The Third Bullet - Страница 25

The hard data points of the assassination totally dismissed any deep-government intrigue; rather, things happened as they do normally: by chance opportunity, by whimsy, turning on someone’s eavesdropping.

Swagger felt he was on to something. He ordered himself to begin at a beginning: how did Lee Harvey Oswald end up in the Texas Book Depository on November 22, 1963? Swagger recalled Posner and Bugliosi. The first hard fact that would never go away was that he got the job before there’d been any announcement that JFK would come to Dallas at a specific time and date (there was a general acknowledgment that the president, for political reasons, would have to make a Texas trip “in the fall”). So any idea of “placing” Oswald in TBD was absurd on its face. What would be the point of placing him in any building in Dallas against the faint possibility that the president might someday drive by? Don’t make me laugh. And that becomes even more ridiculous in view of what actually happened.

He got that job the way most people get most jobs. Someone who knew that he was looking for work heard a certain place was hiring, made some phone calls, notified Lee, and Lee showed up in a place he’d never heard of, was hired in the lowliest of positions-essentially a stock boy-and started work the next morning, Wednesday, October 16, at $1.25 an hour. Were these CIA or military-industrial-complex shadow agents or even Men from U.N.C.L.E. or SPECTRE manipulating bureaucracies to bring killer and victim within range? Hardly. They were the redoubtable Ruth Paine, a sublimely decent Quaker gal who had met and taken a liking to Marina Oswald and was trying to help her by helping her husband, whom she didn’t like much-she had a nose for character, that one-and Roy Truly, supervisor of the Book Depository, who was always filling his staff of clerks with transients, knowing that the jobs were perishable and demanded little except a strong back and a willingness to do boring, menial work. In fact, Truly was responsible for another facility and assigned Oswald to the Dallas building only on a whim; he could have as easily sent him to the suburbs. By what secret method did the U.N.C.L.E. agent Ruth Paine learn that Truly was hiring? She heard a neighbor’s son had just been hired there!

Swagger was now up, walking about, the muttering getting louder.

Later that week, the White House announced that there would be a fall trip. But planning didn’t begin on the trip for some time. Agendas had to be worked out and translated into schedules, which had to be coordinated with Texas officials as well as the vice president’s office. All this took time and negotiation, and it wasn’t until November 16 that the Dallas Trade Mart was selected as the site for the president’s 1 p.m. luncheon speech. The Secret Service advance party didn’t arrive in Dallas until the seventeenth, to begin the more intensive preparation for the trip; and it wasn’t until the nineteenth, when two Secret Service officers and two ranking Dallas officers drove the routes from Love Field, where the president would arrive on the twenty-second, to the Trade Mart, that a certain route-the one that took the president down Main, to a right-hand jog on Houston, to a sharp left-hand turn down Elm to access the Stemmons Freeway entrance-was selected.

At best, a “mole” representing the deep-government conspiracy could have alerted the kill team the night of the nineteenth; but in all likelihood, the killer (or killers) didn’t find out about it until the next morning, when the route ran on the front page of the Dallas Morning News. Since Oswald was in the habit of reading day-old newspapers, he probably didn’t learn about it until November 21, the day before.

Swagger tried to advocate against himself for a bit. If indeed there was a conspiracy planning to kill JFK in Dallas long before Oswald entered the picture, he thought, it would have had a maximum of the night of the nineteenth, the days of the twentieth and twenty-first and half a day of the twenty-second, sixty-six hours, to do the following:

Find and recruit Oswald and get him committed to the sixth-floor Book Depository shot.

Learn what kind of rifle he would be using.

Develop a method of ballistically “counterfeiting” the rifle that was so successful, it would withstand nearly fifty years of the highest-tech scrutiny, with the tech getting higher every decade.

Find an alternative shooter who could make the head shot on the president that everyone who knew Oswald would consider well beyond his modest range of talent.

Find an alternative shooting site whose angle to the target was close enough so the trajectory of the counterfeited bullet wouldn’t give the game away.

Plan and execute an entrance and exit with such precision that it would go unnoticed in the hubbub.

One more thing occurred to him, and he wondered why his gun-soaked brain hadn’t come up with it earlier: the rifle would have to be silenced so its noise wouldn’t give away the existence and locale of the second shooter. Silencers, more accurately “suppressors,” are not easy to come by. In the first place, they are Class III items, controlled by federal regulation, like machine guns. It’s probably safe to assume that, as with machine guns, professional government espionage agencies and underworld organizations have access to them, but procuring them quickly and testing them for effectiveness and their influence on the point of impact demands time that these theoretical conspirators didn’t have. Also, a sudden search for such a device is certain to have attracted notice, and even in (or particularly in) the underworld, people talk. If circa November 20, 1963, a search of underworld inventories for a rifle suppressor had been suddenly run, snitches sure as hell would have squawked to the police as a way of sliding a few months off a breaking-and-entering sentence. So the suppressor remains completely mysterious, another item that could not have been obtained in the time frame without having left a record.

BANG! BANG! BANG!

He looked around, startled. It was someone in the next room pounding on the wall. Something was yelled in Russian, presumably “Shut up, asshole.”

Swagger took the hint.

He turned off the light and crept back into bed, and this time sleep was awarded him. But he had a new conclusion to add to his mental inventory: they’d have to be the best team ever assembled in order to bring it off.

On the fifth day, late in the afternoon, he took a roundabout walk to the Underground and headed into another precinct of Moscow.

He arrived at the flea market late. Most of the tourists had left, there was little activity, and already the merchants were rearranging their wares and closing their booth fronts. It was another maze, as avenue bisected avenue on a square mile, all of it with the appearance of something temporary that had become something permanent. Most of the structures were low wooden booths, possibly walled or awned in canvas. The plaza of low-end retail was dominated by a central building in the old style, with the typical onion-shaped dome of gold gilding, which rose on a tower from a complex structure that could have been a monastery or a refurbed software outlet. The flea market was the place to go for nesting dolls, which had come to represent the universal symbol of Russia, and shop after shop offered them in dazzling variety, including those boasting the symbols of great NFL teams, as each doll inside revealed a new and smaller icon of gridiron greatness. Ceramics were another popular sales item, as were watches, particularly the Russian diver’s model with the screw-on cap chained to the case protecting the winder, jewelry, knickknacks of all sorts, imitation icons, photo books, and store after store of medals and badges where you could pick up a Panzer-killer award with three bars, signifying that you had knocked out three Tiger IIs in the ruins of Stalingrad.

Swagger dawdled here and there, setting up switchbacks and ambushes to check if he was being followed. Finally, satisfied that he was at least for now unobserved, he found a corner, navigated a street and then another, and found his destination, a surplus-military hardware shop that sold ponchos, helmets, bayonets, T-shirts, boots, tunics, everything that spoke of war, including some old Marine Corps helmets with the jungle-green camouflage cover. He slid up, pointed to the pile of helmets, and said to the proprietor, “I’ll take six of them, please.”

The man looked up from his newspaper, took a second to comprehend, then said, in English, “Jesus Christ, Swagger.”

That he spoke English was no surprise, since the flea market’s economy sustained itself on tourism, so if a fellow wanted to make a living, he had to know the language of the people with the dough.

“I have to see Stronski.”

There was nobody else around, though down the way, an old woman was closing down a nesting-doll joint, delicately stacking the ornate doll faces back on the counter so they would be enclosed when she lowered the shutter.

“Man, do you know you are the most hunted guy in this town? Here, look at this.”

He shoved over a piece of paper from the mess on his counter, and Swagger beheld himself, sans the beard and low cap, in a kind of Disney caricature.

“My eyes aren’t that close together,” he said, and in a second tumbled to the rest: how had they-never mind yet who they were-gotten this out so fast, so completely, so nearly lethally? How did they know? The intelligence operation was superlative. Whoever put it together-the red James Bond again? — knew what he was doing.