too clean.”

“Absence of evidence is not evidence,” Bob said.

“Hmm, where have I heard that before? Okay, that’s from my end. Now tell me about yours.”

Bob didn’t mention synesthesia, Sir Francis Galton, or colored numbers. He didn’t have enough. “I found a letter in New Jersey. It establishes that, yeah, Lon was sent a .264 Win Mag in 1960, first year of production. So the gun in the case could be his. No serial numbers, unfortunately, but it checks out as far as it can.”

“You think it’s legit?”

“That’s my feeling,” said Bob. “I spent another hour there. Obviously, I’m not a scientific document expert. But the paper was the same weight and shade as the others in the file, even accounting for aging. Typewriter was the same font, perfect to the slight darkness in the center of the small ‘e.’ The format was in accordance with other letters from Charlie Harris, including those to Jack O’Connor at Outdoor Life and Warren Page at Field & Stream. The diction felt right for about 1960. The shipping reference is right; he said ‘trips to the railway station.’ That’s because guns and powder couldn’t be shipped by common carrier in those days, meaning they couldn’t be delivered. You had to go to the Railway Express office at the train station and sign for the packages. And, Charlie Harris was the manager of the gun room. I found references to him all through the literature of the time. He sold Hemingway a batch of guns.”

Nick considered. “I don’t like it. All that may be true, but it’s within the reach of professional high-end forgers.”

“Maybe, but because that’s so it doesn’t mean this is forged.”

“Too bad you didn’t bring it with you.”

“I wanted to preserve the box, for comparison purposes. And I thought to go the lab route would take too much time. If and when, we can subpoena for it. I stashed it carefully in that mess.”

“I don’t like it, Bob. If it means you go alone to that estate, out of our swift-response zone, you could be dead and buried before we get choppers in. Help is minutes away when you need it in seconds.”

“I don’t like it either. But it seems to me we have to keep going on this line or cut bait.”

“What about we bust Marty and Richard for attempted fraud and third-degree ’em. As you say, they’re not tough guys; you know they’ll fold. Meanwhile, we give that letter the full nine yards in our doc lab. Marty and Richard roll over, we go to the next link up the chain, and he rolls over. If the letter’s forged, our forgery guys will know who did it, and we round him up and bang his head against the bars. He squeals. That’s how you bring a crime lord down.”

“Yeah, but a crime lord has property, a place in the community, investments, family, all of which make him more or less stuck in place. If Hugh’s alive, he has none of that, that we can find. We have no idea where in the world he is. He can disengage in a second, and he’s clever enough to have designed break-offs in his network so he can disappear from our reach instantly. We pick up Marty and Richard, he’s gone for good. Then next year or the year after, I catch a .338 Lapua in the ear while I’m riding spring fence, and that’s the end of that. We’re close. I know we’re close. Nobody has been this close. I feel him.”

“What are you getting?”

“It has to be Hugh. He’s old, cagey, smart. He’s been in the game a long time. He knows what he’s doing. He’s no psycho; everything is rational, objective-driven. He’s subtle, he’s witty; in a funny way, he’s honorable. We left his kids alone, he’s left my family alone. I don’t know why, but I trust him for that. Like his cousin Lon, he’s a decent man, except for the few seconds when he killed the thirty-fifth president of the United States.”

“It’s your ass, so it’s your call.”

“Then I go.”

“I’ll have people close by, chopper teams, observation–”

“No, uh-uh. If Hugh has people, they’ll see it and hit eject hard, and that means he’ll hit eject. It only works if I go in alone, unobserved, no teams, no air cover, no radio nets, no backup. If I need help, I’ll call the state cops.”

“Swagger, still crazy after all these years.”

“I’m not saying I’m not scared or that I think this is wise. I am, it’s not. I just don’t see any other way.”

“That’s what they said about Iwo Jima.”

“We won Iwo Jima. Look, here’s my plan. I’ll call Richard, tell him about the letter, have him contact Marty, and set up a date for next week. Then. . I go on vacation.”

“Do you have a time-share or something? A condo in Florida?”

“No. But I have to get away. By myself, somewhere quiet. I’ll pick it at the airport. I have a lot to think about.”

“You seem to have done a lot of thinking already.”

“Not enough. I have crap in my head that I can’t figure. There’s something called synesthesia involved, which reflects a mind glitch that sees certain letters or numbers in color. Niles was a synesthete, as they’re called.”

“What does that have to do with anything?”

“So was Nabokov. He saw letters in color. Niles had a connection to Nabokov through synesthesia, and I think that’s why he used it to construct his bogus ID for Hugh. It was an expression of his and Hugh’s love of Nabokov, and it represented the kind of cleverness Nabokov used. Niles saw nine as red. I’m guessing the fake name that Niles gave Hugh all those years ago reflects a color or a number, probably a variation on red or nine. I’m trying to work that angle.”

“It’s thin,” said Nick. “I mean, even knowing that it’s a color or a number, a red or a nine for some reason, what use is that without a suspect pool?”

“Oh, I’ve got a suspect pool,” said Bob. “It includes everyone currently alive on the planet Earth.”

“Good,” said Nick. “That’s encouraging.”

“Then there’s something about the Charlie Harris letter. Don’t know, but I’m getting a buzz. Everything’s perfect, as I told you, but I get this buzz. Got to figure that.”

“The Swagger buzz. Admissible in all state courts. I have complete confidence that you’ll get your man.”

“I’m sure I will too. After all, Humbert got Clare Quilty at the end.”

“What the hell are you talking about?”

“Another manhunt story. I’ll tell you later.”

Swagger!

It clawed me from unconsciousness. I awoke, as before, in a cold sweat, enfeebled, aged, overmatched. I tried to sort it out before my heart exploded and aneurism did finish me. I had directed Richard to work with a police artist to prepare a likeness of the “Jack Brophy” who had shown, possibly killed my driver, then disappeared in Dallas, and it took until that night, but. . could it be Swagger? No. Impossible. The odds were too distant. But I’d seen long odds cash in enough times not to see it as a possibility. I grabbed the drawing from my desk and bore down on it.

I had seen him, of course – that day in 1993 at the preliminary court hearing in New Orleans. I had sat behind the prosecutor’s table in gray herringbone and red bow tie. I looked like ol’ Perfesser Flibberty-Gibberty out of a Frank Capra movie, very much the Ivy paragon of diffident and eccentric genius. That was my style then, hopelessly tweedy of appearance, of mind.

I remembered: lanky, jeans, boots, some sort of cowboy jacket. For all my efforts, I couldn’t get a face. I had impressions, not images. I saw that stretched-out body, not accustomed to sitting, unsure how to arrange those legs. Wary – the word “wary” keeps coming to mind. He seemed to be watching everything evenly, without remarking, holding his cards tight to his chest, always calm, a kind of easy grace to his actions. It was easy to project that temper into a sniper, who’d need wariness, a gift for observation, patience, and could have nothing of the showy, boastful, immodest, or psychopathic about him. The work was too dangerous for show; it demanded contradictory gifts, the precision for equipment maintenance and the patience for detailed preparation, but also the imagination to project into space an enemy’s movement and predict where he might be; and beneath it all, the stubbornness to keep the imagination from inventing demons and letting panic take hold. Many men can be brave in batches, where sacrifice and support are the group norms; being brave on your own, out in Indian country, for hours and hours – that’s a trick.

So now, at 4:19 a.m., I looked at the likeness and racked my memory. Were they the same man?

I felt like Laurence Olivier’s Crassus in Spartacus, who learns with amazement that he’s seen Spartacus fight but can’t remember the details. I stared frantically at the rendering, trying to resolve it. Finally, I faxed it back through the layers of administration between me and the facilitators of my orders and required that the artist do his best to render the same face minus the twenty-odd years. I thought that might help. I also ordered the issue expedited.

The new version came the next day, and it did the trick.

There was no doubt: Bob Lee Swagger was hunting me, and if history was any guide, I wouldn’t survive that distinction.

Now I tried to imagine the fantastical circumstances that would bring him back in quest of me. How had it happened? What were the links, the whimsies, the chance connections that put him on my trail again, twenty years later, when I thought I was out of it? I couldn’t run an investigation for the simple reason that it would soon reveal itself to him, he would then know I knew, and the game would become infinitely more complicated. The first rule of my war against him was to prevent him from knowing I knew his identity. I did resolve that when it was over and I had him dead and buried, I would solve the mystery. It was that fascinating to me.

The first step was hard thinking: what could he know? Not what did he know, but what could he know, as a maximum? That would be our parameter for action. I had to apply the tenets of the New Criticism to my interpretation of his mind, to ruthlessly obliterate wishful thinking, daydreams, sentimentality about his nobility and heroics, his capacity for Hemingway’s classic grace under pressure, and think of him purely as an enemy who needed to be destroyed. I realized that he would come upon the “dead” Hugh Meachum sooner or later. He’d track me through Hugh.

Was there much on Hugh Meachum available? No; I’d been smart. No family pix, no glory wall, that Washington vanity, behind my desk, nothing written for the record. Moreover, the Buddings Institute of Foreign Policy, the feeble cover for me and many of my colleagues in Clandestine, was long gone and had left no records. A genius might tease out some information by tracking through real estate records to determine that the funding that staffed (if barely) the suite in the National Press Building for many years originated in Agency coffers, but I didn’t think that was the sort of work Swagger was capable of.

Then there was Agency culture; would he try to find survivors of Clandestine, men like me in their eighties, in hopes of turning up a memory of Hugh Meachum, poor old long-dead Hugh? Possibly they’d talk after a lifetime of being coached not to.

All that didn’t matter in the long run. Even if he discovered that Hugh had survived his own funeral, my new identity was secure; he would never know, and he could never locate me, while it was a matter of time before I located him. I had to like my odds in this fight.

I made decisions. Richard in Dallas had to stay put. It was probable that “Brophy” would try to contact him again, since he was the one possible link to me, whom he presumed was still alive. Brophy/Swagger wouldn’t be sure whether our man was an agent or simply someone we kept under observation and piggybacked our ops off of, so he’d be sly about it. But when it happened, the Dallas operative was to notify us immediately. He would be given a special number by which he would directly contact the unit I meant to set up. They would be able to hit the ground running, the object being to kill Swagger.

I knew I’d have to put together a first-rate kill team, preferably men with special-ops experience, SWAT or Delta, that level, at any rate, and I’d have to equip them with the latest toys, because those boys would as soon work with cool toys as make millions of dollars. I’d have to put a jet at their disposal, have all documents at the ready, so that they could be anywhere in the world in twenty-four hours.

The same unit would have an intelligence component too, the best people, well experienced, savvy manhunters; my mind turned to the Israelis, the world’s best at this sort of thing. They would be charged with running as discreet an investigation as possible into Swagger: what had he done the past twenty years, where did he live, how did he support himself, what were his operating patterns, his preferred methods of travel and communication, his ties to a logistics base (did he have access to sophisticated documents, photos, forgeries?), what were his technical capacities, who were his allies, his relatives, his children, how was he vulnerable, whom would he die for, whom would he kill for? If possible, I wanted to leave family out of it; if he was married and had kids, I hoped I had the strength of character to keep them off the board. After all, he had not come after mine and was not interested, as far as I had any knowledge, in my three sons or their wives and children. That was how I hoped to keep it.

I went back to bed, humming with excitement. I have to say, it was good to be back in the game. Retirement, even in a style of haute billionaire decadence, didn’t appeal to me that much. This was going to be fun.

Within a month, I was set up. My intelligence team was headed by Colonel ----, formerly of Mossad, with a reputation for prying Arab terrorists out of the gutters of casbahs all over the Middle East. He was assisted by Captain ---- and Sergeant ----, also Israeli manhunters, specialists in seeing tracks where there were none, reading signs, making brilliant deductions, and with the patience of hawks high in the air, planning and executing the best in assassinations. Their specialty was the helicopter-wire-driven missile hit, and they could put a bird through any window in the world if they had to. It took a pretty penny to dissuade them from their duty stations in the Tel Aviv defense complex and relocate them to a command bunker I had prepared. Fortunately, I had several pretty pennies at my disposal.

I secured a landing site and training ground in New Mexico and there located my kill team. These were magnificent men. Two were ex-SEALs, one ex-Special Forces. All had survived, even flourished, during much time in both war zones. They were under the leadership of a major from 42 Commando Royal Marines, where he’d run a close-combat troop. He had more combat time than the others combined. The Brit was one of those tough guys who, by reputation, would not stop coming; he had been shot in the head, laughed it off, and killed the fanatic who shot him. Who was the real fanatic? I leave it to you. All commanded another pretty penny, but all – I personally vetted them – had sterling reputations. They spent their mornings in brutal physical workouts to keep themselves in top shape, and in the afternoon, they worked on devious tactical live-fire exercises. They were probably the best close-quarter battle unit in the world, and they loved the unlimited ammunition budget even more than the ample pennies I deposited into their accounts on a regular basis.

Close by them, in a rather too nice condo in Albuquerque, I had my forgery unit. This was basically a man-wife team who had provided product to all the major Western intelligence agencies. They cost a fortune too, and I must say, they were the only ones I resented, because while the killers were shooting and practicing jiujitsu or Bruce Lee kung fu or whatever, and the hunters were locked in cyberspace, penetrating databases, monitoring police reports, and accessing satellite data, Mr. and Mrs. Jones, as I called them, spent their time on the golf course or in the malls, living a grand old life at my expense. Such loafers! That’s the price of talent. I knew that I could send them a BlackBerry alert, and within eight hours, they could produce identification documents, passports, top-secret clearances, the whole gamut of access media that would get my killers in anywhere in the world, except perhaps North Korea, and I bet they could do North Korea in sixteen hours. Meanwhile, they shopped and golfed.

We waited, we waited, we waited, life went on, pleasant but more expensive than before; I encouraged the government to up the budget for and the manpower of the special battalion responsible for security in my neck of the woods, and still we waited and waited. I spent five thousand dollars a day on ammunition, I lived at the end of an umbilical cord to my communications, and finally. .

Moscow!

Do you need details? I am too weary to note them now, and besides, what difference does it make? Final score: S&S: 5, the Izzie boys: 0.

But I knew: the real hunt was just beginning.

CHAPTER 21

Jean Marquez” was how she answered her phone.

“Jean, it’s Bob Swagger.”

“Oh, you!” she said. “I’m so happy to hear from you. I thought you’d disappeared.”

“I can be hard to find at times. My old crank’s suspicion.”

He was calling from his cell in the arrival terminal at Baltimore/Washington International. Vacation in Baltimore? In the real world, it’s been known to happen, but in this case, he was on duty, as it were. It wasn’t exactly Marquez he wanted to see; nor did he want to rent her inherited tommy gun – yet. He had another purpose.

“I heard about some Russian driver-murderer killed in Dallas,” she said. “I know I can’t ask you questions, but–”

“That was part of the deal. He was the wheel man. He tried his trick on somebody who was waiting for him. It was part of an FBI sting.”

“You–”

“I had a little to do with it. But the job ain’t finished. Have you got time to talk?”

“I’m a newspaper reporter. I chat, that’s what I do. Go ahead.”

“Ah, this is sort of hard to explain, but some evidence has come up that suggests a puzzle of some sort, many years old, might be involved and has to be solved. I know, it sounds goofy. It is goofy. But that’s how they worked back then.”

“I’m listening.”

“Did your husband ever make a connection to the Russian writer Vladimir Nabokov?”

“I must say, the last two words I ever expected to come from your mouth are ‘Vladimir’ and ‘Nabokov.’”

“They were the last two words I ever expected to say, believe me.”

“The answer would be no. Jimmy’s literary period was long past. He read about guns and he read history and politics. I don’t think I ever saw him read a novel.”

“Long shot here: did he ever show any interest in a gun called a Red Nine, an old German automatic pistol?”

“You know, it was always one gun or another, but they didn’t stick in my mind. I could check his books, I suppose. He was forever buying gun books from Amazon. The one-click shopping was his financial ruin.”

“That would be a help. I have one other question. This one is strange. It’s so strange, I can’t believe I’m asking it.”

“Wow, I can’t wait,” she said.

“It’s about literature.”

“Not exactly a small topic. I’ll try.”

“This puzzle, which involves both Nabokov and Red Nine, was put together by a guy who loved literature. His office was crammed with fiction books, up, down, everywhere, with underlines and commentary on what he was reading, all of them alphabetized, all of them in good shape, which I take to mean that they were of great value to him. He knew, loved, dreamed, and breathed literature. Fiction stories, anyway. So the puzzle might reflect that, and guess who’s stupid about it? Me.”

“I doubt you’re stupid about anything, but go on.”

“My question is, do you know somebody who really knows literature? I have to find a principle to uncork the message in the bottle, and I don’t even know what the cork would be, much less the bottle. I thought if I could talk to someone who knows and loves it, maybe that person would see something I never could or would say something that might organize my thinking in a helpful way.”

She paused. “There’s a creative writing department at Johns Hopkins that’s supposed to– No, no, wait, I have another idea. There’s a nice woman in town named Susan Beckham. She’s published a series of novels that have been extremely well received. She sent me a wonderful note when Jimmy died. She doesn’t talk to the press. She doesn’t want to ‘give too much away,’ she says. She’s the only writer left in the world who doesn’t court publicity. I could call her. This is exactly the kind of intriguing question that she might like. And as I say, she’s nice.”

She was nice.

They met at three the next afternoon in a coffee shop in a utopian village in Baltimore called Cross Keys, where it was possible to forget the ugliness of the rat- and crime-infested city just beyond the fence.

She was willowy, her reddish hair shot with gray, her freckles still visible into her fifties. Well-turned-out in pantsuit and glasses and low heels, she could have been a mom, a vice president, a lawyer, a teacher.

“Hi,” he said. “I’m Swagger. Miss Beckham?”

“Mr. Swagger,” she said, rising, offering a hand, “it’s nice to meet you. Jean told me you were an extraordinary man, a real hero in the old-fashioned sense.”

“She got the ‘old’ part right, anyway. All that was a million years ago. Even then I was lucky. The real heroes came back in boxes. Only us fakes came back on two legs.”

“I saw a limp as you walked in.”

“Okay, a leg and a half, then.”

That got him a smile. He sat down across from her.

“I’ve never solved a puzzle in my life,” she said, “so I don’t know how I can help you. But I’ll give it a try.”

“Thank you, ma’am. Here it is. There was an old CIA fellow whose job was making up phony biographies for agents overseas. He was good at it, because he had a creative mind and he knew a whole lot of stuff. He may have made up a name for someone, and I’m trying to find that man. Here is what I’ve found out so far.”

Swagger told her of the office full of novels, the special love of Nabokov and his puns and gamesmanship, and finally, the synesthesia that Niles and Vlad shared. “I know it’s hard to believe, but–”

“Mr. Swagger, I happen to be an expert on the tricks the mind can play on people. I believe it completely.”

“So that’s it. I’m thinking you’ll see a pattern or come up with a question I should ask, or might have an idea that–”

“Tell me what writers he had in his library.”

“Some I knew, many I didn’t. A few years back I read a lot of post-World War II novels. So I recognized The Big War by Anton Myrer, Catch-22 by Joseph Heller, Away All Boats by Kenneth Dodson, and The War Lover by John Hersey. And famous important writers, Hemingway, Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Updike, all the famous foreigners, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Trollope, Woolf, le Carre, a lot of those Modern Library classics.”

“He had refined tastes.”

“Not quite. There was also a lot of what you might call junk. Crime stuff, thrillers, that sort of thing. A couple of books by James Aptapton. Lots of paperbacks, people like Hammond Innes, Jim Thompson, Nevil Shute, James M. Cain, Dashiell Hammett, someone called Richard S. Prather, John D. MacDonald, another Mac-Ross Macdonald-books that, from their title or their cover, seemed to be about crime or murder. It was all mixed up. He wasn’t a snob, I’m guessing. If it had a good story, he’d learn from it. All the books felt read – you know, all the spines were limber, most were marked up, he had one of those ex libris labels in each one with his name. He was a hard, serious reader of stories. Nabokov, he had every Nabokov thing, some in Russian, even. Are you getting anything?”

She sighed. “No, not really. Only this, and I don’t see how it would be any help at all. It has nothing to do with synesthesia, colors, Russian lit, Nabokov, anything.”

“Please, who knows, maybe it’s the key.”

“One thing he would have learned over a lifetime of reading assiduously in both serious and pop literature is the difference between the cliched and the authentic.”

“Yes ma’am,” Swagger said. “Cliched and authentic.”

Without humiliating him by asking if he knew what that meant, she went ahead, after a sip of her coffee. “Cliched. Meaning written to a formula, familiar from a hundred other stories, with certain expectations. If you’ve read it before, it’s a cliche, but cliches are so insidious that many fine professional writers don’t notice them. And they’re comforting, like the furniture in an old house. They’re prominent in some of the pop writers you mentioned. Examples: the rescue in the nick of time. The hero and heroine falling in love at first glance. The hero winning the fight every time and never getting shot.”

“You do get shot in gunfights,” Bob said.

“Exactly. You know that, but many of these writers don’t. They just know that for the formula to pay off, the hero has to survive.”

“I get you.”

“On the other side – and please understand it has its own pitfalls – is what I’m calling the authentic. By that I mean the normal, the undramatic, the small. The world is never at risk. No one ever mentions a sum of a million dollars. People misbehave, get angry, forget things, come down with colds, lose the grocery list. The hero has terrible flaws that cripple him. No plan ever works right. The universe is largely indifferent to the fate of the characters. But life counts, love is important, pain is real. You have to find a way to dramatize that.”

“I understand,” he said. “Could you give me more cliches? Somehow that idea, what you’ve identified, I have a feeling it’s something Niles would have enjoyed thinking about.”

“It’s not just plot elements. It’s also language. Words that have been put together so many times, they’re as comfortable as an old bar of soap. ‘Dark as night.’ ‘Sky blue.’ ‘Wine-dark sea.’ ‘Raven-haired beauty.’ All those are familiar, so their meanings have eroded. They don’t carry any electricity. They remind you of a movie.”

“What about ‘Passion’s Golden Tresses’?”

“Perfect. Good God, where’d you get that?”

“It’s from an old magazine. Anyhow, I think I’m getting it.”

“Characters can be cliches too. Compare, say, Chandler’s detective Philip Marlowe with Nabokov’s Humbert Humbert. Marlowe is incorruptible, smart, and brave, and he sees through everything, every motive, every feint, every lie. He’s too good to be true. Humbert, though he’s super-intelligent, makes every possible mistake, is in the grip of a pathetic obsession, can’t control his own behavior. Even when he shoots Quilty at the end, it’s not some terrific, highly choreographed gun battle but a pathetic transaction, where, shooting wildly, he runs after a begging, crying man. So Marlowe is the cliche, Humbert the authentic. Nabokov wouldn’t write about a cliche, except maybe to joke about it, to turn it on its nose, to make a game out of it.”

“I see,” said Bob. “Would Niles, after Nabokov, make a game of a cliche?”

“Well,” she said, “as you know, Nabokov loved games, so I suppose Niles had to pick up on that. He might have. His ‘code’ may involve a spirit of play. You know him better than I do.”

“Can you give me some other plot cliches? Nick of time was one, the hero never getting shot was another.”

“The most famous would be ‘The butler did it.’ That’s from a type of English crime novel in the twenties, when murder was considered an upper-class occurrence and the books were pure puzzle. The temptation of the butler was too delicious to resist: he was invisible, he was discreet, he was loyal, he knew the house and grounds perfectly.”

“There were a lot of books with a guilty butler, then?”

“Dozens. Hundreds. Then they reversed the cliche. Since everyone expected that the butler did it, it turned out the butler didn’t do it, even if he was the chief suspect. That became just as much of a cliche. But if you wanted to do that today, the real joke would be a game on the game. That is, the butler really did do it.”

“I see,” Swagger said.

“Here’s another one. It’s prevalent in a modern thriller: nothing is what it seems. The hero’s in a situation, and he continually interprets the signs for guidance. What he doesn’t know is that some evil genius has purposely constructed false signs to lead him astray. It never happens in real life, but it’s a great, if cheap, device. Most such books or movies dramatize the process by which the hero sees behind the manipulations and figures out what’s going on.”

“Got it. And if Nabokov, or even Niles Gardner, were to do a game on that, his version would make you think that nothing is as it seems, but actually–”

“–everything is exactly as it seems,” she said. “I see, by the light in your eyes, I might have scored a point.”

“Yes ma’am. I’m realizing that was the principle of the Red Nine. I thought it stood for something or labeled something or meant something else – say, a code name for an agent, a radio call sign, a chess move, something like that. In the end, it turned out to mean nothing else. It simply was what it was. He saw nine as red. He saw all nines as red, that’s all.”

“It was literal, not metaphorical. So it was the subtlest of codes, yes. The code was that there was no code. Who would ever figure that out except maybe a Bob Lee Swagger? No college professor would figure it out, because no college professor would be capable of thinking that clearly.”

“I’m thinking that maybe he used the same principle on the next step. Something seems like a code, but it’s not. It just is what it is, in plain sight, but you could look at it all day and not get that. The code is that there is no code. The secret is that there is no secret.”

“It’s too clever,” she said. “I could never use it in a book. Real life is never like that.”

It is all right to fail if you learn from your failure. Here is what I learned from the Moscow debacle. Swagger, at sixty-seven, was still very, very good. He could not be taken by run-of-the-mill criminal gunmen. He was too smart, too swift, too calm in action, too determined. Moscow had hardened him while confirming his suspicions, and he would move more directly to the target, which was, alas, me.

The second thing I learned (I have had to learn this lesson over and over again; maybe it will stick by the time I reach ninety!) is that you can’t rush things. They will happen at their own pace, at their own place in time. The more you rush, the more you cut corners, the more damage you do to yourself. I should have flown in my kill team at first notice and not tried to make do with a crew of uncertain talents and dubious motivations. To take professionals, you need to have professionals, so that issues of pride are involved, not just greed and the will to violence. My world-class killers wouldn’t have panicked, would have planned better, would have shot better, would have had more contingencies in play, would not have been thrown off their game when their sitting ducks proved to be armed.

The third thing I learned (I knew this too, but I forgot it also!) was to prepare the ground. Our team took Stronski at a place he, Stronski, knew best. He knew all the shooting angles, the paths through the bushes, the locations of the bench pedestals, which would stop incoming, and the trash cans, which would not.

I resolved to do better next time. For one thing, it would be the full focus of my attention. There would be no tending to empire and pleasure and turning to tactics in spare minutes between soirees. No, I had to go to war footing to win the war, which meant it had to be a 24/7 operation. I had to put aside my decadence and find my war brain again, and become the hard and ruthless Hugh of Clandestine Service, that old legend who’d killed a president and hundreds more in his time.

My first resolution was: take the fight to the enemy.

I knew I could not back off and let him find a new angle of attack to which I would react, because in the reaction would be encoded my failure. I was not going to live in anticipation of a move against me by this genius operator at the time and place of his choosing and pray for the luck of my guards. No, I had to go to him, I had to net him, I had to lure him to prepared ground where we knew the locations of the trees and benches and all the escape routes were predetermined, the sights zeroed, the weapons tested. It had to be done not just professionally but at the highest levels of professionalism.

I did have one advantage: I knew where he had to go. He had to go to Texas.

The only sure link to me was through the man who’d been his mentor in Dallas, and he suspected that man was an agent of mine. He’d have to reengage and infer from that a way to me. Who paid him, what were the arrangements, how did he report, how could he be played? He’d have to confront those questions.

In Texas I’d put something before him. Something so seductive, he could not resist its temptation. He would have to go after it; it would be his grail. He would study the approach, sniff a dozen times, seem to go, then back off. He’d circle around, he’d look for signs, for disturbances, for indicators of preparation and ambush, and I’d have to prepare carefully enough to survive that scrutiny. And finally – weeks down the long and winding path before me – he’d make his approach, and then we’d have him.

Since he was by nature a gunman, and since guns were in a way his Yoknapatawpha, I understood instinctively that he’d come at me through the guns. He would have no choice. They were what he knew, his terrain; he was the master navigator of that small world, and he would feel the most confidence in that arena. But there was more. I could feel it as if it were just beyond a screen or covered by a sheet, its outlines barely visible, no details yet to be seen. It had to do with guns. Guns were at the heart of it. Alek’s junky little war-surplus Italian clunker, Lon’s sleek, excellent Winchester, the whizz of the bullet to the target, the extraordinary damage such a small piece of matter could engineer within flesh if propelled at the proper speed and–

Then I had it. The breakthrough. Quite a moment, when it feels as if God is whispering in your ear. No, He is otherwise busy, I’m sure. The rapping at your chamber door is from your subconscious, which has been engaged with the issue full-time, trying facts against possibilities, seeing if parts fit or must be discarded, testing, testing, testing all the time until that moment when, miraculously, it all comes together in perfect, stunning clarity.

What I needed was a physical object, a file, a confession, something tangible and palpable, which would prove the existence of our plot against Kennedy. I needed something Swagger would kill to get and, at the same time, risk death to get. To make it real, I needed a plausible narrative to sustain it. I had to invent documents to validate it, I had to have unimpeachable witnesses to verify it, I needed a realistic chain of events that would account for its whereabouts since 1963 and that put it within Swagger’s reach today. This is what my imagination created in one gushing rush of fact and detail.

I came up with a gun case containing Hugh’s Model 70, the suppressor, and some of the hybrid .264/Carcano ammunition, locked and sealed with shipping tags proving it was shipped from Dallas to Richmond on the night of November 24, 1963, by Braniff. I imagined a backstory by which it was lost and then found by a writer doing a bio on Lon/John who would need the help of someone with practical ballistic experience. I imagined Richard bringing them together.

The one thing I could not imagine would be Swagger’s refusal.

I must say that, though they cost me a fortune, the Joneses turned out to be worth every pretty penny. The profusion of old documents they produced was amazing. It turned out that Mr. Jones was some sort of paper expert who knew about thread counts, finishes, manufacturing processes, the effects of aging, and all the minutiae of what I suppose could be called the paper game. His true expertise was chemical; using a variety of magic potions out of little brown bottles that produced vapors, he could give a routine sheet of papyrus the brittle yellowness of age so accurately that it was laboratory-proof as to time of origin.

That product was dispensed to various nimble professional criminal figures under contract to people who were under contract to various other people who were under contract to me, and in a bit of time we’d inserted a document in the necessary file, which appeared to be the files of the Madison Avenue seventh-floor gun room of Abercrombie & Fitch, a legendary place that shipped Lon most of the rifles he decided he couldn’t live without.

The Joneses had access to a whole range of criminal fabricators I had no idea even existed. They were able to hire a contractor who built an exquisite replica of a 1958 Abercrombie gun case and had it suitably aged; they came up with a Model 70 of the appropriate vintage, a Unertl scope, aged bottles of Hoppe’s gun oil, and an ancient .264 brass brush. No luck on the German Schalldaempfer, so they settled on an ancient Maxim silencer that at least was time-frame-appropriate. They used a noted arms expert to fabricate the cartridges, and he did so on brass of the proper historical pedigree, loaded on dies of the proper historical pedigree, and the bullets loaded into the shells were authentically from the rare lot 6003 of the Western Cartridge Co. 6.5 Mannlicher-Carcano white-box ammo. Don’t ask what it cost. I’d rather not know.

Then there was the man who’d play the “writer” in whose care the gun case would be left. I couldn’t hire a con man or a real actor for this tricky role. It had to be an authentic firearms expert with great knowledge and a list of published volumes with whose work Swagger would be familiar. He had to be able to talk guns with Swagger, while Swagger was secretly monitoring the conversation, looking for telltale signs of a fraud. It had to be someone who was known to others in this field, so Swagger could get personal recommendations. Nobodies need not apply. Hmm, how would we settle this? I chose the expensive course, and the mission was given to my Israeli manhunters, those bird dogs of deceit and human weakness. In time they produced. They came up with a fellow named Marion “Marty” Adams, who, helpfully, had a character defect: a tendency toward larceny. As a known expert, he became a broker on many fine gun sales, the man who assured the buyer that it was indeed a rare first-model Henry rifle he was spending his $150,000 on and not a counterfeit. But there was so much more money in the counterfeits. Marty, it seems, was in the process of being sued by one enraged buyer, and if that became known, his reputation would be shattered, his career destroyed, and his bridge to the high end of the gun biz forever burned. Marty was approached; the offer was one he couldn’t refuse. He would quietly settle out of court with the plaintiff, paying an exorbitant punitive fine, and the case would disappear before causing damage to Marty’s reputation. Since Marty was an idiot with no money, cash and legal guidance would be our contribution. In return, he would be prepped to play a part in a larger deception, the point of which would never be clear to him.

There was one more figure, the lynchpin. That is, Our Man in Dallas, Richard Monk.

I decided to run him myself. I would do so by encrypted satellite phone, the most secure form of verbal communication in the world. I arranged for him to be given the implement, already dedicated to my number alone, so he couldn’t dial up sex talk from Vegas or make anonymous dirty calls to teenage girls in Tennessee at my expense. He would be the one man in the world who could reach me instantly and directly when the situation demanded it.

I knew I could not tell him he was tasked with leading Jack Brophy to his death in a violent commando ambush in which he might himself be winged or even terminated. He would flee to the moon by tomorrow noon. Or if he didn’t, Swagger would read the sick anxiety on his face like a road map. I told him a little fib as part of the briefing.

“I represent a venture group that has its eye on a nice collection of corporations. Alas, the sole owner of this group, a discreet, elderly WASP, cares not to discuss selling them to us at a reasonable price. Since we don’t kill, we have targeted the crown jewel of his collection for ruin, and when it collapses, it will drag down the stock prices of his other holdings. We will pounce, and he will wake up the next day a minority stockholder. We will buy him out for pennies on the dollar.”

“I see, but–”

“The crown jewel is an old and prestigious New York publishing house. We will swindle it, through your good efforts, into paying an outrageous sum for a book that ‘solves’ the Kennedy assassination, with the physical proof to make the case stick. That is why everything is arranged so carefully, as if we were the CIA. This is a deep deception. When the book is published to much huzzah, we will prove, through friendly journalists, that it is a hoax and that the publishing house has been deceived and is selling a fraudulent product that must be recalled. And thus falls the house of cards. Do you understand?”

“So it has nothing to do with the Kennedy assassination? Just some big-dough guys trying to outhustle each other?”

“No Q-and-A, Richard.”

“Yes sir.”

“Let us return to business. We expect in some time the man you know as Jack Brophy will make contact with you. Your job is to steer him, very carefully, to the man called Marty Adams. This should all be familiar to you.”

“It’s been pounded into my head.”

“You will brief me before and after every meet with Brophy.”

“Yes sir.”

“You will take extreme security precautions. He must never see this communications device, never suspect you are in real-time communication with me. He will penetrate your house, he will go through your underwear, your collection of dirties, he will read all the squalid details of your failed marriages, Richard. Where is the phone secured?”

“It’s in a book safe in the basement shop. It’s in Bugliosi’s Reclaiming History, which was the only thing big enough to conceal it. But there are thirteen thousand other books down there.”

“That’s the guy, Richard. You make me so proud.”

We started getting responses from the operation almost immediately. Pings, blips, echoes, readings, whatever you want to call them. Swagger was on my trail, and it was impressive. It wasn’t just his courage and his skill with a rifle that made him a standout. By some queer mutation, he had been given a superb mind for analysis and deduction. It is strange how genius occasionally shows up in a single generation, then vanishes. Yet as impressive as his skill and determination turned out to be, they didn’t answer the one question that most intrigued me. Why?

I suppose he needed a mission, and this was the one that came along. He was the type who couldn’t live without a mission. There was also the issue of grief: he had lots, beginning with his father, then moving on to his spotter, Donnie Fenn (he was married to Donnie’s widow, Jen), and finally, an Agency officer named Susan Okada, killed in his most recent foray into our world, which ended with a missile detonating in the Rose Garden. Was grief driving him?

Or was it something else? Could it be a love of Kennedy? Was he a JFK groupie whose world had been shattered at Lon’s shot heard ’round the world? Was he in love with Jackie, with Camelot, with the children, John-John and Caroline? Did he see himself as their avenger? It seemed unlikely to me that a man so relentlessly pragmatic would have a soft core, particularly in devotion to something he had never experienced himself but only read about and saw on TV as an American teenager. I remained baffled.

Nevertheless, he was a formidable opponent. And he was getting closer and closer. Could he win? I honestly didn’t see how, as I knew who he was, and there was an impenetrable wall between who I had been and who I was now. Even if he determined, as he was sure to do, that Hugh’s death was fiction, I had removed all traces from my records of who I might become. Anybody who knew me then was dead; only their children survived, and we of the Agency did not, as a rule, share with our children.

I knew this: he had to return to Texas.

The satellite phone rang at 5:55 p.m. my time.

“Yes?”

“He’s back in Dallas.”

“Richard, he approached you?”

“Out of nowhere. Like nothing had happened. I was sitting in McDonald’s a few minutes ago, eating my usual Egg McMuffin, and suddenly – there he was.”

Richard continued with his report, the upshot being that Swagger was back in town, as I had anticipated, and was playing Richard again.

“How did you leave it?” I asked after hearing the nuts and bolts of what had happened to Brophy, where his researches had taken him, where he wanted to go now.

“I’m going to look into the possibilities he’s interested in. He wants me to be discreet, because of the value of his ‘intellectual property.’ He’s afraid of a claim jumper or someone beating him to the punch. So he’ll contact me in a couple of days.”

“Do you know where he’s staying?”

“No. He made a joke about that. If I don’t know where he’s staying and I’m captured and tortured, I can’t give him up. Ha, ha. Not funny, in my opinion, but I laughed anyhow. He said it’s better if he finds me than the other way around. Just protecting his intellectual property.”

“Excellent, Richard. Do go ahead and help him. Don’t mention Marty Adams until you’ve gotten him what he wants. Don’t force it; it’s an afterthought, not a main point. If he doesn’t respond, don’t mention it again. He’s paying attention, even if he pretends he’s not. He’s mentally recording everything you say and will spend hours going over it. He’ll look into Marty, sniff, paw, howl a little, head up one trail, come back, circle around, and return. If he senses you’re trying to force him in a direction, he’ll be suspicious of you.”

“Sir, are you the type who kills people if they fail?”

“No, Richard. You will be tortured exhaustively, but not killed.”

“Thank you, sir.”

I will spare us all the tedium of close reporting on the game. I will say only that its one amusement was the image of Richard, a fat lake trout with two hooks in his jaw, being played by two expert anglers. Poor Richard, trying to please me and trying to please the mysterious, slippery Brophy, with his far-seeing eye and almost supernatural gift for anticipation.

On the fourth meet, I felt that Richard was confident enough to work the Adams angle and authorized him to do so. He reported that Swagger reacted with indignity, even anger, but in the end seemed to warm to the idea of a collaboration. His final instructions: “Hold off a bit. Let me look into this guy. I’m not a writer, I’m an engineer. Maybe he could help me, I could help him. But goddammit, don’t tell him no more about me!”

He checked into Marty through the auspices of the FBI. Our computer wizards determined that another deep data search was done on Marty Adams, and circumspect inquiries were made in the publishing world and the high-end gun-sales world and so forth and so on, and we knew that they’d come back positive, since we had interceded before any stain on Marty’s honor could be recorded (just barely; he’d left many unsatisfied customers, so it was only a matter of time).

In week four, we got the news: our two fictions would meet. Jack Brophy and Marty Adams, each not who they said they were, each with a different agenda, but each eager to continue the charade.

It seemed to go well. Marty, as anticipated and confirmed by Richard, was a blowhard autodidact, and he bored both Richard and Swagger out of their socks with his various pontifications. In the end, Swagger/Brophy was intrigued enough to agree to another meeting. Clearly, his interest had been snagged, particularly by the mysterious “thing” that Marty had promised would tie a ribbon around the case.

The wait. I am required to show that my craft discipline hasn’t eroded over the years. It wasn’t easy, but enough was happening to keep me busy, and for nights, I had Viagra, Shizuka, and forties musicals and melodrama. The Israelis, monitoring through their various cyber-penetrations, reported a more thorough hunt for Marty Adams particulars and now a network of field interviews by anonymous young men. Even Marty Adams’s agent was interviewed, seemingly on another matter, but the well-trained investigator managed to divert focus to Marty and spent most of the time unearthing details on him.

I realized the time was appropriate to initiate the tactical phase. The famous Meachum luck provided that Marty’s inheritance included an estate in western Connecticut, the last remaining relic of the fortune that his father lost trying to sell high-quality .22 target pistols to a country gone mad on fast draw and mock combat shooting in the fifties and sixties. The place, about a hundred miles outside Hartford, was hard against a scut of mountains in the low northeastern configuration, hills with trees to anybody who’s seen real mountains. On the property was a decaying house, and Marty’s taxes were in arrears, so we paid them off (ouch!) to preclude municipal interest. It wasn’t gated or fenced or up to modern security requirements, but it was remote from neighbors, and Marty retired there to write and shoot often enough that gunshots didn’t necessarily cause the police to drop by. It was also nice that he had a Class III license, so the sound of full automatic weapons, if heard, was not another police signal.

I had an engineering firm discreetly map the place, as I had an aerial photographer record its nuances from his Cessna. This documentation I provided my shooters in New Mexico. I asked them to prepare a plan from the documents, then to journey up there one at a time, infiltrate the property, and spend a few days exploring it and learning the land. They were all equipped with digital cameras for close-ups on the cover-versus-concealment issue, for the angles of fire, for whatever other tactical concerns came up.

The plan was sound. The goal was to get him under all four guns, run them hard to empty, and take him out in one decisive assault. Marty and Richard, if there, might fall in the fusillade. I decided that was an acceptable price to pay, although I never told them that, as I never told Marty about the incursions on his property and my plans for the final moments. He would survive or not, depending on his luck. But he was strictly collateral.

There was some debate as to timing. I ultimately decided on hitting him after he’d had his conversation with Marty and examined the unopened case and was on the road out of the place. The reason was that coming in, he’d be wary, he’d have a tiny worry that it was an ambush, and all his senses would be extra-sharp. He’d be volatile, prickly, at high combat readiness. He might be armed. If Richard was with him, that could tangle things as well. So we’d let him come in, and once he saw the package and realized its significance and gamed out what it explained and what it made possible and examined it closely (without opening), and looked at Marty’s X-rays of it, once he’d swallowed that, he’d be far more relaxed and at the same time distracted. His mind would be going a hundred miles an hour; he’d be in a mode of triumph because he’d found the leverage at last to prove the conspiracy, get the case reopened, and loose the dogs of law enforcement on Hugh Meachum and begin the international manhunt that would shake that villain out of the trees, no matter where the trees were.

The hit would go down a quarter of a mile out of Marty’s rambling wreck of a house, on a dirt road with a 33-degree angle and no maneuverability due to the dense trees and sharp angles on either side. If he should escape – doubtful, given the firepower – there was only one way to run, and that was up a low Connecticut foothill where the trees gave out. He’d find himself on Robert Jordan’s hilltop in Spain – no, Jordan was at the bridge, not the hilltop, who was at the hilltop? – anyway, that person’s hilltop in Spain, unarmed, with only a few low stones as the four best operators in the world moved in. El Sordo, by the way, was the fellow on the hilltop. El Sordo didn’t make it off of his, and neither would Swagger.

The firepower and accessories (someone, possibly Anna Wintour, said: “It’s all about the accessories”): the boys had decided to go with deep ghillie camouflage and to infiltrate the property two days in advance. There’d be no movement on the place the day before, and to any observer, casual or professional, no sign, no trace, no indication of penetration. If they had to move quickly, the boys would shuck the ghillies and revert to digital-camouflage battle tunics and trousers. Faces would be blackened or painted green-brown (for some reason, these commando types love the touch of the painted face!). Hatwear: either the ubiquitous black wool watch cap or a suitably dappled boonie cap. Fashion is so important to high-end commandos, and I wanted mine to be up to Ms. Wintour’s standards.

As for the guns, the boys would each have as primary ambush weapon the MK48 light machine gun that had happily mowed its way across Iraq. This superb piece of combat engineering was ultra-reliable, even in the sand, and spat out its deliveries at a rate of about seven hundred rounds a minute of 7.62 mm ammunition. It was beloved by high-speed operators. The ammo, slung underneath the gun body in a hundred-round belt rolled into a canvas-wrapped container, would be standard military ball, for penetrating the body of the auto. Anybody inside that vehicle would be Bonnie-and-Clyded in the first few seconds. If, by some odd trick, Swagger survived the initial hose-down and headed up the hill, the fellows would dump their MK48s and default to the latest AR platform, the M-6 IC from LWRC on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, accessorized with Eotech hologram sights, LaRue flexible 3X magnifiers, and at least ten H-K mags with twenty-nine rounds of Black Hills 77-grain hollowpoint. And of course – nothing is too good for my boys – each would carry a Wilson CQB .45 ACP and a Randall knife. I know all this because I saw the invoices, and it added up to Pretty Penny no. 2,318,314. Too bad these fellows couldn’t have been deployed against a meaningful national target instead of my need to get another hundred or so blow jobs from Shizuka before the reaper came calling on me, but there you have it.

As far as the extract was concerned, I would have a helicopter in orbit on the outskirts of the estate. One of the pilot’s duties was to monitor law enforcement channels, to see if the gunfire attracted any undue attention. If squad cars were dispatched from the state police barracks, he’d notify the ground team, swoop in, and evac. If not, he’d wait until they’d policed the killing ground, removing and disposing of the brass and the body and that load. Finally, I’d made disposition that he had FLIR aboard, forward-looking infrared technology, so that if, by a one-in-a-million chance, Swagger got into the brush, the chopper could nose him out via his heat signature and direct the kill team to him, again in a few minutes.

Meanwhile, back in the real world, the process ground slowly on. Swagger leaped at the rifle lure, as I anticipated, but insisted that he first establish the provenance, and Marty skillfully guided him to the Abercrombie & Fitch records in Rutherford, which we had penetrated and into which we had inserted a superb forgery establishing ownership. When Swagger saw that, he would be hooked through the gills! He would insist on being allowed to examine it, and a date would be set for his trip to Connecticut. That was it. No big deal. Swagger was so provoked by the rifle case that all other precautions were irrelevant. That was the whole point of the multimillion-dollar operation, and it was accomplished in a split second, as an afterthought.

I had him.