The Third Bullet

only thing he can think to do is return home. He counted on something happening, and it has not; now he must deal with that reality.

The bus soon runs into traffic as it approaches the chaos of Dealey. Oswald hops off, cuts a few blocks across town to a Greyhound station, and catches the only cab ride of his life.

Swagger had a new thought: This known fact has been undercommented on. Oswald is at the Greyhound station, he has dough in his wallet, and hey, it’s a bus station, right? So there are buses leaving regularly for other cities in Texas. Yet he does not buy a ticket and climb aboard. It’s true, he may know that it’s a matter of time before law officers arrive, check on last-minute ticket purchases, and send messages to the highway patrol to waylay buses. But if escape were his goal, given the way his world was about to be closed down, wouldn’t that be his best chance, to scurry away before the manhunt net was thrown out?

No answer presented itself. Swagger continued narrating to the two figures in the dim window that overlooked the Russian nightscape.

It is known that Oswald takes the cab to his roominghouse in Oak Cliff. He’s smart enough to have it drop him a few blocks away, so he can recon for law enforcement activity before blundering in. That suggests that the roominghouse is a rational destination, something he’s thought about and decided makes the most sense given the problems he faces. He knows that it won’t be long before a canvass of employees is taken at the Texas Book Depository and his name comes up and he’s ID’d as missing. He knows that eventually – but not how quickly – the police will connect him to the recovered rifle. The cops could arrive at any second. Yet he takes the chance to go to his roominghouse, to beat the police response, in order to get one thing: his pistol.

Who did he think he was, Baby Face Nelson?

- - - -

The next day, right at 5 p.m. when the office closed, she pulled up to the American embassy on Bolshoy Deviatinsky Pereulok, and he peeped up from the well of the front seat where he’d been crouching and opened the door. The marine guards were twenty feet away across the sidewalk, so he felt quite secure.

“You were great,” he said. “I can’t thank Kathy Reilly enough. If anything happens with this, I’ll try to repay you.”

“Swagger, get out alive. That’s all the repayment I need.”

“Good idea. Here, can you get rid of this?” He pushed the pistol across the seat toward her, wrapped in newspaper. “Just dump it in a trash can. It can’t be traced. Sorry, but I had to carry it until now.”

“It’s loaded?”

“Extremely.”

“I’ll throw it in a river.”

“Much better. It’s a great little gun. Saved the geezer bacon. Your friend Mr. Yexovich knows what he’s doing.”

“Ixovich. The oligarchs are all-wise. Plus, they give great parties. Endless caviar.”

He leaned and kissed her on the cheek. “Kathy Reilly. The best.”

“I’m sorry it didn’t work out.”

“Oh, that,” he said. “The trip.”

“The trip. You paid, what, forty thousand dollars in bribes–”

“Fifty. There was another installment.”

“You paid fifty grand in bribes, you got hunted like an animal for two weeks in the Moscow demimonde, you lost about twenty pounds, you got shot, and you didn’t find your red James Bond.”

He smiled. “That’s true. But it reminds me, I swore to set something right with you. Please don’t hate me, but I lied to you. Or rather, I played you a certain way.”

“Why is this not a surprise?”

“I told you I wanted to find the red James Bond – actually the super case officer. That was to motivate you to make that your goal, to try to see him everywhere, in every file and every report. You tried your damnedest to make me happy. But you failed. Except you succeeded. I wanted your best effort, because then I knew if you couldn’t find a red James Bond, there really wasn’t a red James Bond. See, a red James Bond screws everything up. He muddies the waters, makes all the linkages problems, confuses the lines of command, brings in foreign guys, makes the thing international and not home sweet home. It’s all spy-movie then, and I’m a lost puppy. So I was hoping to Christ he didn’t exist. But before I could move on, I had to make sure he never existed. He had to be eliminated. A lot of it is about elimination. It all traced back to the Soviet embassy, but as it turned out, the reds were conduits of information, and basically, everything they told that guy Mailer was true. Their role is small: their Oswald info was intercepted by the real killers. Now I can go after them.”

“If you can find out who they were, you mean?”

“Oh, no, Ms. Reilly. I know who they are. I’ve always known who they are, from the first second. That bicycle print; remember it? It’s actually from a wheelchair. I know the guy.”

“You know who they are?”

“I even know his name and what happened to him. I saw his body.”

“He’s dead?”

“Yeah, but he wasn’t the brains guy, the case officer. He was just operations. I think the case officer is still around, because he keeps trying to kill me.”

She looked at him, dumbfounded. “I don’t- I don’t know what to say.”

“You don’t have to say a thing,” he said. “There’s nothing to say anymore. It’s time to hunt.”

PART III Back in the U.S.A.

“There’s a man with a gun over there”

CHAPTER 13

It’s a peculiar way to run an investigation,” said Nick.

Swagger couldn’t think of an answer. His hip had been sewn up, a process that essentially involved tying two slabs of scar tissue together with hemp thread, the highest, strongest magnitude, with a needle that looked like a stainless-steel flagpole; he’d been loaded with antibiotics, and the State Department, with FBI intervention, had found space for him to return from Moscow, quite the worse for wear, aboard its weekly diplomatic flight. Complaints had been filed; FBI agents were not permitted to work undercover in Moscow, much less shoot up parks with well-known gangsters, leaving bodies all over the ground. If the new director hadn’t been so busy giving speeches and interviews, he might have objected and brought heat and smoke on Nick, not his favorite to begin with, but he missed the boat on this one, so for the time being, it went officially unremarked upon.

Now Swagger sat in his living room in Idaho, hip sore and swaddled in bandages, in the silence of his disapproving wife and daughter, while Nick upbraided him.

“It’s not the diplomatic embarrassment I care about. I’m too old to give a damn about that. But this technique you’ve come up with is pretty spectacular. You find a target. You run at it in full aggression, guns blazing, daring it to destroy you. It makes that attempt, and somehow, by luck, talent, whatever, you survive and proceed to learn what can be learned from the assassins whom you’ve just killed. Does it ever occur to you that you’re too old for this kind of shit, that sooner or later your luck is going to run out, and when that happens, it will be tragic, as well as a mess for all involved?”

“It never occurs to him!” Jen hollered from the kitchen. “He is self-destructive and stupid.”

Bob didn’t answer her either; he couldn’t. “I didn’t plan on the gunfight,” he explained to Nick. “That was their idea. It came, we dealt with it, and we prevailed. We were armed, we reacted faster than they expected. We won the fight to the action curve. Honey, can you get me some more coffee?”

“Get it yourself,” came the call from the kitchen.