The Second Shooter (21 page)

"You know where he's going?" Donahue said.

"Yeah."

"Okay," Donahue said as he snapped his notebook closed. "Where's he going?"

"Dallas," Garcia said.

"Why Dallas?"

Garcia didn't answer. Instead, he opened his briefcase and extracted an unopened pack of cigarettes. Then he pulled off the top of the pack. It just popped loose because it wasn't a real pack of cigarettes at all, Blackstone saw, but a clever fake. The pack was hollow, and inside Blackstone could see the butt of a tiny pistol. "I was afraid the deputies at the jail would find this," Garcia said as he pulled the gun out.

"What kind of piece is that?" Blackstone asked.

Garcia held the gun up for Blackstone to see. It was a tiny black revolver, smaller than a man's hand. "A smoothbore .22 Magnum," the Cuban said. "Made from Teflon-infused polymer and ceramic. No metal parts, not even the cartridges or the bullets. So it can't be detected. Holds five rounds."

"What's the range?" Blackstone said.

"It can penetrate a skull at six feet."

Donahue, who had also been looking at the little pistol, leaned closer and said, "Looks pretty weak."

Garcia cocked the tiny hammer and shot the FBI agent in the face. The report, though not even as loud as a firecracker, filled the car. The driver swerved hard and nearly plowed into a ditch. Donahue slumped back in his seat, blood pumping from the small hole just below his left eye. Blackstone reached for his pistol but it wasn't there. It had burned up in the fire.

"Relax," Garcia said as he slid the revolver back into the fake cigarette pack and replaced the top.

Blackstone looked again at the dead FBI agent. Absent a beating heart, the blood had stopped pumping from the wound. Only a trickle still flowed from the neat little hole. "What the fuck did you do?"

Garcia nodded at the driver, who had the car back under control but whose eyes where darting back and forth from the road to the rearview mirror. "You sure he's okay?" Garcia asked Blackstone.

"He's fine. Now answer my goddamned question."

"He knew too much."

"He was FBI."

"Which made him even more dangerous."

"He was under control."

"For now," Garcia said.

Blackstone stared at Garcia, really, really wishing he still had his pistol. "He was helping us."

"There was nothing more he could do."

"And because of that, you killed him?"

"Like you said, he was FBI. Once he figured out what we were doing, he would have found himself in a moral dilemma. And I couldn't be sure which side he would come down on."

"What about me?" Blackstone asked. "Aren't you worried I might find myself in a moral dilemma?"

Garcia shook his head. "No."

"Why not?"

"Because you don't have any morals."

Nodding, Blackstone said, "But maybe I'd still be better off not knowing what you're doing."

Garcia returned the cigarette pack to his briefcase. "The Sergeant Schultz defense."

"Never heard of it."

"The German sergeant from Hogan's Heroes, who always said, I know nothing." Garcia pronounced that last part with an absurd German accent.

Blackstone didn't know how to respond to that so he didn't say anything.

"Doesn't matter," Garcia said. "It's too late. Or it soon will be."

"Too late for what?"

"Too late to claim you didn't know. Too late to play Sergeant Schultz."

Blackstone looked again at the dead FBI agent. Then he stared at Garcia. "But I still don't know, do I?"

Garcia smiled and Blackstone could see his silver tooth peeking out from beneath his top lip. "You will," the Cuban said. "You will."

***

At 8:15 p.m. the nervous driver pulled the Chevrolet Tahoe to a stop on the apron at the Mena Municipal Airport next to the Gulfstream V, which Blackstone had already ordered refueled and made ready to go.

An Agency front company had moved into the three hangers on the southern edge of the small airport, far away from the commercial and general aviation hangers and the flight operations office. They were the same hangers that, a generation before, another Agency front company had built and used to store the weapons that its contract pilots flew down to the Nicaraguan contras. Small teams of security contractors from Dynamic International rotated in and out of Mena on a thirty-day cycle and guarded the hangers twenty-four hours a day. Sometimes the hangers were empty. Sometimes they weren't. Blackstone didn't know much about the Mena operation, except that it involved Mexico. He suspected that it more specifically involved Mexican cartels, but he wasn't sure, and he certainly wasn't going to ask.

He stepped out of the front seat of the Tahoe and opened the back door for Garcia. As the Cuban climbed out, Blackstone noticed that he hadn't even gotten any blood on his jacket or his guayabera shirt.

Wendell Donahue lay slumped against the far door. Blackstone had seen a lot of dead men, many of them ripped apart, and the expressions on their faces were almost universally of horror. But Donahue, even with his eyes open, seemed almost to be resting. At most, he had a look of mild surprise on his face, as if he'd died before the full realization of what was happening had hit him. Blackstone hoped so. The guy was a prick, but...he wasn't that bad. Not really.

Garcia stood at the driver's door, leaning into the open window, forearms resting on the sill, repeating the instructions he had given the driver-an ex-Special Forces staff sergeant-before they had reached the Mena airport. "Make it look like a robbery," Garcia said. "And arrange the scene so that it appears to have been the result of a homosexual tryst."

The driver nodded, then drove off with Donahue's body.

"You think that's going to work?" Blackstone said.

Garcia nodded. "You can always count on the FBI for one thing, and that's to do whatever is necessary to protect its own image. When they hear that the ASAC of the Washington Field Office was found dead in a park with his pants around his ankles, they're not going to look too hard for whoever killed him."

"What about the ceramic bullet rattling around inside his skull?"

"The gun has a smoothbore barrel," Garcia said, "so it doesn't leave ballistic fingerprints."

"Don't you think an unusual round like that might draw some attention?"

Garcia shrugged. "Just one of life's many mysteries."

"That easy, huh?"

"What?"

"To kill a man on your own side."

"It's never easy," Garcia said. "Just necessary."

One cold motherfucker, Blackstone thought. But he didn't say it. Instead, he said, "What's next?"

"We go to Dallas."

"What's happening in Dallas?"

The Cuban gave him a hard stare. His eyes didn't blink. Blackstone could see tiny flecks of yellow in his dark irises.

"Regime change," Garcia said.

"It was during that long ride to Dallas that I became convinced he was telling the truth. Either that or he was the biggest psycho in history...and I was the biggest idiot."

***

Jake caught a glimpse through the side window of a red, white, and blue 'Welcome to Texas' sign reflected in the glow of the headlights as the motorhome rumbled south through the darkness on US Highway 271. It was 9:30 p.m. He was sitting in the cabin facing Favreau across the coffee table. Gordon was driving with Stacy sitting beside him in the passenger seat.

"Mad Jack Gillard went to prison in 2004," Favreau said. "Since then, I've run a café in Marseilles. Two or three times a year, the CIA uses the apartment upstairs as a safe house. Three months ago, a man came to see me. An American. He asked me to review a plan. He showed me a very detailed satellite picture of downtown Dallas. Two buildings were circled in red, with a line connecting them. He also had photographs of the buildings taken from the street. There were some handwritten notes on the photographs and on the satellite picture. I recognized one of buildings right away. It was the old School Book Depository. The other building was a...tall rise?" He pantomimed a tall building.

"A high-rise?" Jake suggested.

Favreau snapped his fingers. "A high-rise. The second building was a high-rise. With lots of balconies."

"Like an apartment building?" Stacy asked. She had turned around in the passenger seat and was looking back at them.

"I'm not sure," Favreau said with a glance at her. "Possibly."

"Go on," Jake said.

"This man, he wanted me to look at the satellite picture and at the photographs carefully, to study them. But I refused. I walked away. I didn't want to see any of it. I told him I didn't want any part of whatever he was planning. But he wouldn't take no for an answer. He insisted I study the plan."

"The plan to kill President Omar?" Jake said.

Favreau nodded.

"He wanted you to do it?" Stacy asked.

"No, I'm too old," Favreau. "To make that kind of shot takes a very steady hand. They have another shooter. A German."

"What kind of shot are you talking about?" Jake asked.

"At least a thousand meters," Favreau said. "Maybe more."

Jake wasn't a firearms expert, he knew a lot more about spreadsheets than guns, but he wasn't a total tenderfoot either. The M-4 carbine he had trained with at the FBI Academy had an effective range of five hundred meters, and that was pushing it, he knew. The farthest targets they had shot in training were three hundred meters away. The Marines shot targets out to five hundred meters, but even that was only half the distance Favreau was talking about. "A thousand meters is a very long shot," he said. "There aren't many rifles that can do that."

"Or shooters either," Favreau added.

Gordon looked at them in the rearview mirror. "You're not talking about a mediocre shooter like Lee Harvey Oswald or a mail-order Mannlicher-Carcano rifle."

"The CIA bought that rifle for Oswald because it fit the legend they were creating," Favreau said, "that of a man with deep psychological problems, living on the fringes of society, a man with big dreams but little money. It was a cheap surplus rifle anyone could order from the back of a magazine, exactly the kind of weapon Oswald could afford."

"What rifle did you use?" Jake asked.

"The same kind as Oswald," Favreau said. "So the bullets would match."

"But the ballistics wouldn't match," Jake said, thinking he had just discovered a giant hole in Favreau's story. "Even if you used the same model rifle, you couldn't frame Oswald as the lone gunman because there would be bullets from two different guns at the crime scene."

"You're right," Favreau said. "The original plan was to use only one shooter, but that shooter turned out to be unreliable. So they worked around that by arranging for a second shooter. Me. And my ammunition was the same as Oswald's, even taken from the same box, but it was modified so that there was no way to prove it had not been fired from the same rifle."

"How?" Jake asked.

"Oswald's bullets were full-metal-jacket military rounds. They were designed to stay intact when they strike the target to achieve maximum penetration. My bullets had the copper jackets stripped off and the noses drilled out so they would burst on impact. In Algeria we called them dumdums."

"That's clever," Gordon said. "Because there wouldn't be enough left of your bullets to compare to Oswald's. So no ballistic match, but also no way to prove that they didn't match. And since only one shooter would ever be identified and only one gun ever recovered..."

"Everyone would assume all the bullets were fired from the same gun," Stacy said. "Oswald's gun."

"Exactly," Favreau agreed.

"And since the FBI could trace all the bullets to the same manufacturer, the same batch and lot numbers, even to the same box..." Gordon looked over his shoulder at Favreau. "What about the half-full box of bullets the Dallas police found at Oswald's apartment?"

"Planted," Favreau said.

"And the casings?" Jake asked. "There were hundreds of people who heard the shots. The number of casings left at Oswald's hide on the sixth floor would have had to match the total number of shots both of you fired."

"He had spent cases from his rifle in his pocket," Favreau said. "If I fired, he was supposed to count my shots and drop that many more cases."

Gordon caught Jake's eye in the rearview mirror. "It's a lot simpler plan than most of the conspiracy theories, including some of mine. But it sounds like it would work."

"It did work," Favreau said.

Jake looked out the window, at the darkness rolling past. After a long moment he focused on Favreau. "What do you want? Redemption?"

Favreau held Jake's gaze. "No."

"Forgiveness?"

"No."

"What then?"

The Frenchman was silent for a moment, but he didn't look away. Finally, he said, "To keep it from happening again."

"Even if you're right about this plot to kill President Omar, there's no statute of limitations on murder," Jake said. "You'll still go to prison for the rest of your life for killing President Kennedy. You might even get the death penalty."

"I know that," Favreau said.

"So what do we do, Jake?" Stacy asked. She was still half-turned in her seat and looking back at him. Gordon was eyeing Jake in the mirror. And Favreau was staring at him across the coffee table. They were all looking at him for the answer, a twenty-five-year-old rookie FBI agent now on the run from his own agency, being chased by a bunch of mercenaries, and probably on some kind of CIA kill list. He had never felt so small in his life. Or scared. But he was also mad. Madder than he'd ever been. Mad at what he was starting to believe had really happened in Dallas on November 22, 1963, and mad at what might be about to happen in Dallas tomorrow. Sometimes mad was enough. He hoped it was enough this time.

Jake looked at his three companions. "We're going to find the shooter and stop him."

President Noah Omar stood behind the lectern in the banquet room of the Ritz Carlton Hotel in Dallas waving goodbye to the three hundred people, members of the Petroleum Club and their guests, who had ponied up $10,000 each to have a "private" dinner with the president. The lectern stood beside the president's table, on the podium at the front of the banquet hall. During dinner the president of the Petroleum Club sat beside the president of the United States in the middle of the table. All of the chairs at the president's table were on one side and faced outward, toward the rest of the hall, so that everyone had a view of the president during dinner.