The Third Bullet (43 page)

He finished on Brophy’s fictional JFK obsession. “Some years ago, I got hooked on JFK’s death. More I read, more I questioned. Read some conspiracy crap and was not impressed. Read Warren, and it seemed ragged. Started thinking hard about it, using my engineer’s brain. Realized a couple of years ago, I had enough money to last several lifetimes and two or three more wives, so I decided I was tired of sleeping bags and would prefer to spend the rest of my life going into this thing in eighth gear and seeing where it would take me. Always loved guns, so that was a start, and I guess ’cause I’m mechanical by nature, my approach has always been through the guns. Interesting. Somehow I came up with some ideas that I don’t believe nobody has, and I’m trying to push forward from them. Not for money, not for fame, just because of a goddamned stubborn streak. If I dig a shaft, I like to have something to show for it. Is that enough for you, Mr. Adams?”

“Excellent account, Mr. Brophy. I’m going to make the first move here and divulge a portion of what I’ve found out. You see if it squares with what you know, and we’ll see where we are at the end.”

“Go to work, sir,” Swagger said.

“All right, here’s my story. I am always looking for subjects for the next book. Some months ago I got interested, quite innocently, in the life and career of a great but tragic American shooter named Lon Scott—”

Swagger’s eyes stayed modestly interested, his breathing smooth, his lips unlicked. He gave away nothing and made certain not to choose this moment to break off eye contact and take a sip of coffee.

“Lon Scott. Interesting fellow,” Adams continued. Then he went ahead to issue the specifics on Lon Scott, the bright youth, the safari heroics, the football stardom at New Haven, the extraordinary run of national match successes in the years after World War II, the tragic accident in ’55 at the hands of his father, his father’s suicide, his reemergence as a writer and experimenter in the late fifties, and then his own death in 1964.

“Sad story,” said Bob as at last Marty had to take a breath and left a gap in the noise. “I hate it when someone so talented gets cut down young. Fella had a lot more to contribute.”

“Yes, it does seem so,” Adams said. “Then I made another interesting discovery.”

He went on to tell how, in the early seventies, a fellow named John Thomas Albright emerged as a gun writer and ballistics authority and soon became a revered if mysterious figure in gun culture. He had an excellent career until he was killed in a hunting accident in 1993, at the age of sixty-eight. “I learned by accident that he was also disabled, wheelchair-bound. You’d never know it from his writing. I checked for pictures, and none existed that I could find. I went to Albright’s home in rural North Carolina and learned that he was a mystery there as well. I began to wonder: could Albright and Scott be the same fellow? If so, why would Lon contrive his own fraudulent death in 1964 and reemerge as John Thomas Albright? What was he hiding or hoping to distance himself from?”

The question hung unanswered for a moment or two, and Bob
glanced at the grim countenance of Richard, the third member of the group, and then answered. “I suppose you’re referring to our point of common interest, a certain event in November 1963.”

Adams, versed in upping the dramatic ante on his tale, paused an artful second or so, then nodded. He waited another second.

“Of course. So I decided to look into the life of these two men more carefully. I discovered that while, obviously, Lon Scott never published an article after 1964, John Thomas Albright never published one before 1964. I acquired copies of all their articles and first by myself and then with the help of an academic who specializes in forensic reading, we made a line-by-line comparison and found deep organizational similarities as well as dozens of turns of phrase that were similar. I found three cases where Albright made reference to discoveries that Scott had made as if they were his own. I discovered that the documentation on Scott’s death was very, very thin, as if contrived by an amateur. I could go on with the irregularities, but the point is obvious: Lon became John. The question is, why?”

“You’re in areas I haven’t even gotten to yet,” said Swagger. “You’re coming at it from a different angle. See, I’m on the
how
. The way an engineer’s mind works, there’s no point in proceeding until the how is answered. But you’ve started on, or you’ve advanced to, the who.”

“You can see what I need,” said Adams. “I need that
how
. Just like you need the
who
. So what I’m looking for, basically, is a theory. It’s one thing to put together a biography full of mysterious elements that might circumspectly suggest that Lon Scott, a great rifleman and ballistic experimenter, was involved in the Kennedy assassination to some degree. But a lot of people, if the data is manipulated and selected carefully enough, could fit in a similar template. What I need is somebody of extreme capability to put together a coherent narrative, based on what I can uncover about Lon Scott in 1963, as to the
how
part of his engagement. Where would he shoot from? What would he use? How would he get in and out? Who helped him? Remember, he’s in a wheelchair, so he needed allies. Here’s a provocative
fact: I learned that he had a first cousin named Hugh Meachum who was some kind of CIA star at the time. He too died in 1993. But the connection of Lon and Hugh in 1963, if it can be documented, is titillating. But see, it’s all meaningless without that first part. How did they do it?”

“You don’t have any idea?”

“Well,” said Marty smugly, “I can’t reveal how I know this yet, but there is some suggestion that another rifle is involved, and it was a Model 70 Winchester. It’s more than Lon’s engagement over the years with Winchester. I’m talking about a specific Model 70, caliber as yet unknown. I got to thinking: what could you do to either a Model 70 Winchester or a Mannlicher-Carcano to make them compatible? Somehow interchange parts? Take the barrel off one and—”

“Trust me,” said Bob, “you are now in my pea patch, and there is a way of doing just that. That’s where my thinking is taking me. I’m looking at some kind of deal where a .264-caliber bullet from a Carcano shell was fired from a .264-caliber casing, say .264 Win Mag, 6.5 Swede, maybe a wildcat like a .30-06/6.5, in order to get enough velocity so the brain-shot bullet self-destructed.”

“Excellent,” said Marty. “Oh, this is so exciting.”

“There’s an issue of timing, but the reloading angle is interesting. And you say you can link it to a Model 70? That would really tie the bow on it.”

“That’s it,” Adams said. “I’m hoping the answers are in sync with the Warren Commission, not crazily opposed to it. You have to know the hard facts of the Warren Commission. And it all has to fit in that time frame. Nobody has ever come close to that.”

Swagger went all engineer on him, hard and practical. “I can see this might work. But what’s your pitch?” he asked. “What is it you want from me?”

Adams said, “Well, I’d like to hear your ideas, though, please understand, I’m not forcing you. Your theory is your intellectual property. I am not trying to pry it from you. You decide if you care to share
somewhere along the line. What I am suggesting is that we explore working together. I’d get a lawyer to draw up a contract so that each of us is protected. I know you’re a cautious man. When you’re satisfied, we should have a working session and a frank exchange of evidence. I should also tell you—I alluded to this earlier—I may have a piece of evidence that could nail this absolutely. I won’t tell you what it is or where I got it, but it could astound the world if it’s what I think it is.”

“Is it this mystery Model 70?”

“When I explain it to you, you’ll understand what I’m talking about. I can’t say more until we’ve signed contractually. I should add that I have a very good agent in New York, and we are talking about a book as the end product, are we not? I will write it, you will vet it. We may have to bring in another, better writer at some point, properly vetted and legally obligated by contract to us. Is this satisfactory?”

Swagger squinted hard. “I never move fast on anything. You have your lawyer draw up that contract, I’ll have mine look at it, and we will see where we are then.”

“That works for me,” said Adams.

“If that happens, I will settle down and write—I ain’t no writer, so ‘scratch out’ is a better term—all the stuff that comes out when I have a late-night thinking session. I think that will do better than any yakkity-yak session. You’ll see that it’s taking you where you think it should. We’ll proceed from there.”

“Absolutely,” said Adams. “I don’t want to apply pressure, but I think we should have as our goal, going public, by either book or other media, by or on November 22, 2013. The fiftieth anniversary. There’s going to be a groundswell of attention then, so we might as well cash in on it. It never hurts to think about marketing.”

The next day, Swagger issued his report over expensive coffee, amid prosperous moms and boho kids and various cino-machines, to Memphis.

“Blew me away when he pulled Lon Scott out of the hat.”

“It is possible that he came up with Scott independently, without knowledge before of Hugh or 1993. I mean, Lon was real, he left tracks, traces, and that is the area in which Marty Adams is known to be an expert researcher.”

“It is. I ain’t saying it ain’t.”

“He seems to be clean. We’ve looked hard at him. I will direct Neal to look hard again.”

“Appreciated. Even a paranoid like me has to admit, though, there ain’t no signs of a game.”

“Before you go anywhere with Marty, I will have everything on him except his colon X-rays.”

“If you get them, I don’t want to see them.”

“I don’t want to see them either. I’ll have an intern go over them. That’s what interns are for. Meanwhile, where are you? Investigation-wise, I mean. Still having fun?”

“I’m tussling with Red Nine. It’s got me up nights. And then when I get real depressed over that, I think about the other riddle I have made no progress on, the deal on the timing. How they did it so fast, how they got Oswald into play when nobody knew until three days before that, by fluke, JFK was going to be driven under his window. Man, they were good.”

“Or lucky.”

“Or even worse: both.”

In this business, bad days are an occupational hazard. I
spent several under intense artillery fire at a forward operating base in Vietnam when I was running Phoenix. An Israeli rocket buried me in rubble for six hours in Beirut, ruining a perfectly fine suit. I was detained in 1991 by some obnoxious Chinese border guards for what seemed like years but was only hours. I thought they were going to beat me up because I was Russian, although I wasn’t, and if I’d told them who I really was, they would have beaten me up twice as hard, plus allowed me to rot in their prison system for half a century. It was frightening, coming close to melting my phony sangfroid and tarnishing my Yalie style.
Incroyable!

But no day of my life has been as bad as November 21, 1963. It seemed to last forever, and at the same time it seemed to be over in split seconds, and the next one, although we all had fierce doubts, was upon us so quickly, we couldn’t believe it.

We were a grim-faced bunch. I don’t think any of us had come to terms with what we were about to do. Some doubts you never put away, and those haunt you—all of us, I mean—for years and years. Now is not the time for the postmortem; I can say only that I plunged ahead on the faith that the change would be for the better, that it would save lives in the hundreds of thousands, white, yellow, north, south, theirs, ours, that it would forestall the anarchy and chaos that I quite rightly had predicted, that I was and we were reluctant assassins, that we believed ourselves to be moral assassins.

Nevertheless, the day was spent in a kind of existential dread, a clammy dryness of breath and persistent wetness of body. Food had no
taste or appeal, liquor had too much taste and appeal (and was therefore avoided), and to quote a line from, I think, James Jones in
The Thin Red Line,
“numbly [we] did the necessary.” (I trust my posthumous editor will have the energy to run the quote down.)

Alek was out of my control, if he’d ever been in it. There was nothing that could be done at this point. He would do what was required of him well enough to enjoy the success that had eluded him in life, or he would not. I suppose it was possible, and I confess it never occurred to me, that he could have called his “friend” Agent Hotsy of the FBI and turned me in, as part of a scenario by which the red spy (he thought) was nabbed and JFK’s life was spared. He’d be a hero then, and money and fame would come of it. In retrospect, I’m glad I didn’t concern myself with such nonsense. In the first place, he didn’t have the imagination. In the second, truly, he didn’t have the disposition: he was a born Dostoyevskian or Conradian subversive, a hard-core assassin or mad bomber. In another century, he’d have carried a bowling-ball bomb with a fizzing fuse under his cape. He wanted to destroy; it was his destiny. He wanted to reach out and atomize the world that had relegated him to bug status, cursed him with reading difficulties, attention difficulties, a sluggish mind, an obsessive streak. It never occurred to me that such a figure would betray me. I was his only hope, his true believer.