observation might have noted a bulge on his hip, even possibly suspected that it represented the sleek lines of an IxGroup GSh-18. But nobody had that close an eye. He was too ordinary.
He was one of Moscow’s unseen millions. The cheekbones suggested Magyar or Tartar; the gray hair, full and brushy, suggested good genes; and he kept his mouth closed because his teeth were too bright and he knew few Russian factory men used Crest White Strips. He had picked up a pair of red and white Nike rip-offs made in Malaysia, and he walked like any of the proletariat of the earth, head down, hands stuffed disconsolately into his jacket pockets, not quite homeless but seemingly without destination, past or future. Flashing Russian Federation ID, he checked in to a workingman’s hotel in a zone far out of the flashier precincts of the new Moscow, disco king, BMW and Porsche capital, Armani outpost of the world. There he sat in his room and waited for four days, eating mainly from food-dispensing machines in the Underground station nearby, where his lack of Russian wouldn’t cause problems or be noted, nursing his scraggy beard and unkempt hair. He let his teeth turn yellow with disinterest and the hair in his nostrils grow repulsively.
He had one companion on this journey into shadow: Lee Harvey Oswald. The killer would not leave him alone and haunted his dreams. Swagger could not stop thinking about him; it seemed just when sleep was deepest, Lee Harvey would poke him in the ribs and start muttering in his ear. Actually, it was his subconscious muttering in his ear, and the damned thing was no respecter of regular work hours.
So Swagger blinked awake in his Russian shithole, more like a fifties-man-on-the-run hideout than anything, and a voice was muttering to him about the timing.
The timing, it kept saying, the
The timing was 4:17 a.m., that was the timing.
But no sleep returned, and the voice grew louder, and he saw that the muttering came from his own throat.
Timing. Timing! Timing: this is where most conspiracy theories wander out into the ozone. Because the time schedule was so fucking fast from the evening of November 19, when the route became known, to the early afternoon of November 22, when the kill shot was delivered – sixty-six hours – a great number of things had to happen very quickly. Those who wanted to believe in conspiracy could only ascribe that kind of speed and efficiency to the result of deep government intrigue. Someone in “deep government,” in a shadow department of great but unseen influence, was able to arrange something far in advance so that immaculate long-range planning could be initiated: Oswald had to be found and brought under discipline, a job for him had to be arranged, and that job had to be on the motorcade route that itself had to be forced on the Kennedy people. Since only CIA was paid to do such things professionally, quite naturally, CIA was almost always invoked. Since both CIA and FBI had previous knowledge of, ran files on, and had dealings with Oswald, their presence could be quite naturally inferred. But that was all shit.
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
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
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
