The Third Bullet (19 page)

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.

He felt his anxiety level raise six degrees. “Is it shoot on sight or anything like that?”

“No,” said Stronski’s man. “Person of interest. The instructions are ‘detain for questioning.’ They had these all over the place four days ago.”

“Figures. Three days ago I went and saw a cop, and his eyes lit up when he looked at me. I didn’t know why, but I had a feeling he’d seen me before and was interested in continuing the relationship. I thought it was time to blow town fast. I’ve spent the last four days in a crummy room in the crummy suburbs, sneaking out at night to buy clothes from used-and-maybe-washed places.”

“And here you are now. The underground man. You could be some Raskolnikov lurking in an alley with an ax. Who’d notice you except for the height?”

“Where is Stronski?”

“You never know where Stronski is. He hides well. He was a sniper.”

“So I’ve heard,” said Swagger.

“We’ll disappear you.”

It became a progression of squalors. He was shunted from place to place in darkness, by friends of Stronski’s, who had no names and issued no instructions. Some spoke English, most did not. He stayed in a room in a brothel and heard people fucking all night. He stayed behind a Laundromat in a room of near-unbearable heat with lint floating in the air. He stayed in the cellar of a Star Dog place that sold imitation American hot dogs. He had one. It was good.

Always, it was the same: at a certain time in the evening, a new man showed, picked him up, and drove him through dismal streets to another dismal hovel. Without a word, he was dropped, entered, shown by his new host his deluxe suite for the night, and there he spent the next twenty-two hours. A farmhouse, a suburban garage, another brothel, the rear of a pawnshop, on and on, for what seemed weeks but was shy of one. Time doesn’t fly when you’re not having fun. He lived in a cold fusion of nerves and shallow sleep, knowing in his heart of hearts that he was exactly where no man should be, hunted in a country whose language he didn’t speak, whose streets he didn’t know, and whose culture baffled him. He knew also: I am too old for this. But it was a thing he had to do. He had given his word. Crazy with honor? Nah. Stubborn was all, an old crank’s privilege.

Food was brought or bought, but nowhere within the whole elaborate structure of escape and evasion was there a cash economy, and no one wanted or would accept payment.

On the seventh day, he was dropped at a bar and told “fourth booth.” He entered a dark place full of bitter, isolated drinkers, found his way through the low lighting and the cigarette smoke, slid into booth no. 4, and indeed, there was Stronski.

“My friend,” said Stronski. “Still alive by the narrowest of margins. They’re hunting you everywhere.”

“Do we know who ‘they’ are?”

“Powerful enemy, whoever. The Izmaylovskaya have called in a lot of favors and essentially control a large part of the police apparat. You never know which cop is your friend, decent, honest guy, and which is Izzy, who will make a call and send the killers on your tail in a second. The main thing is, we have to get you out of here. That is why I have you moved around, wait until the novelty of manhunt has worn off and watchers aren’t so watchful.”

Swagger nodded. “Good strategy.”

“I think,” Stronski said, “now it’s good to go. You rest tonight, tomorrow you will be taken to truck yard and hidden in long-distance trailer north, out of Moscow. Long ride, my friend, over seven hundred miles. You’ll make it out soft route on the Finnish border. I have friends there too. Finland, Sweden, you home safe with warm memories of Mother Russia.”

“No,” said Swagger.

“No? What the fuck, brother? Is it money? No money. It’ll cost you nothing! This isn’t about money, at least your money. This is business. I back you, I give you my loyalty, no matter what it costs short-term, people have to know Stronski can be trusted. That’s my long-term. I got you into Lubyanka, I’ll get you out of Russia, everyone says you go to Stronski, you get what you bargained for. He is man of trust. In my business, that’s money in the bank.”

“That’s not it. I still have business here. There’s a last detail that has to be nailed down, and I’m not leaving until I’ve nailed it.”

“Swagger, are you nuts? These Izzy birds are gunning to kill you. They are not going away soon. They will in time track you down, it has to happen. Somebody will see, somebody will call, gunmen will show. Don’t matter if you’re in nice restaurant, in park, in orphanage, it don’t matter. In they come, blazing, killing any and all in the way, and that’s you on the floor, leaking. Nobody wants to leak.”

“I don’t want to leak. But I can’t move on unless I cover one more thing.”

“Goddamn, Swagger, you are a stubborn bastard.”

“I need to get back into the Lubyanka.”

“Jesus Christ! That’s the one place they look hardest for you. You’d be the one hundred thousandth killed there, but the first sniper. You want that record?”

“Of course not. But I don’t mean I’d go myself. I mean my representative. I have to get a man in there. Get him in there to check a certain thing. Then I am out of here.”

Stronski’s blunt face showed frustration. “Swagger, go home. Tell me what it is. I will find out. I will let you know. No need to die for something so small.”

“No, I have to debrief the guy who goes in. I have to see him, talk to him, ask him stuff so I trust him. So there are no doubts. That is why there is only one man for the job. That is you, Stronski.”

“Jesus Christ, you’ll get me killed too in your madness over something that happened fifty years ago. Crazy, man, crazy.”

“I have to trust the guy. I trust Stronski. Then we have to have a sit-down afterward in some safe place in Moscow for a debrief.”

He did trust Stronski. Also, knowing Stronski, he felt he could read the man’s face more than he could read a stranger’s.

“Money. You know the price that shit charges? And that was after haggling.”

“I don’t care.”

“Man, you don’t. I never thought I’d meet a guy who didn’t care about money, but that’s you, brother.”

“Maybe it won’t be as much. It’s just you, for under an hour, not the three of us in all night, prowling, two of us American. And you’re not in the big room, you’re in that other room, the counterespionage annex on the other floor.”

“If I do this, you’ll go home?”

“I’ll walk into the American embassy and turn myself over to the
Marines. They’ll get me home easily enough. No Finland border stuff, no crawling through the snow. I’m way too old for that.”