Outside the hall people crowded around the general, trying to touch him, show him their faces. He moved slowly to a waiting car. Lee pushed through the crowd. People thrust their faces into Walker's line of sight. They called to him and reached across bodies.

Lee caught the general's eye and smiled as if to say, Bet you don't know who I am. Untouchable. He had his hand inside the jacket, gripping the stock of the. 38, just to do it, to get this close and show how simple, how strangely easy it is to make your existence felt. He saw a picture of the crowd breaking apart, crying out as they scattered, No, no, no, and Walker on the pavement, hatless now, a front-page photo in the Morning News.

He took the bus to his rooming house. He sat on the bed, holding the revolver. Shooting Walker was a dead-end now. He had no means to get to Cuba. They probably wouldn't take him even if he shot the man and managed to escape. History was closed to Edwin Walker. He put the gun in a dresser drawer. He went to the kitchen and drank some milk, standing in the dark.

What would he have to give Fidel before they let him live happily in little Cuba?

He sat at the wheel of Ruth Paine's station wagon. Dust blew across the gravel surface of the huge parking lot. It was Sunday and the lot was empty.

Ruth Paine was tall and slender, a long-jawed woman in her thirties with wavy doll's hair and librarian's glasses. She turned in her seat, looking straight back.

"Slow, slow, slow," she said. "Take it very slow."

He went in reverse for thirty yards, then hit the brake too hard, jolting them both. They sat looking out at the windswept lot.

"Did you tell him where I live?"

"I don't know where you live," she said. "It wasn't until he asked that I realized I didn't know. Even Marina doesn't know. Put it in forward and we'll do some turns."

"Did he say how he found you? How he knew Marina is staying with you?"

"He seemed a very reasonable man. I don't think he'll cause you any trouble at work. He said he wouldn't do that and I believe him."

"He knows where I work?"

"I told him. I didn't see what else I could do. They're the government, Lee."

He stared through the windshield.

"Put it in forward. Drive toward that litter basket. Then make a left around it."

He remembered now. He'd left a forwarding address at the post office in New Orleans before he went to Mexico City. Ruth Paine's address. But why are they looking for him? Because they know he visited the Soviet and Cuban embassies. They have him on film. They have recordings of his voice. What is it called, electronic eavesdropping?

"Ease up on the accelerator," Ruth said.

A broadsheet was fastened around the litter basket. the vatican is the whore of revelation. He made the turn nicely and straightened out.

"He wanted to know about anyone visiting or calling. I told him your social contact at the Paine house consisted mainly of dialing the number that says what time it is. He thought that was fairly funny."

If the Feebees could find him, so could Guy Banister. Whatever the Feebees knew, Banister could find out. A whole Sunday paper scattered in the wind, pages skipping past. He brought the car to a stop and stared through the windshield.

Ruth Paine said softly, "Let's try it in reverse one more time."

He saw something in the Morning News about JFK coming to Dallas. A noon luncheon. November 21 or 22. He barely scanned the story. He barely ran his eyes over the surface of the words. It was a bright cool day. He saw a shopping cart roll slowly out of an alley.

Marina slipped out of the house during the FBI man's second visit there. She walked around and around his car, trying to figure out what make it was. She couldn't read the raised metal lettering but she did memorize the license number, as Lee had ordered, and wrote it on a slip of paper when she got back to the house, getting one digit wrong.

Lee wrote a letter to the Soviet embassy in Washington, using Ruth Paine's typewriter. He had to type the letter several times and had trouble with the envelope as well, getting the address and return address mixed up and leaving out numbers and whole words. But it was worthwhile to see the sentences emerge so clear and solid with the authority his handwriting could not convey. He complained about the notorious FBI. He tried to tell the embassy between the lines that he was known to the KGB. He asked about Soviet entry visas and announced the birth of his daughter. He blamed Mexico City on the Cubans.

Then he wrote a note to the FBI man and took it on his lunch hour to the local office of the Bureau, where he handed it to a receptionist and walked out. He understood the agent's name to be Hardy and this is the single word he wrote on the envelope. He did not sign or date the note. The note said he was tired of the FBI bothering his wife and if they didn't stop he would take action. It also said he was affiliated with the New Orleans FBI, including being assigned an official code number, and that could be verified.

He practiced parking on the weekend with Ruth.

The nosebleeds started again.

He played with little Rachel, who had dimples just like Papa. It was David Ferrie who'd told him months before that dimples were a mark of the Libran.

Nicholas Branch has a sound tape made in Miami nine days before the President was due to appear in that city. The conversation on the tape was secretly recorded by one William Somersett, a police informer. The man talking to Somersett is Joseph A. Milteer, a member of the Congress of Freedom and the White Citizens Council of Atlanta.

somersett I think Kennedy's coming here on the eighteenth, something like that, to make some kind of speech.

milteer You can bet your bottom dollars he's going to have a lot to say about the Cubans. There's so many of them here.

somersett Yeah, well, he'll have a thousand bodyguards. Doo't worry about that.

milteer The more bodyguards he has, the easier it is to get him.

SOMERSETT Well how in the hell do you figure would be the best way to get him?

milteer From an office building with a high-powered rifle. He knows he's a marked man.

somersett They're really going to try to kill him?

milteer Oh, yeah, it's in the working. There ain't any countdown on it. We've just got to be sitting on go. Countdown, they can move in on you, and on go they can't. Countdown is all right for a slow prepared operation. But in an emergency operation, you've got to be sitting on go.

somersett Boy, if that Kennedy gets shot, we've got to know where we're at. Because you know that'll be a real shake if they do that.

milteer They wouldn't leave any stone unturned. No way. They will pick somebody up within hours afterwards if anything like that would happen. Just to throw the public off.

When the Secret Service heard the tape, they prevailed upon the President's men to cancel the motorcade scheduled for Miami. Kennedy traveled by helicopter from the airport to a downtown hotel, where he spoke to a group of journalists.

Branch has two theories about this incident.

One, T. J. Mackey leaked news of the plot either directly to Milteer or to people in his circle. It's a fact that Mackey had connections in the intelligence unit of the Miami police and it's possible that he knew Milteer was being monitored. Milteer, a sixty-two-year-old Georgian, was known to be involved in violent resistance to integration.

Two, it was Guy Banister who told Milteer about the Miami plot and unwittingly ruined the operation.

(The Secret Service did not forward details of the taped conversation to agents responsible for the President's safety in Dallas. The FBI questioned Milteer superficially after the assassination.)

Branch also has a theory about the Oswald doubles who were active for almost two months, mainly in and around Dallas but also in other Texas cities. He thinks Mackey devised the scheme principally to occupy Alpha 66, to get them so deeply entrenched in rigid arrangements and setups that they wouldn't be able to adjust when the Miami fagade folded over in the first breeze. Joseph Milteer had spoken of the difference between countdown and go. Mackey wanted to be sure that Alpha was stuck in countdown. He would be sitting on go.