There are many like it, but this one is mine…
The Asset took aim. The president was fifty yards out, moving away from him at ten, maybe eleven miles per hour. At this distance, he couldn’t miss. He looked through the scope, exhaling as he’d been taught. Slowing his breathing, his heartbeat. Relaxing his finger against the trigger.
My rifle is my best friend. It is my life. I must master it as I must master my life.
He was indeed the master of his life. In this moment, he was all powerful, just as he’d always known he would be, even as a boy on his cot in that white-walled room, as those devious psychiatrists tried to trick him. Even as his fellow marines shunned him.
Without me, my rifle is useless. Without my rifle, I am useless.
Through the scope, the Asset watched Kennedy wave to the relatively few people gathered on both sides of the street. The Asset tracked him, aiming for the back of his head. One shot, one kill. Kennedy was still inside seventy yards. The Asset’s accuracy inside that distance was better than 97 percent. It was as good as done. Still, he could feel his heart beating in the tips of his fingers.
Are you the mouse, or are you the snake?
The Asset fired.
He missed.
The bullet sailed wide left, striking the concrete curb on Main Street. A fragment of the bullet broke off and hit a spectator named James Tague on the right cheek, drawing blood. Heads turned toward the sound of the rifle shot. Had it been a firecracker? An exhaust backfire? Kennedy—a combat veteran—was one of those who turned.
“Impossible…,” the Asset whispered to himself. “Imposs—”
Shut up! There’s still time…
The Asset exhaled.
I must fire my rifle true. I must shoot straighter than my enemy who is trying to kill me…
Eighty yards. He aimed at the president’s back, a bigger target, hoping to blow his heart to pieces or, at the very least, sever his spinal cord.
I must shoot him before he shoots me…
He chambered another round with astonishing speed. Took aim. Squeezed off a second shot. Kennedy flinched in the scope, then awkwardly raised his elbows and clutched at his throat. The bullet had entered the president’s upper back, nicked his spine and right lung, then exited out the center of his throat, tearing his tie knot, before continuing forward into Governor Connally’s back just below his right armpit, shattering his ribs and exiting out his chest.
It was a clean hit, but it wasn’t a kill shot. The Asset had to be sure. He pulled back on the bolt and chambered another round. He exhaled again and aimed at Kennedy’s head, now slumped to the left as the first lady put her hands on his shoulder, bracing him, asking him what was wrong. Ninety yards. He pulled the trigger with a feather touch.
Kennedy’s head exploded.
Redhead…
The bullet had entered the back of Kennedy’s skull dead center and broke into fragments, each of those tearing through his brain, the shock wave creating incredible pressure in his skull, forcing blood and cranial fluid outward as if a bomb had been set off in the center. The front of the president’s head bulged out, then broke—pieces of skull, brain, and blood flying out of the massive hole in his head. All of this in roughly one-eighteenth of a second. The time it took Abraham Zapruder to record one frame of his famous motion picture.
Blood, skull fragments, and pieces of brain were ejected all over the interior of the Continental—both the inside and outside of the windshield. They landed on the Secret Service driver’s suit jacket, on the car’s front hood… even on the faces of two of the Dallas motorcycle policemen who were following a car’s length behind. One of those policemen—hit in the face with what he described as a “fine mist”—would never forget the salty taste of President Kennedy’s brains on his tongue.
The Asset sucked in a breath, as if breaking the surface of a lake after nearly drowning. His whole body tingled. It was almost orgasmic, watching the leader of the free world’s head break apart and spill its contents. He watched through the scope as Mrs. Kennedy tried to climb out of the line of fire, only to be stopped by her personal Secret Service agent, Clint Hill, who’d come running from behind.
As the limousine sped away, the first lady screamed, “I have his brains in my hand!” and then leaned over to her husband and asked, “Jack? Jack, can you hear me?” over and over again. Jack could not. Jack was dead. He’d been dead before his head recoiled. For all the fuss about last rites and the tearful official pronouncement that would come less than an hour later at Parkland Hospital, he was, for all intents and purposes, gone before his limousine reached the end of Main Street.
The Asset was pleased, but this was no time to sit and admire his work. There was a procedure. A strict schedule to adhere to. He hid the rifle and walked, calmly, toward the stairs.
Better late than never, thought Virginia.
The assassination had originally been assigned to a different group of assets, twenty days earlier, in Chicago. As Kennedy’s motorcade drove from O’Hare Airport into the city, three men, each with a high-powered rifle, were to have been stationed at the Jackson exit off the Northwest Expressway, where the limousine would be forced to slow and take a precarious turn. All three would’ve fired at once, trapping the president in a turkey shoot, while a fourth gunman waited on an overpass a few hundred yards down the street to finish the job in case the others didn’t.
At the exact moment Kennedy was gunned down in Chicago, her other assets would have struck halfway around the world, assassinating the president of South Vietnam. With the dual strikes against the American and Vietnamese heads of state, the American appetite for intervention in Southeast Asia would have evaporated, clearing the way for the dominos—Laos, Cambodia, Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, India—to fall and establishing the Soviet Union as the world’s sole superpower and communism as its dominant ideology. America’s time in the sun would finally be over.
But her assets in Vietnam had carried out their mission three hours earlier than scheduled, giving time for news of the assassination to reach Washington. Fearing a plot, the Secret Service had scrapped the president’s trip to Chicago at the last minute, leaving Virginia scrambling to get everything in place in time for the next window.
Unfortunately, that window was Dallas, where by far the weakest of her assets was stationed. He was a troubled man, this asset, with delusions of grandeur and a personality disorder bordering on schizophrenia. But he was zealous and easily manipulated, and he was a crack shot with a rifle. To Virginia’s immense relief, he’d done brilliantly. Now only one thing remained. The most important step in any assassination:
Kill the assassin.
Guiteau6 had hanged for shooting Garfield. Czolgosz had sizzled and smoked in the electric chair for killing McKinley. The asset who’d poisoned Taylor7 was never caught, so Virginia had dispatched him herself.
But this idiot… this idiot had gotten himself arrested.
Virginia had given him specific instructions: he was to take the bus to the Texas Theatre on Jefferson Boulevard, where a KGB agent would contact him and accompany him out of the city. He would be driven across the border, to Mexico, and from there flown to Havana, where his wife and daughters would be waiting for him. They would all be flown to Finland, then cross the border into the Soviet Union, where the Asset would receive a hero’s welcome, a high-level job, and a lifetime pension. (It was all a lie, of course—in truth, they would drive him and his family into the middle of nowhere, kill them, burn them, and bury their charred bones in an unsuspecting farmer’s field.) In any case, all he had to do was sit in an air-conditioned movie house and wait.
Instead, he’d panicked and shot a Dallas police officer8 who’d stopped to question him as he fled the scene of the assassination. At least a dozen witnesses saw the shooting, after which the Asset—instead of improvising an escape—continued into the Texas Theatre as planned.
He was a crack shot, but he was no scholar.
No m
atter. Virginia always had a contingency plan in place. She called another asset—one who’d been in semiretirement for some time. He was a Dallas local, a nightclub owner and mob associate whom Virginia had recruited and trained in Havana years earlier. His name was Jack Rubenstein, but he went by Jack Ruby.
Abe and Henry were thirty-six thousand feet above the earth, aboard Henry’s Lockheed Jetstar,9 its four engines pushing it toward Dallas at five hundred miles per hour. The pilots relayed news from the ground: at twelve thirty p.m., the president had been shot in the back of the head by an assassin’s bullet (the similarities to Abe’s assassination were striking, though Abe and Henry felt no need to discuss them). At 1 p.m., doctors at Parkland Hospital had pronounced him dead. At 1:15 p.m., a Dallas patrolman had been shot by an unknown assailant, who fled to the Texas Theatre, where he was taken into custody at 1:50 p.m. It would be another twelve hours before that suspect was officially charged with the president’s murder, but there was a feeling among the Dallas detectives that they had their man—the coincidence of the two shootings so close together, and by a man with similar descriptions, was just too great.
There was nothing they could do for Jack Kennedy. One of the president’s closest aides, Kenneth O’Donnell, had spoken to Henry from Air Force One as it had carried Kennedy’s body back to Washington.
He asked me if there was any way to restore the president. I’d brought Lincoln back, he said, why not Kennedy? But it was impossible. Half of Kennedy’s brain was missing, parts of it still embedded in motorcycle tires and dashboard vents. Even if I could bring him back, what would’ve emerged from the fog would’ve been nothing like the president and, in all likelihood, severely impaired.
All they could do was get to Dallas as quickly as possible. Get in front of the shooter. Interview him. Intimidate him. There was still a chance he could lead them to Dare. And if he did, there was a chance they could catch her before she vanished into thin air again, if she hadn’t already.
Darkness had fallen by the time Abe and Henry landed at Love Field, where the president himself had landed earlier that very day. They sped to the Dallas police headquarters on Harwood Street, where the suspect was being interrogated. But instead of walking into a police station, Abe and Henry found themselves in a madhouse.
There were reporters everywhere, clogging the hallways, hot television lights and huge studio cameras on wheeled pedestals. We decided to wait until the commotion died down.
Hours passed. At 11:31 p.m., the Dallas police trotted their suspect out in front of a crowded room of reporters, for what would become known as “the midnight press conference.” Abe and Henry stood near the back of the room as the suspect was allowed to answer just a few questions. Jack Ruby was also in attendance, a loaded Colt Cobra .38 revolver in his jacket pocket.
It was five in the morning by the time we were finally able to sit down with [the suspect]. A detective brought him into a small interrogation room, where Abe and I had been kept waiting for more than three hours. He was exhausted. He’d been beaten at least once. He hadn’t been allowed to talk to an attorney or make a phone call. And now here he was, delirious and handcuffed, led into yet another endless room to be asked the same three questions. So imagine his surprise when he sat down and I asked him—
“Where’s the red-haired woman? The one who trained you in Minsk?”
The suspect looked up, his eyes suddenly alive with mischief. He stared at Abe and Henry for a moment.
“Who are you?” he asked.
“Answer the question,” said Abe.
“We know she recruited you,” said Henry, “sometime after you defected. We know she was there when you were trained at the Factory in Minsk. And we know that she’s been in contact with you as recently as yesterday.”
This last part was a bluff—we didn’t know when he’d been in contact with Virginia, but it was reasonable to think he had.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” said the suspect through a smile.
“She’s going to kill you,” said Abe. “You, your wife… your daughters.”
The twinkle left the suspect’s eyes.
“Cooperate with us,” Abe continued, “and we can protect them. We can protect you.”
The suspect looked at them for a few moments, then smiled and lowered his head so that his chin was touching his chest.
“Like I said,” the suspect continued, “I’ve got no idea what you’re talking about… I’m just a patsy.”
Those were the last words he spoke to us. Everything else was met with silence. He wouldn’t talk to us or even look at us. It was clear we were getting nowhere. We’d been at it for twenty-four hours straight, from Hell’s Kitchen to Dallas. We were tired and frustrated. We decided to grab a few hours of sleep and try [interviewing him] again in the morning.
But the second interview never came. By the time Abe and Henry returned, at just after ten a.m., the decision had been made to move the suspect to a jail on the other side of Dallas, where the press would have less access. At 11:21 a.m., as Abe and Henry watched with a crowd of reporters, the suspect was escorted through the basement of police headquarters toward a waiting armored car. He made it a few feet before Jack Ruby stepped forward and shot him in the gut.
Jack Ruby lunges at fellow Dare asset Lee Harvey Oswald with a .38 Colt Cobra revolver in the basement of Dallas police headquarters. Abe and Henry were only a few feet behind and to the left of the photographer when this picture was taken, but they were unable to stop him.
It was late. The morgue was empty—a vast, dimly lit space, tens of thousands of light-blue tiles making up its floor. There were corpses everywhere, some off in the dark corners of the room, stacked floor to ceiling like items on a store shelf, wrapped in plastic, or covered with white sheets. Other corpses lay on stainless-steel tables, their shiny surfaces slightly tilting toward a drain at one end, which collected blood and other fluids for disposal. Electric saws, designed to rip through bone with their circular blades, and other surgical instruments sat on wheeled tables beside them. Scales for weighing organs hung from the ceiling under light fixtures, most of their fluorescent bulbs dark, only a few flickering here and there, creating pockets of sterile light. One of the walls was covered with the shiny doors of sliding storage lockers—full-size for adults, smaller for infants and children.
Virginia walked across the cold tile, slender legs jutting from her skirt, each high-heeled step echoing off the hard surfaces. She would’ve preferred more functional clothing, but she’d had to charm her way into the building, and that had called for skin. Her vampire senses soaked it in: the smell of death and chemicals everywhere, formaldehyde and bleach, mixed with the faint smell of gas, which was used to fuel the cremation furnaces built into the far wall. The low hum of the refrigeration units, staving off decomposition by keeping everything at a constant forty degrees Fahrenheit.
Her Asset was somewhere in here, dead nearly twelve hours, if you believed the official story. There were rumors he’d survived Ruby’s bullet to the stomach. Virginia had to see him with her own eyes. She had to be sure.
The morgue staff had gone home for the night, no doubt glued to their radios and televisions along with the rest of the country. She was alone with the dead of Dallas. The president himself would’ve been on one of these slabs, had the Secret Service not insisted (by pulling their guns and threatening to shoot Parkland Hospital staffers) that his body be taken back to Washington.
Virginia began with the stacked corpses, lifting each sheet or peeling away just enough plastic to get a look at the toe tags. Her Asset wasn’t there. She continued to the bodies on the autopsy tables, studying the faces of the freshly dead—some of their chest cavities splayed open, some with the tops of their skulls cut off, brains exposed or altogether missing. Her Asset wasn’t there, either, which meant he’d been put in one of the storage lockers. Virginia walked along the metal wall. The front of each locker bore the name of the deceased, written in wh
ite grease pencil. Sure enough, on the last door of the bottom row, all the way in the corner of the morgue, she found the name she’d been looking for.
She smiled, reached for the metal latch, and pulled. The locker slid open, revealing a body covered in a white sheet. Virginia reached for the top of the sheet and began to pull it—
Someone’s in here.
She wheeled around, startled by a presence in the room. She’d been so focused on finding the Asset, she’d missed the sound of careful footsteps on the tile floor; the soft shuffling of clothes.
A tall, slender man with a thick beard stood at the far end of the room, silhouetted by one of the flickering bulbs. It was Abraham Lincoln—still missing the fingers she’d taken from him on the Hindenburg. He was dressed in blue jeans, boots, and a white T-shirt, sunglasses hanging from the collar, his long dark hair resting on broad shoulders. He was holding an ax in his left hand.
But if Lincoln’s here, that means—
The Asset’s corpse sat up beside her; the white sheet fell away from its face.
Henry.
Dressed like his partner, only in a black T-shirt instead of white. Virginia took a step back, her eyes flitting between Abe and Henry. She needed to be aware of both of them now. Every step, every twitch.
“It’s over,” said Henry, swinging his feet over the side of the locker. “There are men covering every exit. They know what you are, and they have the weapons to stop you.”
“Do they?” asked Virginia.
“There’s still a way out for you, Virginia,” said Henry. “Help us. Work with us. Expose the other people behind this.”