“Swagger, you have such a talent for getting yourself into bad shit.”
She got down to the dark lot to find him wriggling out from underneath one of the small Chevys that the Post provides its reporters in Moscow. Once he got himself upright, he was able to move without much more of a limp than he normally had, though looking closely, she saw the small bullet hole and a dark stain that suggested some blood loss.
“No arteries, no veins. Like a whack from a baseball bat. My whole side’ll be purple for a month, but once the laceration heals, it’ll be fine.”
“You’ve been shot!” she said. “It can’t be fine!”
“I’ve been shot before. Please, it’s not a big thing. My main worry is Stronski now.”
“He’ll be all right.”
The small elevator took them up seven flights. They turned through a metal door that could have guarded a bank vault and walked into a spacious double living room apartment laden with sofas, icons, books, textile hangings, art, all of it in splendid taste. Swagger had nothing to compare it to; he had never seen such a den of the mind as opposed to the body, but he imagined it as the kind of place some sort of fancy professor might keep.
“Nice,” he said. “Lots of books. Bet you’ve read ’em all.”
“Not hardly. The office is through the door down the way; it’s another apartment, rigged for business with our computers, which are tied in to the Post’s in Washington. It’s like I’m twenty-five feet away from my boss, not four thousand miles.”
He flopped on the sofa, not that interested in miracles of modern journalism. “This is fine for me. Maybe in a few minutes I’ll head into the bathroom and take a shower. The bleeding seems to have stopped. I can feel it stiffening.”
“Do you want anything to eat or drink?”
“You know, I am hungry.”
She fixed him a sandwich and a koka, which he greedily consumed. Then he told her all about the event.
“God,” she said, her face alarmed, “how can you be so calm? All those men trying to kill you, and it’s some kind of a joke.”
“Sooner or later, somebody will manage it. Or I’ll fall off the porch and starve to death like an old stag with a broken leg. It’ll happen. I’ve seen it enough. It’s a fact. I just want to get this one done, though. That would be enough.”
“How did they find you?”
“They didn’t follow either of us. Maybe they had a GPS planted on Stronski, but I doubt it. I picked the spot, he didn’t, and he didn’t know about it early enough to notify anyone, and neither could anyone else in his outfit. So my guess is they had a bunch of likely Stronski places under static observation, with a kill team near each one, and when we showed up, they got into action in a few minutes. What that tells me again is what someone else said: someone is spending a lot of money on this. Only governments have money like that to spend, or oligarchs, or Hollywood directors.”
“I doubt Steven Spielberg has it in for you.”
“You never can tell.”
“You’d better get some sleep. Do you want to move into the bedroom?”
“I’ll take the shower, sack out. I should be okay to move tomorrow. You won’t tell anybody I’m here?”
“If I told my editors I had a guy on the couch shot up in a Russian mafia gunfight who was investigating the Kennedy assassination, they’d ship me to the Anne Arundel county mall in two minutes.”
“I don’t know what that is, but if you say it’s a bad thing, I’ll take your word for it.”
He lay on the sofa. Escape. I made it. Tomorrow I’m safe, the Moscow thing is over, and nobody’s hunting me. He tried to relax, and in a bit, fed and showered and only marginally uncomfortable from the hit on his steel hip, he fell into a restless sleep.
But escape was the theme of the evening, and as he tried to draw some pleasure from his own, his mind naturally went to his buddy Ozzie Rabbit. That guy had been on the run too, although he never made it. Swagger, reliving the sense of crushing dread that had accompanied him on the walk out of the Park of the Fallen Heroes, came awake in the Moscow apartment. He knew sleep would not visit again. But Ozzie Rabbit would.
He rose, went to the window, and looked down across the open park between the buildings in the complex, while on the horizon, those various new Dallases that were the future of Moscow rose and sparkled against the dark of the night. He could barely make out his own image in a trace of reflection on the window; he saw a specter, a shape, haunted by the nearness of death.
In time Lee Harvey moved in and sat next to him, face dull (as it always was, except when he got shot), hair a mess, skin pasty, broadcasting distress and melancholy and yet defiance and pure psycho anger. Man on the run, 11/22/63.
He makes it out of the Book Depository, though he is briefly stopped by a policeman, and heads up Elm Street. He has skipped out seconds before the police arrive in force to cordon off the building and search it. He continues on Elm Street, passing the Dal-Tex Building, disappearing into the crowd, and four blocks later jumps aboard a bus heading back down Elm Street. He is so determined to get aboard this vehicle that he stops it in the street and hammers on the closed door for admittance.
That was a mystery in the classical assassination canon, Swagger knew. Many wonder why he chose to go back in the direction he came from, back toward Dealey Plaza, the site of the assassination, where crowds and policemen were collecting in large numbers and traffic, as a consequence, was backing up.
Some say he had no plan at all, he was a moron in a panic, he took the first chance he saw to get out of the area.
On the other hand, it is the no. 2 bus, and its destination is not arbitrary. It will take him past the Depository, under the triple overpass, over the Trinity River, and into Oak Cliff, the area of Dallas where his roominghouse is located.
Swagger realized: Peculiar. It’s clear he has no escape plan in place. This means either, first, he’s an idiot, acting irrationally, beyond comprehension; or second, his original escape plan is ruined for some reason, and the only thing he can think to do is return home. He counted on something happening, and it has not; now he must deal with that reality.
The bus soon runs into traffic as it approaches the chaos of Dealey. Oswald hops off, cuts a few blocks across town to a Greyhound station, and catches the only cab ride of his life.
Swagger had a new thought: This known fact has been undercommented on. Oswald is at the Greyhound station, he has dough in his wallet, and hey, it’s a bus station, right? So there are buses leaving regularly for other cities in Texas. Yet he does not buy a ticket and climb aboard. It’s true, he may know that it’s a matter of time before law officers arrive, check on last-minute ticket purchases, and send messages to the highway patrol to waylay buses. But if escape were his goal, given the way his world was about to be closed down, wouldn’t that be his best chance, to scurry away before the manhunt net was thrown out?
No answer presented itself. Swagger continued narrating to the two figures in the dim window that overlooked the Russian nightscape.
It is known that Oswald takes the cab to his roominghouse in Oak Cliff. He’s smart enough to have it drop him a few blocks away, so he can recon for law enforcement activity before blundering in. That suggests that the roominghouse is a rational destination, something he’s thought about and decided makes the most sense given the problems he faces. He knows that it won’t be long before a canvass of employees is taken at the Texas Book Depository and his name comes up and he’s ID’d as missing. He knows that eventually—but not how quickly—the police will connect him to the recovered rifle. The cops could arrive at any second. Yet he takes the chance to go to his roominghouse, to beat the police response, in order to get one thing: his pistol.
Who did he think he was, Baby Face Nelson?
The next day, right at 5 p.m. when the office closed, she pulled up to the American embassy on Bolshoy Deviatinsky Pereulok, and he peeped up from the well of the front seat where he’d been crouchi
ng and opened the door. The marine guards were twenty feet away across the sidewalk, so he felt quite secure.
“You were great,” he said. “I can’t thank Kathy Reilly enough. If anything happens with this, I’ll try to repay you.”
“Swagger, get out alive. That’s all the repayment I need.”
“Good idea. Here, can you get rid of this?” He pushed the pistol across the seat toward her, wrapped in newspaper. “Just dump it in a trash can. It can’t be traced. Sorry, but I had to carry it until now.”
“It’s loaded?”
“Extremely.”
“I’ll throw it in a river.”
“Much better. It’s a great little gun. Saved the geezer bacon. Your friend Mr. Yexovich knows what he’s doing.”
“Ixovich. The oligarchs are all-wise. Plus, they give great parties. Endless caviar.”
He leaned and kissed her on the cheek. “Kathy Reilly. The best.”
“I’m sorry it didn’t work out.”
“Oh, that,” he said. “The trip.”
“The trip. You paid, what, forty thousand dollars in bribes—”
“Fifty. There was another installment.”
“You paid fifty grand in bribes, you got hunted like an animal for two weeks in the Moscow demimonde, you lost about twenty pounds, you got shot, and you didn’t find your red James Bond.”
He smiled. “That’s true. But it reminds me, I swore to set something right with you. Please don’t hate me, but I lied to you. Or rather, I played you a certain way.”
“Why is this not a surprise?”
“I told you I wanted to find the red James Bond—actually the super case officer. That was to motivate you to make that your goal, to try to see him everywhere, in every file and every report. You tried your damnedest to make me happy. But you failed. Except you succeeded. I wanted your best effort, because then I knew if you couldn’t find a red James Bond, there really wasn’t a red James Bond. See, a red James Bond screws everything up. He muddies the waters, makes all the linkages problems, confuses the lines of command, brings in foreign guys, makes the thing international and not home sweet home. It’s all spy-movie then, and I’m a lost puppy. So I was hoping to Christ he didn’t exist. But before I could move on, I had to make sure he never existed. He had to be eliminated. A lot of it is about elimination. It all traced back to the Soviet embassy, but as it turned out, the reds were conduits of information, and basically, everything they told that guy Mailer was true. Their role is small: their Oswald info was intercepted by the real killers. Now I can go after them.”
“If you can find out who they were, you mean?”
“Oh, no, Ms. Reilly. I know who they are. I’ve always known who they are, from the first second. That bicycle print; remember it? It’s actually from a wheelchair. I know the guy.”
“You know who they are?”
“I even know his name and what happened to him. I saw his body.”
“He’s dead?”
“Yeah, but he wasn’t the brains guy, the case officer. He was just operations. I think the case officer is still around, because he keeps trying to kill me.”
She looked at him, dumbfounded. “I don’t— I don’t know what to say.”
“You don’t have to say a thing,” he said. “There’s nothing to say anymore. It’s time to hunt.”
PART III
Back in the U.S.A.
“There’s a man with a gun over there”
CHAPTER 13
It’s a peculiar way to run an investigation,” said Nick.
Swagger couldn’t think of an answer. His hip had been sewn up, a process that essentially involved tying two slabs of scar tissue together with hemp thread, the highest, strongest magnitude, with a needle that looked like a stainless-steel flagpole; he’d been loaded with antibiotics, and the State Department, with FBI intervention, had found space for him to return from Moscow, quite the worse for wear, aboard its weekly diplomatic flight. Complaints had been filed; FBI agents were not permitted to work undercover in Moscow, much less shoot up parks with well-known gangsters, leaving bodies all over the ground. If the new director hadn’t been so busy giving speeches and interviews, he might have objected and brought heat and smoke on Nick, not his favorite to begin with, but he missed the boat on this one, so for the time being, it went officially unremarked upon.
Now Swagger sat in his living room in Idaho, hip sore and swaddled in bandages, in the silence of his disapproving wife and daughter, while Nick upbraided him.
“It’s not the diplomatic embarrassment I care about. I’m too old to give a damn about that. But this technique you’ve come up with is pretty spectacular. You find a target. You run at it in full aggression, guns blazing, daring it to destroy you. It makes that attempt, and somehow, by luck, talent, whatever, you survive and proceed to learn what can be learned from the assassins whom you’ve just killed. Does it ever occur to you that you’re too old for this kind of shit, that sooner or later your luck is going to run out, and when that happens, it will be tragic, as well as a mess for all involved?”
“It never occurs to him!” Jen hollered from the kitchen. “He is self-destructive and stupid.”
Bob didn’t answer her either; he couldn’t. “I didn’t plan on the gunfight,” he explained to Nick. “That was their idea. It came, we dealt with it, and we prevailed. We were armed, we reacted faster than they expected. We won the fight to the action curve. Honey, can you get me some more coffee?”
“Get it yourself,” came the call from the kitchen.
“I’d say your wife is a little perturbed.”
“Can you get Nick more coffee?”
“He can get it himself too.”
“There you have it,” said Bob. “At any rate, I feel we made substantial progress. I feel I have cleared the brush away from any high-level Soviet involvement in this thing, and that any information that was in play in ’63 may have originated in the Soviet embassy in Mexico City, but it was available to other parties.”
“Meaning Agency.”
“They were the ones who were listening.”
“Now you want to focus on the Agency, 1963.”
“Yeah, I know, there’s not much left of that place at that time. It was so long ago. Everybody’s dead. Still, if people in the Agency knew Oswald took a shot at Walker, which they could have learned from their intercepts, that made certain things possible. They used the same model in 1993 in their operation against Archbishop Roberto-Lopez. Manipulate a patsy into place with a known rifle, engineer some sophisticated ballistic deceit, have the backup shooter make the kill shot that the patsy couldn’t be trusted to make, then betray the patsy. It was the same goddamn thing.”
“It’s a lot of could haves, might haves, possiblys, and maybes,” said Nick.
“There was nothing possibly or maybe about the bullet Lon Scott was about to put into me, and there was nothing possibly or maybe about the bullet you put into him in 1993. You tagged him before he tagged me, maybe by a second.”
True enough. Nick remembered the six-hundred-yard shot, the way the dust or debris vibrated into a puff when he put the bullet into the man and watched him slump back and disappear into his hide. Later, he remembered looking at him, crushed, so still, just wreckage. Great shot, somebody said. It wasn’t till later that Nick learned that Lon was wheelchair-bound, and though confined to the steel trap, had fought his way admirably to a righteous life, that is, until the end.
“The ops were similar, yes. But there’s something in Latin that means ‘Just because it came first, doesn’t mean it caused it.’ In other words, they could have planned 1993 on the model of what they thought happened in 1963 or what could have happened in 1963. Nothing that happened in 1993 proves anything about 1963.”
“It’s too goddamn provocative to be left alone. Agree with me on that. That’s the favor I’m asking. You’ve come this far. It’s worth a hard look, and people seem to be trying to kill me because I’m taking that hard look.
And you remember the 1993 people even better than I do. One in particular.”
“I remember him,” said Nick, thinking of the frosty figure of a man called Hugh Meachum, who supposedly represented the “Buddings Institute of Foreign Policy” but clearly spoke for a larger, more secretive entity when he tried to convince Nick to testify against Bob.
“So . . . are you going to help me?” asked Bob. “I know you’ve gone way out on a limb, but the fact that twice, high-priced, highly connected killers have tried for me, and that previously one of them killed James Aptapton, is evidence that we’re close to something.”
Nick shook his head.
“I know you’ve never really believed in this,” said Bob. “I’m not sure I do either. But I don’t know what to do except push ahead. Here’s one idea. The people who tried to take Stronski and me out were from an outfit called the Izmaylovskaya gang, known to be the most violent of the Russian mobs. They seem to be, by reputation, connected to an oligarch named Viktor Krulov, very powerful international presence, that sort of thing. Could we run a deep cyber-search of Krulov? See what connections he has to American businesses. My assumption is that whoever hired the Izzys had to do so under the auspices of Krulov. So if we get a shake-out on Krulov’s business affiliations in the U.S., we’ll know who was capable of making such an arrangement. There’s also one named Yeksovich. No, no, dammit, Ixovich. Weird name, huh? He owns some gun companies, and that might tie him to arms exports that might involve criminal activity and possibly the Izzies.”
“Yes, I will look into Krulov and Ixovich.”
“Okay, the next thing is Hugh Meachum.”
“He died in 1993.”
“Officially. That has to be looked at carefully.”
“I have. Unlike John Thomas Albright, whose life as Lon Scott was clumsily hidden, everything about Meachum’s death is perfect. All t’s crossed, all i’s dotted. I looked very carefully at the public documents, and they are complete,” said Nick.
“But he was a spy, one of the best. He would be good at that.”