Stephen Hunter - The Third Bullet

He insisted on high end all the way, no casual tamale and beer joint for him, and so the three men met in the French Room at the Adolphus, a Texas fantasy of high Louis XV dining, where every item on the menu boasted its own apostrophe and some two or three.

Marty, as he was called by all who knew and could afford him, held the floor, as he always did. It was the divine right of blowhards. It turned out he knew a great deal about apostrophes, French dishes, wines, art, politics, just about everything, and even Richard yielded to the torrent of knowledge; meanwhile, Swagger picked at the morsels of overprepared food, wished he’d ordered the chicken, and worked at keeping a look of polite interest on his face. Finally, Marty turned to business, over coffee.

“I am not a conspiracy ‘nut,’” he said. “In fact, like millions of others, I accepted without question the Warren Commission report and was willing to let it go at that. But I do make my living telling gun stories. I was born into the business, really at its high-water mark. My father was a manufacturer and his father before him. Connecticut gun people. I had the gene too, but from a slightly different angle. I had the hunger to know and chronicle, not manufacture, not shoot, not hunt. I’m the amanuensis of the American gun culture. I’ve written books on all the major manufacturers, I consult at the country’s finest auction houses, I am a registered appraiser in thirty-nine states, and I advise many of the nation’s most distinguished collectors on the guns they are about to purchase. I assume you have checked my background and found it satisfactory.”

“Nobody has a discouraging word about you, Mr. Adams,” said Swagger.

“Nor you, Mr. Brophy. I’ve checked too. You seem to be a man who’s handled crises all over the world.”

“I seem to have come out okay. I am a lucky son of a gun.”

“May I ask you, respectfully, for a brief account of your life?”

“Sure,” said Swagger, launching easily into a colorful spin on the mining engineer’s life, the risks, the near-misses, and the long nights alone with books.

He finished on Brophy’s fictional JFK obsession. “Some years ago, I got hooked on JFK’s death. More I read, more I questioned. Read some conspiracy crap and was not impressed. Read Warren, and it seemed ragged. Started thinking hard about it, using my engineer’s brain. Realized a couple of years ago, I had enough money to last several lifetimes and two or three more wives, so I decided I was tired of sleeping bags and would prefer to spend the rest of my life going into this thing in eighth gear and seeing where it would take me. Always loved guns, so that was a start, and I guess ’cause I’m mechanical by nature, my approach has always been through the guns. Interesting. Somehow I came up with some ideas that I don’t believe nobody has, and I’m trying to push forward from them. Not for money, not for fame, just because of a goddamned stubborn streak. If I dig a shaft, I like to have something to show for it. Is that enough for you, Mr. Adams?”

“Excellent account, Mr. Brophy. I’m going to make the first move here and divulge a portion of what I’ve found out. You see if it squares with what you know, and we’ll see where we are at the end.”

“Go to work, sir,” Swagger said.

“All right, here’s my story. I am always looking for subjects for the next book. Some months ago I got interested, quite innocently, in the life and career of a great but tragic American shooter named Lon Scott–”

Swagger’s eyes stayed modestly interested, his breathing smooth, his lips unlicked. He gave away nothing and made certain not to choose this moment to break off eye contact and take a sip of coffee.

“Lon Scott. Interesting fellow,” Adams continued. Then he went ahead to issue the specifics on Lon Scott, the bright youth, the safari heroics, the football stardom at New Haven, the extraordinary run of national match successes in the years after World War II, the tragic accident in ’55 at the hands of his father, his father’s suicide, his reemergence as a writer and experimenter in the late fifties, and then his own death in 1964.

“Sad story,” said Bob as at last Marty had to take a breath and left a gap in the noise. “I hate it when someone so talented gets cut down young. Fella had a lot more to contribute.”

“Yes, it does seem so,” Adams said. “Then I made another interesting discovery.”

He went on to tell how, in the early seventies, a fellow named John Thomas Albright emerged as a gun writer and ballistics authority and soon became a revered if mysterious figure in gun culture. He had an excellent career until he was killed in a hunting accident in 1993, at the age of sixty-eight. “I learned by accident that he was also disabled, wheelchair-bound. You’d never know it from his writing. I checked for pictures, and none existed that I could find. I went to Albright’s home in rural North Carolina and learned that he was a mystery there as well. I began to wonder: could Albright and Scott be the same fellow? If so, why would Lon contrive his own fraudulent death in 1964 and reemerge as John Thomas Albright? What was he hiding or hoping to distance himself from?”

The question hung unanswered for a moment or two, and Bob glanced at the grim countenance of Richard, the third member of the group, and then answered. “I suppose you’re referring to our point of common interest, a certain event in November 1963.”

Adams, versed in upping the dramatic ante on his tale, paused an artful second or so, then nodded. He waited another second.

“Of course. So I decided to look into the life of these two men more carefully. I discovered that while, obviously, Lon Scott never published an article after 1964, John Thomas Albright never published one before 1964. I acquired copies of all their articles and first by myself and then with the help of an academic who specializes in forensic reading, we made a line-by-line comparison and found deep organizational similarities as well as dozens of turns of phrase that were similar. I found three cases where Albright made reference to discoveries that Scott had made as if they were his own. I discovered that the documentation on Scott’s death was very, very thin, as if contrived by an amateur. I could go on with the irregularities, but the point is obvious: Lon became John. The question is, why?”

“You’re in areas I haven’t even gotten to yet,” said Swagger. “You’re coming at it from a different angle. See, I’m on the how . The way an engineer’s mind works, there’s no point in proceeding until the how is answered. But you’ve started on, or you’ve advanced to, the who.”

“You can see what I need,” said Adams. “I need that how . Just like you need the who . So what I’m looking for, basically, is a theory. It’s one thing to put together a biography full of mysterious elements that might circumspectly suggest that Lon Scott, a great rifleman and ballistic experimenter, was involved in the Kennedy assassination to some degree. But a lot of people, if the data is manipulated and selected carefully enough, could fit in a similar template. What I need is somebody of extreme capability to put together a coherent narrative, based on what I can uncover about Lon Scott in 1963, as to the how part of his engagement. Where would he shoot from? What would he use? How would he get in and out? Who helped him? Remember, he’s in a wheelchair, so he needed allies. Here’s a provocative fact: I learned that he had a first cousin named Hugh Meachum who was some kind of CIA star at the time. He too died in 1993. But the connection of Lon and Hugh in 1963, if it can be documented, is titillating. But see, it’s all meaningless without that first part. How did they do it?”