Stephen Hunter - The Third Bullet

“Sorry I’m late,” said Swagger, showing up at five after the hour.

“It’s not a problem,” said Kathy Reilly, putting away her Black-Berry.

“Were you followed?”

She laughed. “I wish. My days are so routine, a little excitement like that couldn’t hurt.”

“It could,” he said, “and I hope to spare you that. You were followed – by me. That’s why I’m late. I tailed you back to your building a few nights ago, then picked you up tonight as you left and was with you on the subway and everything.”

“I– I never saw you,” she said, a little nonplused.

“I followed you to see if anyone else was following you. The answer, both the first time and tonight, was no. So we’re clean, I think. We can continue, if you’ll still play.”

“Oh, sure,” she said. “It’s so Cold War. I love it. Have you arranged for the files?”

“Absolutely. I know they’ll be there.”

“Great. And where is there?”

“The ninth floor. They centralized their archives a few years ago, with the idea of moving them all to digitalization. But the budget never caught up, so it’s still old paper, some of it a century or two old. Very delicate. Fortunately, we don’t have to do a lot of digging. We’re just going to look at one month, one year.”

“You said 1963.”

“September. Maybe October, maybe November.”

“Of 1963.”

“That’s right.”

“And where is this archive? Ninth floor of?”

“Lubyanka.”

He waited. Her eyes stayed calm, maybe fell out of focus for a fraction of a second, then returned to the full-on gaze.

“I take it you’re not joking?”

“No. Please, it takes some getting used to.”

“You’ll have to explain.”

“We’re not parachuting onto the roof or shooting our way in. We’re not blowing a vault or tunneling up from underground. We’re traveling by that glamorous transportation means called the elevator.”

“I don’t–”

“Money. I’ve bribed, through my friend Stronski, an SVR lieutenant colonel. To show you how serious I am about this, I’m giving him forty thousand, American cash. Mine. Not the FBI’s; mine, hard-earned.”

“Swagger, you spent forty thousand dollars of your own money on this?”

“I did. I’d do it again. I gave a woman my word I’d look into the death of her husband. I ain’t near where I have to be on that one. There’s other issues too. Anyhow, to me, the money don’t mean a thing. I’ll spend it all if I have to. I gave my word, I got myself engaged, and maybe there’s some other memories yelling at me. I’ll do what I have to do.”

“‘Crazy with honor’ is the phrase that comes to mind. Did you step out of a thirties movie?”

“Ms. Reilly, I don’t know enough to know what a thirties movie would be. I only know what I’ve got to do.”

“You are so insane, it’s kind of impressive.”

“Maybe so. Anyhow, enough on me. Let’s get back to tomorrow. Let me tell you, if Stronski says it’s guaranteed, it’s guaranteed. It’s safe.”

He explained the details. “The lieutenant colonel himself will give us ID badges and escort us to the ninth floor. He will show us where we need to be. We have six hours. No photos, no notes. All by memory. What we’re looking for isn’t that big a deal. As I say, the Russian James Bond. We have to find out if he visited or worked in the Mexico City embassy in September through November of 1963.”

“See,” she said, “that’s the other thing.”

“I know it is. You see what this is about.”

“I know Lee Harvey Oswald went to the Mexico City Russian embassy sometime in 1963, trying to get a visa or something. He failed, I guess. I think it’s all been looked at.”

“It has. Over and over again. A man named Norman Mailer even managed to interview all the KGB people and examine the records. There’s nothing there. Case closed. History reclaimed. End of story. That’s what I believed too, until a few weeks ago.”

“And now you believe a Russian James Bond killed JFK?”

“No. I don’t know enough to believe anything. I will tell you, however, why I think that if – I do say if – there was some kind of game being played, it had to be played through the Russians. Maybe in a big way, maybe in a small way.”

The waiter cleared the plates.

She ordered a vodka tonic. “I think I’ll need this.”

He stuck with koka. “A few weeks ago a piece of information came to me. It was too mundane for anyone to have made up. There was no profit in it, and it was transferred over the years through completely normal, workaday people, none of them troublesome in any way, all of them sane, productive, middle-class. It was about a tread-print on the back of a coat. Stupid, huh? Briefly, it suggested that a rifle may have been present in something called the Dal-Tex Building in November 1963. Dal-Tex is right across the street from the Book Depository, and its windows give virtually the same angle on the limo on Elm Street as the sixth-floor ‘sniper’s nest’ of the Book Depository. The treadprint suggested the presence of someone I know about who was a superb rifleman.”

“He would be the second gunman?”

“Possibly. Just barely possibly. But the coat could have also been owned by an old-boy Texas pheasant hunter, and it was his daughter’s bicycle that put the treadprint there. Still, worth investigating.”

“So that was what the man went to Dallas to investigate. Then he got killed. Then you went to Dallas. And a Russian tried to kill you. Is that how the Russians come into this?”

“Possibly. It’s another indicator that somehow in this thing, all lines of possibility run through Russia. But the fact that the guy who tried to kill me was Russian wasn’t the thing I zeroed on.

“What I’ve done is, I’ve tried to isolate hard data points from the Warren Commission report, that is, the things that we know happened, times, dates, places, all multiply verified. And I’ve tried to triangulate from that a possible scenario by which someone besides Oswald could have been involved. I have worked hard trying to find the intersection of certain streams of information that were necessary for anyone trying to kill Kennedy. If I can find a place and a time where all the lines come together, that would be the place to start. My only technique is trial and error, try this, try that, try something else. Believe me, I ain’t no genius. But I’ve come to something. And that something has to be at the Soviet embassy in Mexico City in the late fall of 1963.”

“Tell me. Wait, the vodka hasn’t arrived. If I’m going to spend ten years sunbathing in the Gulag archipelago, I’ll want to know why.”

He waited, composing his thoughts. The vodka and the new koka came. She took a swig. “Very good. The world is nicely blurred. Please proceed.”

“If anything of a conspiratorial nature happened,” Bob said, “it had to have sprung from the intersection, by chance, of five elements. I say ‘elements.’ They tell me it’s a lousy word because it means ‘stuff.’ That’s because the five things are different in nature, and no word other than ‘stuff’ collects them all.”

“I’m listening.”

“The first four are pieces of information. Three are related but separated in time. One is completely unrelated, from left field, and it arrives real late. The fifth isn’t information at all; it’s a personality.”

“Okay. I can follow that, and I get lost in Agatha Christie, much less le Carre.”

“First bit of information: someone had to know that a man named Lee Harvey Oswald existed. And that he was kind of a pathetic screwball with dreams of glory that his sad little life couldn’t possibly support. Who would know that?”