The Second Shooter (30 page)

"Already started by the time we arrive," Finch said. "We're there for half an hour and scheduled to leave at 1:45. We can stay as late as two o'clock, if you like."

"Quarter till is fine," the president said. "I want to get to the golf course."

"Of course, sir," Richard said.

From the corner of his eye, the president saw his wife roll her eyes. She didn't play golf, so she didn't understand how seductive chasing that little white ball was. "Thank you, Richard," the president said. "As usual, you've done an excellent job. I don't know what I'd do without you."

Richard Finch nodded.

The president looked out the window again. The motorcade was getting close to Dealey Plaza. He could feel the weight of history beginning to press down on him.

***

"I really do admire your loyalty to your men," Max Garcia said. "And I find it particularly commendable that you're willing to spend the rest of your life in prison to keep them out of danger."

Bill Blackstone shook his head. "There you go with the prison thing again. Who said anything about going to prison?"

They were sitting in the Chevrolet Tahoe outside the Dallas police station where Favreau and his colleagues were being held.

"I keep mentioning prison," Garcia said, "because that is exactly where we're headed if we don't get control of this situation." He glanced at his watch. "Within the next hour."

"What you want them to do is a suicide mission," Blackstone said. "Plain and simple."

Garcia stared at him for a long moment. "Better them than us."

"Agreed. But I still have to sell it to them."

"Don't they follow orders?"

"They're contractors," Blackstone said. "They're in this for the money. And the action. But mostly for the money, and they're smart enough to know that if they get arrested, all they're going to be spending their money on is lawyers."

"They're not going to get arrested. Not if they're as good as you say they are. We're talking about a surgical strike against a pretty soft target. In and out. Two minutes, tops."

"I wouldn't exactly call it a soft target," Blackstone said.

"Soft enough."

"There's no fake ID or phony writ you can pull out of your briefcase that's good enough to get them out of this if they get caught."

"That's why they can't get caught."

Blackstone stared out the windshield for nearly a minute. "This is an extreme step, even for you."

"This is an extreme situation."

Another minute ticked by. It was crunch time and every minute counted. Still, Garcia waited. He saw Blackstone glance up at the rearview mirror. The second Tahoe was parked behind them, the four men inside it waiting for instructions. "In and out?" Blackstone asked.

Garcia nodded. "In and out."

"Two minutes?"

"At most."

"Then we're done?" Blackstone said.

"Then you're done."

"Completely out of the picture?"

"Totally."

"What are you going to do with them?"

"Do you really want to know?"

"No, I guess I don't," Blackstone said. "But we're free and clear. No...repercussions."

Garcia raised his hand. "You have my word."

For a moment, Blackstone looked like he might challenge that. But he let it pass. "All right," he said.

Two uniformed Dallas cops waited beside the open rear door of the prisoner transport van as two more officers led Jake, Stacy, Gordon, and Favreau out through the back door of the police station and into the parking lot. The four prisoners shuffled across the pavement, still in street clothes, but with their ankles clamped in leg irons and their wrists handcuffed in front and locked to waist chains.

A set of portable metal steps stood behind the van, and the two cops waiting for them warned them to duck their heads, then pushed them one by one up the steps and into the back of the van.

Inside, two bare metal benches ran the length of the prisoner compartment and were bolted to the reinforced steel walls and floor. At four spots along each of the two benches a short chain and a single handcuff was secured to a metal ring. A steel barrier with a small Plexiglas window separated the prisoner compartment from the cab.

Jake and the others waddled in with their heads stooped and their shoulders hunched and dropped onto the benches, Favreau and Jake on one side of the van, Gordon and Stacy on the other. None of the cops followed them inside to secure their waist chains to the benches. It was a lazy oversight, Jake thought, and it gave him a glimmer of hope. As a general rule, police departments did not typically assign their best and brightest officers to prisoner transport duties.

Glancing out the open rear door, Jake saw the two officers who had escorted them from the holding cells walking back into the police station. Then the heavy van door slammed shut and locked, and a moment later the other two officers climbed into the cab. The passenger cop, gaunt and hatchet faced, peeked through the small window and eyed the prisoners. His gaze lingered on Stacy. "You kids comfy?" he said in a voice muffled by the thick, bullet-resistant partition.

"Asshole," Stacy muttered.

"What's that, honey?" the cop said. "I didn't hear you." Then he laughed and turned around as his partner cranked the motor. A few seconds later, the van lurched forward.

As they drove, Jake heard the two cops talking to each other and occasionally laughing, but he couldn't make out their words. He turned to Favreau and spoke in a stage whisper that he hoped the cops couldn't hear. "Who's the Latino? You were staring at him like you know him."

"He calls himself Max Garcia," Favreau said, his voice low, his tone almost expressionless. "He was the one who recruited me to be Oswald's backup, to be the second shooter."

"His accent sounds Cuban," Gordon said.

"He was a colonel in Batista's secret police."

"Oswald was a dedicated communist and hard-core Castro supporter," Gordon said. "There's no way he would have worked for one of Batista's goons."

"Unless he thought he was working for Castro," Favreau said.

"A false-flag recruitment?" Gordon asked.

Favreau nodded. "Garcia convinced Oswald he was with the DGI and that Castro himself had sanctioned the hit."

"What's the DGI?" Jake asked.

"Castro's version of the CIA," Gordon said. "But even more vicious."

"And since Kennedy had already tried to assassinate Castro," Stacy said, "Oswald probably thought that by killing Kennedy he was saving Castro's life."

Favreau smiled at her. "Exactly."

Gordon turned to Favreau. "As pitiful as Oswald's life was, he was convinced he was destined for great things. I doubt he needed to be brainwashed into volunteering for a mission as grandiose as assassinating the president of the United States for Fidel Castro. So why bother sending him through MK-ULTRA?"

"And why did they need you?" Jake added.

"The program was just the guarantee that Oswald would go through with it," Favreau said. "And I was there in case he missed the target."

"That target was the president of the United States," Stacy said.

Favreau looked at her and nodded. There was true regret on his face. They all saw it. Stacy's expression softened. She rattled her handcuffs. "Anyone got any ideas?"

Favreau wriggled his tongue inside his mouth, then pulled back his lips to reveal something clamped between his teeth. Jake looked closer and saw it was the same sliced-off strip of credit card that Favreau had used to jimmy his handcuffs at the Washington Field Office.

***

Gertz stood on his balcony a mile north of Dealey Plaza and watched as the lead police cars of the fifty-car presidential motorcade turned off Main Street onto North Houston Street. He raised the small walkie-talkie to his lips and keyed the transmit button. "Are you watching?"

***

Walsh was standing on his own balcony, two hundred feet in the air and two and a half miles south of Dealey Plaza, watching through his twelve-power Bushnell binoculars as the motorcade's advanced escort cruisers turned left onto Elm Street and rolled past the Dallas County Administration Building when the German's voice broke the silence on the walkie-talkie.

Ignoring the German for a moment, Walsh continued to stare through his binoculars as the first police car stopped on Elm Street directly in front of the Bryan Pergola, the terraced walkway built atop a gentle slope of land only a few dozen yards from the southwest corner of the Administration Building. What splendid irony, Walsh thought, that part of the president's security force was parking at the foot of the infamous grassy knoll.

The German called again. More insistent this time. "Are you there?"

Walsh keyed his own radio. "Of course, I'm here."

"Then why didn't you answer?"

"Because I'm watching history," Walsh said. He wondered if all Germans, who as a race had made such a mess of history, had as little appreciation for it as Gertz.

"You keep watching it," the voice on the radio said in its accented English. "Meanwhile, I'll be making it."

What a prick, Walsh thought.

***

"There was no plan. It was moment by moment, step by step. The first thing we had to do was get out of those restraints, the handcuffs and the leg irons. The second thing was figure out a way to get out of the van. We couldn't save the president unless we could get away from the police."

***

As soon as the second handcuff popped loose from Jake's wrist, Favreau went to work on the leg irons and Jake pulled the waist chain and the attached handcuffs off over his head.

The police officers in the front seats were still talking and looking straight ahead, oblivious to what was happening behind them. Outbound traffic was moving steadily, and Jake guessed the police van was doing about thirty miles an hour. He didn't know where Central Lockup was, but he didn't think they had much time left.

"He's going to shoot from behind the Book Depository Building," Favreau whispered without looking up as he opened one of Jake's ankle cuffs and attacked the second with the thin strip of plastic.

"That's not possible," Jake said. "He won't be able to see the president from there."

The second ankle cuff sprang open, and the Frenchman swung around to get to work on Stacy's handcuffs. "He'll use a ruse or a feint," Favreau said. "Something to activate the emergency protocols. The backup limousine is already parked behind the building."

Jake remembered the news report he'd seen in the holding tank. "I saw that on TV."

"I saw it too," Stacy said as Favreau jammed the plastic strip into her handcuffs. "A reporter was doing a stand-up with the limo in the background."

Favreau looked over his shoulder at Jake. "This German bastard is clever. I saw him through the telescope, at least I think it was him, set up behind the target..." Glancing up at Stacy, Favreau corrected himself, "Behind the president."

She nodded her appreciation.

Turning again to Jake, Favreau said, "He plans to shoot from a direction no one would consider possible because the president will never be within his line of sight."

"Unless something happens that forces him into that line of sight," Jake said, warming to the idea.

Favreau nodded. "Exactly."

BOOM!

The police van lurched sideways, slamming everyone against the wall. Glass shattered. Metal shrieked. Tires exploded. Horns blared. The van rolled once, then twice, tumbling the four of them like sneakers in a dryer, before finally coming to rest on its roof.

"Pull over," Max Garcia said, seconds before the crash.

The stolen Ford Explorer was charging straight at the police transport van at a ninety-degree angle. The van had the green light, the Explorer the red. But the Explorer didn't stop. It accelerated, doing at least fifty when it T-boned the van from the right side. The impact knocked the van sideways until it hit the curb and blew out both left tires. Then it flipped over and rolled across the sidewalk. There were people on the sidewalk and it was a miracle the van didn't crush any of them. The mangled police van did one complete roll, then another until it stopped upside down, looking like an overturned turtle.

Blackstone jerked the Tahoe to a stop less than a hundred yards from the crashed van.

For several seconds everything at the crash site was still and quiet, or nearly so, the only sound being the steady blare of a horn, though Garcia couldn't tell if it was from the Ford Explorer or the police van.

"Your men could have been more subtle," Garcia said.

"You didn't give us much time to prepare," Blackstone said. "So subtlety wasn't an option."

The Explorer's front passenger door and both rear doors pushed open. The driver's door stayed shut. Garcia could see the driver slumped against the steering wheel. "I think one of your men is hurt."

"As long as they accomplish the mission," Blackstone said. "Isn't that what you said?"

"Yes," Garcia agreed. "That is what I said." Then he watched as the remaining three members of Blackstone's beefed-up and juiced-up tactical team bailed out of the Ford Explorer, which they had only moments before boosted from a self-service downtown parking lot, and charged the overturned van with drawn pistols. All three men still wore their tight-fitting dark suits, but they had pulled black Nomex balaclavas down over their faces. The mission parameters were simple: Get in, get out, don't get caught. Recover the prisoners if possible. If recovery is not possible, kill them with at least one bullet to the chest and another to the head.

Garcia saw a flash inside the van, down low, inside the shattered driver's window, and he heard the distinctive pop of a pistol just as a balloon of red mist erupted from the back of one of the balaclavas and the man wearing it collapsed. The shot was answered by a barrage of gunfire from Blackstone's other two men. Then an arm encased in the sleeve of a Dallas police uniform shirt flopped out of the driver's window and lay motionless, its hand still clutching a pistol.

***

Jake landed hard on the ceiling of the van when it finally stopped rolling. His cheek and lips felt numb, like he had been punched hard in the face. Broken glass littered the prisoner compartment. Stacy lay on her back, her head wedged against the wall. Her eyes were open and blinking. She looked like she was in shock but she was moving, trying to get up. Gordon was hurt, curled up in a ball and holding his side, breathing in quick gasps. His forehead was bleeding. Favreau had gone ass-over-teakettle just like the rest of them, but tough son of a bitch that he was, he was already on his feet.