The man wore the baggy, nondescript workingman’s grunge so common in Eastern Europe and Russia, corduroys, an untucked plaid shirt, an indifferent burgundy jacket of some Chinese miracle fabric whose zipper didn’t quite work, a watch cap pulled low over his eyes. He carried no luggage, though anyone with a close eye for observation might have noted a bulge on his hip, even possibly suspected that it represented the sleek lines of an IxGroup GSh-18. But nobody had that close an eye. He was too ordinary.
He was one of Moscow’s unseen millions. The cheekbones suggested Magyar or Tartar; the gray hair, full and brushy, suggested good genes; and he kept his mouth closed because his teeth were too bright and he knew few Russian factory men used Crest White Strips. He had picked up a pair of red and white Nike rip-offs made in Malaysia, and he walked like any of the proletariat of the earth, head down, hands stuffed disconsolately into his jacket pockets, not quite homeless but seemingly without destination, past or future. Flashing Russian Federation ID, he checked in to a workingman’s hotel in a zone far out of the flashier precincts of the new Moscow, disco king, BMW and Porsche capital, Armani outpost of the world. There he sat in his room and waited for four days, eating mainly from food-dispensing machines in the Underground station nearby, where his lack of Russian wouldn’t cause problems or be noted, nursing his scraggy beard and unkempt hair. He let his teeth turn yellow with disinterest and the hair in his nostrils grow repulsively.
He had one companion on this journey into shadow: Lee Harvey Oswald. The killer would not leave him alone and haunted his dreams. Swagger could not stop thinking about him; it seemed just when sleep was deepest, Lee Harvey would poke him in the ribs and start muttering in his ear. Actually, it was his subconscious muttering in his ear, and the damned thing was no respecter of regular work hours.
So Swagger blinked awake in his Russian shithole, more like a fifties-man-on-the-run hideout than anything, and a voice was muttering to him about the timing.
The timing, it kept saying, the timing.
The timing was 4:17 a.m., that was the timing.
But no sleep returned, and the voice grew louder, and he saw that the muttering came from his own throat.
Timing. Timing! Timing: this is where most conspiracy theories wander out into the ozone. Because the time schedule was so fucking fast from the evening of November 19, when the route became known, to the early afternoon of November 22, when the kill shot was delivered-sixty-six hours-a great number of things had to happen very quickly. Those who wanted to believe in conspiracy could only ascribe that kind of speed and efficiency to the result of deep government intrigue. Someone in “deep government,” in a shadow department of great but unseen influence, was able to arrange something far in advance so that immaculate long-range planning could be initiated: Oswald had to be found and brought under discipline, a job for him had to be arranged, and that job had to be on the motorcade route that itself had to be forced on the Kennedy people. Since only CIA was paid to do such things professionally, quite naturally, CIA was almost always invoked. Since both CIA and FBI had previous knowledge of, ran files on, and had dealings with Oswald, their presence could be quite naturally inferred. But that was all shit.
The hard data points of the assassination totally dismissed any deep-government intrigue; rather, things happened as they do normally: by chance opportunity, by whimsy, turning on someone’s eavesdropping.
Swagger felt he was on to something. He ordered himself to begin at a beginning: how did Lee Harvey Oswald end up in the Texas Book Depository on November 22, 1963? Swagger recalled Posner and Bugliosi. The first hard fact that would never go away was that he got the job before there’d been any announcement that JFK would come to Dallas at a specific time and date (there was a general acknowledgment that the president, for political reasons, would have to make a Texas trip “in the fall”). So any idea of “placing” Oswald in TBD was absurd on its face. What would be the point of placing him in any building in Dallas against the faint possibility that the president might someday drive by? Don’t make me laugh. And that becomes even more ridiculous in view of what actually happened.
He got that job the way most people get most jobs. Someone who knew that he was looking for work heard a certain place was hiring, made some phone calls, notified Lee, and Lee showed up in a place he’d never heard of, was hired in the lowliest of positions-essentially a stock boy-and started work the next morning, Wednesday, October 16, at $1.25 an hour. Were these CIA or military-industrial-complex shadow agents or even Men from U.N.C.L.E. or SPECTRE manipulating bureaucracies to bring killer and victim within range? Hardly. They were the redoubtable Ruth Paine, a sublimely decent Quaker gal who had met and taken a liking to Marina Oswald and was trying to help her by helping her husband, whom she didn’t like much-she had a nose for character, that one-and Roy Truly, supervisor of the Book Depository, who was always filling his staff of clerks with transients, knowing that the jobs were perishable and demanded little except a strong back and a willingness to do boring, menial work. In fact, Truly was responsible for another facility and assigned Oswald to the Dallas building only on a whim; he could have as easily sent him to the suburbs. By what secret method did the U.N.C.L.E. agent Ruth Paine learn that Truly was hiring? She heard a neighbor’s son had just been hired there!
Swagger was now up, walking about, the muttering getting louder.
Later that week, the White House announced that there would be a fall trip. But planning didn’t begin on the trip for some time. Agendas had to be worked out and translated into schedules, which had to be coordinated with Texas officials as well as the vice president’s office. All this took time and negotiation, and it wasn’t until November 16 that the Dallas Trade Mart was selected as the site for the president’s 1 p.m. luncheon speech. The Secret Service advance party didn’t arrive in Dallas until the seventeenth, to begin the more intensive preparation for the trip; and it wasn’t until the nineteenth, when two Secret Service officers and two ranking Dallas officers drove the routes from Love Field, where the president would arrive on the twenty-second, to the Trade Mart, that a certain route-the one that took the president down Main, to a right-hand jog on Houston, to a sharp left-hand turn down Elm to access the Stemmons Freeway entrance-was selected.
At best, a “mole” representing the deep-government conspiracy could have alerted the kill team the night of the nineteenth; but in all likelihood, the killer (or killers) didn’t find out about it until the next morning, when the route ran on the front page of the Dallas Morning News. Since Oswald was in the habit of reading day-old newspapers, he probably didn’t learn about it until November 21, the day before.
Swagger tried to advocate against himself for a bit. If indeed there was a conspiracy planning to kill JFK in Dallas long before Oswald entered the picture, he thought, it would have had a maximum of the night of the nineteenth, the days of the twentieth and twenty-first and half a day of the twenty-second, sixty-six hours, to do the following:
Find and recruit Oswald and get him committed to the sixth-floor Book Depository shot.
Learn what kind of rifle he would be using.
Develop a method of ballistically “counterfeiting” the rifle that was so successful, it would withstand nearly fifty years of the highest-tech scrutiny, with the tech getting higher every decade.
Find an alternative shooter who could make the head shot on the president that everyone who knew Oswald would consider well beyond his modest range of talent.
Find an alternative shooting site whose angle to the target was close enough so the trajectory of the counterfeited bullet wouldn’t give the game away.
Plan and execute an entrance and exit with such precision that it would go unnoticed in the hubbub.
One more thing occurred to him, and he wondered why his gun-soaked brain hadn’t come up with it earlier: the rifle would have to be silenced so its noise wouldn’t give away the existence and locale of the second shooter. Silencers, more accurately “suppressors,” are not easy to come by. In the first place, they are Class III items, controlled by federal regulation, like machine guns. It’s probably safe to assume that, as with machine guns, professional government espionage agencies and underworld organizations have access to them, but procuring them quickly and testing them for effectiveness and their influence on the point of impact demands time that these theoretical conspirators didn’t have. Also, a sudden search for such a device is certain to have attracted notice, and even in (or particularly in) the underworld, people talk. If circa November 20, 1963, a search of underworld inventories for a rifle suppressor had been suddenly run, snitches sure as hell would have squawked to the police as a way of sliding a few months off a breaking-and-entering sentence. So the suppressor remains completely mysterious, another item that could not have been obtained in the time frame without having left a record.
BANG! BANG! BANG!
He looked around, startled. It was someone in the next room pounding on the wall. Something was yelled in Russian, presumably “Shut up, asshole.”
Swagger took the hint.
He turned off the light and crept back into bed, and this time sleep was awarded him. But he had a new conclusion to add to his mental inventory: they’d have to be the best team ever assembled in order to bring it off.
On the fifth day, late in the afternoon, he took a roundabout walk to the Underground and headed into another precinct of Moscow.
He arrived at the flea market late. Most of the tourists had left, there was little activity, and already the merchants were rearranging their wares and closing their booth fronts. It was another maze, as avenue bisected avenue on a square mile, all of it with the appearance of something temporary that had become something permanent. Most of the structures were low wooden booths, possibly walled or awned in canvas. The plaza of low-end retail was dominated by a central building in the old style, with the typical onion-shaped dome of gold gilding, which rose on a tower from a complex structure that could have been a monastery or a refurbed software outlet. The flea market was the place to go for nesting dolls, which had come to represent the universal symbol of Russia, and shop after shop offered them in dazzling variety, including those boasting the symbols of great NFL teams, as each doll inside revealed a new and smaller icon of gridiron greatness. Ceramics were another popular sales item, as were watches, particularly the Russian diver’s model with the screw-on cap chained to the case protecting the winder, jewelry, knickknacks of all sorts, imitation icons, photo books, and store after store of medals and badges where you could pick up a Panzer-killer award with three bars, signifying that you had knocked out three Tiger IIs in the ruins of Stalingrad.
Swagger dawdled here and there, setting up switchbacks and ambushes to check if he was being followed. Finally, satisfied that he was at least for now unobserved, he found a corner, navigated a street and then another, and found his destination, a surplus-military hardware shop that sold ponchos, helmets, bayonets, T-shirts, boots, tunics, everything that spoke of war, including some old Marine Corps helmets with the jungle-green camouflage cover. He slid up, pointed to the pile of helmets, and said to the proprietor, “I’ll take six of them, please.”
The man looked up from his newspaper, took a second to comprehend, then said, in English, “Jesus Christ, Swagger.”
That he spoke English was no surprise, since the flea market’s economy sustained itself on tourism, so if a fellow wanted to make a living, he had to know the language of the people with the dough.
“I have to see Stronski.”
There was nobody else around, though down the way, an old woman was closing down a nesting-doll joint, delicately stacking the ornate doll faces back on the counter so they would be enclosed when she lowered the shutter.
“Man, do you know you are the most hunted guy in this town? Here, look at this.”
He shoved over a piece of paper from the mess on his counter, and Swagger beheld himself, sans the beard and low cap, in a kind of Disney caricature.
“My eyes aren’t that close together,” he said, and in a second tumbled to the rest: how had they-never mind yet who they were-gotten this out so fast, so completely, so nearly lethally? How did they know? The intelligence operation was superlative. Whoever put it together-the red James Bond again? — knew what he was doing.
He felt his anxiety level raise six degrees. “Is it shoot on sight or anything like that?”
“No,” said Stronski’s man. “Person of interest. The instructions are ‘detain for questioning.’ They had these all over the place four days ago.”
“Figures. Three days ago I went and saw a cop, and his eyes lit up when he looked at me. I didn’t know why, but I had a feeling he’d seen me before and was interested in continuing the relationship. I thought it was time to blow town fast. I’ve spent the last four days in a crummy room in the crummy suburbs, sneaking out at night to buy clothes from used-and-maybe-washed places.”
“And here you are now. The underground man. You could be some Raskolnikov lurking in an alley with an ax. Who’d notice you except for the height?”
“Where is Stronski?”
“You never know where Stronski is. He hides well. He was a sniper.”
“So I’ve heard,” said Swagger.
“We’ll disappear you.”
It became a progression of squalors. He was shunted from place to place in darkness, by friends of Stronski’s, who had no names and issued no instructions. Some spoke English, most did not. He stayed in a room in a brothel and heard people fucking all night. He stayed behind a Laundromat in a room of near-unbearable heat with lint floating in the air. He stayed in the cellar of a Star Dog place that sold imitation American hot dogs. He had one. It was good.
Always, it was the same: at a certain time in the evening, a new man showed, picked him up, and drove him through dismal streets to another dismal hovel. Without a word, he was dropped, entered, shown by his new host his deluxe suite for the night, and there he spent the next twenty-two hours. A farmhouse, a suburban garage, another brothel, the rear of a pawnshop, on and on, for what seemed weeks but was shy of one. Time doesn’t fly when you’re not having fun. He lived in a cold fusion of nerves and shallow sleep, knowing in his heart of hearts that he was exactly where no man should be, hunted in a country whose language he didn’t speak, whose streets he didn’t know, and whose culture baffled him. He knew also: I am too old for this. But it was a thing he had to do. He had given his word. Crazy with honor? Nah. Stubborn was all, an old crank’s privilege.
Food was brought or bought, but nowhere within the whole elaborate structure of escape and evasion was there a cash economy, and no one wanted or would accept payment.
On the seventh day, he was dropped at a bar and told “fourth booth.” He entered a dark place full of bitter, isolated drinkers, found his way through the low lighting and the cigarette smoke, slid into booth no. 4, and indeed, there was Stronski.
“My friend,” said Stronski. “Still alive by the narrowest of margins. They’re hunting you everywhere.”
“Do we know who ‘they’ are?”
“Powerful enemy, whoever. The Izmaylovskaya have called in a lot of favors and essentially control a large part of the police apparat. You never know which cop is your friend, decent, honest guy, and which is Izzy, who will make a call and send the killers on your tail in a second. The main thing is, we have to get you out of here. That is why I have you moved around, wait until the novelty of manhunt has worn off and watchers aren’t so watchful.”
Swagger nodded. “Good strategy.”
“I think,” Stronski said, “now it’s good to go. You rest tonight, tomorrow you will be taken to truck yard and hidden in long-distance trailer north, out of Moscow. Long ride, my friend, over seven hundred miles. You’ll make it out soft route on the Finnish border. I have friends there too. Finland, Sweden, you home safe with warm memories of Mother Russia.”
“No,” said Swagger.
“No? What the fuck, brother? Is it money? No money. It’ll cost you nothing! This isn’t about money, at least your money. This is business. I back you, I give you my loyalty, no matter what it costs short-term, people have to know Stronski can be trusted. That’s my long-term. I got you into Lubyanka, I’ll get you out of Russia, everyone says you go to Stronski, you get what you bargained for. He is man of trust. In my business, that’s money in the bank.”
“That’s not it. I still have business here. There’s a last detail that has to be nailed down, and I’m not leaving until I’ve nailed it.”
“Swagger, are you nuts? These Izzy birds are gunning to kill you. They are not going away soon. They will in time track you down, it has to happen. Somebody will see, somebody will call, gunmen will show. Don’t matter if you’re in nice restaurant, in park, in orphanage, it don’t matter. In they come, blazing, killing any and all in the way, and that’s you on the floor, leaking. Nobody wants to leak.”
“I don’t want to leak. But I can’t move on unless I cover one more thing.”
“Goddamn, Swagger, you are a stubborn bastard.”
“I need to get back into the Lubyanka.”
“Jesus Christ! That’s the one place they look hardest for you. You’d be the one hundred thousandth killed there, but the first sniper. You want that record?”
“Of course not. But I don’t mean I’d go myself. I mean my representative. I have to get a man in there. Get him in there to check a certain thing. Then I am out of here.”
Stronski’s blunt face showed frustration. “Swagger, go home. Tell me what it is. I will find out. I will let you know. No need to die for something so small.”
“No, I have to debrief the guy who goes in. I have to see him, talk to him, ask him stuff so I trust him. So there are no doubts. That is why there is only one man for the job. That is you, Stronski.”
“Jesus Christ, you’ll get me killed too in your madness over something that happened fifty years ago. Crazy, man, crazy.”
“I have to trust the guy. I trust Stronski. Then we have to have a sit-down afterward in some safe place in Moscow for a debrief.”
He did trust Stronski. Also, knowing Stronski, he felt he could read the man’s face more than he could read a stranger’s.
“Money. You know the price that shit charges? And that was after haggling.”
“I don’t care.”
“Man, you don’t. I never thought I’d meet a guy who didn’t care about money, but that’s you, brother.”
“Maybe it won’t be as much. It’s just you, for under an hour, not the three of us in all night, prowling, two of us American. And you’re not in the big room, you’re in that other room, the counterespionage annex on the other floor.”
“If I do this, you’ll go home?”
“I’ll walk into the American embassy and turn myself over to the Marines. They’ll get me home easily enough. No Finland border stuff, no crawling through the snow. I’m way too old for that.”
Stronski shook his head in doubt.
“We’ll set it up,” Swagger said, “so that I meet you somewhere public close by the embassy. We have our debrief chat, that’s that, shake hands, and I walk into the embassy. They’ll cooler me for a day or so, but they’ll verify me through U.S. sources, the FBI will okay it, and I’m out of here. Does that work for you?”
“What makes you think I can do it? I am sniper, not professor. That Kathy, she was good, she would get it, but me? Suppose I can’t find it?”
“I’m sure you can.”
“What would it be?”
“There has to be a security sweep every few years. All services do that. I have to know to what degree the embassy in Mexico City, particularly the KGB suites, were penetrated in 1963. That was the game back then. Microphones all over the place, in the most amazing locations. Stalin’s eye, Lenin’s beard, the men’s room urinal. That place, the American place, all the places all over the world, they were radio stations broadcasting twenty-four hours a day, and not far away we had a little roomful of listeners writing it all down or monitoring the tape recorders. There were no secrets, at least not until cyber-cryptography came in, and that probably didn’t last too long either. I need confirmation that anything Oswald told the KGB goons wasn’t private. That is, it reached other parties.”
“I think I know who you’re talking about,” said Stronski.
“Yes. The red James Bond didn’t have to be red at all. He could have been a listener. And who was he listening for? He could have worked for the CIA.”