The Third Bullet bls-8

by Stephen Hunter

  No identification of Alek by name has yet been given over the radio, and none has linked him to Oak Cliff and the Beckley Avenue area. It’s just that his appearance is so right. That’s why Tippit tails him for a block or two and then pulls over. Yeats: “It’s old and it’s sad and it’s sad and it’s feary.” Yes, it was, especially “feary,” that is, fearful, horrifying, tragic. Had I but known. But I didn’t. Guilty, guilty, guilty.

  Alek sees the black vehicle slow up and pull over. He realizes he’s been nabbed. He ambles off the sidewalk to the vehicle, where the officer, window rolled down, awaits him.

  What could they have said? It’s pointless to imagine, and it was probably a banality, a cliche, nothing memorable. Witnesses – there were several, some close – report no hostility, no harsh words, no threats; it wasn’t an altercation, it was an exchange, and Alek may have gotten away with it for a second, for then he broke contact with the seated officer and turned to go on his way.

  Tippit isn’t done with him but at the same time hasn’t made up his mind to make the pinch. He climbs from his squad car, gun definitely not in hand, and possibly calls to Alek.

  Alek turns, walks around the car to place himself in range, draws, and fires three times point-blank. All three hits from close range are solid mortal blows, careening through center mass, upper body, blood-bearing organs, and as soon as he is hit, Tippit is down, bleeding out if not already dead.

  Why?

  After all, Alek is not without his verbal faculties; he’s a debater, an arguer from way back, a guy who’s always got an answer. That’s how he defines himself, part guerrilla warrior, part dialectical soldier. Why doesn’t he at least try to con his way out? The performance isn’t beyond him, and his intellectual vanity that he’s smarter than some cop would surely be in play.

  From Alek’s point of view, the fact that the cop is already there – it’s only forty-five minutes after the shooting, and chaos and confusion reign – is proof that the man is part of the conspiracy. Whoever set Alek up either informed the authorities of his address or hired a professional killer dressed as a cop to ambush him when he returned home. Perhaps Dallas is full of professional killers in search of Alek, already equipped with his name, address, description, and likely whereabouts. That would be an easy intellectual leap for a man with Alek’s tendencies toward paranoia and conspiracy.

  So Alek thinks the cop is a hit man. His rage, his paranoia, his violent nature, his fear, his self-hatred, and his other hatred were in full bloom in that single instant, and that and that alone can explain his next move, which utterly violates any principle of self-preservation.

  If Alek has just shot a cop to escape, his next move has to be to turn and flee, race down alleyways, cut across yards, throw off any followers, catch a bus, get out of the area, fast.

  Instead, he walks over to the downed Tippit and shoots him in the temple. From the autopsy: “[The bullet] is found to enter the right temporal lobe, coursed through the brain transecting the brain stem, severing the cerebral peduncles surrounded by extensive hemorrhage and found to exit from the brain substance in the calcarine gyrus to the left of the midline.” Of course he wasn’t shooting Officer Tippit; he was shooting me.

  His vengeance expressed, Alek mutters, “Poor damn cop,” as he empties the shells from his cylinder and quickly reloads, then turns and heads up Patton, down Jefferson, cuts through a yard and dumps his jacket, then cuts back to Jefferson, which, in a half mile or so, will take him to the Texas Theatre. His absurd incompetence comes to the fore again. So lame is his attempt at escape and so ignorant is he of what’s going on around him, he is followed by a number of citizens. One of them has called the murder in to headquarters on Tippit’s radio. Two men snatch up Tippit’s revolver and begin to hunt Alek on their own.

  In a brief while, a matter of several blocks down Jefferson, trailing trackers, Alek comes to a small commercial district. He’s consumed with evading his killers (even though he hasn’t bothered to look behind him), and his main thought is to get off the street. To the logic of his twisted brain, he seeks refuge by dodging into the Texas Theatre on that street. I suppose he thinks his killers will eventually be driven off the streets by the excess of Dallas policemen who will flood the zone in hours if not minutes. Perhaps he imagines a surrender, the revelation that the “cop” was a Mafia hit man, and some sort of redemption as he proves he never killed the president and he was manipulated by shadowy “others” of indeterminate origin. He might see himself as a hero, the subject of an admiring movie. In those ten minutes in the movie theater’s private darkness, he must have comforted himself by self-delusion. Facing the reality, for a man whose resources were so fragile, would have been too much.

  And then the lights came on. His vacation had lasted ten minutes, and cops were closing in from both sides.

  - - - -

  I first heard the name sometime in ’74 or ’75. I was in Moscow, working undercover in one of several well-documented Soviet identities. I was in and out of Moscow in those years under a variety of guises, and I have to say they were great years, maybe the best of my life. We knew we were getting somewhere and doing some good, and the economics and the demographics were breaking in our direction, so we were filled with hope and optimism. Moreover, Vietnam was managing to wind down without killing me or any of my sons, for which I was eternally grateful.

  We were under pressure from Langley – or from the Defense Department by way of Langley – to come up with a gun. It was a new Soviet-issue semi-auto sniper rifle that bore the seemingly but not actually melodramatic name of Dragunov. It sounded like the SovMil had gotten all Hollywoody and called the thing the Dragon. No such luck. Soviet military nomenclature has always featured the name of the designer, which is why Sergeant Kalashnikov became world-famous, as did, in an earlier age, Comrade Tokarev, whose stubby little pistol snuffed out so many lives in the cellars of Lubyanka during the Great Purges of the thirties. In any event, although it seemed absurd in a world where giant rockets carrying nukes could obliterate millions in minutes, everyone in American military culture was in a frenzy over this Dragunov, and it went without saying that he who obtained either plans or working copies of the thing would be awarded a gigantic feather to be stuffed into his cap. I meant to get myself that feather. Petty ambition; I am diminished by the memory.

  But Bob Lee Swagger beat me to it.

  Can you imagine a name like that? What a moniker to conjure with. He was every Ole Miss quarterback, every NASCAR driver, every tiny-town police chief or state trooper rolled into one. He was actually a gunnery sergeant in the United States Marine Corps, with an intelligence background, as he’d worked with another Agency jamboree, called the Studies and Observation Group, on an earlier tour. That was particularly dangerous duty; it consisted of leading indigenous troops up near the Laotian border to run interdiction missions against the North Viet supply line. Lots and lots of combat, lots of shooting. The talent pool consisted of aggressive senior NCOs from either army special forces or marine infantry outfits, and they had themselves a dandy war amid the mountains and swamps of the Laotian border.

  It was his third tour as a sniper in which he snatched up Comrade Dragunov. At a forlorn fire base somewhere in the jungle, he and his spotter worked a ruse, with an Agency team and the marines in full co-op mode, that resulted in our acquisition of the first Dragunov in Western hands. That rifle today is at the Agency museum on the first floor of the main building in Langley. Before it was put on display, I had a good hands-on experience with it at the Langley technical directorate’s shop. The very same one!

  His twenty years after Vietnam were the most banal of hells. It seems sad that a man of such gifts should suffer so basely, but what are you going to do? Men of such dark fury and skill frequently turn it on themselves, as Pilgrim Swagger did, and the record is beyond melancholy and well into squalor. Alcoholism, business failure, brushes with the law, car wrecks, a failed marriage, a whole litany of messages to God
requesting annihilation, since reality was too painful. God must have been busy that day, or perhaps he was saving Swagger to punish a real sinner, such as moi; somehow the sniper retreated to the woods, acquired a trailer, and rebuilt himself. Despite his many feats of arms, this was probably his greatest, bravest accomplishment. He became a reader, curious as to what had caused Vietnam and, beyond that, what had caused so much pain, from his traumatic wound and from the losses he suffered, his first Vietnamese wife and then his spotter. Swagger, I tried to save you from all that. I knew as early as ’63 that it would come to no good end and your story would be written in blood and pain a million times. Kill me if you can, goddamn you, Swagger, but I committed the crime of the century to save you. You should love me as you press the trigger, if that’s what is in store.

  Alone in Arkansas except for a dog and a brace of rifles, he gave himself over to the history of the Vietnam War and then the history of war itself, which after all is paradoxically the history of civilization. He educated himself in the ways of a world he served but never knew. His mind refined itself, shed itself of childish notions like pride and bravado and domination, and became wise. He stopped talking, he started listening. He shot and shot and shot and turned his grade-A talent into something almost beyond knowing. He retrained himself for a mission, and at last one came along. I should know. It was my mission.

  In ’93, I was sixty-three years old. I was a hoary old eminence grise, beloved by the younger men, known for steady advice, unquenchable rationality – I had never abandoned the New Criticism – and superb technical skills, especially at planning and funding black ops. I was Mr. Black in Agency lore. I was in high demand. Though I spent much of my time on Russia – it was I who put together the money train that enabled Yeltsin to take over after Gorbachev, and I don’t think he or anybody else ever knew I was an American, much less an American agent – I oversaw or advised on projects in other spheres as well.

  That was how El Salvador came into my life. God-awful place, never want to go back. It reminded me of Vietnam, though the food was all mealy and saucy, nowhere near the level of the Mexican that Alek had introduced me to.

  This need not be a long tale, and I will spare you details and dramatization. I begin with a personal note, although my memoir is by design professional, not personal. But the personal intrudes on the professional. In 1992 Peggy died of breast cancer after a six-week ordeal. It was a terrible thing to see, a woman so vital, so intelligent, so beautiful, so loyal, so terrific, the best of all her peers and the source of whatever strength I had, as well as an extraordinary mother to the boys, eaten alive by the crab. The boys and I were at her side when she passed, and she lived long enough to see them through college and through their own well-established careers and families. It was a devastation for me, one that hurt and hurt and hurt. I am not making excuses; I am merely explaining why I was not at my best in what followed. I made bad judgments, mistakes, my concentration slipped; it was far from my proudest hour. I was lucky to escape alive, even if I didn’t.

  Let’s speed this up. Time may not be on our side, thanks to Mr. Swagger. It became necessary to eliminate a man, and it occurred to me to replicate Operation LIBERTY VALANCE. Same method: a patsy sniper, a real sniper, a ballistic deceit, the patsy caught during the op and eliminated, the home team getting away clean. The details are forever sealed in Langley’s files, but again I cast Lon as the real shooter; it turned out he was hungry for the adventure, having become bored stiff by his self-decreed “retirement.” I cast Swagger as Oswald.

  Bad career move, as they say.

  Swagger, unlike poor, stupid Alek, escaped, and it became a race and a chase. We had to get to Swagger before the FBI did. This was Shreck, my main operative’s, task, and Swagger outsmarted, outfought, and outshot him at every turn. My first mistake: not realizing he would have made a better shooter than patsy. Neither Shreck nor I saw until too late that the plot we had engineered for him generated not his death but his rebirth. He reentered the world he had abandoned stronger, smarter, more guileful, more cunning, and braver. All along, we weren’t hunting him, he was hunting us.

  A final ambush was painstakingly set. I urged Lon to be the shooter, and I do think he enjoyed the whole thing. It was better than rotting away in a wheelchair in a secluded estate in the North Carolina countryside. For his heroism, his effort, his high morale, he was awarded a bullet in the head. I should regret this more than I do, but after all, given his tragedy, Lon enjoyed an interesting life because of my importuning. Better he passed that way than via decay. Shreck, for his part, was unhappy to discover that a shotgun slug could penetrate a bulletproof vest. He wasn’t as unhappy as his number two, a stumpy little ex-NCO of extremely violent tendencies named Jack Payne, who made the same discovery, but not until Swagger had blown off his arm with the same shotgun. Swagger: the best man I ever heard of in a gunfight, bar none.

  Even then he had surprises. He was captured, and our deeper trap seemed to still be in place, by which he would swing for murder.

  Oops, I say! He’d outthought even the great Hugh Meachum. He’d subtly disabled his rifle before the whole thing happened, so it was impossible for it to have fired the fatal shot. As far as I know, they’re still looking for the person who did, but it was at this point that Hugh Meachum decided to die.

  - - - -

  Again I pull the screen of discretion between the reader and the details. Let me say that it should be beyond the ken of no professional intelligence operative – and I was one of the world’s best – to arrange a convincing fiction for his own death. I was, after all, a superb planner, a manipulator of documents and secret funding, and had long since made the necessary preparations for such a contingency. It helped that I lived alone and there was no spousal difficulty to contend with. It helped also that I was still under discipline, and I knew that once I made the break, I made it permanently: there could be no going back, no farewells, not a minute crack in the facade.

  I put the operation into action on a Wednesday, and by Friday I was gone. I left without saying good-bye to the boys and their children. That hurt. That still hurts. But I knew them to be secure both financially and emotionally and that the lessons of labor and loyalty, as well as the dividends that Colt, Winchester (now FN), Smith & Wesson, and so forth and so on provided, would continue to comfort them against the rude buffeting of circumstance.

  I enacted a certain computer code meant to eat all my files in the Agency database. I suppose that was overkill, but one can never be certain. It was doubtful that anyone would go trolling that deep in the distant past, particularly in a world that was changing as rapidly as this one, but safer is always to be preferred over sorrier.

  And thus Hugh Meachum shuffled off this mortal coil.

  As for the real me, he went where he went and became what he became. I prospered. I had been quietly looting money from the Agency for some years – if an old spy doesn’t look out for himself, who will? – and the ample fund in a Swiss bank account made my new life one of comfort. I had some contacts, I knew some things, I had some documents: in time, I improved my station, for my mind was still sharp. In time, I did more than improve; I became wealthy, even filthy wealthy. I lived in splendor.

  In my new life, I developed a taste for flavors of decadence. I reacquainted myself with the nuances of delight that alcohol provided. I discovered the pleasures of sex with younger women, especially when amplified beyond the power of the man himself by drugs in all their variations. I found I excelled in business manipulations that produced munificence for me and all who sailed with me. I had fought so hard for capitalism, it seemed appropriate to enjoy its fruits. I became an entrepreneur, a builder, an investor; I devised layers and further layers of supernumeraries between myself and reality.

  It has come to this: I live in a mansion hidden behind a thirty-foot steel wall off of Ulysse Nardin drive, in an area patrolled by a special battalion. I sit out on my veranda in the warm weather, and all I see is
mine to the river a mile away. I am totally secure. I have mistresses and masseuses and chefs and sommeliers. The world has been kind to me, which I take as proper recompense for the efforts I put into my crusade to secure freedom and peace for the largest number of people, and which, despite some setbacks, I believe I accomplished.

  What could possibly go wrong?

  The answer came one night deep in sleep, when I was feeling most safe. I don’t know why it chose that moment to announce itself, but it did, and while I can’t say it changed my life (at least not yet), I will say it gave me a lesson in paranoia from which I’ve never recovered, and that is why my security arrangements are the most impenetrable in the world.

  The coat.

  The goddamned coat.

  I hadn’t thought of those days in the ten years I’d been building my new life. It was so far behind, and all the players were dead. But I awakened in the middle of the night in a cold sweat, remembering.

  Jimmy Costello had hidden in the elevator machinery house on the roof of the Dal-Tex Building for a long sixteen hours, and during that time, the bore solvent from Lon’s Winchester collected and migrated and ultimately seeped into the garment, soaking its breast from the inside, forever cursing it with the smell of the murder weapon. Even before that, it had been placed on the stack of swatch books we used to elevate Lon to the proper height, leaving a tire tread on the back.