The Second Shooter (17 page)

"But why pick a guy who can't shoot?" Stacy said.

"Is that what you heard?" Gordon asked. "That Oswald couldn't shoot?"

She nodded.

"Then I guess that depends on your idea of what a good shot is."

"I heard, or read, the same thing," Jake said.

"The Marine Corps has three levels of shooters," Gordon explained. "Same now as back in the fifties when Oswald was in. Marksman is the lowest, sharpshooter is the middle, and expert is the highest. The basic qualification course requires Marines to engage targets out to five hundred yards. Oswald qualified as a sharpshooter, which makes him an average shot by Marine Corps standards, but makes him a lot better than most everybody else."

Nobody said anything for a minute. Then Favreau leaned forward in his chair. "For years after Dallas, I thought I had helped stop the spread of communism." He focused on Jake. "Then I read one of your father's books, and I—"

"My father is a retired FBI agent," Jake said. Then he saw Gordon close his eyes for a few seconds as the words cut into him, just as Jake had intended them to.

When Gordon opened his eyes, there were tears in them. "I'm sorry, Jake."

"For what?" Jake asked.

"For leaving you and your mother."

"We did okay without you."

"I know you did," Gordon said. "She's a strong woman. And I'll be forever grateful to Lee Miller."

Jake found himself nodding. Not really accepting Gordon McCay's apology. He would never do that. But acknowledging it. That would be all right. He looked at Favreau. "Go on. What about...his book?"

Favreau continued, "After I read that book, I knew everything I had been told was a lie. It wasn't Western democracy I had helped save, it was the CIA."

Jake shook his head. "All those conspiracy theories were investigated and disproved years ago. By the Warren Commission, by the Church Committee, by the House Select Committee on Assassinations."

Gordon smiled. "So you have done some reading."

"The JFK assassination used to be kind of a hobby of mine," Jake said. "I even wrote a term paper about it in high school."

"What was your thesis?" Gordon asked.

"That Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone."

"Because the government said so?"

"No," Jake said. "Because you said he didn't."

Gordon looked at Jake for a long moment. "I understand."

But Jake wasn't sure what Gordon McCay, his biological father, was claiming to have understood. He didn't ask, though.

Gordon cleared his throat. "Just so you know, not all of the official investigations reached the same conclusion that you did about Oswald. The final report by the House Select Committee on Assassinations said that Kennedy was probably killed as the result of a conspiracy. Their words, not mine. I can show you the report if you want." He glanced around the cluttered motorhome. "I have a copy of it around here somewhere."

"I read it," Jake said. "But that report was a product of its time, the post-Watergate era, and of a generation that saw three of its heroes cut down in their prime by lone assassins. People were in the mood to believe in conspiracies, especially government conspiracies, because that was a lot more comfortable than the truth, that one nut with a gun could change the fate of the whole world."

Jake turned to Stacy, who had been quiet for a while. "I hope you're not taking any of this seriously."

"Let me show you just one more thing," Gordon said.

"No," Jake said, turning back to him. "I've seen enough."

Gordon stood and stepped away. "Not the House report. Something much better."

Jake stayed silent as Gordon rummaged through the motorhome, digging through more files crammed into nooks. When he came back he dropped another stack of paper beside the Senate report, but this second stack dwarfed the first. It was at least six inches thick. The cover page was a CIA memorandum, the top of which was stamped 'SECRET—EYES ONLY'. The memorandum was dated '16 MAY 1973'. The subject line read "Family Jewels."

"I hope you're not expecting me to read that," Jake said.

"No," Gordon said. "But I can summarize it for you."

Jake glanced at Stacy. She gave him a slight shrug. He turned back to Gordon and nodded.

Gordon pushed the stack of paper a couple of inches closer to Jake. "That's a seven-hundred-page CIA report that took fifteen years of fighting under the Freedom of Information Act to get. It documents decades of CIA crimes: drug testing on mental patients, the intentional release of whooping cough in Tampa and yellow fever in Savannah, large scale illegal domestic wire-tapping, burglaries and bombings, and the assassinations of foreign officials, including Trujillo in the Dominican Republic and Lumumba in the Congo."

"Does it say they killed Kennedy?" Jake asked.

Gordon shook his head. "No."

Jake pushed the heavy report back toward Gordon. "Then how's it relevant?"

Favreau said, "Because the CIA hired me to make sure President Kennedy died in Dallas on November 22, 1963."

"Okay, I believe you," Jake said. "I'm convinced that you killed the president of the United States." He stood up and pulled the Glock pistol from the small of his back, the pistol he'd taken from the security guard at the Washington Field Office. He pointed it across the coffee table at Favreau.

"Jake!" Stacy shouted as she sprang to her feet.

Ignoring her, Jake said to Favreau, "You're under arrest."

A long silence followed, during which no one moved, no one spoke. Then from outside, Jake heard tires rolling to a stop on the trailer park's gravel driveway. He heard a car door open. Probably one of Gordon McCay's Happy Valley neighbors returning home from a trip to the mini-mart with a bag of chips, a six-pack of beer, and a handful of lottery tickets.

Then Favreau said, "Would you rather arrest me for killing President Kennedy fifty years ago...or help me stop the assassination of President Omar tomorrow?"

***

The Suburban turned off the two-lane highway onto the horseshoe-shaped gravel driveway that curved through the trailer park. The sign read 'Happy Valley'. Max Garcia didn't see anything happy about it, and it definitely wasn't in a valley. Just a few dozen old trailers and battered motorhomes draped over concrete pads and set on a landscape as flat as a pool table.

"Up ahead on the right," Blackstone said, staring at the satellite image on his laptop display. "Number thirty-six."

They drove past a Ford Fairmont, circa 1980s, sitting on cinderblocks next to a shit-brown trailer. The brake drums and lugs on the Ford were rusted, and the double front window of the trailer was covered with cardboard. Happy Valley reminded Garcia of the poor white trash trailer parks dotting south Florida.

They were three-quarters through the bend at the bottom of the horseshoe when Blackstone looked up from his laptop and scanned the trailers and RVs to their right front. He pointed to an old Winnebago with a tall antenna jutting up from the roof. "That's it. That's the one."

The driver let off the gas and the Suburban coasted toward the motorhome.

"I already felt like I had fallen down the rabbit hole and was trapped in an alternate universe. Then he springs this on me. Someone's going to kill the president. All of a sudden this isn't about history. This isn't about John F. Kennedy. This is about right now. This is about Noah Omar."

***

Jake stared at Favreau, not quite comprehending the man's words and having to replay them in his mind to get his head around them.

The assassination of President Omar tomorrow.

Stacy turned from Jake to Favreau, then back again. And Jake thought that the expression of confusion on her face must be a mirror of his own.

What was this French lunatic talking about?

Then the window next to the cabin door exploded inward and something small and heavy thudded on the floor. Jake saw the object roll a few feet across the worn-out shag carpet. Sparks were sputtering from it. Jake knew what it was. He had seen a lot of them during his weeklong block of tactical training at the FBI Academy. He had even gotten to throw a couple. The object lying on the floor and shooting sparks onto the shag carpet was a flashbang. He wrapped his arms around Stacy and dove onto the sofa. "Get down!"

The flashbang detonated in a burst of blinding light and a thunderclap of deafening sound.

Stacy screamed.

Jake lurched to his feet and scanned the motorhome. Gordon was on the floor, hands clapped to his ears. Favreau was standing, shaking his head to clear the shock and clutching the Beretta in his fist. Jake looked down at his own hand and saw it still held the Glock.

A second detonation, smaller than the first and muffled by the ringing in Jake's ears, blew the doorknob into the cabin. While Jake stared at the door in a state of stunned inaction, Favreau was moving, crossing the cabin in two strides and pressing his back against the wall beside the flimsy door as it was yanked outward. A man charged through the door wearing tan military cargo pants, a nylon pistol belt, and a tactical vest festooned with pockets and loops. He sported a buzz cut and carried an M-4 carbine, the same weapon Jake had used in training.

The man's eyes focused on Jake, standing in the middle of the cabin and holding a gun. He pointed the M-4 at Jake and shouted, but Jake couldn't make out the words over the ringing in his head. The man advanced on Jake, the carbine thrust out. His eyes swept to his left, taking in Gordon on the floor and Stacy just starting to sit up on the sofa. His eyes did not go to his right, where Favreau stood pressed against the wall, pistol in one hand, steel cooking pot from the tiny galley in the other.

Favreau cracked the man's bare head with the bottom of the steel pot. He went down hard. Favreau dropped the pot and snatched up the man's M-4. He fired a quick burst out the door, then half-dove and half-rolled to the opposite side of the cabin. Meanwhile, Jake found himself still standing in the middle of the cabin, like an idiot, casually admiring Favreau's surprising agility, especially for such an old guy.

Then the passenger door in the cab jerked open. A second man-also decked out in tactical gear-sprang into the passenger seat and started firing a pistol into the main cabin.

The staccato of pops and flashes from the muzzle snapped Jake out of his stupor. That and the thud of bullets striking the wall behind him. He raised the Glock in a two-handed combat grip, just like he'd been taught at the FBI Academy, blocked out everything going on around him, found the front sight, dropped it into the white square of the rear sight, and squeezed the trigger.

Jake saw his own bullet hit the man in the throat, saw his eyes go wide with shock, saw blood spill over his tactical vest, saw him drop his pistol, saw him slump backward against the dashboard, saw him slide out of the cab.

Jake looked at the pistol in his hand. Then back at the empty passenger seat. There was blood on the headrest. He had just shot a man, probably killed him. He felt like throwing up.

For a moment, everything was still inside the motorhome.

Then bullets started ripping through the wall.

Dropping to the floor, Jake found himself face to face with the man Favreau had clobbered with the cooking pot. The man was on his back, unconscious. There were two pockets on the front of his ballistic best. One was empty. The other held a flashbang. Jake yanked the flashbang from the man's pocket and the Beretta pistol from his holster.

As bullets continued to slice through the motorhome, Gordon pressed himself against the floor, looking like he was trying to melt into the threadbare shag carpet. Favreau cradled the M-4 in his arms and was wriggling toward the open cabin door. Meanwhile, Jake crawled to Stacy, who had managed to slide under the bolted-down coffee table. He handed her the Glock. "Can you use this?" he shouted over the sound of the gunfire.

She nodded.

"Whoever these guys are," he said, "they're not here to arrest us. They're here kill us."

"Why?"

Looking into Stacy's eyes, Jake saw fear, but also something else, gritty determination. She was a fighter. "I don't know, but I promise you we're going to find out."

A long blast of gunfire erupted inside the cabin. Jake turned and saw Favreau in a prone firing position beside the door, shooting the M-4 and shouting-Jake assumed he was cursing-in French.

The gunfire from outside stopped.

Favreau glanced at Jake. "Do you believe me now?"

Jake didn't answer.

"I do," Stacy shouted from beneath the table.

Gordon, whose face had been buried in the carpet, looked up at Jake. "You have to accept facts, Jake, especially when they're staring you in the face." Just then, several more bullets punched through the cabin wall. One knocked a thick book off a plywood shelf. Gordon pointed to the hole in the book's spine. "Those bullets they're firing, those are facts."

"You might be onto something," Jake admitted.

Jake rolled out from under the coffee table and low-crawled to the cabin door. Squeezing in beside Favreau, he peeked out and counted four men crouched behind a Chevy Suburban with blacked-out windows. Two young guys in SWAT gear carrying M-4s and two older men in suits armed with pistols, one a Caucasian, the other a Hispanic. Jake recognized the older white guy as the suit from the Washington Field Office who had been bossing around the ASAC.

"Look under the truck," Favreau said. "Do you see that?"

Jake saw a puddle spreading out beneath the Suburban. "Is that gas?"

Favreau nodded and pointed to the flashbang in Jake's hand. "How good is your aim?"

"I played American Legion baseball."

The Frenchman looked confused.

"Never mind," Jake said. "My aim is pretty good." He laid the Beretta on the floor and pulled the pin from the flashbang. Then he rolled onto his left side and threw the flashbang with his right hand.

As the canister sailed through the air, the spoon flew off and sparks erupted from it. A second later it reached the apogee of its arc and tumbled toward the Suburban. One of the tactical guys actually fired at the descending canister. He missed. The other three ran.