The Third Bullet

by Stephen Hunter

  “Hmm, never heard of it,” said Richard, taking a finishing draft on his Tecate, then raising his hand for another one. “Now that you mention it, I might have seen it a time or fifteen.”

  “I think I was with you until the time-travel jazz came up. I dig holes in the ground, long, straight holes. In other words, I live in and fight dirt. Dirt is about as elemental as you can get, Richard, especially when six miles of it are between you and what you’re trying to dig up. So for me, time travel is a nonstarter. I just can’t wrap my mind around it. I have to get off the boat right here.”

  “Jack, trust me on this—time travel, by the laws of physics, is theoretically justifiable. I’ll spare you the math, but the secret is the position of the body in space. You see, if you sent a man back a hundred years from here, from this nice restaurant and among all these attractive young people, and he stepped into the here of a century ago, he would instantly die, because he’d be in outer space. Hello, no air, 5,000 degrees below zero, and pieces of shit flying along at light speed because there’s nothing to slow them down. That’s because the earth, the solar system, the whole shebang, nothing is where it was. It’s all moving and moving fast. You have to first devise the mother of all computers to calculate exactly where here was a hundred years ago, and by particle beam transmission, that’s where you send him. So when he gets there, there is a there to be gotten to.”

  “I’m getting a headache,” said Bob.

  “We’re almost done,” promised Richard. He took another long draft and resumed. “He wasn’t a special man. But he had to be a hundred percent certain. After rigorous psychological testing, he was found, winnowed from the thousands who’d sworn they could do the deed. But in 2015 everyone knew the temptation to stay in the past would have been overwhelming. The past was so much better than the ever-diminishing present. They had to have a man with the integrity to destroy himself on faith for a world he’d never see, for children he’d never know, who’d not only die but, more tragically, perish from memory, a man who not only wouldn’t exist but never would have existed.

  “They found him. Maybe he was someone like you, Jack, tough and smart, salty, been around, walked with a limp, always with the watchful eyes, always slightly tense, as if he’s ready to dodge a flying drill bit. That would be the guy. A hero, like Jack, with a limp from a wound he never talks about.

  “They sent him back. He entered the past at twelve-twenty-nine p.m. CST on November 22, 1963. They sent him to the southwest corner of the Texas Book Depository, just beyond the Hertz sign. He had a minute or so to set up, and he’d been trained well. He didn’t flinch. He didn’t hesitate, doubt, fear, regret. Very capable, a Jack Brophy if ever there was one. Good with tools, even or especially guns. He had a rifle, nothing special, nothing complicated, and a nice midrange scope, and several rounds of ammunition. All of these were chance survivors of the nuclear wars, located at great cost and effort by our descendants in the year 2015.

  “The hero on the roof put his well-zeroed scope on the head of the vital, attractive young man known as John F. Kennedy and saw the president take Lee Harvey Oswald’s second round and flinch but not fall, watched his hands involuntarily rise to his throat in the nerve behavior known as the Thorburn position, counted to five, and squeezed the trigger. He drove a bullet into JFK’s skull.

  “In that moment, he disappeared. The rifle disappeared. All traces of the bullet disappeared. As it performed its killing duty, it ceased to exist. All evidence of the second rifle ceased to exist. And that’s why nobody will ever ‘solve’ the case. A confused but still idiotic Lee Harvey Oswald was left to go Huh?, panic, and begin his crazed last run. Who cares what happened to him. What’s important is that in the moment of JFK’s death, the next hundred years ceased to exist, or ceased to have existed. JFK was dead; he wasn’t wounded, he didn’t recover, his brain had been turned to vapor, he didn’t pull the troops out of Vietnam, he didn’t beg the Russians for mutual concessions, he didn’t unilaterally stand down from the brink, thus pushing us over the brink. There was no nuclear holocaust, no deaths in the billions, no nuclear winter, no collapsing ecosystem, no vanished agriculture, no poison seas, no demographic suicide, no second Manhattan Project; we got, as a planet and a species, something unknown—a second chance.

  “That’s where we are now, Jack, fifty years into the second post–November 22, 1963, reality. Vietnam. Watergate. Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, Bush One, Clinton, 9/11, Bush Two, the war on terror, Iraq, Afghanistan, it’s been one mess after another, Jack, but we haven’t blown ourselves up, and billions of us still drink the water and breath the air. So maybe that lone gunman did us some good after all.”

  “Well,” said Bob, “you promised me a theory, and that’s a hell of a theory.”

  “See, most theories assume that had JFK survived, the consequences would have been positive. There’s no way to make that argument. Just as likely, by that goddamned law of unexpected consequences, they could have been negative, tragic, even catastrophic. We can never know.”

  “Richard, you are either brilliant or insane, I don’t know which.”

  “I’ll bet you’re not surprised to learn I’ve heard that line a few times before. Now chew on that one overnight, and tomorrow at eleven, show up at the lobby of Dal-Tex, and Dave Arons will take you through the building.”

  Swagger got back to the hotel with a headache, as if he’d been drinking. In a sense, he had been: Richard’s science fiction story, with time travel and all that goofy bullshit. What the hell was that about? It had a meaning, somehow, but he couldn’t see it.

  He almost wished he had a drink, and as usual, the temptation to go to the bar, to have the one that would become two and then three and so on was still there, like a pilot light, something that never went out.

  He had to think of something else. He had to put something between himself and his appetites and the craziness that swirled in his head. He pulled on clothes and boots, took the elevator down, and walked the twelve blocks in darkness and coolness and emptiness to Dealey in a haste that belied the pain in his hip and the gracelessness of his walk.

  He wanted to look at it again, see it in the dark, as form without detail, as shape. That nightmare site of so many crazies: the grassy knoll.

  Without features, the small hill to the west of the plaza seemed utterly nondescript. He walked to it, climbed it, and watched the cars peel down Elm. He imagined himself as that legendary French gangster, the favorite candidate from one of the first theories, who somehow had lingered. A Corsican, the story went, like someone out of an old Hollywood movie, so degraded that he could kill the world’s most beautiful and dazzling man. There he was with his M1 carbine, leaning forward at 12:30 p.m. that day, putting the front sight blade on the president’s head and squeezing the trigger.

  But—

  No, it was wrong. The French killer couldn’t have aimed at the president. The president was moving at an uncertain speed. His killer would have to aim ahead of him. He’d have to hold, what, six inches to the front to make that brain shot. It was called shooting on the deflection, and it took talent and practice. Some people never got it.

  Most people assume that the Frenchman on the knoll had the easier shot because he was closer. In their minds, close equals easy, far equals difficult. Oswald was 263 feet away, the Frenchman 75. Clearly, these people hadn’t done any wing shooting, or taken any shots at running game or men.

  Swagger estimated that the theoretical Frenchman would have been on a ninety-degree angle to the vehicle, which itself was beginning to accelerate at an uneven speed. In order to place one shot—and he would be limited to one shot in order to preserve the false-flag operation—he would have had to shoot on the deflection. In skeet and trap and sporting clays, this is the hardest shot, called a “crosser,” because it demands the biggest lead. It is mastered by shooting it over and over again to develop a feel for the necessary lead given the speed of the target. The Frenchman would have had to find the
target, keep the rifle moving, pull ahead of the target a certain (unknown) distance, and then pull the trigger without disturbing the sight picture as he kept the rifle moving. Swagger knew that was hard enough with a shotgun, which blasts a pattern of shot covering a fairly wide area, but almost impossible except for the top professionals with a rifle, an instrument that puts a single bullet into a single spot. The odds on making that shot the first time out are extremely remote. No, they are not impossible, but it seemed unwise for a professional team to base its plan on one man hitting a near-impossible shot first time, cold bore, unless it had at its disposal some sort of shooting genius, and such men are rare and difficult to find.

  As for Oswald, or whoever was back there in the building, whichever one it was, his situation was completely different. His shot, in wing-shooting terminology, was an outgoer. It’s pretty easy. The target presents very little angle. The limo wasn’t exactly at zero degrees angle to him, but as it moved down Elm Street and as he oriented himself in the window to track it, it was under five degrees. From his point of view, even through that poor-quality scope, it was trending right to left slowly, possibly even undetectably to him. Its main quality was that it was diminishing in size as it traveled farther in distance. Neither of these conditions required that he shoot on the deflection, demanding that skillful computation of lead. He could hold point-blank on the target, concentrate on his squeeze, and get his shot off. If the rifle was accurate and the sight aimed dead zero, then the shot was technically no harder than a benchrest shot at a rifle range. The difference in distances—75 feet versus 263 feet—was hardly meaningful. To Bob’s sniper’s brain, the shot from behind and above was far easier than a shot from 90 degrees at a vehicle accelerating at an unknown rate.

  Swagger thought: Hmm, that’s kind of interesting. The shot had to come from behind.

  CHAPTER 5

  Shower, dress, coffee, paper. The same khaki suit, still baggy. The same red tie. He noticed neither tie nor suit and headed out. Dal-Tex was eight blocks or so away, the same walk as last night’s jaunt to Dealey, and he thought it would do his hip some good to walk it.

  He made them easily enough. Two of them. One on foot, one trailing in a car, which looked to be an ’09 Chevy. The car hopscotched, and the man on foot would change duties with the driver. One guy was black, in a black suit with no necktie, a porkpie hat, and shades. The other was dour and plump, in plaid sport coat and slacks, no tie, no hat, no glasses, sun or otherwise. They were not amateurs.

  Bob walked down Main, swallowed by the glass-and-steel canyons that had not been there fifty years ago. As last night, he followed Kennedy’s route, pungently aware that the style of modern air-conditioning climate control largely banished the open window from large building construction. No open windows in the sheets of tinted glass that rose forty stories.

  It was all different for Kennedy. The buildings then were squatter, stouter things, constructed mostly in the twenties and thirties, lots of ornamentation and showy work, arches and cupolas and the other flourishes that cheap skilled labor could routinely produce in brick or stone. And windows. The close-in canyons of Main must have pushed JFK past fifty thousand open windows, and a shooter could have lurked in any of them. It was outside the limits then. Kennedy himself joked about it and drew smiles because it was such a fantastic possibility. He was just about out of windows too; beyond the depository, it was wide-open space all the way to the Trade Mart and the speech he never gave. The fifty-thousand-and-first window had a gunman behind it. End of story.

  As had Kennedy, Swagger reached Main’s jog at Dealey, and instead of turning left to follow Main, he turned right down Houston. A block brought him to the corner where he’d met Nick, where Houston crossed Elm and the two brick piles stood side by side, the Book Depository and Dal-Tex, almost twins: square girder and mortar palaces.

  He looked hard at Dal-Tex. A biggish office building, seven stories tall, redbrick, flat roof, fairly elaborate with arches built into the brick, recessing the windows, thick stone slabs edging the roof, big windows that opened from the bottom up. He could see where new oranger brick had replaced a couple of chunks at the joinery of the Elm-Main corner, to sustain a new brand for the unit. That corner also sported the building’s sole retail unit, the Sixth-Floor Museum souvenir shop and coffee gallery, though it was unclear if it was officially connected with the museum in TBD across the street, or if they had claimed the name as a marketing ploy. He noted that a fire escape, which in 1963 ran the height of the building on Houston Street, was gone.

  Swagger’s vision drifted leftward, across the gulf of Houston Street, and settled again on LHO’s sniper’s nest, at the sixth-floor corner window. From where Swagger stood at the corner of the two streets, the window seemed immense. It couldn’t have been seventy-five feet away, and the downward angle wouldn’t affect the trajectory because the range was so close. You point at the white shirt through that junky scope and pull the trigger and cannot miss; no bad trigger pull could jerk the gun far enough to make a difference, no wind deflection could push the bullet from its destiny, nothing could interfere with its flight into flesh.

  He stood on the corner, again imagining the slow pivot of the big car as the driver wheeled it through the 120 degrees of the turn. It would have been all but stationary except for the slow pivot. And up there, behind Window 50,001, was the gunman.

  Again: why didn’t he shoot then? Wide-open target, straight angle into the high chest, Connally too far forward to interfere, Jackie to the right and out of the way, the shot so easy. A Boy Scout could have made it.

  What was going on with LHO up there in his nest?

  Another mystery, unknowable, unsolvable, that had died with Jack Ruby’s .38 Special into Lee Harvey.

  Swagger waited for the light to change, crossed the street, turned right and then left up the four steps, and entered Dal-Tex.

  The first thing he felt was the openness. Looking up, he saw space, as an atrium scooped from the guts of the building exposed several floors of balconies and the wood trusses of the roof. Moving ahead to the security kiosk, he was greeted by a man in his forties, well dressed and pleasant.

  “Mr. Arons? My name is Jack Brophy. I think my friend Richard Monk called you on my behalf.”

  They shook hands and Arons said, “Yes, he did, Dr. Brophy—”

  “Jack, please.”

  “Jack, then. He did, and I like Richard, so I’ll be happy to take you through and try to answer any of your questions.”

  Swagger peppered the man with inquiries. The first concerned the atrium, which, no, wasn’t there in ’63. It was the creation of a nineties refurb. The whole building, Swagger saw, had the kind of urban-hip tone of so many gentrified older units, and the new designer had stressed raw brick where possible, lots of plain white structural wood, simplicity and unforced elegance everywhere. The ceilings had been cleverly peeled of stucco, exposing the stout girders that were the frame of the building nested in the still-sound wood beams that also sustained the building’s pressures.

  “I’m guessing these three elevators were here before?” he asked as they rode up.

  “Since the beginning,” said Arons. “They’ve been rehabbed, of course”—the elevator was sleek stainless and teak, with mirrors for the vain—“but the shaft was always here, central rear.”

  “Got it. Were there ever any elevator operators? Particularly in 1963?”

  “Not then, not ever.”

  “What about security?”

  “Never. Not until recently, that is.”

  Swagger felt that the building was smaller on the inside than on the outside, even with the opened atriums and ceilings. Also, it was squarer; somehow you sensed the perfection of its symmetries inside, whereas from outside, it seemed longer one way, more rectangular.

  They started on the seventh floor, and Arons took him to an unrented office suite that fronted on Houston Street, looking south to the Book Depository. Its roof could be seen twenty-fi
ve feet away, but more evident was the angle down Elm, exposing totally the street up to and beyond the X that marked the brain shot.

  It didn’t take a genius to see how easy that shot, or the back shot that preceded it, would have been from here. Moreover, the wide sill made for superb, almost bench-quality stability, and since the window was recessed in an encompassing arch, the muzzle wouldn’t have been visible from the street nor, given the height, from the TBD across Houston, the only building on the horizon. The angle into the car and bodies would have been almost identical to Oswald’s, depending on the subtleties of twist and turn of the president and the governor.

  “And the windows? They’ve always been the kind that slid up and down, like these, not the kind that hinged outward?”

  “Always up and down.”

  “And the floors? All wood, like now? Ever covered with carpet?”

  “Just as you see it, except in those days, plasterboard covered the brick. Then as now, it was used for office space and storage. It was a much busier building, with a lot of garment wholesalers. They used it as a distribution center, so it was in one sense more a warehouse, particularly on the lower floors. The office suites were on the upper four floors.”

  Swagger wanted to see the angle from the front, that is, from the Elm Street windows. That was easily arranged, and he soon found himself facing down Elm from a more severe angle, yet if he stood to the left of the window and oriented himself to the street, he had an equally easy shot. Moreover, the shooter would have to be, by the mandate of the angles, concealed, as he’d be standing or sitting to the left and shooting out the window at roughly a forty-five-degree angle.

  He also noted one of his watchers sitting on the park bench at Elm and Houston, right at the top of Dealey, where Bob had sat with Nick earlier. It was the black one, and he sat pretending to read a paper but in reality keeping his eyes nailed on the Dal-Tex entrance between the lid of his hat and the top of the newspaper. Bad craft. A smarter move would have been to amble down the street and set up against the Dallas Records Building across Elm, where he wouldn’t have been so visible.