The Third Bullet (36 page)

“I will show you.” He reached into his shirt and pulled out an envelope that he had been careful not to fold. He pulled a photograph out of it. “See,” he said, “this is who I really am.”

I pulled to the side of the road and turned on the light in the car. The photo later became world-famous when it appeared on the cover of
Life
magazine and a thousand crazed conspiracy books. You’ve seen it. Alek in black, holding his rifle across his body, his pistol tucked into his belt, and in his other hand copies of the
Daily Worker
and the
Trotskyist International
—he had no idea that these two organs, like the parties they represented, were in blood opposition to each other—staring forthrightly at the camera lens in poor Marina’s hand, wearing that eternal smirk of the sucker who thinks he’s figured the game as the game is figuring him. I could see that it was a kind of romantic image of the red guerrilla that animated his deepest fantasies, like something out of the 1910s, an assassin,
a bomber with a bowling-ball explosive and a long, sparkling fuse, a Gavrilo Princip, a figure out of Conrad. I felt sorry for a man who could be so deluded even as I said, “Yes, Alek. That is it. That’s the spirit we need!”

I spent the next few days holed up, working on The Plan. I went back to the operational zone a couple of times, I took public transportation to and from, I walked the distances, I charted the police activity, I noted the mileages to the police stations, I had margaritas at the Patio so I could determine whether Alek’s movement on the roof or my shooter in the car where I would place him would be particularly visible. I even climbed up on the roof in old blue jeans and boat shoes, Yale poof playing Jedburgh commando! I got a good look at Alek’s shooting position and tried to imagine his actions.

I knew certain things. First, that the immediate result of the shot would be a frozen moment of fear followed by absolute chaos. As I saw it, my shooter would have the general zeroed and be well prepared for Alek’s shot. If Alek missed, he would fire a silenced shot (I took on faith that Lon would solve all problems), finishing the issue. But witnesses would remember it differently; some would say there came a shot and the general’s head exploded, and others would say there was a shot and the general’s head exploded a full second later. What if Alek missed and the bullet was recovered? That would be dicey, yes, but it would be so confusing to everybody that no one would get it. There would be—assuming Lon had worked it out—no record of a second bullet existing. Since the Patio was brick, the building behind it stone, there was a good chance that a miss by Alek would shatter on a hard surface. In any event, the worst-case scenario seemed to amount to confusion, conflicting theories, an eternal mystery, a suspicion that there was more to know—but nothing substantial leading to our plot, except a theoretically captured Alek’s crazed insistence that the reds had made him do it.

The difficult part wasn’t the plan itself but reducing it to easily remembered components. I tried to find a mnemonic device that would help Alek’s pea brain retain the information. I came up with APPLE: approach,
position, patience, liquidation, escape. I knew that “liquidation” was weak, but I had to get a known word out of the puzzle. Since it was a word associated in the popular imagination with old NKVD practices and employed frequently by the patron saint of agents, Ian Fleming, in his Bond books (which Alek had read devotedly), it was okay but not optimal. I thought that authorities would consider it the kind of hokey nonsense a fantasist like Alek would come up with.

Each letter had further information associated with it. APPROACH had a set of numbers, 830 15-33-15, which meant 8:30 bus no. 15 to Thirty-third Street, fifteen-minute walk down Thirty-third to target area.

And so forth and so on, very secret agent–like. I thought Alek would enjoy the primitive spycraft, and if I got his imagination fired up, maybe he’d apply himself.

I sent him a postcard, knowing in those days of postal efficiency, it would be delivered the next day. It simply said, “Texas Theatre, 8 p.m. show.” That was the movie house a mile or so from his roominghouse, where, ironically, he would be arrested on November 22.

That night he showed up. The movie was absurd, something about teenagers on a beach, and I could not stand it. I’d noted him when he came in. I went, sat next to him for a second, and dropped the plan (in an envelope) in his hands.

I whispered, “Take it home, commit it to memory, and copy it in your own hand. Do not destroy it. It must be returned to me when next I make contact. Every night study it until you know it by heart. Run through it one night and be sure you can make all the connections. I will be back in contact in ten days or so, the week of the eighteenth. Our target date is November twenty-fifth, that Monday night.”

Then I left. You must remember, in those days there were no easily accessible copying machines. Xerox had yet to take over the world, there was no fax, and the only “copiers” were extremely expensive photocopiers of the sort that produced negative imagery, to which Alek, in his reduced circumstances, would be unlikely to have access. I knew that making a copy of it was beyond him.

I left him in the Texas Theatre, while silly California girls did the frug and the monkey on-screen, and disappeared into the night. I had become an expert on Dallas transportation, so I walked a few blocks west and caught a bus downtown. The next day I flew back to Boston and then back to D.C. My next mission was to see what Lon had come up with.

It took most of the day to get back from Dallas. I had
to pay cash for the flight to Boston, take a cab to Cambridge, sneak upstairs, come down and check out of the hotel, take another cab back to Logan, then the flight to National. The only problem was the checkout, where the clerk said, “Was everything all right, sir? We noticed you didn’t seem to sleep in the bed.”

I said, “Yes, it was fine. Look, if anyone should ever ask, it’ll be my wife’s private detectives. So take
this
”—I winked and handed him two twenties, after having considered the whole flight back to Boston how much to pay, twenty being too little and apt to annoy him and fifty being too generous and apt to prove memorable—“and remember to forget that I never mussed the sheets.”

“Yes sir,” he said with a smile. “And I bet the housekeeping reports disappear too!” In those days, all us “wolves” hung together; manhood was a national adultery culture, possibly under the influence of
Playboy
magazine, which made such activities hep, like jazz and hi-fi. I never once cheated on Peggy, but many was the time I used the pretense of such a thing to help me out of a tight one.

I called Peggy from National and told her I was back, I’d be home, but first I wanted to run to the office. It made sense, because once I was on the GW Memorial Parkway, it was just a few exits beyond the Key Bridge, and I was at our big shiny new campus.

I went to my office—it was more than half empty because I arrived around 5—and quickly typed up a fictional report on my PEACOCK adventures,
what young writing stars I had talked to, which of them were likely to go into journalism, which would waste their lives writing movies or potboilers or even, God help them, television. I should say as an aside that after Dallas, I moved PEACOCK from its fictional guise to an actual existence, and it was one of the Agency’s enduring successes. I made friends through PEACOCK who served me the remainder of my years at Langley, particularly in Vietnam, when I ran Phoenix and wanted to get the Agency’s side of the story told in the right papers; it exists, in slightly different form, to this day.

I also checked on three operations I was in charge of that seemed to require no immediate influence and whose details will only bore the reader, as they would bore the writer; I sent inter-office notes to a few colleagues with updates, questions, requests, to get back into the flow of things and make sure my absence hadn’t been noted.

Then it was home by 9; Peggy had a highball waiting, and before I had a sip, I visited each of the boys to find that the pattern was the same. Jack had missed me and showed it and gave me a big hug; Peter, my middle boy, never had much use for me and more or less communicated his indifference (yet I am told he gave the most passionate oration at my “funeral” in 1993); and Will hadn’t really noticed, as he’d had games or practice on all the days when I was gone. Peggy and I had a late supper, and she went to bed and I poured another highball and told her I’d be up in a bit, I just wanted to check the mail.

I’m glad I did. Mostly, it was bills, but there was one strange, rather large envelope without a return address. Hefting it, I suspected it contained some kind of tabular matter; it had the weight of heavy paper. I noted that it was postmarked Roanoke, near Lon’s place in southwestern Virginia.

I opened it up. It was a copy of a magazine called
Guns & Ammo,
and it was full of pictures of various firearms and articles on such things as “Remington’s New 700: A Challenger to the Model 70?” and “Llama’s Big .44 Mag Makes Its Point Loud and Clear,” whatever those things meant.
Flipping through it once, I noted nothing. Flipping through it a second time, I noted that one of the center pages seemed heavier or less flimsy than the others. I looked closely and realized that pages 42 and 43 had been glued together. I peeled them apart, and a letter fell out on the floor. I had to laugh; Lon was playing cloak-and-dagger tricks on me, to his own merriment.

I picked it up and read the salutation:

To: Commander Bond 007

From: Technical Department

Re: The Assassination of Dr. No

Disposition: Burn After Reading

Good old Lon. Ever the cheerful gamesman, and it was in that vein he began.

Commander Bond, I have given much thought and some experimentation to your requirements and believe I have just found a solution. Put a pot of coffee on because you’ve got a long night or afternoon ahead of you, much of it boring, unless you’re like me and find the arcana of firearms and ballistics fascinating in and of their own. But since that’s about .0001 percent of the population, I wish you luck.

I should hereby give the same admonition to the reader. Henry James’s explication of the prose narrative—“Dramatize, dramatize, dramatize!”—will hereby be put aside and replaced by “explain, explain, explain.” For you to understand how we managed to fool the world for half a century, you must steel yourself to the assault of the details.

After reading Lon’s letter, I burned it in the fireplace. Probably a week hasn’t gone by in the fifty years since that I haven’t thought of it, for it made, as I knew it would, what happened possible. It was the fulcrum of the event. I think I remember it pretty well, so I will now give it to you as I got it from my great and tragic cousin Lon:

Let me begin by narrowly defining the technical requirements. You, James Bond, have been assigned to eliminate one Dr. No for his multifarious crimes. Yet you cannot be caught, and there can be no evidence of your involvement or the British Secret Service’s involvement. Fortunately, you have a handy patsy, Felix Leiter of the American CIA, that dunderheaded American would-be intelligence service. Poor Felix: you can manipulate him into almost anything because he so wants to be like the debonair, suave, bunny-bagging Commander Bond. So you have easily conned him into taking a sniper shot at Dr. No. Alas, he has only one weapon available, and that is a surplus war rifle of Italian vintage, namely a Model 38 6.5 mm Mannlicher-Carcano carbine with a dreary Japanese telescopic sight of questionable utility. You worry that Felix is incapable of making the shot, so you have arranged for a backup shooter of much higher ability to be present at the moment of the killing. If Felix, as is probable, misses, the agile backup shooter will take the kill in the next second or so. But all ballistic evidence must point at Felix; he is the Judas goat in the operation.

I will not worry here about firing angles, getaways, placement, any of that stuff. That is your department. I will not worry about the disposition of poor Felix; that is yours as well. Mine is simply the technical: how can backup Shooter X put a bullet into Dr. No’s cerebellum and leave no trace of his existence so that the apprehended Felix Leiter is held responsible for the shot, as proved by the ballistic forensics scientifically applied by experts. It’s the case of the bullet that never was.

This is what I would do. First, I would provide Felix with the ammunition he is to use, having previously secured an example of it myself [this I had already done, basically on instinct, so I was ahead of the game]. So we give Felix a box of 6.5 mm Mannlicher-Carcano ammunition manufactured by the Western Cartridge Company under contract from the Italian government, declared surplus by the Italians, resold to American wholesalers, and packaged in a nice
white box. The bullet Shooter X fires is basically identical to Felix’s and off the same cartridge-manufacturing line at Western’s St. Louis manufacturing facility.

We have before us one of those cartridges. Let us examine it. It is blunt-tipped with a copper-coated bullet protruding from its brass case that has an unusually exaggerated length given the overall size of the cartridge. It doesn’t look like a missile so much as a cartridge case with a cigar stuck in it. It is a heavy, dense item for its size, speaking eloquently of its seriousness of purpose.