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.”
CHAPTER 11
It cost ten thousand dollars, and that was after much haggling. Give it to Stronski, he drove a hard bargain and finally got his price. Swagger was driven in the back of a delivery truck to a Bank of America ATM in downtown Moscow – he was too tense to ponder the ironies – and took out the money after having arranged it via satellite phone call with his banker in Boise. The miracle of modern satellite communications: he, in the back of a bicycle shop in Moscow, calls a man in Boise who calls Atlanta so that a computer transaction is verified back in Moscow, and the next day, with the PIN, Swagger walks away with the cash, gets in the delivery van, and heads back to the bicycle shop.
Then it was wait, wait, wait, more days fled by, days of nothingness and boredom that did nothing to alleviate the crush of anxiety. Too bad he no longer smoked or drank – either crutch might have provided some mercy – but it was a thing of staring at the ceiling as the plaster crumbled away while time decayed slowly. He cultivated an interest in a soccer team, wondered when the NFL would get to Moscow, tried not to think of his daughters and his son and the fine lives they were building, missed his wife, mourned his dead (always), thought about certain flavors, colors, and smells, and more or less concentrated on existence. His only companion was the pistol, brilliantly engineered by the Instrument Design Bureau, flawlessly manufactured by oligarch Ixovich’s IxGroup. He stripped it, examined it, dry-fired it, drew it, grew proficient and familiar with it, learned it in all the ways a man can learn a gun without firing it, which happen to be considerable.
His nighttime visitor, Lee Harvey Oswald, stubbornly stayed away. No ideas, no insights, nothing. Swagger tried to nudge the work along by sitting at the desk of one hole where he stayed and writing LEE HARVEY OSWALD three or four times in the margin of a Russian magazine about health food. The pen wouldn’t work, the paper was too glossy, and nothing came of it.
Or maybe something did.
That night, as before, he swam from unconsciousness in the dark and felt the presence of the other man. Lee, you fucking little monkey, what are you up to now?
The chilly punk bastard was silent and smug, as always, and Swagger scoffed as if to play hard to get and sailed back into sleep, but then it started.
He saw the creep in his sniper’s nest, hair a mess, limbs a-tingle, full of hunger for glory and immortality, on his sleazy, tiny rifle.
What the fuck are you up to, you little bastard?
The first question that came to mind was: why did he wait until the limousine had turned the corner off Houston onto Elm and was obscured in the few trees in the area to take (and miss) his first shot? What a moron!
This one had stuck in Swagger’s craw since he’d stood in the sniper’s nest. It spilled over him again. What the fuck? What’s going on here? Any shooter looking at the situation would know that he was assured one clear, unhurried shot before any kind of reaction took place. He would not choose a shot through the cover of trees at a moving target. Rather, as Swagger had chewed on a million times or so, the best shot was when the limousine had slowed almost to a standstill as it was rotating around the left turn directly below Oswald. At that point, the president was at his closest to Lee Harvey, around seventy-five feet. His chest and head were plainly exposed. The angle was roughly seventy-five degrees, so the trajectory ran well over the windshield of the limousine and the windscreen that cut off the driver’s compartment from the passenger compartment. It was the literal fish-in-a-barrel shot, and it was so close that difficulties with the scope alignment or even the three-hundred-meter battle zero of the iron sights wouldn’t move the bullet placement outside of the lethal zone. That had to be the shot Oswald planned to take.
That was in fact the shot he tried to take. Consider that when he arrived on the sixth floor that morning, he had his choice of windows. There were six. Why did he chose the left-hand corner? Because it gave him direct access to the turning automobile immediately beneath him. It was the right choice. If planning a shot farther down Elm Street, he surely would have chosen the right-hand window: it was the building’s width closer and, in terms of the curve in Elm Street, gave him less deflection to the target. It seemed that even Oswald, fired up on a wave of egomania and sense of destiny as he was, doubted his ability to make a deflection shot at close to three hundred feet, which was what his choice of the left-hand window ultimately committed him to doing. It was difficult to believe he could hit that shot if he didn’t think it was within his powers and had planned to avoid it.
Knock knock.
Hello, who’s there?
An insight.
Swagger realized the little creep in the nest had tried to take the closer, easier shot, and his failure to bring it off – consistent with his goof-up’s personality and his tendency to fall apart at big moments – was what determined the outcome of the next eight to ten seconds. Oswald prepped for that shot, put his scope squarely on the president’s chest, and at the moment of minimum movement and maximum proximity, pulled the trigger to discover that the rifle would not fire.
Had he put the safety on his loaded weapon and, in the heat of the moment, forgotten to remove it? The safety on a Mannlicher-Carcano is a devilishly small thing, poorly designed and not for battle usage. It’s a button located under the bolt plunger at the rear of the receiver. To manipulate it, you’ve got to break your hold, look at the fucking thing, and carefully guide it out of one condition and into the other. The idiot whom the other boys called Ozzie Rabbit snapped dry, panicked, went through the process, then went back into the shooting position, aware that he was already behind the action curve. His first shot may have been premature, as he was hunting for a target through the trees and stacking the trigger for the final pull, and the M-C trigger, unlike most of the age, is surprisingly light.