The Third Bullet (24 page)

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

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

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

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

“It’s loaded?”

“Extremely.”

“I’ll throw it in a river.”

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

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

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

“I’m sorry it didn’t work out.”

“Oh, that,” he said. “The trip.”

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

“Fifty. There was another installment.”

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

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

“Why is this not a surprise?”

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

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

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

“You know who they are?”

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

“He’s dead?”

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

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

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

“There’s a man with a gun over there”

I
t’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.