The Third Bullet (59 page)

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.