Dragonfly

saw the man who shot Officer Tippit and chased him for approximately one block. He informed the FBI that the man who had shot Tippit was not Oswald. Two days later Reynolds was shot in the head by an unknown assailant. He survived. FBI men visited him in the hospital, and when he could talk again he had decided that it was Oswald who had shot Tippit. Domingo Benavides was only a few yards from Tippit when Tippit was shot. Benavides described the assailant as a man who did not even vaguely resemble Oswald. He was not asked to testify before the commission. Acquilla Clemons, another police witness, saw Tippit's killer and gave a description matching that supplied independently by Benavides. She was not called to testify before the commission. Mr. Frank Wright, whose wife called the ambulance for Tippit, was adamant that Oswald was not Tippit's killer. He was not called before the Warren Commission. A waitress, whose vantage point for the Tippit killing was not nearly so good as that of Benavides or the others, became the state's star witness. Even she could not identify Oswald, according to testimony in the commission report — yet in the summary the commission says she did positively identify Oswald.” He was still smiling. “Did you bother to read the report and locate this kind of material? There are hundreds of things like it.”

Rice licked his lips. His throat was dry. He was so excited he could barely speak. “No. I didn't look. I never looked.”

“And if you still doubt me,” West said smugly, “one more thing. Lee Harvey Oswald's Marine records, and testimony of friends he made in the Marines, show that he was an abysmal marksman barely able to pass his requirements. Yet the commission wants us to believe that he fired at a moving target, aiming through an opening in a tree's foliage, a situation that allowed him eight-tenths of a second to aim and fire. And he was using a mail- order rifle.” He laughed. “The commission asked three Master riflemen to re-create the assassination, just to show that it could be done as the commission said it had been done. The Masters used the Mannlicher-Cardano rifle Oswald had used, but only after the telescopic sight was remounted.”

Rice blinked. “Remounted?”

The sight wasn't aligned with the barrel and, therefore, whatever one saw through the telescope was not what the barrel was pointing at. We made a mistake planting the Mannlicher-Carcano. We should have made certain the gun at least could have been used for the job even if it wasn't. But it worked out well enough.”

“The Master riflemen,” Rice reminded him.

“Oh, yes. After the telescopic sight had been remounted, the three Masters tried their hands at a recreation. They were placed on a platform half as high as the sixth-floor window from which Lee Oswald supposedly fired the shot. Their target was not moving, while Oswald's target had been moving. They were allowed all the time they wanted to line up a shot— not eight-tenths of a second, as Oswald supposedly had. Their target was more than twice as large as the President's head had been. You know what? None of them could kill the target — or even come close to killing it.” He sighed and leaned back in his chair, picked up his cigar. “There was no need to make a perfect job of it. The files of evidence — which the public has been told again and again contain nothing that hasn't already been told — were sealed in the National Archives and will not be made public until the year 2039. This is for reasons of national security, we're told. And even then, even when they're told that worthless evidence must be kept secret for seventy-five years, the sheep suspect nothing.”

Rice finished his brandy in one swallow.

“Do you believe me now?” West asked.

“Yes.”

West let smoke out through his nostrils. “I have convinced my associates that we must not waste the contacts and the expertise that we developed while planning and executing the Kennedy assassination. We must organize, establish an underground apparatus — what I like to call The Committee. We must solidify our gains and protect them. And we must look for a new, profitable — operation. Operations. We must use The Committee as if it were a stock-investment plan.”

“Other assassinations?” Rice said weakly.

“If it comes to that, yes. But there are other tools. If we can gain even partial control of the FBI and CIA, we ought to be able to engineer events that will keep the Communist sympathizers out of office in the first place. We can use federal officers to harass them. We can put federal taps on their telephones. We can shadow them every minute of the day. If a candidate has a mistress — or some other dark secret — we'll find it and use it to make him drop out of the race even before the primary elections are over.”

“And where do I come in?”

Finishing his brandy, West said, “We need someone to run the day-to-day affairs of The Committee. Someone who is dedicated to this country, someone who hates, as we do, the Communist conspiracy. We need a man who is intelligent, as brilliant a man as we can find. He must be willing to take big risks. He must be ruthless. And he must be a man who has no public identity, because we want to build him an identity as one of the foremost liberal thinkers of his day.”

“Liberal?” Rice said, perplexed.

“Camouflage,” West said. “He'll be a double agent, so to speak.”

“But I've written this book—”

“As yet unpublished.”

“You mean — destroy it?”

“Do you mind?”

“I guess not. But the articles in Scott's magazines—”

“For all practical purposes, no one reads them. And certainly, no one remembers who wrote them. Scott will burn all unsold issues that contain your articles. Most people who subscribe to the magazines probably throw their copies away. And even if someone runs across one of the essays after you've been established as a liberal theorist, you can blush and say it was the work of a younger and less sensible Andy Rice. Easy.”

“May I have more brandy?”

“Help yourself.”

They were silent for a few minutes.

Then Rice said, “I'm interested.”

“I knew you would be.”

“But you risked so much! You told me all of this without being sure I'd want to get involved. You told me you set up Kennedy's assassination and—”

“No risk,” West said. “If you'd been appalled, if you hadn't wanted to be a part of The Committee, we'd have killed you.”

Rice shivered. “I see.”

West poured himself another brandy. “Well! Shall we get down to specifics?”

His heart hammering, Andrew Rice nodded, sipped his brandy, and listened to A.W. West reshape his life

.

“Mr. Rice?”

Startled, Rice bit his fingers as they were shoving a chocolate-covered marshmallow cookie into his mouth. He grunted with pain. He looked up, but there was no one else in his office.

“Mr. Rice?”

Miss Priestly.

The intercom.

He pushed the button. “What is it?”

“The list just arrived, sir.”

“List?”

“The list of federal marshals you asked me to get from the Justice Department, Mr. Rice.”

“Oh, yes. Bring it in, please.”

She brought it in, and after she had gone he picked up the white telephone and dialed Miss Rockwalt in the CIA file room out in Virginia. He said, “This is the Spokesman.”

“Yes, sir.”

“I've got a list of names for you. Pencil handy?”

“Go ahead.”