“Swagger, you are a bastard. I know you think you’ve won. But you haven’t. You have no idea where I am, who I am, what my circumstances are. Are you going to indict a dead man? Hugh Meachum is dust and ashes scattered across the countryside outside Hartford. He is a beloved hero, and if you try to bring him down, you will unleash unbelievable trouble on yourself. Meanwhile, I will keep going on and on and on, and you have no idea if I’m a mile from you right now or sitting at the North Pole under the nom de guerre S. Claus.”
“Not so fast, Mr. Meachum. Maybe you ain’t as tricky as you think. Your pal Niles Gardner shared your enthusiasm for this Nabokov, the Russian writer. Niles liked cross-language puns, wordplay, games, that sort of thing. He had one other thing in common. Like his hero, he suffered from a condition known as synesthesia. Because of some confusion in the brain pathways, he sees some numbers in color. He saw the number nine in color, red. That’s why he had a pistol on his desk called a Mauser Red Nine. And when he came to cook up the last and best and deepest fake life for his pal and fellow Nabokov lover, Hugh Meachum, he paid a gamesman’s tribute to his connection to Nabokov, to yours, and to Nabokov himself, by using synesthesia as the key. You were born from synesthesia. You’re the child, the son, of the Red Nine, Mr. Meachum.”
“Thin, Swagger. So thin. It tells you nothing.”
“I ain’t done yet. His smartest trick was the code that wasn’t a code. It was what it was, in plain sight if you could see it. You don’t even get it, do you?”
“This is nonsense,” I said. “You’ve gone insane.”
“He hung a name on you that gave it up if you could see it clearly. The name began with I-X, Mr. Meachum. Cross-lingual pun. I-X, from English into Latin. I-X, Mr. Meachum, meaning nine. You are the son of the Red Nine. Your new name is Dimitri Ixovich Spazny. Niles really loaded the Nabokov mayonnaise on this sandwich. The old butterfly catcher would be so impressed.”
Niles! I thought. All these years later, tripping me up with his cleverness.
“When it came time for you to ‘die,’ you slipped into Russia and took up again as Dimitri Ixovich Spazny, of KGB, with all the contacts and the timing exactly right. You even own the gun company that manufactured the nine-millimeter I used in the fight in Moscow. As Yeltsin’s pal and money guy, you also own, what, electricity, newspaper, taxicabs, the Izmaylovskaya mob, radio, the air, most of the water, half of Belgium, three quarters of Hong Kong, and what else?”
“By the time you move on me, I’ll be someone else,” I said, though my heart was hammering in my chest. “You’re not fast enough. Brains are meaningless without speed.”
“Then how come I know you’re wearing tan cargo pants and a green shirt? How come I know you’re resting on a chaise longue, in sunglasses, with a yellow tablet in your hand? How come I know you’re drinking vodka? How come I know you’re on your back porch, looking down across a mile of grass framed on either side by pine forest? How come I know there’s a river a mile off?”
I swallowed – or should I say, I swallow. I had not seen that one coming. It hit me blindside. I suck for air, while in my stunned panic, I look for a spotter who is clearly, at this very second, eyeballing me through binoculars.
“You’re lying on the chaise at your dacha down Ulysse Nardin Boulevard behind a thirty-foot green steel wall, in an area patrolled by an MVD special battalion. You’re a mile from the Moscow River. The sun is setting there, Mr. Meachum, but the days are long, and it’s light enough for a sniper.”
Stronski! Stronski is out there somewhere.
“He’s on the trigger now. A KSVK twelve-seven.”
No understanding, no context, no empathy, no regret. Just the sniper’s bullet. It was the ultimate application of the New Criticism.
“See you in hell, then, Sergeant.”
“I’ll be along soon,” Swagger said, and hung up.
And so: yes, it’s come to this. So be it. I’ve had a good life, maybe a great one. I loved my wife and never cheated on her, I loved my sons and saw them grow into fine men and fathers. I love my country and tried to serve it well. I fought its wars–
Never mind. With seconds left, it’s time to face whatever’s next with a clean breast. Talk about an unreliable narrator! Talk about a murderer with a fancy prose style! I killed Jimmy Costello. I blew his action and cover to the RCMP, and I knew he couldn’t let himself be taken alive. I regret it and always will, but what if, in a few years, he – I just couldn’t help myself.
And I killed Lon. I knew by the last move that Swagger was strong and my team was weak, and I bullied and forced Lon to go on that last, absurd mission, and he finally relented and died.
I regret both. Failures of nerve and character. I am so sorry. I deserve whatever it is I’m about to get and I hope
CHAPTER 24
Swagger threw the phone off into the trees somewhere.
Account closed, he thought.
He took a look around saw nothing but green. He tried to think of his next step but had some trouble concentrating. He looked at the wound in his battered hip. More blood than he’d expected. Maybe the bullet had ticked downward into the flesh instead of off into the air.
He didn’t have any first aid or clotting agent. He peeled off his jacket and wadded it against the blood flow, but it quickly absorbed its limit, went magenta and heavy-damp, and proved useless.
Better get to the goddamn road so they can find me, he thought.
But downhill with a bad wound bleeding hard was not easy, particularly as he could feel the leg numbing out on him, and in time it ceased to work in coordination with the other leg, and there came a moment when he lost it, toppled forward, put a bruise into his spine, ripped the hell out of his arms rolling through brambles, felt his shirt rip, and hit a rock solid with his head, which was already concussed from the clout he’d delivered on the 42 Commando major.
He got himself up and put his hand on the wound. It wasn’t gushing copiously, but he could feel the steady, warm liquefaction finding ways around his fingers. He got a little farther down and noticed that a sudden chill had come into the air, as well as a fog that eroded the edges of his vision.
He staggered over a hump and hit the road. He couldn’t remember which way was which and realized it didn’t matter. He’d never make it back to the house, and what was there except those two guys whose names he didn’t remember and he knew they weren’t worth a damn.
He began to shiver. Damn, so fucking cold.
He looked for a splash of sun to warm him up and saw an opening in the canopy a few yards ahead that admitted the light. He limped to it, falling once, then got to it and, of his own volition, decided to stop fighting gravity and let himself tumble into the dust.
It was warmer. In time, he saw someone approaching him. He tried to rise, but the man waved him back down as he rushed to him. Bob saw that it was his father, Earl.
“Dad!” he cried.
“Well, Bob Lee, damn, it’s good to see you, boy.”
Earl came to him and knelt down. Earl wore the uniform of the Arkansas state police, 1955, as he had on the last day of his life, and it was razor-sharp, in perfect duty condition, as it was always for Earl. He had the strong, kind, wise face of a hero, and he was everything a boy could love in a father.
“Dad, God, I’ve missed you, I missed you so much.”
“Now there’ll be plenty of time for a nice long visit, you’ll tell me all the things you’ve seen.”
“Dad, you–”
“Bob Lee, you just relax. I’m so proud of my son, you have made me so proud.”
“I tried so hard, Dad, I didn’t want to ever let you down and–”
“He’s coming back, he’s coming back.”
Swagger blinked, and it wasn’t his dad’s face but some crew-cut young man’s.
Bob coughed, realizing that the guy had just jacked a charge through him with an external defibrillator.
“Hit him again?” another medic asked.
&nb
sp; “No, no, he’s good, the lactate is going in fine, the adrenaline is taking effect, he’s breathing again, his pulse is rising.”
Swagger breathed, feeling clean air come into his lungs.
“Jesus Christ, you scared us,” said Nick Memphis.
As Swagger’s eyes cleared and the fog thinned, he lifted his head a bit and saw an ambulance, a batch of state police cars, a lot of police activity along the road, and above him, in the hands of another young man, a bottle of intravenous fluids feeding life through a brown tube into his arm. He lay on a stretcher; his hip was strongly bandaged and bound, but some numbing agent quelled the pain.
“Okay, STAT, let’s move this man to the chopper and get him to Trauma. I’m staying on him to monitor vital signs.”
“I’m riding too,” said Nick, and he turned to Bob and said, “Baby, you were gone, you were in negative heartbeat, but we got you back, don’t ask me how.”
“I saw my dad, Nick,” said Bob.
“And you will again,” said Nick, “but I hope not for a long time.”
A Note on Method
Readers should be assured that I’ve made a good-faith effort to play fair by the data established in The Warren Commission Report, Case Closed by Gerald Posner, and Reclaiming History by Vincent Bugliosi. Lee Harvey Oswald is always where those volumes say he was, and he always does what they say he did. All “conspiratorial business” takes place in times uncovered by any of the foregoing works. In my effort to construct a legitimate alternate narrative to the WC, I alter no known facts in order to make my argument tighter. I do reserve the novelist’s right to reinterpret motive and reason.
For a demonstration of my method, take as an example the shooting from the Book Depository and Oswald’s last run. I accept as factual the following: that he took three shots, that he cocked a last live cartridge into his chamber, that he walked across the ninety feet of the sixth floor, rifle in hand, that he hid the rifle at the head of the stairway down, that he escaped north up Elm and took a bus south down Elm, then a cab to his roominghouse on North Beckley in Oak Cliff, where he secured his revolver. Fifteen minutes later and a mile distant, he shot Officer Tippit, including a coup de grâce to the head. He was arrested in the Texas Theatre fifteen or so minutes after that. The Warren Commission, Posner, and Bugliosi agree on that.
To that historical record, I added motives and reasonable conjectures – that he planned to shoot when Kennedy was just below the sixth-floor window but somehow botched the opportunity; that he hurried all three shots at a diminishing target (exacerbating exponentially the likelihood of a miss on his last shot); that he was driven by a more pungent fear of his betrayers than he was of law enforcement, which drove him to an extremely foolhardy trip through the assassination zone to recover his .38; that he administered the final brain shot to Officer Tippit out of rage at his betrayal.
I should also add that all the firearms and reloading data in the book have been tested by myself and colleagues; it is possible to fire a Carcano bullet from the .264 Winchester Magnum case in a Model 70, with great velocity and accuracy. (NOTE: Firing a jacketed .267 Carcano bullet throught a .264 bore is not a recommended reloading practice, and the fact that we were able to do it without incident does not mean you will.) There are some tweaks I purposely left out to keep non-gun culture people from slipping into a coma, but in general, it is easily accomplished as I have described it.
I should add that I have deliberately avoided conspiracy books and have stayed out of assassination-community culture in hopes of not inadvertently picking up somebody else’s intellectual property. If I have accidentally absorbed something by osmosis or random white noise, I do apologize. I mean to steal no one’s bread.
I should also add that I made no inquiries into the state of the Abercrombie & Fitch firearms records and my account of their location and disposition is entirely fictitious.
Acknowledgments
Any book has a multitude of starting points. This one began on November 22, 1963, in the lunch hall of New Trier High School, in Winnetka, Illinois, where I got the news. I followed the events of the next three days with the concentration of any teenager whose world has just been rocked. And I followed the subsequent developments over time. It was the kind of thing that never went away.
I basically paused at each of the stations of the cross of assassination theory over the following forty-nine years. I believed the Warren Commission, then I believed Mark Lane and his compatriots (I never believed the secret surgery at Andrews Air Force Base, however; did anyone?), then I believed Posner and Bugliosi.
In my mind, it was pretty much settled history until John Carroll, the great editor of The Baltimore Sun, knowing I knew a thing or two about guns, asked me to cover Howard Donahue and the book Mortal Error, written about his theories, by Bonar Menninger. I met Howard, a Baltimorean through and through, I respected Howard, I liked Howard (who didn’t?); however, like Swagger, I found his explanation of the third bullet convincing but thought he went off into the wild blue yonder by ascribing it to a Secret Service agent with an AR-15 in a following car. It was hard to believe such a thing could happen in front of two thousand witnesses and nobody would see it.
Later in the process, Howard invited me to lunch. By that time he’d been pretty well fried in the press and was looking for a new method to illustrate his idea; he asked me to write a novel expressing his theory. I politely declined. I guess my subconscious, however, took up the challenge, and in a way, this is the book that Howard wanted me to write. To do it, I had to come up with my own theory about the second-rifle/third-bullet mystery.
Somewhere in all this – I can’t remember the exact chronology – I wrote a book called Point of Impact. It was inspired by the old Sun reporter Ralph Reppert’s earlier account of Howard’s theory in the Sun magazine. Howard had been one of the shooters in the tower at the H. P. White Ballistic lab in Maryland who took and hit the Oswald shots for CBS News’s re-creation. That was what started Howard on his odyssey.
I picked up on the idea of a marksman in a tower solving a shooting problem against a time clock and later realizing from the angles and the speed that he’d just reenacted the JFK assassination. I had to come up with a shooter, and so, with the help of Carlos Hathcock, I invented Bob Lee Swagger.
The idea was that the actual assassins were using Swagger in another hit, casting him in the role of Lee Harvey Oswald, to their infinite regret. As I progressed, I lost faith in my ability to bring it off, and I lost faith in conspiracy theories (I think Case Closed came out around then), so I ultimately kept Swagger but ditched JFK. At one point, I went through the manuscript and got rid of all the JFK references. Alas, I am by nature sloppy, so I missed many, and those accidental survivors later became the joinery between Point of Impact and this book. That’s how Hugh Meachum and Lon Scott came into it.
The most recent starting point was February 2011. I was writing a book called Soft Target and sitting around with my good pal Gary Goldberg in the living room. Somehow, the JFK assassination came up, and I performed my assassin-from-the-future routine, just as Richard does, and then I did riffs on the context of the Mannlicher-Carcano, the angles versus the proximity issue and several other subjects that I reuse in this book. We had a good old time, and I think there was hooch involved.
I said to Gary, “You know, maybe I ought to have Bob Lee Swagger solve the JFK conspiracy,” and we got a hearty laugh out of that one, and one second later, I thought, You know what? That’s a damn good idea. I ought to get Bob Lee Swagger to solve the JFK assassination.
The day after I finished Soft Target, I began The Third Bullet. It was a great ride, believe me. One of the best ever. Let me thank all those who pitched in.
First of all, Gary. He was with me from the start, and he became my researcher and contact with the world. He took care of all my computer glitches, dug up all the relevant WC testimony, found the new owners of Dal-Tex, and secured permission for me to go a-prowl in its mysteri
ous (to me) insides. Gary even took over an eBay auction for me and got me the exact scope mount and Hollywood scope that LHO used. Gary was great.
Kathy Lally, who might be the basis of Kathy Reilly, put my wife and me up in Moscow and hauled us around with her husband, Will Englund. They are, jointly, the Washington Post correspondents in that most engaging city, as well as being old Sun alumni. In fact, Kathy invented my life back in 1982, when she prevailed on the debauched aristos who ran the Sun in those days to appoint me film critic. They probably wanted someone who would work for free.
My great friends and enthusiastic readers Lenne P. Miller, Bill Smart, Jay Carr, Jeff Weber, and Mike Hill were extremely supportive and enthusiastic. My editor at Simon & Schuster, Sarah Knight, was terrific and helped me reorganize the material into a more accessible form.
Barrett Tillman, the distinguished aviation and naval historian, was also an early reader and enthusiastic supporter. My good friend John Bainbridge returned to proofreading duties and, as usual, caught fifteen things I never would have.
Dave Emary, the brilliant technician at Hornady (he devised the 6.5 Creedmore) discussed Mannlicher-Carcano ballistics with me and revealed that he had come to a similar conclusion regarding the third bullet. He loaded a dummy .264 Win Mag/Carcano hybrid for me and sent it on with some other sample bullets doctored as we agreed the conspirators would have done them. I was introduced to Dave by Mark Keefe IV, the editor of American Rifleman.
My gun buddy Roger Troup also helped; it was under his auspices that we reloaded some .264 Win Mag/Carcano cartridges for real and tried them out in one of two pre-’64 Model 70s in that caliber I had bought for this project, by which we learned that not only was it feasible but the load produced excellent accuracy and velocity.
Through Roger, I met Bill Vanderpool, retired FBI Special Agent and firearms instructor. He patiently met with me and had many good ideas and contacts.
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