The Third Bullet: A Bob Lee Swagger Novel

by Stephen Hunter

To make certain of my own intentions, I applied the New Criticism to my plan, laboring intensely to occlude personality, opinion, immaterial knowledge, or rogue or random feeling from consideration and concentrate entirely on the text that was Oswald, understand its dynamics and dimensions without regard to outcome or hope or past indignities or whatever it was that formed the twisted creature he was. I must say, although this sounds egotistical, I felt somewhat like a great white hunter with many tusks in his lodge on the track of a titmouse. I was so overgunned for this safari, it seemed a little obscene, so I made a pledge to myself that though I would use Oswald, even as I loathed and despised him, I would make a tiny effort to see the humanity that lurked underneath, to understand what forces had so warped him, and try to reach somehow the soul in him, and touch it with a gesture that, in whatever larger context of manipulation and betrayal it arrived, had a whisper of authentic human feeling.

  I had tasks to be done. First I had to conjure up a fantasy operation and code name so I could liberate black funds to pay for my instantly conceived Oswald-Walker operation, which involved selling Cord on a fiction. Sure, I had enough money from Uncle Colt and his co-uncles Winchester, Smith, Wesson, and Remington, to say nothing of the Du-Ponts, the five marques of General Motors, and the whole industrial cash box that sustained my portfolio, to pay the limited expenses this thing would cost on my own, but in case it ever came back to me, any investigator would go to finances on the first day and learn that I had spent a hundred grand of my own dough on a mystery project in November 1963. I could swindle the money from the Agency far more easily than I could swindle it from myself, and it would be protected in perpetuity by our Agency’s larger mandate to keep all things secret. (It has not been uncovered to this day, nearly fifty years after the fact!) Generations of case officers enjoyed this privilege, some corrupt and for their own benefit, some pure at heart and laboring in the hope that they were helping win the war. As for my pitch, it would not be difficult; I enjoyed high status in Clandestine Services, as the recent removal of Mr. Diem from both presidency of the Republic of South Vietnam and occupancy of Planet Earth was conspicuously viewed as a victory for our side and had found its origins in a classified report I authored entitled “U.S. Interests in RSV: An Assessment for the Future,” which made me a star in factions of the Agency far beyond my own. (More on this later.) Second, I had to secure the Oswald master file, as indicated on the transcript, an assignment any third-rate secret-agent-man pretender ought to be able to bring off.

  For the record, I will summarize, with apologies to any of you reading this account who haven’t a taste for sober explication and prefer the rush of narrative; I cannot, however, let the narrative rush without satisfying myself that I have fulfilled the expositional requisites, if only for the one reader in a hundred who requires such a thing.

  As for the fictional operation, I named it PEACOCK and sold it to Cord without a hitch, establishing a hundred-thousand-dollar budget out of the Bank of New York, shielded by accounting ploys so subtle that only a few men, none of whom worked for the government, were capable of penetrating them. PEACOCK, I claimed, was meant to look at the possibilities of identifying young Harvard-Yale-Princeton-Stanford-Brown-UChicago-and-other-elite graduates who had writing talent and seemed headed for the powerful Luce publications or the New York Times or the upstart Post properties that had just acquired Newsweek (Cord’s wife’s sister was married to a prominent Newsweek fellow, to show you how small and cozy the world was in those days), with an idea to nurse them in their careers with secret deposits of information, not money (they would be offended by money), so as to accelerate their climb and at the same time make them indebted to us, although they’d never know who “us” really was. PEACOCK was named for vanity, as I assumed such fools would be morally vain and easily manipulated. I would write Cord a monthly report on what scouts I had befriended in the thickets of academe and what I had offered them and what we could expect from them. It was wonderful, as it was entirely unsubstantiable. No actual journalist would know he was being manipulated by us and could never squeal, and no one could look at a particular piece and say, Yes, the tip came from us or No, it didn’t. That’s how the old Agency was: it worked on a trust I was only too happy to betray in search of a larger contribution.

  As for acquiring the Oswald paperwork, again, not terribly difficult. I memorized the master file number as referred to on the transcript jacket, then went to Records at a particularly busy time—Monday, 1030, when all the girls were overworked with juniors who had been requested to pull files for this or that Invasion of Italy or Nuclear Detonation over Moscow scenario. The place was chaos and anguish, as I expected, the girls overtaxed and bitter because they were too smart for their jobs and too connected to be treated this way by Mrs. Reniger, head of files, in one of her perpetual menstrual flare-ups. The wheels were definitely off the cart, so I pulled Liz Jeffries aside. She was Peggy’s older sister’s daughter and my niece by marriage. I said, “Liz, Cord’s on a tear, I need this fast.”

  “Oh, Hugh,” the wan beauty replied, distress making her more lovable than usual, “we are so behind.”

  “Liz, it’s my tail on the line.”

  She knew who had gotten her the job, with its glamour opportunity to marry a spy, a much better catch socially than a diplomat or a legislator, so she said, “Look, you know the system, just duck back there and pinch it; don’t let Reniger see you.”

  “Thanks, sweetie,” I said, and gave the child—she was a few years younger than I, but she seemed from a different generation—a peck. It was a common enough thing, so no eyebrows were raised. I slipped back, sliding by a busty young thing in one of the aisles and being careful to make no “accidental” contact with her breasts so that she wouldn’t remember me, found the file, opened it—the files were controlled by a series of master locks that old bitch Reniger, an OSS London vet, opened each morning at 9 and closed each evening at 5—and slipped out the Oswald file and the one I had requested, hid Mr. O’s inside the covering one, and dropped my file request slip in the box for recording.

  That night I made further contact with LHO. I will not bore readers with intricate accounts of one of the most overbiographized men in the world. The details are depressingly familiar. A chaotic childhood ensued upon the too-early death of the father; the strange, domineering, and slightly crazy mother, Marguerite, hauling the family all over America in hopes of finding a place to stay, marrying twice, wrecking both marriages, hauling Lee and the other two boys from school to school, state to state, poverty to prosperity and back to poverty in a single year sometimes. No wonder he was so screwed up: he was always the new kid.

  In New York, his growing malfunction was spotted by an alert social worker who wrote perhaps the most penetrating prose ever—little did she know three thousand authors would eventually come into competition with her, yet never best her—and alone in the world seemed to worry about where this sad bean would end up. She was underwhelmed by the narcissist Marguerite as mom and the incoherent wandering as lifestyle, and thought the boy had it in him to do great harm if not put into some kind of treatment quickly. In the whole mad circus that was the life of Lee Harvey Oswald—and I am speaking as his recruiter, his betrayer, and indirectly his murderer—this brave lady alone did a job we can take pride in as Americans. Too bad for LHO and JFK nobody listened; Marguerite snatched him away from the do-gooders and hauled him back to Texas or was it New Orleans before anything official could be done.

  Influenced by his older brother, little Lee, like many a small man who dreams of toughness, joined the Marine Corps immediately out of high school (from which he did not graduate). Like everything he attempted, it came to nothing. The marine years were wholly undistinguished, and anyone who trusted him to guide an airplane to its landing strip—his official job—must have had rocks in his head. I saw that the marines didn’t let him do much of that sort of thing, as they always had him on noncrucial duty. Somehow he managed to shoot him
self in the arm. What a dimwit!

  It was in the service where he first proclaimed himself a Communist, to the irritation of all around him in his various postings. You wonder why some fellow PFCs didn’t beat the hell out of him and spare the world the tragedy that ensued. It’s one of the few times the United States Marine Corps has failed in its duties. It won the Battle of Iwo Jima, but it lost the Battle of Lee Oswald! And once he was out, his first move—another hastily considered crusade—was to defect to the Soviet Union. Our first notice of him came via the State Department after he’d gotten into Russia on a student visa and refused to leave. Sensibly, the Russians didn’t want him either—nobody ever wanted him!—and for a while State and KGB fought to see who would inherit him as a consolation prize. He spent two and a half years in the Soviet Union, mostly in an electronics plant in Minsk, mastering the intricacies of cheesy transistor-radio assembly. He met and married a young woman who seemed quite attractive in the photo; I wondered in my study that night if the poor gal knew what a damaged package she’d hooked up with.

  He burned out in Russia and managed to talk his way back into the United States. I am well aware that some in the conspiracy community—“conspiracy community,” God, what an appalling concept! It was both loud and wrong for half a century!—have maintained that the CIA’s fingerprints are all over this strange sojourn. Good God! The only fingerprints on it were mine, and I knew paper didn’t record fingerprints, so I was safe. What I saw was what real life produces, as opposed to the dark master planning of the spy conspiracy believers: the shaggy, shapeless, pilotless, planless bumble of luck, circumstance, and opportunity, as this weasel of a man tried to get two giant bureaucracies to pay him the slightest bit of attention. Agh, you could feel their lack of enthusiasm in the slow grind of their cogwheels as, eventually, while the long dreary months passed, this nobody was allowed to reclaim citizenship in a country he loudly despised.

  From that point on, we got a new narrator, a much beleaguered FBI agent named James Hotsy, who inherited Lee—I will call him Alek from now on, for that is his Russian nickname, and Marina and I both called him that—when the fellow came back to the United States from Russia. He was known to the Bureau as a “suspicious person,” given his well-documented love affair with the reds. Poor Hotsy, of the Dallas field office, overworked and underloved, had Alek added to his immense caseload, and it was my privilege to read his reports in photocopy, because at that low level of security, the two agencies happily shared data. Hotsy’s picture of him more or less confirmed mine, although the hostility he received after Alek’s return added a particularly unpleasant new pathology, the chronic whine. Hotsy could find nothing he’d done that was illegal, only in poor taste, which should be a crime, I’ve always believed, but who listens to me on these matters? Hotsy’s intensity picked up when he discovered that Alek had been to Mexico City in late September and visited the Cuban interest section and the Soviet embassy, and soon he was interviewing Marina, her friend (but never Alek’s) Ruth Paine, and anyone else who had knowledge of or insight into Alek. Again, he could come up with nothing substantial, because Oswald himself was not substantial. He was, as they say in Texas, all hat and no cattle. Nobody had any need for him, not even Marina, for Mrs. Paine passed on to Special Agent Hotsy the bad news that Marina frequently displayed bruises on her arms or swelling around the eye. Alek was up to his tricks again.

  I do not have one here before me, as I sit in the sunlight on the veranda, scribbling and merrily riding the vodka express to the amazement of the servants, watching the slow progress of shadow across the far meadow, awaiting a call on my satellite phone that will inform me whether my current threat is finished or has grown more complicated, but I do know that at that time I had a photo of Alek.

  That face was soon to be burned into the consciousness of the world. I expect it will never be forgotten. At the time, who could know, who could anticipate? What I saw was American working-class sui generis, remarkable in its unremarkablity. It was an old shot taken by a newspaper when our self-proclaimed Communist hero (Ma, call the papers!) returned from Russia to proclaim the glories of Marxism but the folly of communism (only a Trot could appreciate the nuances; it’s unlikely Alek did). The camera reveals truths, things that Alek did not know about himself and would not learn. The thickness of his nose, his most prominent facial landmark, revealed or at least represented his pugnacity. He had a thickness to him in many respects, both physically and mentally, a kind of fixation on a goal or object from which he could not be stirred. His eyes were beady and small and squinty, and any Hollywood casting director would see him as a Villain No. 2, a minion who administered the beatings or the knifings but had no grasp of Mr. Big’s vision and simply took it on trust. He had a small mouth that gave him an unattractive piscean quality, his face somehow “pointed” as it reached its end point in the surly orifice surrounded by thin lips. His receding hairline and overbroad forehead seemed to suggest the same motif, and all of these features together created a typology, as amplified by the perpetual shroud or grimace of annoyance he wore. He looked exactly as he was: surly, obstreperous, self-indulgent, charmless. You knew he would be tricky to deal with, to command; he would be a resenter, a creep (a wife beater!), a natural traitor, an obdurate whiner, a too-quick-to-measure quitter. I don’t know if he was a little monster because he looked like a little monster or he looked like a little monster and so he became one. I doubt if any of his three thousand chroniclers do either.

  In any event, I stared at that picture, committing its nuances to memory. Sometimes a man in life can look so unlike his photo, you can hardly believe one is the record of the other. I sensed with Alek this would not be a problem and that when I saw him first in the flesh, I would recognize him right away. I can remember lying in bed, listening to Peggy’s even breathing, to the night rush of wind, and knowing that my boys were down the hall as secure as possible with futures fixed before them, and thinking of little Alek, pawn and creep, lynchpin and sucker, upon whom the weight of my plan would pivot, and I hoped he was up to it.

  That was when I realized, that very night, he wasn’t.

  It turned on shooting.

  Alek was a “trained marine marksman”—whatever that meant, and I suspect, in those dreary peacetime years, not much—yet he had missed a target, according to news reports, who sat at a desk forty feet away, with a rifle that had a telescopic sight! Good God, even I could have made that shot! I realized that shooting wasn’t just shooting. He had done his rifle work in the marines with that old warhorse, the M1 Garand rifle, a heavy, steady, accurate semi-automatic that had served from the halls of Montezuma to the shores of Tripoli with distinction. He could not have had a Garand rifle at his disposal in Texas for his try at the general. He’d called his gun “An Eye-Tie [?] Mannlicher-Carcano six-five,” a circumlocution so baffling that our poor typist had no idea that “Eye-tie” was argot for “Italian.” If it was Italian, it was probably some piece of surplus junk with a squishy trigger and a vino-swilling peasant’s intrinsic precision, which is to say none at all, and that would be his weapon of choice, and ours too, as it was linked to him by paperwork, witnesses, and circumstance, for the job I had in mind. Then there was the larger issue of incompetence. He had failed at everything he’d ever tried, and this meant part of him expected failure, and the expectation became the father of the event. Could I trust him? Could I risk my whole career and good name, to say nothing of a long stay in a Texas penitentiary, on this idiot? It had to be clean, smooth, crisp, efficient, professional, not a bumbling, staggering mass of twitches and mistakes.

  I don’t think I slept a bit that night, or the next either, and I began to doubt the wisdom of a course that depended on first-class work by an idiot.

  That’s how Lon came into it, and because of Lon’s presence, it made a whole universe of other possibilities real and unleashed my imagination in ways that astonished even me.

  CHAPTER 14

  Swagger summarized h
is findings for Nick at a meet in a Dallas coffee shop.

  “He’s not tracking you?” asked Memphis.

  “Maybe he hasn’t made the leap. Maybe he doesn’t know who I am. Maybe I’m off his radar so far.”

  “Maybe he doesn’t exist.”

  “Then who’s trying to kill me?”

  “Bob, you’ve made a lot of enemies. It could be anyone, right? I’m just playing devil’s advocate here.”

  “The same hired killer got James Aptapton.”

  “Fair enough. You got him, I got a feather in my cap, we took a bad actor off the street forever. Nice transaction all around.”

  “Any word on this Krulov? The oligarch who’s supposedly in with the Izmaylovskaya mob?”

  “Yes and no. It turns out that through his many companies, Comrade Krulov has many official contacts with American corporations, such as Ford Motor Company, McDonald’s, 3M, Procter and Gamble, and on and on. To investigate, we’d have to get Justice Department approval and convene a task force with subpoena powers and begin a massive effort. Do you think we have enough to take it to Justice?”

  Swagger knew the answer. “Of course not. What about, I can never remember the name, Yecksovich?”

  “I-x-ovich.”

  “That guy. Owns a gun company. Weird name, you’d notice that name.”

  “The name turns out to be a nickname, means nothing. His father was named Aleksandr, and when he was a kid—the father, I mean—his little brother had trouble pronouncing it, so he called big brother ‘K-s,’ pronounced ‘Ix.’ Ix stuck, the guy goes through life as Ix, he grows up, has a kid, and since he was a successful goon, he gave his son the patronymic Russian middle name of Ixovich, that’s all. Dimitry Ixovich Spazny. Spazny is hard-core KGB, in line when Yeltsin dumps communism and gets all kinds of breaks and becomes a billionaire. I have his businesses, and he’s invested all over the world like the rest, and as with Krulov, I’d need a federal task force to begin to make a dent in his affairs.”