The Third Bullet Read online

  “He would be the second gunman?”

  “Possibly. Just barely possibly. But the coat could have also been owned by an old-boy Texas pheasant hunter, and it was his daughter’s bicycle that put the treadprint there. Still, worth investigating.”

  “So that was what the man went to Dallas to investigate. Then he got killed. Then you went to Dallas. And a Russian tried to kill you. Is that how the Russians come into this?”

  “Possibly. It’s another indicator that somehow in this thing, all lines of possibility run through Russia. But the fact that the guy who tried to kill me was Russian wasn’t the thing I zeroed on.

  “What I’ve done is, I’ve tried to isolate hard data points from the Warren Commission report, that is, the things that we know happened, times, dates, places, all multiply verified. And I’ve tried to triangulate from that a possible scenario by which someone besides Oswald could have been involved. I have worked hard trying to find the intersection of certain streams of information that were necessary for anyone trying to kill Kennedy. If I can find a place and a time where all the lines come together, that would be the place to start. My only technique is trial and error, try this, try that, try something else. Believe me, I ain’t no genius. But I’ve come to something. And that something has to be at the Soviet embassy in Mexico City in the late fall of 1963.”

  “Tell me. Wait, the vodka hasn’t arrived. If I’m going to spend ten years sunbathing in the Gulag archipelago, I’ll want to know why.”

  He waited, composing his thoughts. The vodka and the new koka came. She took a swig. “Very good. The world is nicely blurred. Please proceed.”

  “If anything of a conspiratorial nature happened,” Bob said, “it had to have sprung from the intersection, by chance, of five elements. I say ‘elements.’ They tell me it’s a lousy word because it means ‘stuff.’ That’s because the five things are different in nature, and no word other than ‘stuff’ collects them all.”

  “I’m listening.”

  “The first four are pieces of information. Three are related but separated in time. One is completely unrelated, from left field, and it arrives real late. The fifth isn’t information at all; it’s a personality.”

  “Okay. I can follow that, and I get lost in Agatha Christie, much less le Carré.”

  “First bit of information: someone had to know that a man named Lee Harvey Oswald existed. And that he was kind of a pathetic screwball with dreams of glory that his sad little life couldn’t possibly support. Who would know that?”

  “His mom? His poor wife?”

  “The second thing they had to know was that he had homicidal tendencies. He was violent. It went with his loser personality. They must have known that he had a rifle with a telescopic sight and that on April 10, 1963, he had taken a shot at and missed Major General Edwin A. Walker.”

  “I think I remember that.”

  “Walker was a right-wing general who had just resigned in scandal when it was learned he was indoctrinating his troops—the Twenty-fourth Infantry Division, in Germany—with John Birch propaganda. He was briefly notorious. As a civilian, he was even more annoying to many people: he gave speeches, he made accusations, he showed up at various civil rights demonstrations and was violently segregationist, he called Kennedy pink, the whole nine yards.”

  “Okay. Oswald took a shot. Someone mysterious and conspiratorial knows that.”

  “The third thing they had to know was that he worked in a building on Elm Street in Dallas, Texas, called the Texas Book Depository. But since he didn’t start working until October 14, they couldn’t have known until then.”

  “Who is they?”

  “That’s where we’re going. Who would care enough about this little schnook to record those pieces of information? The FBI questioned him, the CIA debriefed him, but both dismissed him as a twerp, unlikely to be of any consequence. They had no idea about the Walker shooting.”

  “I have you.”

  “The late piece of information was that on the afternoon of Tuesday, November 19, 1963, the Dallas Times Herald announced that JFK was going to be parading down Elm Street in front of the Texas Book Depository at twelve thirty in the afternoon on Friday, two and a half days later. Remember this—they couldn’t possibly find Oswald in that short amount of time. And they couldn’t possibly have predicted that Kennedy would pass within seventy-five feet of this screwball. So, you ask, who knew all that about Oswald? Not the FBI. Not the CIA.”

  “I know the answer. I know what you want me to say.”

  “Of course. The Russians. He’d been to them. He’d begged them to take him back. He said he’d do anything for them. I’m sure he bragged about the shot he’d taken at Walker as the proof of his willingness to serve. They knew. They had to know. But all that was in September. He didn’t start at the depository, as I say, until October 14. How’d they know he was working there over a month later?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “This is where the Russian James Bond factors in. The fifth element.”

  “Hmm,” she said.

  “Someone who would see the potential in Oswald after the Walker shot and establish a clandestine communication. So he would be up-to-date. He would know Oswald was working at the Depository. See?”

  “I see theoretically.”

  “We need a certain personality. Actually, I say James Bond, but I’m being inaccurate. James Bond is an operator. We don’t need an operator. What we need is a case officer. Do you know what a case officer is?”

  “I’ve heard the term, but that’s about it.”

  “He would be the guy like the movie producer. He has the vision. He sees the possibilities. He sets the goal. His talent is putting a team together to get the job done. He keeps everybody focused. He adjudicates. He administers. He finances. He hires, he fires. He’s the tough guy, not the creative guy. He does logistics. He gets everybody there when they have to be there. He figures out cover stories, escape routes, all the petty details that the specialists are too good for. He’s the guy who makes it happen. He’s the guy we’re looking for.”

  She said nothing.

  “Here’s what I’m seeing. Maybe this isn’t exactly how it happened, but I’m guessing it’s close. Oswald does his crybaby number for the KGB and, of course, is laughingly turned down. Ha ha, what a schmuck. But there’s this guy—maybe he’s GRU or some other branch of the apparatus—and he hears about Oswald, particularly the part about trying to hit General Walker. And unlike the stooges, he thinks, You know, this guy has possibilities. So he tracks him down in Mexico City, which would be easy, as there’s a whole Sunday, September 29, when we don’t know what Oswald did.

  “He says, speaking in Russian lingo that would astound Lee, ‘Say, Comrade, let me buy you a beer.’ He says, ‘You know, they all think you’re a loser, but I’d like to give you a chance. If you want that chance, you have to clean up your act. None of this letters-to-the-editor bullshit, none of this Fair Play for Cuba bullshit, none of this reading the Party newspaper in the cafeteria. You get a job, you live straight, you work hard, you put your ‘radical past’ behind you. Your goal is to get a job in the next ten years in aeronautics, defense, high-tech engineering, medicine, something where you can do us some good. Can you do that?’

  “Oswald is flattered. Nobody’s ever trusted him before, thought he was worth a damn. ‘Yeah, sure,’ he says. The guy says, ‘Look, I’m giving you an address. You can send me a letter there. Any place I am in the world, I will get that letter quickly. Now go home, get to work, and keep me up-to-date.’

  “Oswald goes home. He gets the Book Depository job. ‘Dear Comrade, I am now gainfully employed at the Book Depository at blah-blah Elm Street. My plan is to remain here five years, complete high school, be a success, put all crazy radical childishness behind me, and then maybe begin some college as a way of getting into the sectors you need me to be in. Yours truly, Comrade Lee Harvey Oswald.’

  “Our guy’s got one of those
case-officer minds that doesn’t forget anything. It happens. The really talented guys have them. When he finds out Kennedy’s going to Dallas, he thinks of Lee Harvey, and when he sees the route—two and a half days before—he sees he’s got the chance of a lifetime. He’ll never have another chance like this. He flies to Dallas, he meets Lee on that Thursday, he says, ‘You’ve got to do this, Comrade.’”

  “But would KGB—”

  “See, maybe it’s rogue. Maybe he knows the general committee would never say yes. Too risky. But he doesn’t see it as risky at all. And he can take out a guy who’s making noise in Vietnam and putting pressure on Cuba and looking for a place to draw a line in the sand and replace him with a Texas guy who knows nothing about foreign policy and just wants to be the next FDR. It’s easy as pie. He can do it.”

  She said, “It sounds original. But I don’t know enough to point out your errors.”

  “Oh, they’re there. For one thing, this whole thing started with someone looking at the Dal-Tex as the site for another rifle. So if there’s another rifle, there’s a complex ballistic-deceit issue involved. I’ll spare you the details, but no one could have figured out the complexities of it, recruited another shooter, found him the place to shoot, and gotten him in and out without a hitch in two days. Not even the greatest case officer in the world. It can’t be done. That’s the crucial issue of the assassination. How did they set it up so fast? The route wasn’t known until the nineteenth. I just can’t get by that.”

  “Maybe . . .” she started. Then, “No, I don’t know.”

  “Anyhow, that’s why I’m here; that’s why I’m hoping you’ll help me. There’s not much else I can say, Ms. Reilly.”

  “I told you, it’s so cold-war, how could I turn it down? Maybe, maybe, maybe somewhere down the line, there’s a story in it for me.”

  “If there’s a story, you’ll get it.”

  Was she sold? Enough to do the job, which, after all, was only scanning old files, looking for records of visits by Soviet intelligence personnel to one embassy over a relatively short period of time.

  Nothing to it.

  CHAPTER 9

  The Russian spoke, Stronski translated.

  “You will not be challenged. You may run into others in there, for the library is never empty. They are simply other spies who’ve paid the same price for their few hours of gnawing at the scraps of history. They will not see you, nor should you see them.”

  The officer led them to a dedicated passageway—no other entries were placed along its way except at the end—and to that last door. Again, it had that old Commie look, the steel, the harsh lights behind cages, girders with rivets everywhere, the smell of paint and iron, the sense of muscular, even brutal industrialism as aggression.

  The officer did discover a bright plastic keypad, self-lit, a concession to the modern era. His fingers flew across the pad, and the door clanked ajar.

  He led them into a final chamber. This one had a sense of hospital to it. The officer pointed to a box of fresh-pressed surgical green utilities, and they pulled them on over their clothes. A mask slipped over nostrils and mouth, a rubberized surgical cap to contain the hair. Gloves came next, rubberized as well, tight and thin, to handle the delicate papers. When they were sealed off in their operating-theater garments, the officer took them through a last door, and they felt the temperature drop twenty degrees.

  Swagger blinked to adjust his vision to the greenish hues. It seemed they were on a metal balcony of some sort, restrained by a railing from a twenty-foot drop to the floor of the place itself, a vast, hushed space with metal racks on two levels, cut by steel stairways running this way and that, the whole thing seeming to extend to infinity or whatever was beyond the realm of the greenish lights on the far side of the opening. Clearly, the cavern occupied the entire eighth and ninth floors.

  Swagger beheld the belly of the red beast: a vast room with crude steel shelving sustaining boxes, each box labeled and containing a forced mass of good old paper-and-ink documents. How many coups, how many deceits, how many black ops, how many wet ops, how many pix of fat diplomats with whores sucking their cocks, how many assassinations? All chronicled here, so it wasn’t a belly, it was a memory, a part of the brain loaded with forgotten info, hard to access, buried deeply away, barely acknowledged.

  “Sixty-three, Mexico?” the Russian officer said.

  Swagger nodded.

  “Okay, you come.”

  He led them downstairs and into the maze of two-leveled shelving, turning so many times that Hansel and Gretel would have become lost. Now and then another pilgrim would pass in the green night without acknowledgment. The officer turned at last down an aisle no different from any others. He spoke in Russian to Stronski, who translated.

  “He says during duty hours, clerks process requests from SVR or army intelligence officers of rank, take the box, find the file, check it out, and present to officer, who can only read in reading room, also on ninth floor. You do not have it so easy. You will have to find your own files, pull your own documents. Sorry for dust, sorry light is not good, sorry no place to sit, no bathroom, no Coke machine.”

  The two Americans nodded.

  The Russian spoke again through Stronski.

  “Rules once again. No pictures, no notes, no Xerox machine, all must be memory. Replace everything. Delicacy, please: no tugging, no folding, no forcing. You must respect the material and make allowances for its age and brittleness. You are interviewing an old man, and his attention may wander, do you see? You yourself, do not wander. Do not leave this area. Do only business you have paid for. Be honest, diligent, and bring glory on your cause, whatever it is. I will come get you in four hours.”

  “Ask him,” said Bob, “if this is all agencies, including, I’m guessing, not only KGB but GRU as well as specialized military teams, or just KGB.”

  The Russian listened and, in time, responded.

  “I don’t know. The idea initially was to consolidate, all by hemisphere and target country, all of it in one place so that access would be better and those who had to know could find all from one area. But budget ran out before it could be completed, and I am not certain if consolidation project got to ’63 or not. Also: this is only ‘offensive’ materials, that is, initiatives generated by heroes of the past. ‘Defensive’—that is, ‘counterespionage,’ in response to something done by main target and others—would be on different floor. That is not so interesting, just notes of suspects being followed, wiretaps being uncovered, traitors found and executed.”

  “Would I be able to get in there at some later date?” asked Swagger.

  “I will take it up with committee,” the officer answered, then laughed at his own joke. “All things are possible for a man with cash in his pockets.”

  “Excellent,” said Swagger.

  “I will see you in four hours,” said the officer. “Not a second longer.”

  They worked on their knees, as if in genuflection to the material before them.

  “Station 14Alpha (1963),” read the marking on the box. That would be it, the Mexico City KGB reports, that year, that place. Stronski removed the box and set it on the floor for inspection, and they crowded in close. This, as much as anything, was what Bob had come for: to see the thing, to check it for evidence of tampering.

  He bent and looked at the cardboard box full of papers, all held in coherence by a red ribbon illuminated in the beam from Stronski’s flashlight. Bob went lower, looked carefully at the knot. “Has it been untied and retied a lot?” he asked.

  His two colleagues closed in as well.

  “I can see the worn-flat signature on two of the intersecting ribbons that suggest it was untied once,” said Reilly, “but it doesn’t look as if it’s been subject to chronic tying and retying. I’m guessing that when Norman Mailer was here in 1993 or ’94, that’s the last time the box was opened. They untied it, found and removed the Oswald reports from the KGB goons, and took those to him in the readin
g room.”

  “Does anybody see signs of disturbance since then?”

  All looked as Stronski rotated the beam across the messy surface of the raggedly stuffed-in paperwork. Tatters and flags stuck out unevenly; a corner or two peeped out at the edges. Stronski gently ruffled the uneven edges, as though pushing his hand through sheaves of wheat, and fluffy clouds of fine dust puffed outward, roiling in the flashlight beam.

  “It does not appear to have been disturbed recently,” said Swagger. “Everybody agree?”

  “Let me compare with others,” said Stronski, and leaped up with his flashlight and walked a few feet, making random examinations. He returned. “It is same. Dust, chaos, paper disintegrating at the edges.”

  “Okay,” said Swagger. “Now what do we see?”

  “I can see divisions, I’m guessing by month,” said Reilly. “Do we start with September, when Oswald showed up?”

  “That makes the most sense,” said Swagger.

  Reilly pointed to the appropriate cardboard separator that demarcated the adventures of September, and he pulled it out as gently as possible, amid more clouds of dust and flecks of disintegration as the paper—at least at its edges—eased toward oblivion. Three sheaves extended a bit from the more neatly collected mass of April reports. They were an obvious starting point. He pulled them out and held them open.

  She examined the first. “This is just the September 27 report by Kostikov on his immediate discussion with Oswald. It’s been published by Mailer, I have the book. Standard stuff.”