Libra - Don Delillo [56]
He showed his laminated badge to the MP at the gate. The badge was coded to reveal to the trained eye just how much clearance the owner had. After his letter of reprimand, Parmenter had been assigned to what was joshingly called the slave directorate, a support division of clandestine services, and he’d been issued a new badge with a diminished number of little red letters around the edges. His wife said, “How many letters do you have to lose before you disappear?”
T. J. Mackey was waiting at the gatehouse. He wore well-pressed fatigues and had the distant look of a doorman in a gold coat outside a new hotel. Basically he doesn’t want his friends to see him.
He took Parmenter to the JOT area, where junior officer trainees received instruction in everything from the paramilitary arts to counterintelligence. They sat alone in one of four sections of bleacher seats that formed an amphitheater over a pit area. Two young men were grappling in the dust. An instructor circled them in a busy way, speaking a language Larry did not recognize.
“Things broke our way early,” he said to Mackey, “but we’ve reached a static period.”
“I’ve been in touch with Guy Banister.”
“Camp Street.”
“That’s the one. He talked to the Dallas field office of the FBI about this Oswald. They finally got him an answer. He left Dallas April twenty-four or twenty-five.”
“There’s a Russian wife.”
“Left Dallas May ten with their baby.”
“Nobody knows where.”
“That’s right.”
“Which leaves us groping.”
“I thought you had a line of communication.”
“George de Mohrenschildt. But he’s in Haiti. Besides I don’t want him to know how interested we are in Oswald.”
“How interested are we?”
“He sounds right, politically and otherwise. Win wants a shooter with credentials. He’s an ex-Marine. I managed to get access to his M-1 scorebook and other records.”
“Can he shoot?”
“It’s a little confusing. The more I study the records, the more I think we need an interpreter. He was generally rated poor. But it looks like he did his best work the day he fired for qualification. He got a two-twelve rating that day, which makes him a sharp-shooter. Except they gave him a lower designation. So either the number is wrong or the designation is wrong.”
“Or the kid cheated.”
“There’s something else we ought to discuss, although I told Win it seems way too soon. Accidental hits.”
“You want a realistic-looking thing. That means multiple rounds flying from a number of directions.”
“Win says hit the presidential limousine, hit the pavement, hit a Secret Service man. Just don’t shoot anyone in the car.”
“Hit a Secret Service man.”
“Hit, don’t kill.”
“This isn’t a controlled experiment,” Mackey said.
“If at all possible, you try to wound one of the men in the follow-up car. The way these things work, there are two agents on each running board of the follow-up car. That’s four dangling men. And the car is going about twelve miles an hour. And it’s only five feet behind the presidential car, which makes it perfectly plausible, an agent taking a bullet meant for the President.”
“Where do we do it?”
“Miami.”
“Good enough.”
“If at all possible, that’s where Win says we do it.”
“It ought to be Miami.”
“Definitely.”
“Agreed.”
“Sooner or later the President will take a swing through Florida. All the political signs point that way.”
Two more young men entered the pit. Mackey said they were South Vietnamese being trained for the secret police. Foreigners attending sessions at the Farm were known as black trainees. A few of them, on sensitive assignments, had been brought to the U.S. under conditions so secure, according to Mackey, that the men did not necessarily know what country they were in. Larry