Page 95 of The 9th Man

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LUKE HEARD HIMSELF SAY WHAT HE’D ALREADY CONCLUDED FROMtalking to the expert. Of course, he hadn’t told the guy any of what was happening. He and Stephanie had decided to keep those details to themselves for now, respecting Rowland’s reach within the government, which surely extended to the FBI.

He pointed. “Kennedy’s motorcade makes the turn onto Elm. A few seconds later Oswald fires his first shot. The bullet hits the president in the upper back. The lead car brakes. So does the trail car, but the driver stomped on the pedal. That detail is in the Warren Report. The force of the deceleration shoved the car’s passengers, one of them an armed Secret Service agent, forward. It’s momentary, but enough. In the back seat an agent, crouched high because he’s the only one armed with a rifle, falls forward. The barrel of the weapon drops, comes level with Kennedy’s limousine, the trigger is accidentally pulled, and the bullet strikes Kennedy in the back of the head.”

He kept motioning, re-creating in his mind what could have happened that day, directing Jillian’s attention to the street.

“At roughly the same moment that happens Oswald lets off his second shot, but misses. Now Agent Clint Hill is off his running board and sprinting toward Kennedy’s limousine, which is surging forward. Oswald cycles the rifle’s bolt and fires his third and final shot. Another miss. The bullet goes downrange, strikes the curb near the abutment, and grazes James Tague. Oswald tries for a fourth shot, but it’s too late. The motorcade has disappeared beneath the underpass. Over there.”

“So what’s his name, this agent with the rifle?”

“Go back to the diagram,” the expert said. “Read what’s next to the deceleration formula.”

He did. Sufficient force. X. Approx 155 lbs.

“That says the braking of the trail car was enough to throw forward a 155-pound man.”

So he wanted to know. “Which agents exactly were in that trail car? Who carried the rifle?”

“Jack Ready was on the passenger-side running board directly opposite Clint Hill. In still images he’s clearly visible as the limousine heads toward the underpass. So we know exactly what Hill was doing. Emory Roberts was in the trail car’s front passenger seat and never moves. Agents Kinney and Landis? Multiple photographs show them pinned to their seats. Same with Powers and O’Donnell, the president’s assistants. It was either Hickey—”

“Or the ninth man.”

“Correct.”

“Thomas Rowland,” he said.

“But wouldn’t the other agents in the trail car have known if that rifle fired?”

“I asked the same thing and was told that it could have fired and no one in that car knew. Maybe Oswald’s third shot and the AR’s shot overlapped. An AR-15 round would’ve crossed the gap to Kennedy’s limousine in a tenth of what it takes to blink your eye. Maybe the acoustics distorted the reports. That rifle would have shown no muzzle flash in broad daylight, and in the chaos of the moment all sound would have blurred together. Of course, it is possible those agents knew and were ordered to keep their mouths shut. Imagine the fallout if it’s revealed the Secret Service accidentally killed the president. Only three agents were called to testify before the Warren Commission. I learned last night that they were Kellerman and Greer from the lead car and Hill from the trail car. No one else was put under oath.”

Which was either suspicious, or another example of the commission’s sloppy work. The guy last night had rattled off a whole list of things the commission failed to fully investigate. Was there a cover-up? A rush to judgment that a single bullet from a single assassin did all the damage? Over the past sixty years the Warren Commission’s findings had been dissected and reassembled so often it had become a Frankenstein’s monster. Not dead, nor alive, but something obscenely in between. But that was not the entirety of the evidence.

There was the audio Simmons preserved.

There’s been an accident, not a murder, so the law can be waived.

An odd choice of words.

Was it the pressure of the moment? A slip of the tongue? Or just a lie told to justify the taking of the body?

He stared around at Dealey Plaza.

Traffic was picking up as Dallas adjusted to a Sunday morning. No one was shooting or chasing them, but danger was out there. They were solidly on Thomas Rowland’s radar. What about Talley? Had the former Delta soldier truly switched mental gears?Target up, target down.That was how effective operators thought. Yet whose side was Talley on? He’d killed Persik and his men, then let Luke and Jillian go. But, after that, he’d pursued them into the bayou and burned Ray Simmons’s house to the ground. What in the world was happening here?

Now that Luke had finally verbalized the assassination scenario over which his brain had been mulling, the sights and sounds of November 22, 1963, were stuck on a memory loop. He could see in vivid detail Frame 313 of the Zapruder film when Kennedy’s head snapped back. Jackie in her pink dress. Blood and brains exploding.

Horrible.

Two gunshots? Three? Four?

One gun? Two?

He couldn’t let this end here.

No way.

You might screw up. You might even fail. But never, ever quit.

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