The Dallas disc jockey known as Weird Beard was Russell Lee Moore, who also used the name Russ Knight.

The man calling himself Aleksei Kirilenko, a KGB cover name, was in fact Sergei Broda, according to records supplied by the Curator.

After repeated requests, Branch has learned from the Curator T that Theodore J. Mackey, known as T-Jay, was born Joseph Michael Horniak and was last seen in Norfolk, Virginia, January 1964, in the company of a suspected prostitute, possibly of Asian extraction, name unknown.

Mackey sat in the car listening to Frank Vazquez. Frank was excited and tired. He said everything three times and quoted Alpha leaders completely, precisely and with gestures. The two men were surrounded by swamp night, the car sitting downstream from the shack, lights off, the banjo frogs getting up a racket.

Frank's judgment was that Alpha planned to kill the President. He seemed to think Mackey would have trouble believing this. But it was easy to believe. Mackey believed everything these days including how simple it was for Frank to walk into Alpha's camp and out again, carrying every kind of rumor and news.

Alpha was not known for shyness or tight security. They held press conferences to announce their raids on Cuban installations and Soviet freighters. Once they invited a Life photographer on a raid, ten men in two boats. A storm ruined the mission and the pictures but Life did a story anyway. Brave boys of Alpha. South Florida was full of Alpha members, uncounted, devout, screaming in their teeth.

"And this is what you also planned, all this time, T-Jay, to get Kennedy?"

"It's just his time has come."

"I don't think we kill an American president so easy. Miami, they'll have extra protection. This is not like walking into some little capital city, walking into the palace, buying off some bodyguards with a few dollars."

"The barrier is down, Frank. When Jack sent out word to get Castro, he put himself in a world of blood and pain. Nobody told him he had to live there. He made the choice with his brother Bobby. So it's Jack's own idea we're guided by. And once an idea hits."

"Not that I don't wish to see it happen."

"Oh I think it will."

"Someone has to pay for Cuba."

"You and I demand it, Frank."

"And it will point to Castro. They will say here is the source. He sent the men."

"This is what we're looking for. But even so, if all the gears don't mesh, at least we have our man. Someone has to die. It is very much a part of our thinking that Jack is the one."

"This is like Alpha. Someone has to die, they say."

"They can't contain it anymore."

"Do we go in with them?"

"I say why not, Frank."

"Do you trust them to run it?"

"They cross the water to blow up Russian shipping. What the hell. This is a man in an open car."

Frank needed to get some sleep.

"Who's in the camp?" he said.

"Raymo and Wayne and a visitor. You don't say too much to him. Smile nice, shake hands."

Oswald wanted his path to be tracked and his name to be known. He had private designs, a hero's safe haven in Cuba. He wanted to use the rifle that could be traced to him through the transparent Hidell. Mackey was cautious. The kid had a dizzying history and he was playing some kind of mirror game with Ferrie in New Orleans. Left is right and right is left. But he continued to fit the outline that Everett had devised six months earlier. There were the homemade documents, the socialist literature, the weapons and false names. He was one element of the original plan that still made sense.

Mackey trained the headlights on the skiff. Frank climbed in and switched on the deer lamp and the boat moved quietly through the duckweed and past the sunken trees.

Mackey sat in the dark again.

Some of Alpha's boldest operations were run by elements hidden in the Agency. Alpha had CIA mentors. These were men Mackey wasn't even close to knowing. They weren't necessarily known to the leaders of Alpha. A case officer would show up to provide money and to advise on sabotage missions. He would limit his contacts to one or two men in Alpha. They would not know his real name or his position in the Agency. There's always something they aren't letting you know. Alpha was run like a dream clinic. The Agency worked up a vision, then got Alpha to make it come true.

Too many people, too many levels of plotting. Mackey had to safeguard the attempt not only from Alpha but from Everett and Parmenter. They might decide to expose the plan now that he'd removed himself from contact, leaving them to their hieroglyphics. Then Banister and Ferrie and the men dealing out the cash. He had to protect the attempt, make it safe from betrayal.

He waved a hand at the persistent hum that jumped around his ear. A mosquito is a vector of disease. He got out of the car and listened. Something felt strange. Then he heard a vast rustling in the trees, coming louder with the wind. It took him some time to realize it was only water tapping on the leaves, rainwater stirred by the wind and falling leaf to leaf, everywhere around him.

His own car was parked next to Raymo's. It was a three-hour drive to New Orleans, where he would talk to Banister about Alpha 66. Let everyone know. Let everyone tell everyone.

Mackey would put every effort into Miami. He would put men and weapons into Miami. Agree to a joint operation with Alpha. Do the groundwork. Get people and money moving. Eighteen November in Miami. He would build a Miami fagade.

In New Orleans

The first thing he did was take a bus to the end of the Lakeview line to see his father's grave. The keeper helped him find the stone. He stood there in the heat and light, searching for a way to feel. He pictured a man in a gray suit, a collector for Metropolitan Life. Then his mind wandered through a hundred local scenes. Oh bike-riding in City Park. Seafood dinners at Aunt Lillian's every Friday when he was eleven, after he took the train alone from Texas. He hid in the back room reading funnybooks while his cousins fought and played.

A man in a gray suit who tips his hat to women.

In Exchange Alley there was a Negro hunkered on the curb looking in the side mirror of a parked car as he shaved, his mug and his brush on the pavement next to him.

Lee looked up Oswald in the phone book, tracking lost relations.

Lee looked for work. He lied on all his job applications. He lied needlessly and to a purpose. He made up past addresses, made up references and past employment, invented job qualifications, wrote down names of companies that didn't exist and companies that did, although he'd never worked for them.

An interviewer noted on a card: Suit. Tie. Polite.

Marina sat in a chair on the screened-in side porch. She held Lee's half-finished glass of Dr Pepper. It was nearly midnight and still wet and hot and awful. This was their home now, three rooms in a frame house with a little bit of gingerbread up top and some weedy vegetation at the front and side.

Lee was out there somewhere with the garbage. They couldn't afford a garbage can so he slipped out three nights a week to stuff their garbage in other people's containers. He went out wearing basketball shorts from his childhood or the childhood of one of his brothers, no top, and sneaked along the 4900 block of Magazine Street looking for a can to stuff the trash.

She watched him come back now, walking up the neighbor's driveway, which was how you reached the entrance to their part of the house. He came onto the porch and took the glass from her hand. TV voices traveled across the backyards and driveways.

"I am sitting here thinking he doesn't love me anymore."

"Papa loves his wife and child."

"He thinks I am binding him like a rope or chain. His attitude is I bind him. He has the high-flying world of his ideas. If only he didn't have a wife to hold him back, how perfect everything would be."