Mass confusion here. Rolling and fighting. • As he was being led out. Now he's being led back. Oswald shot.

The police have the entire area blocked off. Everybody stay back is the yell, is the yell. A stocky man with a hat on. Oswald doubled over. One of the wildest scenes. Screaming red lights. A man in a gray hat. Somehow he got in. The police protection and the police cordons.

People. Policemen.

Here is young Oswald now.

He is being hustled out.

He is lying flat.

There is a gunshot wound in his lower abdomen.

He is white.

Oswald white.

Lying in the ambulance.

His head is back.

He is unconscious.

Dangling.

His hand is dangling over the edge of the stretcher.

And now the ambulance is moving out.

Flashing red lights.

Young Oswald rushed out.

He is white, white.

Remember the ambulance in Atsugi, camouflage-green, wavering in the heat haze on the tarmac, and the pilot climbing out?

Lee didn't feel real good. First they shot him, then they tried to give him artificial respiration. He learned in Marine training this is the last thing you do for a man with abdominal injuries.

He could see himself shot as the camera caught it. Through the pain he watched TV. The siren made that panicky sound of high speed in the streets, although he had no sense of movement. A man spoke close to him, saying if he had anything he wanted to say he was going to have to say it now. Through the pain, through the losing of sensation except where it hurt, Lee watched himself react to the augering heat of the bullet.

Remember how the pilot looked, a spaceman in a helmet and rubber suit?

Everything was leaving him, all sensation at the edges breaking up in space. He knew he was still in the ambulance but couldn't hear the siren any longer or the voice of the man who wanted him to speak, a friendly type Texan by the sound of him. The only thing left was the mocking pain, the picture of the twisted face on TV. Die and hell in Hidell. He watched in a darkish room, someone's TV den.

The falling away of things we carry around with us, twilight and chimney smoke. What is metal doing in his body?

He was in pain. He knew what it meant to be in pain. All you had to do was see TV. Arm over his chest, mouth in a knowing oh. The pain obliterated words, then thought. There was nothing left to him but the pathway of the bullet. Penetration of the spleen, stomach, aorta, kidney, liver and diaphragm. There was nothing left but the barest consciousness of bullet. Then the bullet itself, the copper, lead and antimony. They'd introduced metal into his body. This is what caused the pain.

But remember the men watching the jet take off? Could hardly believe how quick it lost itself in mist.

They logged him in at Parkland at 11:42. Chief complaint, gunshot wound.

The heart was seen to be flabby and not beating at all. No effective heartbeat could be instituted. The pupils were fixed and dilated. There was no retinal blood flow. There was no respiratory effort. No effective pulse could be maintained. Expired: 13:07. Two sponges missing when body closed.

Aerospace.

It is the white nightmare of noon, high in the sky over Russia. Me-too and you-too. He is a stranger, in a mask, falling.

If we are on the outside, we assume a conspiracy is the perfect working of a scheme. Silent nameless men with unadorned hearts. A conspiracy is everything that ordinary life is not. It's the inside game, cold, sure, undistracted, forever closed off to us. We are the flawed ones, the innocents, trying to make some rough sense of the daily jostle. Conspirators have a logic and a daring beyond our reach. All conspiracies are the same taut story of men who find coherence in some criminal act. But maybe not. Nicholas Branch thinks he knows better. He has learned enough about the days and months preceding November 22, and enough about the twenty-second itself, to reach a determination that the conspiracy against the President was a rambling affair that succeeded in the short term due mainly to chance. Deft men and fools, ambivalence and fixed will and what the weather was like. Branch not only has material resulting from the Agency's internal investigations-Everett and Parmenter cooperated to varying degrees-but he also has key information about the last stages of the plot derived from sources inside Alpha 66.

The stuff keeps coming. The Curator sends FBI surveillance logs. He sends a thirty-five-hour film chronology of unedited network footage shot during the weekend of November 22. He sends a computer-enhanced version of the Zapruder film, the 8mm home movie made by a dress manufacturer who stood on a concrete abutment above Elm Street as the shots were fired. Experts have scrutinized every murky nuance of the Zapruder film. It is the basic timing device of the assassination and a major emblem of uncertainty and chaos. There is the powerful moment of death, the surrounding blurs, patches and shadows.

(Branch's analysis of the film and other evidence leads him to believe the first shot came much sooner than most theories would allow, probably at Zapruder frame 186. Governor Connally was hit two point six seconds later, at Zapruder 234. The shot that killed the President, crushingly, came four point three seconds after that. Even though he has reached firm conclusions in this area, Branch will study the computerized version of Zapruder. He is in too deep to stop now.)

The Curator sends a special FBI report that includes detailed descriptions of the dreams of eyewitnesses following the assassination of Kennedy and the murder of Oswald.

The Curator sends material on Bobby Dupard. Branch knows about Dupard only through the Curator. But how does the Curator know? Did Dupard tell someone about his role in the attempt on Walker? Did Oswald let his name slip to someone in New Orleans?

There are worrisome omissions, occasional gaps in the record. Of course Branch understands that the Agency is a closed system. He knows they will not reveal what they've learned to other agencies, much less the public. This is why the history he has contracted to write is a secret one, meant for CIA's own closed collection. But why are they withholding material from him as well? There's something they aren't telling him. The Curator delays, lately, in filling certain requests for information, seems to ignore other requests completely. What are they holding back? How much more is there? Branch wonders if there is some limit inherent in the yielding of information gathered in secret. They can't give it all away, even to one of their own, someone pledged to confidentiality. Before his retirement, Branch analyzed intelligence, sought patterns in random scads of data. He believed secrets were childish things. He was not generally impressed by the accomplishments of men in the clandestine service, the spy handlers, the covert-action staff. He thought they'd built a vast theology, a formal coded body of knowledge that was basically play material, secret-keeping, one of the keener pleasures and conflicts of childhood. Now he wonders if the Agency is protecting something very much like its identity-protecting its own truth, its theology of secrets.

The Curator begins to send fiction, twenty-five years of novels and plays about the assassination. He sends feature films and documentaries. He sends transcripts of panel discussions and radio debates. Branch has no choice but to study this material. There are important things he has yet to learn. There are lives he must examine. It is essential to master the data.

Ramon Benftez, the man on the grassy knoll, is seen in a photograph taken in April 1971 at the dedication of the eternal flame in Cuban Memorial Plaza on Southwest Eighth Street in Miami. An urn containing the flame rests on a twelve-foot column. Five plaques list the names of the fallen-los mdrtires de la brigada de asalfo. The Curator forwards vague reports that Benftez, using another name, drove a taxi for some years in Union City, New Jersey. Otherwise, nothing.