The Third Bullet: A Bob Lee Swagger Novel

by Stephen Hunter

  “Let us consider such an object, the case in which the rifle is stored. It’s leather, possibly from Abercrombie and Fitch, about a yard long and half a yard wide, able to contain the two parts of the rifle, stock and action/scope, plus the tube of the suppressor, in parallel on velvet cushion. There’s plenty of room for the bolt, for the screws, maybe a two- or three-piece cleaning rod, a pack of patches, a brush, a small container of Hoppe’s 9, a small bottle of lubricating oil, and a rag or chamois for mopping up.

  “Maybe in the case as well are two or three extra rounds, that is, of the counterfeit iteration on which you have such provocative insights. Suppose, further, a metallic residue could be removed carefully from the uncleaned barrel, and that residue, by neutron-activation hocus-pocus, would link it to only one kind of bullet at the exclusion of all others, the Mannlicher-Carcano 6.5 manufactured by Western Cartridge Company in the mid-fifties. That’s the point, if I understand it, right, Jack?”

  “That’s right, Marty.”

  “Let us further allow that in those days they always put a luggage destination tag on every suitcase, which one can fairly guess bore the initials of the ultimate destination—in his case, Richmond—and wrapped it around the handle, and there was some kind of adhesive or stickum by which the two ends were joined. And suppose they were always dated. And Lon’s name and address would have been validated by another tag.

  “We have this object, linked by dated tags to Dallas, November 22, 1963, never opened, because Lon never again used or touched the rifle. It is physical proof that Lon was in Dallas that weekend; Lon, one of the greatest shots in the world. We have physical proof that he had a rifle capable of firing a bullet into the president. We have several samples of the cartridge, possibly with Lon’s fingerprints. We have the rifle itself with his fingerprints or DNA traces on it. The barrel of the rifle will contain metallic traces that can be linked metallurgically to the bullet that assassinated the president. Your Honor, I rest my case: whoever has possession of that case has physical proof of the conspiracy to murder the thirty-fifth president of the United States and, by fair inference, the identity of the man who pulled the trigger. Such a discovery would force a reopening of the case, and reopened, the case would lead straight to wherever it would lead, perhaps to the CIA cousin Hugh Meachum. The jig, as they say, would be up. Do I have your interest yet, Jack?”

  Swagger stared at Marty intently. His mind was abuzz. Was this bullshit, a setup, or had the silly fool stumbled on exactly what he’d said and had the key to the whole goddamn thing?

  “It’s very interesting,” said Swagger. “Are you saying—”

  “Let’s continue. As I’ve said, Lon doesn’t like to look at it, so it’s stuffed away somewhere, in a closet or a storage room. In a few years, his paranoia gets the best of him, and he does some research and then clumsily fakes his own death and takes up a new persona. He’s not a professional, and that’s why it will be easy for anyone to learn that ‘John Thomas Albright’ is Lon Scott, cousin to the mysterious Hugh.

  “After he ‘dies,’ a lot of Lon Scott’s shooting material—his beautiful rifles, his notebooks, the drafts of the articles he wrote for the gun press, his reloading and experimental records, all that is left to the National Rifle Association, and some of it is displayed in the National Firearms Museum, first in D.C. and later in Fairfax, Virginia.

  “As for the gun case, it is incriminating, so he wouldn’t give it to the NRA. When he ‘died’ and became Albright, he took that with him, unopened. It was at his new very fine home in North Carolina when he died for real, this time as Albright, in 1993.

  “To whom would he leave the case? He had no living relatives, no children, there were no women in his life; maybe Hugh? Maybe a faithful servant? A loyal lawyer? Another shooter? Another shooter’s son?

  “Hmmm. Let’s go with that one. Maybe this son dumped it in an attic, having no interest in it but unwilling to dispose of it. Some years later, he was contacted by a writer. Not a real writer but one of those fellows whose obsession with the arcana of firearms impels him to pen volumes like Winchester, An American Tradition and The Guns of Ruger and so forth, and they are such beautiful volumes and he has such great connections in New York that he can get big firms to publish them. Maybe this writer has tumbled to the fact that famous shooter Lon Scott, mysteriously dead in 1964, became John Thomas Albright, famous shooter, who lived another thirty years before dying in a hunting accident in Arkansas. What an interesting life the fellow had, even absent the minor detail of November 22, 1963, in Dallas, Texas. He’s decided to write the biography.

  “As I say, this writer contacts the son of another shooter who has unwittingly inherited all the John Thomas Albright material, and he sells the young man on his project. The young man agrees to turn over all the stuff—the gun case, a few other rifles, the Albright manuscripts, whatever is left, everything for and by and of John Thomas Albright—for research purposes. The deal is that when the book is published, the stuff will be returned to the son, he will donate the papers to the NRA, and sell whatever other goods remain at auction, and the provenance of ownership by Albright/Scott will make the stuff very valuable. Everybody wins: the writer gets his book, the son gets the profits of the sale, John Thomas Albright/Lon Scott gets his place in history.

  “The writer is in receipt of the material at his domicile, and the first thing he does is make a catalog. That’s when he discovers the gun case, unopened, and he’s about to tear into it when he sees the date on the tag and the originating city. Ding-dong! Something goes off in his head. He puts it down, his own mind racing.

  “He thinks and he thinks and he thinks. He sees how Lon Scott, later known as John Thomas Albright, could have been the Kennedy triggerman. That would explain the otherwise baffling, clumsy midlife identity change. He’s sitting on the scoop of the century. But he doesn’t know enough. He reads books, he tries to master the gears and flywheels of the event, he tries to figure angles and so forth. He realizes he needs help. So he goes to Dallas and discreetly looks around. He locates Richard Monk, who is, after all, a responsible figure in the assassination community, and after they bond, the writer tells him his story and admits he can’t handle it himself, he needs a better investigator, someone he can trust, someone with practical ballistics knowledge and experience, etc., etc. And that is where we are right now.”

  Swagger said, “Wow. That’s a lot for one bite.”

  “Oh, there’s more,” said Marty. He reached under the table to remove a briefcase, opened it, and produced two items. The first, unrolled, was an X-ray. It clearly delineated a Model 70 broken down into action and Monte Carlo stock, a tube that had to be a Maxim silencer, a disassembled cleaning rod, a few spare brushes, two small bottles, and three cartridges of oddly blunt configuration. The second was a photograph that displayed the sealed travel tag in close-up, with its inscription dated November 24, 1963, and its Braniff DFW-RIC route indicator and Lon’s name and signature and phone number, MOuntaincrest 6-0427.

  Swagger’s response was explicit. “Do not open it. Do NOT open it.”

  “Of course not,” said Marty.

  “Is it secure?”

  “It’s in my gun vault in Connecticut. In the country house.”

  Swagger thought, feeling overwhelmed: Is this it? Does this idiot actually have it? He could only come up with security-arrangement questions. “Is the house guarded professionally?”

  “No, but it’s locked in a vault that guarded my mother’s diamonds and my father’s rare guns for sixty years without a problem.”

  “Okay,” he said. “This could be big. This could be it. We have to proceed carefully now.”

  “I agree.”

  “I think you should hire a security company to patrol your house. Or move it to some highly protected site.”

  “Jack, I’m in the middle of nowhere. And nobody knows a thing except the two of us. No one is going to steal it, I guarantee.”

  Swagger nodded.
“You’re right. I do get paranoid.”

  “Understandable. This is exciting.”

  “I have to see it. I just have to look at it, to have a sense of it, so it’s settled in my own mind that it’s there. Oh, wait. Let’s get a handle on all this. Have you examined the provenance? Can we determine that the gun itself is linked to Lon outside of the case?”

  “Doesn’t his name on the case make that point rather eloquently?”

  “Yes, but if we could link the gun going to Lon, Lon possessing it, via an outside confirmation, the argument is so much stronger. Any idea where Lon got it?”

  “This is the sort of practical detail I never think of. No, it didn’t occur to me. I’ve just kept it, trying to figure out my next step.”

  “Aren’t the Winchester records all at the Cody Firearms Museum?” asked Bob.

  “Yes, but no. There was a fire in the Winchester plant, and all the modern records were burned—among the casualties, all those on the Model 70. But Lon didn’t get his rifles directly from Winchester. He got them from the Abercrombie and Fitch gun room on Madison Avenue in New York City, where all the American swells got theirs. Teddy Roosevelt and his sons, Richard Byrd, Charles Lindbergh, Ernest Hemingway, Clark Gable, Gary Cooper, probably through Lyndon Johnson, all the fancy big game hunters who went to Africa for short happy lives in the fifties. Abercrombie was purveyor to the aristocrats, the celebs, the nabobs, the millionaires for nearly a century. They went bankrupt in ’77, and the current outfit just has the brand name.” Marty snorted. “Now it’s a mall clothing company for twenty-year-olds with actual abdominals.”

  “But the firearms records?” asked Bob. “Were they destroyed?”

  “No,” said Marty. “Now that you mention it, they’re in a warehouse in Rutherford, New Jersey. Too valuable to throw out, I suppose, yet not valuable enough to catalog, index, and display.”

  “Can we get in?”

  “I do happen to know Tom Browner, who was the last manager of the room. Though he’s old and retired, I know he has some sway still. But Jack, it’s not like you can give a name to a clerk and he comes back with the files ten minutes later. It’s a bloody mess, years dumped into other years, shipping documents spread everywhere, correspondence half there and half not. Finding Lon in that mess would be like cleaning the stables.”

  “I have cleaned some stables in my time,” said Swagger.

  “I see it would make you happier to try. Maybe you’ll succeed. All right, I’ll call Tom Browner tomorrow and see what he has to say. When will you go?”

  “Ah, better leave it open. Sometime soon. Early next week, say. Rutherford, New Jersey. Anyhow, when I get back, I’ll call you.”

  “Do you want to make it one trip and go from—”

  “No, New Jersey will wreck me for a week. I’ll need recovery, believe me. So we should set up a date for me to see the case in a couple of weeks.”

  “Excellent,” said Marty.

  “It was your idea to go to New Jersey?” asked Nick, in Seattle’s Best number eight, this one in Oak Cliff.

  “Yeah,” said Swagger. “But it could easily be anticipated. It would have to be done sooner or later. You’d think Marty, with his connections up there already, would want to do it. But he let me come up with it and volunteer to do it, because he wants me to believe in the authenticity of the thing on my own. If I find anything in the Abercrombie files, that nails it.”

  “On the other hand, it commits you to a known place and time, and if this is a setup, that’s where it could go down. Jack Brophy walks out of the warehouse into four guns, and that’s the end of Jack Brophy.”

  “Sure. But my call is that neither Marty nor Richard have the stone cojones to get involved in a hit. Not their part of the forest. I don’t think they could hold it together mentally, setting something like that up. There’d be tells all the way through. Marty’d be sweating like a pig, and Richard couldn’t stop swallowing, licking his lips, avoiding eye contact. They’re not suited for the violent end of the game.”

  “Maybe they don’t know. Maybe whoever’s pulling the string is lying to them, telling them it’s some other kind of scam; maybe they’re expendable to this guy, who, after all, is fighting for his life, his legacy, his family name, if he’s who you think he is and has done what you think he’s done.”

  “But how can I not go? If I’m who I say I am, I have to go, or the whole deception falls apart and we’re left with nothing and I have to sit around and wait for Hugh to find me.”

  “You tell me what to do.”

  “I have no suggestions. Pray for luck, how’s that?”

  “Okay, then I’ll make a suggestion. You set up your appointment. On that day, I’ll have a team from New York in the parking lot. No big deal, plainclothes, but with enough signs of serious operators on-site. Overcoats concealing long guns, vests under the coats, snail-cord earpieces, tactical shades, bloused boots, that sort of thing. If Hugh has people, the last thing he’ll want is a gunfight in the parking lot. They’ll take a powder fast, and there won’t be any action.”

  “Okay,” said Bob. “It sounds good. You can pay for that?”

  “It’s under the James Aptapton investigation and the Sergei Bodonski investigation. Capping Bodonski wasn’t enough; we have to find out who let the contract. It’s legit law enforcement initiative.”

  “Great,” said Swagger. “I’m appreciative.”

  “If we can take down the contract taker and he’s someone big, maybe even a once-dead Hugh Meachum, then we don’t have to go to JFK up front. And once we bag him, we can work for proof, and eventually, it gets out.”

  “Not bad,” said Swagger. “There would be your career finisher. Your—what do they call it? Your capstone.”

  “Just,” said Nick, “so it’s not your—what do they call it? Oh, yeah. Your tombstone.”

  Like many Americans, I’m not sure if I saw Alek get his in real time, live on the network, or if I saw it a few minutes later, when the other networks ran the tape. I suppose it doesn’t matter.

  I’d missed his brief encounter with the press Friday night, since I’d been ingloriously passed out. But I’d seen it on tape, as they had to fill the time when nothing was happening, and what I’d seen had seemed classical Alek. He was scruffy, as usual, hair a mess, and the shiner from the punch in the eye he’d taken earlier that day from a Dallas cop hadn’t subsided. He was surly, squint-eyed, radiating animus. The cops shoved him up on a riser, and immediately, a surge of newspeople surrounded him, shoving mikes in his face, yelling questions. Bulbs flashed; he winced and got to speak only a few words before the cops hauled him up to Homicide.

  “I didn’t kill anybody,” he said, or words to that effect, and I suppose to him, it made perfect sense. He had to know he hadn’t fired the fatal shot. It would be a while before I worked out what had happened to him up there, but he must have seen the president’s head take its hit, and he knew in his feral way that there was a game going on, that he’d been played for a sucker and was now somebody’s prey, and off he went.

  That’s why his cry of “I didn’t kill anybody” as he was taken away haunted me. What you heard in that plaintive tone was self-belief. He knew he hadn’t murdered anybody—it follows that if he was a setup, he had concluded that his shooting of the Dallas police officer was pure self-defense—and you hear it in that yell.

  The next morning, after an alcohol-free, somewhat redemptive sleep, I returned to the television. It seemed all the TV people were grouchy too; they’d been working long hours without sleep, chasing witnesses and rumors, dealing with bureaucratic recalcitrance and ass-covering, shoved this way and that by defiantly unempathetic Dallas cops, being screamed at for being slow by network headquarters and screamed at louder for getting things wrong. What a life. I wouldn’t give it to a dog.

  As I fought for clarity with my first cup of room-service coffee, I could sense the irritation everywhere. We were now in the basement of the police station, to witness
Alek’s transfer from the supposedly vulnerable jail to one that offered more protection. To that order, an armored car had been arranged, so that only a bazooka rocketeer could kill Alek, and not even in Texas were bazookas legal.

  But the transfer had fallen behind schedule. Things almost always do, don’t they? The reporters had been milling around listlessly for about an hour, and when anyone “reported,” it was time-filling banality, updates on the timing of the transfer or explanations on why it was late. Occasionally, they’d cut to Washington, where again, nothing was happening. They might run some old tape, to remind us what this was all about, not that we’d ever forget. Nobody did or could distinguish themselves under those circumstances, and I stayed with it only because it occupied all the channels. I’d decided to take a shower, get up, go for a walk, find a nice restaurant, head back, maybe watch some football—the NFL had decided, amid much controversy, not to cancel its slate of games. Tomorrow I’d fly back to somewhere under my fake identity, then to Washington under my real one, and rejoin the human race and my family.

  Suddenly, on the television, it was as if a wave of energy had crackled through the black-and-white image of lolling, sullen reporters. Our correspondent—I have no idea who it was—informed us that Lee Harvey Oswald, indicted for the murder of Officer J. D. Tippit and the only suspect in the murder of John F. Kennedy, was on his way.

  Why do I relive this incident? Surely any who read these pages will have seen it for himself. There’s no suspense; it turns out the same each time the tape is run, and as movie special effects have gotten almost too realistic, so the almost chaste, bloodless death by gunshot of this appalling man is of little consequence to anybody. That is the view from a comfortable perch in our present. Then it was all different: nobody knew what the next big twist in our giant American narrative would be. Nobody could have predicted it, not even I, who had made the unpredictable happen two days earlier. Nobody had any idea that Mr. Deus Ex Machina was about to introduce himself.