somersett I think Kennedy's coming here on the eighteenth, something like that, to make some kind of speech.
milteer You can bet your bottom dollars he's going to have a lot to say about the Cubans. There's so many of them here.
somersett Yeah, well, he'll have a thousand bodyguards. Doo't worry about that.
milteer The more bodyguards he has, the easier it is to get him.
SOMERSETT Well how in the hell do you figure would be the best way to get him?
milteer From an office building with a high-powered rifle. He knows he's a marked man.
somersett They're really going to try to kill him?
milteer Oh, yeah, it's in the working. There ain't any countdown on it. We've just got to be sitting on go. Countdown, they can move in on you, and on go they can't. Countdown is all right for a slow prepared operation. But in an emergency operation, you've got to be sitting on go.
somersett Boy, if that Kennedy gets shot, we've got to know where we're at. Because you know that'll be a real shake if they do that.
milteer They wouldn't leave any stone unturned. No way. They will pick somebody up within hours afterwards if anything like that would happen. Just to throw the public off.
When the Secret Service heard the tape, they prevailed upon the President's men to cancel the motorcade scheduled for Miami. Kennedy traveled by helicopter from the airport to a downtown hotel, where he spoke to a group of journalists.
Branch has two theories about this incident.
One, T. J. Mackey leaked news of the plot either directly to Milteer or to people in his circle. It's a fact that Mackey had connections in the intelligence unit of the Miami police and it's possible that he knew Milteer was being monitored. Milteer, a sixty-two-year-old Georgian, was known to be involved in violent resistance to integration.
Two, it was Guy Banister who told Milteer about the Miami plot and unwittingly ruined the operation.
(The Secret Service did not forward details of the taped conversation to agents responsible for the President's safety in Dallas. The FBI questioned Milteer superficially after the assassination.)
Branch also has a theory about the Oswald doubles who were active for almost two months, mainly in and around Dallas but also in other Texas cities. He thinks Mackey devised the scheme principally to occupy Alpha 66, to get them so deeply entrenched in rigid arrangements and setups that they wouldn't be able to adjust when the Miami fagade folded over in the first breeze. Joseph Milteer had spoken of the difference between countdown and go. Mackey wanted to be sure that Alpha was stuck in countdown. He would be sitting on go.
The operation was crude. Someone looking like Oswald walks into an auto showroom, says his name is Lee Oswald, says he will soon be coming into money, test-drives a Comet at high speeds and makes a remark about going back to Russia. Someone who says his name is Oswald goes to a gunsmith and has a telescopic sight mounted on his rifle. Someone looking like Oswald goes to a rifle range half a dozen times in a thirteen-day period and makes a point of shooting at other people's targets.
All of these incidents took place at times when the real Oswald was known to be elsewhere.
To Nicholas Branch, more frequently of late, "Lee H. Oswald" seems a technical diagram, part of some exercise in the secret manipulation of history. A photograph taken by hidden CIA cameras of a man walking past the Soviet embassy in Mexico City bears the identifying tag "Lee H. Oswald." Oswald was in Mexico City at the time but the man in the picture is someone else-broad-chested, with a full face and cropped hair, in his late thirties or early forties. Another form of double. It's not surprising that Branch thinks of the day and month of the assassination in strictly numerical terms- 11/22.
But there's something even more curious than the misidentification. The man in the photograph matches the written physical descriptions Branch has seen of T. J. Mackey.
(The Curator has never been able to provide a photograph of Mackey labeled as such.)
Branch sits in his glove-leather chair looking at the paper hills around him. Paper is beginning to slide out of the room and across the doorway to the house proper. The floor is covered.with books and papers. The closet is stuffed with material he has yet to read. He has to wedge new books into the shelves, force them in, insert them sideways, squeeze everything, keep everything. There is nothing in the room he can discard as irrelevant or out-of-date. It all matters on one level or another. This is the room of lonely facts. The stuff keeps coming.
The Curator sends thirty more volumes from CIA's one-hundred-and-forty-four- volume file on Oswald. He sends cartons of investigative reports and trial transcripts concerning people only remotely connected to the events of November 22. He sends coroners' reports on the dead.
Salvatore (Sam) Giancana, the syndicate boss who grew up near Jack Ruby in Chicago, is found dead in June 1975 in his finished basement, shot once in the back of the head, six times in a stitching pattern around the mouth. He was scheduled to testify five days later before a Senate committee looking into plots against Castro. The murder weapon is found and traced to Miami. No arrests in the case.
Walter Everett Jr., the man who conceived the plot, is found dead in May 1965 in a motel room outside Alpine, Texas, where he was assistant to the president of Sul Ross State College. Ruled a heart attack. He was registered as Thomas Stainback.
Wayne Wesley Elko, the ex-paratrooper and part-time mercenary, is found dead in January 1966 in a motel room outside Hibbing, Minnesota. Ruled acute morphine poisoning. In his pickup, police find tools and copper wiring stolen from an iron mine nearby, and a two-year-old boy asleep in a toddler's car seat.
Francis Gary Powers, the U-2 pilot, gets a job with KNBC in Los Angeles, flying a helicopter and reporting on traffic and brush fires until one day in August 1977 when the Bell Jet Ranger evidently runs out of fuel and comes yawing down in a field where boys are playing softball, killing Powers instantly.
The crash occurs just three miles from the Skunk Works, a building with blacked-out windows at Lockheed Aircraft where the first U-2 was developed twenty-two years earlier.
Branch has become wary of these cases of cheap coincidence. He's beginning to think someone is trying to sway him toward superstition. He wants a thing to be what it is. Can't a man die without the ensuing ritual of a search for patterns and links?
The Curator sends a four-hundred-page study of the similarities between Kennedy's death and Lincoln's.
Wayne shared the back seat with Raymo's ancient shepherd dog. The idea was travel light. They'd moved out of Miami real quick, grabbing essential things, so it was hard to see the need for an animal coming along, big and sick as it was, gasping for last air.
They rode through the night.
Raymo drove and Frank sat next to him. They spoke Spanish most of the time, which Wayne didn't try to decode. His mind was still on fire with the knowledge of what they were going to do. They were going to go over the line. It was like science fiction. It carried you past the ordinary portals.
Frank drove for a while and Wayne sat up front. At least they weren't using the Bel Air. This was a '58 Merc with a pockmarked body and an engine out of the speed shop, easy-breathing, the pounce of a slingshot dragster. Wayne turned the radio full-blast. The wind shot through. They'd left all the new weapons with Alpha except for one rifle Mackey was transporting. Rock 'n' roll screamed in Wayne's face. Middle of the night near Tallahassee.
Wayne's old man used to say, "God made big people. And God made little people. But Colt made the.45 to even things up."
But this wasn't a mission to locate the social mean. They were making a crash journey over the edge. Wayne kept shaking his head to settle all the pieces. Making these shiver motions that drew a look from driver Frank. Wayne was amazed that an idea like this could even exist in America. And here he was in the middle of it, wind streaming through the car.