The pilot arrives in an ambulance, with armed guards. He wears a white helmet that is sealed to his airtight suit and he strides to the unmarked plane without delay. The ground crew and guards back off as the engine emits the high-pitched signal that always brings a few men slouching out of the radar shack to watch the black-bandit jet streak down the runway. It's over almost at once, the shrill sound rising, the strut-and-wheel devices keeping the long wings level until flying speed is reached. Then the plane is up, the pogos drop off, the men try to keep track of the fast steep climb, the brilliant leap into another skin. They scrunch up their faces, peering into the haze. But the object is already gone, part of the high quiet, the flat and seamless sky out there, leaving behind a string of soft drawled curses and murmurs of disbelief.

The pilot, sooner or later, whoever he is, whatever his base or his mission, thinks about the items stored in his seat pack. Water, field rations, flares, a first-aid kit; a hunting knife and pistol; a needle tipped with lethal shellfish toxin and concealed in a fake silver dollar. ("We'd just as soon they didn't get a chance to interrogate you guys, not that we think you'd breathe a word.") There is also the delicate charge of cyclonite that will pulverize the camera and electronic equipment an undetermined number of seconds after the pilot activates the timer and gets his feet into the stirrups of the ejection seat, should the remote possibility arise that any such maneuver is necessary. ("Now, you people understand the ejection seat can cause amputation of the limbs if things don't work just perfect, so maybe you ought to figure on slipping quietly over the side, like you don't want to wake the kids.") He can't help thinking, sooner or later, about the worst that could happen. A stall at extreme altitudes. Or an SA-2 missile just happens to detonate nearby, knocking out a stabilizer. ("Not that the bastards have the know-how to go that high.") Next thing he knows he is out in the stratosphere, sky-hiking with a pack on his back, and he tries to convince a somewhat dreamy hand to jerk the pull-ring. At fifteen thousand feet it happens automatically, swat, the orange plume streaming out of his shoulder blades. It becomes a matter of dignified descent. He comes floating down out of the endless pale, struck simultaneously by the beauty of the earth and a need to ask forgiveness. He is a stranger, in a mask, falling. People come into view, farm hands, children racing toward the spot where the wind will set him down. Their rough caps are tilted back. He is near enough to hear them calling, the words bounced and steered and elongated by the contours of the land. The land smells fresh. He is coming down to springtime in the Urals and he finds that this privileged vision of the earth is an inducement to truth. He wants to tell the truth. He wants to live another kind of life, outside secrecy and guilt and the pull of grave events. This is what the pilot thinks, rocking softly down to the tawny fields of a landscape so gentle and welcoming it might almost be home.

20 May

Laurence Parmenter booked a seat on the daily flight to the Farm, the CIA's secret training base in Virginia. The flight was operated under military cover and used mainly by Agency people with short-term business at the base.

The Farm was known officially by the cryptonym isolation. The names of places and operations were a special language in the Agency. Parmentef was interested in the way this language constantly found a deeper level, a secret level where those outside the cadre could not gain access to it. It was possible to say that the closest brotherhood in the Agency was among those who kept the crypt lists, who devised the keys and digraphs and knew the true names of operations. Camp Peary was the Farm, and the Farm was isolation, and isolation probably had a deeper name somewhere, in a locked safe or some computer buried in the ground.

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 Parrnenter 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-l 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 sharpshooter. 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 thought this was farfetched. Look at the damn trees, you know you're in Virginia. But he was careful to say nothing to T-Jay. T-Jay was not to be disputed on subjects central to his interests.