The Second Shooter (28 page)

***

Max Garcia was back in the Chevrolet Tahoe, riding shotgun while Blackstone drove, inching them through traffic along the side streets that bordered the security zone. The four beefy security contractors in their ill-fitting dark suits trailed them in the second Tahoe.

Blackstone squeezed the steering wheel so hard his knuckles looked like they were going to pop. "How are we going to find them like this? We were better off on foot."

"I was tired of walking," Garcia said. They had pounded the pavement for an hour, flashing Garcia's fake Marshals Service credentials and handing out copies of the bogus wanted poster to every cop and Secret Service agent they saw.

"And what happens if we don't find them?" Blackstone said.

"We'll find them."

"Just say we don't," Blackstone pressed. "Say in all this," he waved at the traffic and the throng of pedestrians, "we just can't find them. What can they do? Every cop within five miles of this place is on the lookout for them and that piece of shit RV they're driving. So with that kind of heat on them, what can they do to stop...whatever it is you've got planned?"

"I don't have anything planned," Garcia said. "I'm only here to tie up some loose ends."

"And looking for four knuckleheads who are trying to mess up your plan. Excuse me, not your plan, the plan. Except everyone else is looking for them too, and by now they must know that. So they're probably in a hole somewhere, afraid to stick their heads up, because if they do, they know they'll get them knocked off."

Garcia checked his watch. It was 10 a.m. Two hours to go until the president's speech. If he could make it through the next two hours he could go home. He looked at Blackstone. "Are you just talking because you like hearing yourself talk, or do you actually have a suggestion?"

Blackstone glanced at him. "I'm glad you finally asked."

Garcia nodded for him to continue.

"First thing I'd do is ditch these vehicles," Blackstone said. "It's like riding in a coffin. We're disconnected from the outside. Then I'd form up into three teams of two men each. You and me are one team." He jerked a thumb at the trailing Tahoe. "And those four are the other two teams. I'd fan out inside the security zone because being inside the security zone is the only chance these four have to spot the shooter. But even if they manage to spot him, they would still have to raise some kind of ruckus with local law enforcement to get somebody to take action to stop him. And as soon as we saw something like that, any kind of commotion at all, we'd swoop in, whip out your marshal ID, and snatch them up."

"Sounds like a Ranger operation."

"Nothing wrong with a little direct action."

"No, there's not," Garcia said. "But there's nothing wrong with anonymity either. And maintaining anonymity means not ending up in the middle of the action. There're a hundred reporters and photographers inside the security zone. If our friends do start some kind of ruckus, as you called it, I don't want my face to end up on the six o'clock news or on the front page."

"So what are we supposed to do, drive around the perimeter all day?"

Garcia pointed past one of the barricades. "We have a lot of eyes in there working for us. Something will break. It always does. If you take the time to lay the proper foundation."

And the break did come. Right then.

A cop manning the barricade spoke into his portable radio, then waved at the Tahoe. Blackstone stopped. The cop jogged over and leaned in the driver's window. "You guys the federal marshals?"

"Yes, we are," Garcia said as he reached for his fake Marshals Service ID.

The cop raised his hand. "I don't need to see your badges. Just looking at you, I know you guys are cops."

"What can we help you with, officer?" Garcia asked.

"I just got word from dispatch," the cop said, almost breathless with excitement. "The people you're looking for, the crazy FBI agent and those three others, they broke into an apartment not far from here. A sector car's got all four in custody."

Gertz sat on the floor of the apartment, just a few feet away from the unconscious Ray Fluker, and did some stretching exercises. Sitting with his legs straight out in front of him, he bent forward and grasped his ankles, then pulled himself down, feeling his lower back relax. After a minute, he let go of his ankles and leaned forward even more, extending his fingertips a good four inches past his toes. He exhaled and held the position for ten seconds, then relaxed, feeling all the tension in his body drain away.

Tension is the enemy of precision, he repeated to himself in slow, precise mental enunciation. It was a mantra he had devised to reinforce the need for the total relaxation of not only his body but of his mind as well. Countless hours of practice had taught him the essential, unalterable truth of that lesson. Tension in the body or the mind would cause him to miss.

Gertz had missed shots in training. Plenty of them. That's what training was for. But he had never missed a real shot, a shot that counted, a shot on a live target. He had made seven such shots since leaving the Deutsches Heer, the German Army. His feelings about his military service were mixed. He was proud to have served das Vaterland, the Fatherland, but he was embarrassed to have had to do so under the thumbs of his country's former enemies: the British, for whom he felt a grudging respect; the French, whom he despised; and the Americans, whom he both envied and hated.

Gertz had spent much of his eight years in the Army assigned to Spezialkrafte, Special Forces, as a sniper, rising to the rank of feldwebel, staff sergeant, and deploying twice to Afghanistan as part of the NATO force, where he'd gotten a taste of combat and found he liked it.

But the world was changing and so was Gertz, who, at thirty-five, was no longer a young man. Modern wars were fought only by half-measures, and the goal was no longer to win. It was a good time to retire, which is exactly what he intended to do after this job. He wouldn't be able to work after this, even if he wanted to. The target was too big. The biggest in the world.

Gertz turned to look at Fluker, lying facedown, head partially turned, still breathing steadily, if shallowly, a puddle of drool on the floor beneath his mouth. The Propofol was still doing its job. Ray Fluker was the patsy, the throwaway, the red meat tossed to the public to sate its appetite for revenge and soothe its outrage over the assassination of this historic president. The masses would demand answers. And justice. Though justice would be denied them because Fluker would be found dead, burned up in the very apartment from where he had taken the shot that killed the president of the United States. Whether a suicide or an accident, no one would ever know for sure. There had to be a bit of mystery left behind, if for no other reason than to keep people guessing. It couldn't look too neat, too...arranged.

But people in the business wouldn't be fooled. Not for a minute. They would know that a professional had taken the shot. There would be rumors. And with only a few men alive who could have made such a shot, a rumor was enough to get Gertz killed.

He considered himself a simple man with simple tastes. The job paid well, and he had negotiated three-quarters of his fee up front. The rest was due upon completion, to be paid ten days from now. But Gertz didn't intend to collect the last quarter of his fee. That's when they would kill him. He had come up with his own exit strategy and could live quite comfortably for the rest of his life on what they had already paid him. He liked warm weather. Maybe Goa.

***

Walsh was on his balcony peering through the spotting scope. The scope was mounted to a tripod and stood on a glass-topped outdoor table. The variable magnification was set to thirty and the lens was focused on Dealey Plaza two and a half miles to the north.

He had to stoop to get his eye down to the lens, and he had been staring through it for a while so his back was in knots. He pulled his eye away from the scope and took a sip of coffee. There was a splash of Jameson in it, so it really was Irish coffee. He stretched his back out, then put his eye back to the scope. The crowd was gathering in the plaza. At least a thousand already and more streaming in.

What the fuck were the newspapers going to say tomorrow? The headlines would live forever. They would be collector's items. He wanted to see them. He was part of this. Years from now when people asked, Where were you on...? He wouldn't be able to tell them, I was in Dallas. But he would know. He wanted to see the headlines. Maybe keep the front page of tomorrow's Dallas Morning News. That would be all right. Perfectly reasonable. Plenty of people would keep their newspapers tomorrow. And every year when they took them out, the newsprint would have turned a little more yellow. And they would remember...

What Walsh didn't want to do was read that headline while lying on a bunk in a jail cell. He turned around and looked behind him through the open sliding glass door at the glider sitting on the work table inside the apartment. Launch the plane, blow the firecrackers, and leave. Never look back.

His assignment was mostly pre-mission support and control. He only had one task during the execution phase of the mission. And nothing post-mission. Whatever they-the all-knowing, all-seeing they-had planned for the shooter afterward was not his concern. The German was a prick anyway. If Walsh had to hear one more time about how luck had nothing to do with success, that success was the result of proper preparation, he thought he'd puke.

The arrogance of the bastard, lecturing him like that. The son-of-a-bitch acted like the goddamned Germans had invented the very concept of success, meanwhile totally ignoring the fact that it was his people who had gotten their asses handed to them in not one, but two world wars, and that they hadn't actually won a war since 1871, and that had been against the fucking French. Seriously, was there anybody who hadn't beaten France in a war?

As long as I get the fuck out of Dallas before too much shit hits the fan, I'll be all right. I just need to find a nice quiet spot and lay low for like a year.

Walsh took another sip of Jameson and coffee and glanced at his watch. Just under two hours to go.

"I had bought into the story, but there was no assassin up on that balcony with a rifle, just a family with a telescope. I felt like a compete idiot. I was in jail, probably headed to prison. Then those two guys walked through the door with that bullshit court order, and I knew that everything Favreau had said was true."

***

The holding tank had six cells, three on each side of the rectangular room. The cinderblock walls and concrete floor were painted soothing shades of light blue and gray. Probably something dreamed up by a psychologist, Jake thought. He, Favreau, and Gordon were in separate cells on one side of the room. Stacy was in a cell across from them. Two cells down from Stacy, a man in filthy clothes lay on his bunk snoring.

A steel door stood at one end of the room, a fingerprint table at the other end. A whiteboard on the wall was marked with height gradations for mugshot photos. Mounted high on the wall above the fingerprint station was a flat screen television tuned to CNN, which was buzzing with pre-coverage of President Omar's speech. Talking heads were babbling in studio and reporters were doing live stand-ups from Dealey Plaza.

In his six months as a field agent, Jake had never actually arrested anyone. Not in the sense of pulling a suspect's hands behind his back and snapping on the cuffs. The white collar crime squad wasn't anything like the drug squad or the bank robbery squad, where agents regularly kicked down doors and charged in with guns drawn. Jake's FBI work had so far consisted of subpoenaing records and poring over financial statements. The only "arrest" he had been involved in was made by sending a certified letter to an attorney and setting up a time for the attorney's client to self-surrender at the US Marshals office. Technically, that went in the books as an arrest, but just barely.

So Jake had never been inside a real jail in his life, much less inside a cell. Now he and the others were locked up in a Dallas police station awaiting transport to Central Lockup on state charges of aggravated burglary and assault, and for a host of unspecified federal charges.

Jake leaned his forehead against the cell door and wrapped his hands around the bars, realizing even as he did so that he must look like a pathetic cliché of every dejected prisoner in every prison movie ever made. But he didn't care. He harbored no illusions about his future. Instead of a career at the FBI, he was going to prison. The only real question was, for how long? Ten years? Twenty years? Of course, that led to another question, what would he do when he finally got out of prison, assuming he survived? He doubted there were many prospects for an ex-FBI agent turned ex-con, even with an accounting degree. He also doubted his stepfather would ever speak to him again. His mother, probably. She would always be his mother. But Lee Miller, retired FBI agent and damn proud of it, not likely. Not ever.

He heard a reporter saying, "...have not used open-top limousines since that tragic day exactly fifty years ago when President John F. Kennedy was gunned down less than one hundred yards from where I'm standing."

Jake turned his head just enough to look up at the television through the bars of his cell. A TV news reporter was doing a live stand-up shot from a street that had been blocked off with barricades.

"In fact," the reporter continued, "the Secret Service has two presidential limousines here today at the site of the old School Book Depository. One is a backup, which has already been pre-positioned..."

The reporter turned slightly and the camera zoomed down the street that Jake now recognized as Houston Street and focused on the nose of a black limousine protruding from behind the building. Two men in dark suits and sunglasses stood beside the fenders, each with a hand resting on the hood.

"That limo, which you can see behind me, would only be used, according to the Secret Service, in case of an emergency, such as mechanical difficultly with the primary presidential limousine."