Stephen Hunter - The Third Bullet

My fears about Alek, instead, were practical. Would he remember the rifle? Could he sneak it out of Mrs. Paine’s house without either her or Marina seeing it? Could he sneak it into the Book Depository the next day without dropping it in the lunchroom with a clatter, sending its removed screws all over the place? Could he reassemble it, or reassemble it correctly? A black comic vision came to me of him having done everything perfectly, the sight exactly on the target, the perfect trigger squeeze achieved, and SNAP! nothing, because somehow he’d dropped the bolt and hadn’t noticed the firing pin fall out on the floor. Or maybe his ride into work on Friday morning would catch a glimpse of the front sight, and the fellow would say, “Lee, what the hell is that?” and Lee would panic and jump out of the car. With an idiot like him, any number of screwups were possible, and I have to agree with a number of anti-conspiracy commentators who, after the fact, said that no intelligence agency would trust such a moron for an important assignment. They were right, but for the fact that operational necessity sometimes compels gambling on a disreputable character.

I tried to put aside my doubts on poor Alek and proceed with business that I could control.

We met that morning after room-service breakfast in my room. Not a bunch of happy fellows, as I say. Jimmy had things to do: he had to get business cards printed, he had to figure out and fabricate some way to smuggle Lon’s silenced rifle into the building, which, among other things, would involve buying a voluminous overcoat whose sleeves would have to be tailored so they didn’t hang down ridiculously beyond his fingertips, like a clown’s. He wanted to go through the Dal-Tex Building again, to reaffirm his impressions, to memorize all the stairwells and floors and sequences of offices, to check out the locks, to conjure escape routes and hiding places, though if it came to hiding, the jig was already up. Basically, he wanted to apply his professional expertise and mind against the site of the crime again, so there’d be no surprises during the operation. I sensed he had to be alone for that, and also that he wanted to be alone. He was always the lone-wolf type, God bless him.

Off he went. Lon and I decided we should get a good look at Dealey Plaza. I pushed him over to Main, and we traced what would be the president’s route, turning right down Houston, flanking the plaza, then halting at Houston and Elm for a good look at Dal-Tex and its big windows with their excellent vantage over the plaza. We then crossed Houston and headed down the gentle slope and curve of Elm in front of the Book Depository. It was all pretty empty, for the plaza wasn’t a tourist attraction; why would it be? It offered no grace or beauty, as a Boston or Connecticut or Washington, D.C., park would, no grand leafy trees, just a few stunted oaks, no brilliant gardens, no ponds with swans and ducks. It was basically banal, a greensward plopped absurdly into the middle of nowhere, a rough triangle of grass between three streets, with, for some bizarre reason, a little annex to the north where the civic fathers, in their infinite wisdom, had thrown up some mock Roman Coliseum-style pillars in a semicircle atop a little rise, as grotesque and misguided attempt as any I’d seen at classical grace. Sure, it was Texas , but why didn’t they hire an architect, for God’s sake, not the mayor’s wife’s drunken brother or whoever perpetrated Dealey upon the world. It was less a park or a plaza than an abandoned field.

We didn’t say much, and I didn’t want to linger. I was being careful; maybe someone would recall the strange Ivy League prince and his wheelchair-imprisoned pal and report that to the feds, and who knew where that would lead. Or maybe Alek himself, taking fantasy shots from the sixth floor, would catch a glimpse of me, though would he recognize me in a gnarly Brooks Brothers tweed jacket and dark slacks with a pipe in my mouth and my horn-rims firmly in place when all he knew was a fellow in a lumpy GUM suit with sleeves of mismatched length because Natasha had been asleep at her sewing machine in hour fifteen of her sixteen-hour shift back in ’55 when she sewed the suit parts together on a Soviet sewing machine the size of a Buick. Then I relaxed. Today Alek would be in Pretendville, riding down the Malecon in Havana in the rear of a well-waxed ’47 Caddy next to his god Fidel, waving at the adoring crowds.

I pushed Lon down the street.

We followed the Elm sidewalk down the slope, and I had to pull against the wheelchair to keep it from getting away in gravity’s grasp. Lon saw a chance for a joke. “Don’t let me slip away, James Bond, and get creamed in traffic. You’ll be one pathetic Danger Man tomorrow.”

I was glad to hear the humor in his voice, even if it was sardonic. “Pip-pip, old man, I shall do my duty, as Yale instructed me,” I said in priss-soprano, kidding the blueblood-agent stereotype of which I was almost a pitch-perfect example.

I didn’t get Lon killed, and we passed the Book Depository off on the right, got down the incline, and I stopped us about halfway to the overpass, just past the idiotic Roman folly on the right, and turned Lon 180 degrees back so that he could see Elm Street, the rise of the hill, the two buildings that commanded the angles, the depository and the one from which he’d be shooting – we hoped – the Dal-Tex Building a little behind it across Houston. We were alone on the sidewalk, with the traffic whizzing by us.

“I make it about a hundred yards,” I said.

“To which building?” Lon asked.

“The one in the rear. The one we’ll probably be in.”

From that angle, you couldn’t see all of Dal-Tex, only the wall along Elm, though at an extreme angle, and a stretch of the Houston Street facade. Another completely ugly, graceless building. I think it was trying to be “modern.” Ugh. It changed personalities after floor two and went to soaring archways encompassing the windows, a flourish that registered as completely idiotic to me. What did they think that did for them? These Texans!

“Suppose we don’t get in?” Lon said.

It was as yet unsettled, and it worried me too. I couldn’t let that show to Lon. Cousin or not, I had leadership responsibility and had to represent clear-voiced optimism.

“Oh, he’ll do it. Jimmy’s the best. He’s very clever. And if he doesn’t, you’ve had a nice trip to Dallas at government expense and gained a story so fascinating, it’s a shame you’ll never be able to tell it.”

“I can’t believe I’m here, looking at this, talking about this,” he said.

“I can’t believe it either. But here we are. Do you see any difficulties in making the shot?”

“No. At that range, with a velocity a little over three thousand feet per second, it won’t drop an inch. The downward angle won’t play because it isn’t far enough, and the buildings as well as the dip will cancel any wind effects. Fish in a barrel. It’s technically point-blank, except you don’t know what ‘point-blank’ really means, and I don’t have much interest in explaining it now. Trust me. The bullet will hit what it’s aimed at, and it will destroy what it’s aimed at, even as it destroys itself. And then we enter the Lyndon Johnston era, God help us.”

“Johnson. Not Johnston.”

“Is this a quiz?”

“No, I’m being a jerk because I’m nervous.”

“Let’s get out of here. I’ve seen enough. Can you push me up the hill, or shall we wait for a cab here?”

“I’m fine.”

I pushed him up the hill. November 21, 1963, sunny but breezy, in the fifties, two men in jackets and ties, one pushing the other up a slight hill in a wheelchair. And that was that for recon, planning, rehearsal, and psychological preparation. We dealt with the issues as they came up, that was all, and improvised our way past any obstacles.