The Third Bullet (55 page)

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.

T
he 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.