Behold a Pale Horse Page 3

  “Enough shit to destroy him and everyone who has befriended him. We’ll have to distance ourselves.”

  “He’s a good man, Bobby. Smart. Reasonable.”

  Bobby shook his head. “There’s just too much, Jack. Hoover has us by the balls.”

  Jack lit a cigar and rocked. “I’m not letting that old bastard run me out of this house, Bobby.”

  “We have to trap him. Find some way to discredit him, arrest him away from his office, then seal it and get the damn files.”

  “Arrest John Edgar Hoover?” The president chuckled. “Neat trick.”

  “It has to be done. We have to do to him what he’s doing to us—to you.”

  “What? Snoop? What’s he like, Bobby, little boys?” Bobby didn’t answer. “You know something, don’t you, little brother.”

  “Something better you did not.”

  The president rocked forward and stood up, once again rubbing his back. “OK, Bobby, find out what you can. I’ve got to fly down to Dallas to make a speech, rub Lyndon’s tummy in front of the home folks. When I get back we’ll decide what to do about Mr. Hoover.”

  6

  COBRA MADE HIS WAY to Dallas and checked into the dilapidated rooming house Lieutenant Carvahal had told him about. He roamed the city center as he had been instructed, eating and drinking little, conserving the meager advance the Cubans had provided. He bought some new clothes, and every afternoon he waited in his room from five to seven to be contacted.

  On the third day of his unproductive vigil, he was startled from a doze by a soft knock on the flimsy door to his room. He opened it, and a big middle-aged man running to fat with an improbable reddish wig and glasses with thick lenses and heavy black frames slid into the shabby room without a word. He was carrying a black case with the silhouette of a tennis racket stenciled on the side. This he placed on Cobra’s sagging single bed, as he waved at the shooter to close the door. “You’re Cobra.” The man made it a statement not a question. “Call me Fernandez.”

  “Mr. Fernandez,” Cobra said, leaning against the wall as Fernandez settled heavily on the bed next to his case. The rusty springs of the mattress protested. “I was promised money.”

  Fernandez withdrew a plain white envelope, badly creased, from the inside pocket of his worn leather jacket. He handed it to Cobra, who opened the flap and peered inside. Hundred-dollar bills, a thick stack encircled with a rubber band.

  “You’re to do a job for that. It’s full payment in advance, because my masters want you to disappear immediately after it’s done. Needless to say, if you think to run without performing your mission, I’ll find you.”

  Needless to say, Cobra thought, pocketing the money. His total wealth had hit a lifetime high. “What’s the job?”

  “In due course. It’s easy, really. You’re backup for a guy who’s going to take the shot. You’re only there in case he fucks it up.”

  “When do I meet this guy?”

  “You don’t. He’ll take the fall; a lone crazy. That’s why you have to make your escape.” He popped the catches on the black case. Inside packed in foam rubber cut to fit were the components of a Mannlicher Carcano 6.5mm bolt-action carbine with an 8x scope, the twin of the rifle he had been given on his way to Cuba.

  Cobra picked up the stock and the barrel. “I’ve seen this type before. Piece of shit.”

  “It is, but we’ve got cases of them, untraceable. Shot, if you have to take it, is less than a hundred yards.”

  Cobra shrugged. “Lay it out for me.”

  Fernandez did. Cobra was to conceal himself in a stand of shrubs on a low hill overlooking the city’s central plaza. The target would be riding in an open car, perhaps with a bulletproof bubble protecting him, perhaps not. The primary shooter would take him from behind from a high hide. Cobra was to shoot if the first guy missed, if the shot didn’t look fatal, or if the plastic bubble was in place, blocking the primary’s shot. Cobra would be shooting at his target from ahead and to the target’s right. “Seems straightforward enough, except maybe the escape from so close,” Cobra said, patting the money folded into his hip pocket. “Payment seems generous. Why?”

  “Because we have to be sure, and because the target is the President of the United States.” Fernandez heaved himself up from the squeaky bed and left without another word.

  Two days later, Cobra carried out his end of the contract. He had scouted his position carefully, noting the only interference with his gun-target line might be spectators lining the route, but he had enough altitude on what later became known as “the grassy knoll” to see over them. He had located a manhole over a reeking sewer and opened it; that was where he would dump the rifle. He had of course cleaned and reset the rifle and the scope. He had no access to reloading machinery so he had to rely on store-bought ammunition, absurdly easy to buy in Texas.

  The Saturday of the mission dawned cool and cloudless, what passed for autumn in Dallas. There was no protective bubble on the Lincoln. Cobra saw his target clearly in the telescopic sight, and he saw the man’s head snap forward as the primary’s round hit. The round seemed to exit through the man’s throat, a probably fatal shot. Cobra put his in anyway, snapping the president’s head back, exploding the skull. Cobra dumped the rifle, reseated the manhole cover, and walked away.

  He made his way to the bus station and took the first one out of state, to New Orleans. He wanted to leave the country, for Europe or Latin America, but the Spanish passport the Cubans had given was such a shoddy forgery that it was literally falling apart. He had no other papers; no birth or baptismal certificate a travel agent said could be used to obtain a Mexican tourist card, no social security card and no driving license, so he couldn’t work. He had no way to reach the Cubans or Mr. Fernandez, and after he saw the pictures of Lee Harvey Oswald being gunned down inside the Dallas Police headquarters, he had no desire to.

  Early in 1964, he was nearly out of money, alone, and scared. Five thousand dollars went rather easily when one had to move every day. The newspapers said people had heard shots (he knew of course there had been only one) from the grassy knoll, and there were newspaper photos of people pointing.

  He was tired of running. He did the only thing a healthy young man with no identity papers could do.

  He joined the United States Marine Corps.

  7

  RUPERT TOLLIVER HEARD ABOUT the assassination while deer hunting on a disused ranch in the Hill Country in south Texas. The ranch was owned by some cousins, all much more rabid Kennedy-haters than Rupert. Rupert hadn’t liked Kennedy’s politics or his much-admired style, but he bore the president no personal animus. He was chilled to think that he had a loaded rifle in his hands the moment the president was shot. He was very quiet when the news was repeated over and over, heard over a little transistor radio in the deer blind. His cousins whooped and hollered and got into the whiskey early.

  Tolliver thought about the unblinking, hard black eyes of the shooter from Cuba, the one with the Spanish passport who had got off the plane with him in Dallas barely a week ago, and felt colder still.

  II

  THE JOURNEY

  1

  December 1999

  JULIA EARLY LOOKED out the window of the American Airlines Boeing 767 at the Mississippi River far below. So many exiting things were happening to her for the first time, and this airplane, the biggest she had ever seen let alone ridden in, carrying her on the final leg of her journey from the dry Texas Hill Country to a new life in Washington, D.C., was the biggest thrill of all.

  It seemed like she had been traveling for a week. She’d cleaned out her desk in the tiny office across the street from the Governor’s Mansion in Austin and had been given a big send-off by the other junior staffers on the campaign committee. With Governor Rupert Justice Tolliver safely reelected, all the staffers would be going to new jobs, many like Julia’s arranged with the help of the governor’s office. It was sad to move away from good friends, fellow crusaders, but wonderfu
l to be going to a wider world.

  Julia drove home to Uvalde to spend Christmas with her mother and to leave her jeep. She packed the few real city clothes she had, hoping she had enough saved to buy some more professional-looking suits appropriate to her new job as a management trainee at Capital National Bank, Washington’s oldest and most venerable. On a chill third of January she took an all-night bus ride to San Antonio, then a little American Eagle plane to Dallas, now at last the big Luxury Liner on to Washington.

  Julia was one of the original Justice Girls—Governor Tolliver used his middle name in preference to his first—recruited from his home county during his first run for the statehouse four years ago. She was eighteen at the time, just beginning at the university, when the fiery orator and former television preacher revealed that God had told him to go to Austin to do the people’s business, to clean out the stable of influence-peddling and outright corruption that Texas politics had become—some said always had been since the days of Sam Houston, old Big Drunk himself. As a preacher Tolliver had been a spellbinder, but as a politician he had shown a greater gift, and his oddball candidacy spread out from the Hill Country like wildfire as he thumped and roared and vowed to make government work for all Texans but especially for the “left aside”: poor redneck farmers, disenfranchised urban blacks, Latino refugees cruelly ignored by the prosperous Mexican-American middle class. His energetic campaign had taken Texas insiders by storm, and Tolliver overwhelmed a promising Republican congressman in the primary, then the incumbent Democratic governor, and preached his way all the way to Austin. Julia had seen the entire campaign, first as a cheerleader warming up crowds on high school football fields and later as a campaign aide stuffing envelopes and working the phones. In the second campaign she worked in fund-raising and saw a different side of the business of politics.

  Julia accepted a soft drink from a passing flight attendant with thanks. She opened her brand-new briefcase—presented by the governor himself at her going-away party and withdrew the letter from the bank’s chairman, a famous Washington insider and adviser to presidents, Colonel Alfred Thayer. She smoothed it on the soft leather and read it for the hundredth time. Management Trainee with a salary of thirty-nine thousand dollars a year! She knew it was the lowliest entry position for a college graduate, but it seemed such a long way from hardscrabble sagebrush Texas. The colonel (or whoever wrote his letters) took noncommittal note of her preference for the bank’s international department. Julia knew most of the bank’s business was overseas, that was one of two reasons she had chosen it over larger New York rivals. The other reason was that a girl bitten with the bug of politics wanted to taste the crackle and hum of government at the national level.

  She turned to the second page. At the bottom below Colonel Thayer’s round signature: cc Governor Rupert Justice Tolliver. She guessed she owed him, but she had given hundreds of hours to the campaigns with no promise of this or any reward. Tolliver was a complex man beneath the thundering prophet of his public persona; controversial, though he didn’t seem to care. He was gentle and caring in public but given to arrogance and rages behind the scenes. His staff loved him and feared him. Julia believed in him because he seemed relentless in pursuit of the corrupt, the deceitful, and in his word, the ungodly. She knew he took a drink now and then to relax and she’d heard the rumors that he stepped out now and again on his beautiful cold-eyed wife. The staff, even the guards from the Texas Ranger Executive Detail, called him Sunflower and her Stoneheart. She was his strength, he always said on the hustings. Be careful, she frequently charged the Justice Girls. Julia wondered. Tolliver had always treated her like a lady—well, a pat on the bottom now and then, a squeeze, but nothing more. One of the girls from San Antonio had left the campaign with appendicitis and never returned, and of course people talked, but people will talk about anything.

  Julia folded her letter, closed her eyes, and retraced the plans she had in her mind for a little apartment in the leafy district she’d been told lay southeast of the Capitol.

  RUPERT JUSTICE TOLLIVER sat in his spacious second-floor office in the Greek Revival Governor’s Mansion in Austin, brooding and doodling on a yellow legal-size pad. Ezekiel Archer, his chief of staff, lawyer, a deacon in his church and some said his conscience, stood beside the desk with an armful of legislative briefs. “Justice, you don’t hardly seem overjoyed at the prospect of four more years as the people’s high servant in Austin.”

  Tolliver grunted. “Glad to get on with the people’s work, Zeke, ‘course I am.” He looked up at his old friend and wondered when he’d next have a chance to hold Archer’s black-eyed Mexican wife in his arms. Texas and its politics, especially the dreary legislative shit like the folders in his aide’s arms, were suddenly boring old news. “What d’you have there?”

  “Markups on the crime bill, the extension of local-option prohibition, a new gay rights bill—”

  “VWR,” the governor said, knitting his fingers behind his head. Veto Without Reading.

  “The gays are going to keep picketing and complaining, Juss. Might be better to throw them a bone.”

  “Fucking faggots. Hurry on, God’s righteous plague.”

  “You’re going to have to moderate those views if you’ve got national ambitions.”

  Tolliver looked sly. “Who says I do?”

  “You’re fixin’ to run for president, Juss.”

  “Maybe.” Tolliver drew more doodles. “This office does seem a might confining after four years of horse trading and horseshit, but I can’t see why I have to change my view of faggots that comes straight from the Lord’s book.”

  “Leviticus twenty-thirteen, if memory serves.”

  “It does.”

  “If you won’t change your views, change how you say them.”

  Tolliver ripped the top sheet off the yellow pad and crumpled it. He threw it at a wastebasket three feet away and missed. Archer set his briefs on the edge of the desk, picked the paper up, and smoothed it. “‘Send Justice to Washington.’ Very original.” Tolliver’s slogan in his first campaign had been “Send Justice to Austin.”

  Tolliver scowled. “Man be a damned fool throw up a sweet perch like this ’n to go to Washington, take shit from a bunch of Jews and damn Yankees.”

  “But you want it.”

  Tolliver grinned. “Think what I could do with the presidency as a pulpit. The damned liberals would be dancing and spitting like raindrops on a hot skillet.”

  “You better go if you’re going, Juss. Election’s in thirteen months, New Hampshire primary’s in four.”

  “Forget New Hampshire. That pursed-lipped Irishman, Senator Joseph Bow-to-Rome Donahue, will win that. If I go for it it’ll be grass-roots, back of the pickup, Friday night speeches and Sunday church suppers.” Tolliver jumped to his feet and clapped his hands like a delighted child. He was a big man with a dark, craggy face that reminded his friends of Abraham Lincoln and his enemies of the devil himself. “We go forth into the south, Brother Archer.”

  “America isn’t Texas, Juss.”

  “Who says it isn’t?” Tolliver walked to the window and looked at the domed Texas state capitol four hundred yards to the northeast. It looked very much like the Capitol in Washington. “You saying the American people wouldn’t vote for a redneck preacher who’d tell ’em the truth? You think the American people are any less weary of corruption and greed and influence-selling in the halls of Congress than the people of Texas were when they sent me here with a shovel and a broom?”

  Archer smiled. Juss is already writing his speeches, he thought. Tolliver had indeed ridden to his first inaugural in the back of a farmer’s stake truck holding a coal shovel and a push broom promising to “muck out the capital.” Sophisticates in Austin and Dallas snickered at the rube gesture and legislators made angry speeches about the disrespectful symbolism, but muck it out Tolliver had. “People in the rest of the country don’t love God as we do, Juss.”

  “We are privileged to l
ove God, Zeke. Others need only learn to fear Him.”

  Archer shook his head. Juss was naive, but wasn’t easily dissuaded. “The city liberals will be nipping at your flanks as soon as you break cover.”

  “Let ’em try, Zeke. They’ll snap and I’ll snap back, and when the bitin’s done we’ll see who’s got the teeth marks and on what parts of their bodies.” He picked up the briefs off the corner of his desk and pushed them back in Archer’s arms. “Do whatever you think is right with this tiresome stuff, Ezekiel. I got a crusade to think up.”

  2

  THE MAN CALLED COBRA sat under an acacia tree on his farm on a plateau north of Stellenbosch in the Cape Province of the Republic of South Africa. He had a laptop computer on a small, somewhat rickety, folding table, a pitcher of gin slings, a bucket of ice, and his tattered journal. He’d bought the vast, dry farm with its quite promising vineyards in 1981 from an old white man who had given up on the racial politics of apartheid despite the gradual emergence of men of goodwill on both sides of the deep color divide that went back generations. He had the money from his campaigns with the legendary Major Mad Mike Harris, boosted by a handful of diamonds from his last and most profitable shot, the elimination of a Russian nationalist extremist. The job had involved killing a retired general and presidential candidate in Russia’s elections of 1994, probably the most heavily guarded man on the planet. The shot had been over a thousand yards on a winter’s day with light wind and snow in the swirling urban canyons of central St. Petersburg. Cobra had been well paid by the Russian government, and even better by the Americans. Neither knew of the other’s involvement. Or so Cobra believed.

  Cobra felt he had earned his retirement. This year he would turn fifty-one years old, but it had been a hard life of danger and war and wounds, both physical and psychic. He liked the quiet life of the country; his workers and tenants, all inherited from the seller, needed minimal supervision, and riding among the vines and across the open veldt gave him pleasure of owning, actually controlling, a vast open place. Cobra had spent too much of his life hiding in small spaces, waiting in damp darkness.