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.”
