The operation was crude. Someone looking like Oswald walks into an auto showroom, says his name is Lee Oswald, says he will soon be coming into money, test-drives a Comet at high speeds and makes a remark about going back to Russia. Someone who says his name is Oswald goes to a gunsmith and has a telescopic sight mounted on his rifle. Someone looking like Oswald goes to a rifle range half a dozen times in a thirteen-day period and makes a point of shooting at other people's targets.

All of these incidents took place at times when the real Oswald was known to be elsewhere.

To Nicholas Branch, more frequently of late, "Lee H. Oswald" seems a technical diagram, part of some exercise in the secret manipulation of history. A photograph taken by hidden CIA cameras of a man walking past the Soviet embassy in Mexico City bears the identifying tag "Lee H. Oswald." Oswald was in Mexico City at the time but the man in the picture is someone else-broad-chested, with a full face and cropped hair, in his late thirties or early forties. Another form of double. It's not surprising that Branch thinks of the day and month of the assassination in strictly numerical terms- 11/22.

But there's something even more curious than the misidentification. The man in the photograph matches the written physical descriptions Branch has seen of T. J. Mackey.

(The Curator has never been able to provide a photograph of Mackey labeled as such.)

Branch sits in his glove-leather chair looking at the paper hills around him. Paper is beginning to slide out of the room and across the doorway to the house proper. The floor is covered.with books and papers. The closet is stuffed with material he has yet to read. He has to wedge new books into the shelves, force them in, insert them sideways, squeeze everything, keep everything. There is nothing in the room he can discard as irrelevant or out-of-date. It all matters on one level or another. This is the room of lonely facts. The stuff keeps coming.

The Curator sends thirty more volumes from CIA's one-hundred-and-forty-four- volume file on Oswald. He sends cartons of investigative reports and trial transcripts concerning people only remotely connected to the events of November 22. He sends coroners' reports on the dead.

Salvatore (Sam) Giancana, the syndicate boss who grew up near Jack Ruby in Chicago, is found dead in June 1975 in his finished basement, shot once in the back of the head, six times in a stitching pattern around the mouth. He was scheduled to testify five days later before a Senate committee looking into plots against Castro. The murder weapon is found and traced to Miami. No arrests in the case.

Walter Everett Jr., the man who conceived the plot, is found dead in May 1965 in a motel room outside Alpine, Texas, where he was assistant to the president of Sul Ross State College. Ruled a heart attack. He was registered as Thomas Stainback.

Wayne Wesley Elko, the ex-paratrooper and part-time mercenary, is found dead in January 1966 in a motel room outside Hibbing, Minnesota. Ruled acute morphine poisoning. In his pickup, police find tools and copper wiring stolen from an iron mine nearby, and a two-year-old boy asleep in a toddler's car seat.

Francis Gary Powers, the U-2 pilot, gets a job with KNBC in Los Angeles, flying a helicopter and reporting on traffic and brush fires until one day in August 1977 when the Bell Jet Ranger evidently runs out of fuel and comes yawing down in a field where boys are playing softball, killing Powers instantly.

The crash occurs just three miles from the Skunk Works, a building with blacked-out windows at Lockheed Aircraft where the first U-2 was developed twenty-two years earlier.

Branch has become wary of these cases of cheap coincidence. He's beginning to think someone is trying to sway him toward superstition. He wants a thing to be what it is. Can't a man die without the ensuing ritual of a search for patterns and links?

The Curator sends a four-hundred-page study of the similarities between Kennedy's death and Lincoln's.

Wayne shared the back seat with Raymo's ancient shepherd dog. The idea was travel light. They'd moved out of Miami real quick, grabbing essential things, so it was hard to see the need for an animal coming along, big and sick as it was, gasping for last air.

They rode through the night.

Raymo drove and Frank sat next to him. They spoke Spanish most of the time, which Wayne didn't try to decode. His mind was still on fire with the knowledge of what they were going to do. They were going to go over the line. It was like science fiction. It carried you past the ordinary portals.

Frank drove for a while and Wayne sat up front. At least they weren't using the Bel Air. This was a '58 Merc with a pockmarked body and an engine out of the speed shop, easy-breathing, the pounce of a slingshot dragster. Wayne turned the radio full-blast. The wind shot through. They'd left all the new weapons with Alpha except for one rifle Mackey was transporting. Rock 'n' roll screamed in Wayne's face. Middle of the night near Tallahassee.

Wayne's old man used to say, "God made big people. And God made little people. But Colt made the.45 to even things up."

But this wasn't a mission to locate the social mean. They were making a crash journey over the edge. Wayne kept shaking his head to settle all the pieces. Making these shiver motions that drew a look from driver Frank. Wayne was amazed that an idea like this could even exist in America. And here he was in the middle of it, wind streaming through the car.

They stood pissing in a field in a light rain.

Wayne took the wheel with the first ruddled light breaking behind them. Radio off and windows shut now. Frank asleep in the rear seat and moaning through his crowded teeth.

"I'm still absorbing this thing," Wayne said, looking across at Raymo. "You read science fiction?"

"Fucking crazy, Wayne?"

"There's a quality I used to feel before a night jump. Like is this actually happening?"

"We're talking this is real."

"I know it's real."

"First they cancel Chicago right out. Then they do Miami without the motorcade. They know it's real."

Wayne kept studying Raymo, occasionally darting a look at the road. The car was tight and quiet, beautifully behaved.

"Like we're racing across the night," he said, mock-hysterical.

"They're paying some nice money. Think of you're doing a day's work."

"Like we're hand-picked men on the biggest mission of our lives."

They passed a convoy of military vehicles. After a while Raymo gestured toward the back seat and said, "There's something cross my mind."

"What?"

"I'm thinking I ought to put him down."

"What? Your dog?"

"He lost all coordination. He tries to get up, he can't keep his paws from sliding out."

"When the nervous system goes."

"I hate to take him to the box. They gas them in a box."

"You don't want gas."

"I hate the idea they use gas."

"Some things you know what has to be done."

"I had this dog since before Gir6n."

"But you don't have the heart."

"You hate to be the one."

"I'm stopping first chance," Wayne said.

He studied Raymo's face, which showed nothing, and five miles farther on he took an exit for a regional airport.

He had his hunting knife wrapped in a couple of sweaters in his khaki poke.

He stopped on the grassy border of a long straight road that ran alongside a chain-link fence with barbed wire canted at the top. He got out and waited while Raymo eased the big dog onto the grass. Silhouettes of hangars and small planes. Raymo got in the car and drove fifty yards and stopped. The dog stood by the side of the road. Wayne approached from the rear, standing over the animal, straddling it. Stars still out. He grabbed the dog's scruff and lifted hard. The front paws paddled air and Wayne moved his knife-hand under the dog's jaw. He growled, cutting the animal's throat. Then he let go with the left hand. The dog fell flat and hard, lying between Wayne's feet, blood running. He growled at it again and walked to the car, holding the bloody knife high. He wanted Raymo to see it, just as a sign, a gesture that had no meaning you could put into words.