Suddenly, the president’s head explodes.
Alek is so startled that his own trigger jerks and he fires his third bullet, but his jump at the sight of the destruction of the skull is so intense that his third bullet goes sailing off to the general southwest, presumably landing in some distant Oz beyond the triple overpass, never to be noted or found. It was an awesome break for us; it meant that witnesses saw him fire his third shot, it squared all accounting of bullets, shells, and wounds, it forever connected Alek to the event, lacking any tangible, empirical evidence of our existence, and it cemented all investigative effort to the Book Depository and to Alek. Cops are predictable; they want to put things in a box, and the sooner and tighter it fits, the happier they are, and the more outsiders tug and pull and poke at the contents of the box, the more stubborn and angry they become. It’s all personal to them.
Back to Alek, for whom the world has just changed mightily.
Given to paranoia anyway, he sees in that second that a conspiracy against him does exist, that he is a patsy, he is a chump, a fool. He’s been set up to take the fall, and that reality becomes instantly clear. (Let us also postulate that his narcissism is secretly pleased; he is important enough to destroy!)
He realizes that all he believed in was false, that there was no Russian agent, he is not working for KGB, there’s no escape car awaiting him, he will not be hustled away and secreted to Havana and the loving ministrations of Dr. Castro. Instead, he’s the sucker at the center of every James M. Cain novel, every film noir, lost in a nightmare city as forces so vast he cannot imagine them grind into position to crush him.
It occurs to him that his life might be in danger. He knows the sixth floor is empty only because it always has been empty, but that wisdom is no longer operative; it is from a different world. It occurs to him that his death is absolutely necessary for the new narrative. It may be that a detective, a security guard, an armed citizen in the know might already be there, hiding behind his own clump of boxes, ready to step out and issue the coup de grace and become both the hero of America and the secret lynchpin of the plot against Alek.
He does what any man in such circumstances would do.
He cocks the rifle, throwing another shell into the chamber, finger to trigger, slack removed, weapon at the ready, and like a patrolling infantryman in an ambush area, he hastens the ninety-five feet diagonally across the empty space to the one stairway down, ready to respond to any emerging attackers. Nobody’s there. And no bullet comes crashing through the windows to snipe him as he sought to snipe the president.
He pauses at the head of the stairs, hating to relinquish his weapon. But he knows that he can’t emerge into society at the site of a presidential assassination with a rifle in his hands. So he stuffs the rifle between two book crates at the top of the stairs, where it will be found an hour later by a detective. That is why it wasn’t found abandoned in the sniper’s nest; that is why it was loaded and cocked.
He heads downstairs, and his adventures in the building, back in society, have been well chronicled. He slides into a chair in the lunchroom, is accosted by a policeman and identified by a coworker, and once the policeman heads upstairs, Alek zips out the front door.
Now what? He knows there’ll be no pickup awaiting him at the corner of Houston and Pacific, and there may be ambushers. Instead of heading north up Houston, where we were nominally waiting to pick him up, he turns east and heads up Elm, past the Dal-Tex Building. That is where I see him as I am pulling Lon out of the lobby while we beat our own hasty retreat from the seventh floor.
Alek continues to surge up Elm for another four blocks. Let us assume it is in this period that he more or less returns to his rational mind. He knows it’s a matter of time before they locate the sniper’s nest and the rifle, take a canvass of employees at TBD and note that he’s the only one missing, though he’s been noted earlier as present, so they’ll know he left right after the shooting. Possibly that’s not paramount in his mind. He thinks he’s being hunted by his own co-conspirators, and he remembers my warning him against bringing the handgun, because I was gaming him into being the easy prey that would be the exclamation point on our operation.
I don’t believe he thinks he can get away, as in escape to a new life. Impossible. He wasn’t stupid, just incompetent. But at that point in his life, I think the one possibility of victory he saw, the one glimmer of hope, was to defend himself against his murderers, not the police or FBI. If he could shoot one of them and bring the bag to the cops, it would be proof of sorts that he’d been manipulated, though he hadn’t worked out the allegiance issues and didn’t know who had used him.
Again, as for any man on the run, his first impulse would have been to get a gun, which explains why, after walking away from the site of the assassination, he climbed aboard a bus headed down Elm Street back to the site of the assassination. No one has bothered to work out the destination of that bus: it was to the Oak Cliff section of Dallas. He wasn’t fleeing crazily, as so many have stated; he was going to get the gun.
Soon enough, the bus is moored in traffic a block east of the assassination site. Time is ticking by, he knows that the police effort is grinding along, possibilities are being examined, questions asked and answered, the winnowing process begun, and that it will cast him up quickly.
He vaults from the bus at the corner of Elm and Lamar and heads south down Lamar for two blocks and goes to. . the bus station! Does it occur to him to buy a ticket on the next bus out of town, to put distance between self and pursuers? He has seventeen dollars with him, which can get him as far as San Antonio or Lubbock or Midland or Austin. But his brain is not working that way; he is thinking, Get the gun. He hails what will be known as the only cab he took in his life. He’s in the cab at 12:45, in Oak Cliff, a block or two past his house so that the cabbie won’t associate his passenger with the soon-to-be-announced address of the suspect. He dashes into his house, goes straight to wherever he’s hidden it, snatches up his revolver, stuffs it into his waistband, throws on a jacket – to cover it, which shows he’s thinking tactically – and is gone in seconds.
Consider how dangerous a move he’s come up with. He knows they’ll know who he is and where he lives. He risks capture in a daring attempt to get back to the roominghouse because that’s where he left his S&W .38 snub-nose. The gun is more important to him than his life, and he takes an awesome chance to get it, because he knows that without the gun, he has no chance against his pursuers, who aren’t the cops but the members of the conspiracy who’ve betrayed him. He does this rather than, say, take the cab to a suburban bus station or train station and try to catch a ride or hop a freight out of town before the authorities can throw out their manhunters’ net. Time isn’t of the essence; the gun is of the essence.
Alek heads back down Beckley in the direction he’s come, diverts at Crawford to take a diagonal going nowhere, turns down Tenth, again seemingly arbitrarily, reaches the intersection of Patton and Tenth, and notices in horror that a black Dallas police car has just pulled over. The officer beckons him.
Now comes the tragedy of Officer Tippit. Had I known that the monster I created was capable of such violence, I would have put a .45 into him and walked away. That said, I must also say that I should have put a .45 into my own head as punishment for the mayhem that was about to transpire, which was entirely my own invention. What is the point of claiming responsibility if you don’t act on it? There is no point. I tried to use my sin as a motive for redemption and, over the years, gave my life in toto to Agency and country, knowing that I hadn’t the guts to punish myself as I should be punished. Perhaps my punishment lies ahead.