Frame 232 (20 page)

“No clue.”

He stepped into the sink and paused a moment to think it over. Then the basin collapsed, the front legs bending at the halfway point like a kneeling camel. Hammond grabbed onto the bottom of the window out of reflex, and the sink fell away beneath him, striking the concrete floor with a plastic slap.

“Oh, great.”

“Jason!”

“Time to wing it,” he said. “Look out!”

Sheila was aware of approaching footsteps as Hammond struggled to get through the opening.

“Here he comes,” he said when he was halfway out, “right on schedule.”

She grabbed his shirt collar and pulled with all the strength she could summon.

When Birk discovered the door was locked, he let out a frustrated scream. He blew the knob away with two shots.

The assassin paused for a second after kicking the door open, and that cost him his chance
 
—the last portion of his target wiggled through the window and was gone. Birk aimed
sloppily and fired once, but the round ricocheted off a cinder block and zoomed away.

He stormed up the steps and hurried to the set of panoramic den windows situated over the area where they had made their escape. He expected to see them running across the lawn toward the woods, which would afford him a gamely hunter’s chance. But they were nowhere in sight. He went to the south side of the house, but again there was nothing.

Cursing, he went from window to window for the next ten minutes. When he saw that their rental car was gone, he realized with a sinking feeling that he should’ve checked there first.

That’s when he decided he would lie to his employer.

THEY DID NOT SPEAK
for the first few miles; the only sound between them was the baseline purr of the rental’s V6 engine. Then Sheila said she could tell Ben Burdick was a good guy in spite of the first impressions, and she wondered if they should go to the police. Hammond felt it would be a waste of time, as Ben was dead anyway and the sociopath who killed him would be long gone by now. Also, he didn’t want anyone knowing where they were.

Hammond did, however, pull over to a pay phone to report the murder anonymously, covering the mouthpiece to muffle his voice. He couldn’t bear the thought of Ben’s body lying there, which it might have for days considering the degree of isolation in which the man chose to live his life.

“Are you hungry?” he asked when they got back to the rooms.

“No, I’ve lost my appetite.”

“Thirsty?”

“No.”

“Is there anyth
 
—?”

She turned to him, her eyes thinned with rage. “You
should have listened to me, Jason! You should have heeded my warning!”

“Sheila
 
—”

“If you had, Dr. Burdick wouldn’t be dead right now!”

“Now hold on a second.”

“In your tireless pursuit of the truth, you cost someone his life! Doesn’t that bother you? Even a little?”

In his mind, Hammond buried that accusation a million fathoms down in a pool of bubbling blackness that seemed to have grown a little wider every time he checked it.

“Sheila,
calm down
.”

She hugged herself and leaned forward.

“That guy was coming to Ben’s house whether we were there or not. That wasn’t going to change.”

“Wrong.”

“What?”

“You’re wrong. He showed up around the same time you did. Somehow he knew you were going to go there. I don’t know how, but he did. Wherever
you
go,
he
goes.”

Hammond tried to find a bearable place for this ugly truth in his mental matrix, and when he was unsuccessful, he set it aside.

“What do you care, anyway? Nothing in your perfect little world will change if this all falls apart! What do you lose in any of this?”

Another heart-slicing observation that had to be put in a cage before it bit him too hard. He’d wondered about this point on many occasions over the years and still had not come up with a satisfactory answer. “Look,” he said, “I know how upsetting this is.”

She wiped her eyes fiercely. “I’ve never seen anyone get shot before.”

“I’m sorry you had to see it today. And if it makes any difference, yes, of course I’m upset about it. But what’s keeping me focused is Ben himself. There’s no way he’d want us to fall apart now. Getting to the bottom of the assassination was his passion. He dedicated years of his life to it. If we give in to our emotions, then the people who did this get to claim another victory.”

More tears came. “I know. I know you’re right.”

He wrapped his arms around her, and she hugged him back.

“I’m sorry about what I said.”

“It’s okay.”
And if you don’t think the guilt is already eating me alive,
he wanted to add,
then you’re crazy.

Hammond opened the laptop and turned it on, then shook the USB drive out of the Pez dispenser. Once the MacBook’s operating system was up and running, he sat down and said heavily, “All right, let’s find out what was so important that Ben was willing to dedicate his last words to it.” As he plugged the drive into the port, he added grimly, “I think I already have an idea, though.”

The icon for the drive appeared on the desktop, and Hammond clicked on it. The new box that opened contained just one file
 
—a Microsoft Word document titled “two.doc.”

“As I suspected.”

“The second book?”

“I’m sure. Look.” He pointed to the columns on the right, where there were more details. “Almost two full megabytes. That’s pretty big for a Word document. A normal doc
 
—say, a two-page letter
 
—is only about thirty kilobytes.”

“Yeah, it’s huge.”

“And check this out
 
—the last time the file was modified was less than a week ago.” He looked up at her. “He’s been working on it the whole time.”

“Wow.”

“Okay, first things first
 
—making a safety copy.” He opened the contextual menu and chose Copy. Then he created a new folder on the desktop and clicked Paste. Once the file was there, he named the folder “Ben” and designated it to be hidden. Then, taking a deep breath, he said, “Now let’s have a look.”

He opened the document. The title at the top, set entirely in capital letters, hit them like a brick
 
—“AUTHOR’S PREFACE: MY PRIVATE NIGHTMARE.”

The opening line was no less startling: “In the time between the publication of my first book on the Kennedy assassination and the writing of this second one, I became the target of a relentless campaign of harassment and manipulation.”

Burdick said the threatening phone calls, letters, and e-mails had begun immediately after the first book’s release. These were from “the usual crazies, the kind of people you’d expect.” That changed, however, after he announced the coming of a second volume, one that would offer new revelations as well as the research to back them up. “As soon as I put teasers on my website to generate some buzz, I started getting phone calls of a very different kind.”

It was one man, and his knowledge of Burdick’s life was of such depth and detail that Burdick determined, “He had to be connected with the government somehow. I am convinced of this.”

Burdick was ordered to take down the site and give up
work on the second book immediately. When he refused, “things began happening that I never dreamed of.” Half the money in his personal bank account vanished. His daughter’s house mysteriously caught fire while her husband was away on business, nearly killing her and her two daughters. And someone took a shot at his son
 
—the bullet missing him by inches
 
—as he walked through a Home Depot parking lot in suburban Minnesota. “That’s when I gave in
 
—and when I started to fall apart both emotionally and physically.”

Sheila put a hand to her mouth. “Jason . . .”

“Yeah.” He continued reading.

I came to understand that I would never get my life back unless I finished this book. So I worked on it little by little, in secret, each day. Something in here has made these people very nervous, maybe more than one thing. I don’t know what that is, but I am willing to risk my life to bring it to the attention of the world and, hopefully, to make those responsible pay for their sins.

Hammond slumped back in his chair and remained in that position, staring at the screen, for a long time.

“I want to read through all of it,” he said finally, firmly. “Every word.”

“Okay.”

“It’s going to take some time. See here?” He pointed to the lower left-hand corner of the screen, where the document’s status bar was located. “More than seven hundred pages.”

“You’d better get started, then.”

The next two and a half hours passed in near silence. Sheila ordered room service for both of them, ate her salad while reading over his shoulder, then lay down on the bed and fell into a deep, dreamless sleep.

Hammond looked like a mad scientist with his face illuminated by the monitor’s glow. He barely noticed his food, barely moved. Sometimes he would mumble something to himself. Other times he would make a comment to Sheila, even after she had drifted off.

He reached chapter 32
 
—“A New Pawn in the Game?”
 
—around ten thirty. He read through it once, his attention so fixated that he wouldn’t have noticed a bomb blast, then roused his partner.

“Sheila, wake up
 
—I found something.”

“Hmm?”

“C’mon, you’re going to want to see this.”

He got behind the computer again and scrolled to the chapter’s opening text. “Okay, check this out
 
—”

I went to the CIA library in May of 2012 to examine some recently declassified files pertaining to the assassination. While reading through them, I came across a single document that was stamped “100-Year Hold,” which meant it wasn’t supposed to be released to the public until 2064. My best guess was that it had been included with the other material by mistake. This could have happened during the declassification transfer two weeks earlier or on the very day those other files had been originally classified and stored away all those years ago. Whatever the case, I couldn’t believe my luck.

Burdick’s first instinct, he said, was to take the document into the men’s room and photograph it with his cell phone, “but with security cameras and human eyes on me from every angle, I knew this wasn’t going to happen.” Instead, he kept the document hidden among the legitimate papers and read it a little at a time, making notes as he went along.

It turned out to be the first page of a report about a man he’d never heard of before
 
—a Cuban soldier of fortune named Galeno Clemente. “The image that quickly crystallized was of an utterly terrifying figure with a long history of violence. He started out in Castro’s military and fought many battles, surviving through raw natural talent in the ways of warfare. He was soon recruited for more advanced training and was transformed into a killing machine.” Burdick said the author of the report believed Clemente might have played a role in the assassination. The report didn’t elaborate further, “likely because he didn’t know of any details.” The author did, however, speculate extensively on Clemente’s whereabouts once the assassination had been carried out, “which gave me the impression that there were many people interested in finding him.”

Burdick closed the chapter with:

My heart sank when I realized the report had more than one page, but I couldn’t find any of the others. I’m sure they were stored in their intended location, along with scores of other documents that continue to hide the truth. I planned to return to the CIA library to research Clemente further. But for obvious reasons, I have not had the opportunity to do so.

When Sheila was finished reading, she looked at Hammond and said, “Do you really think Clemente is the man in my mother’s film?”

“It’s very possible.”

“Did Ben mention him on his website when he put those teasers up?”

“I never saw it, so I have no idea. I wish I had.”

“What do you think we should do?”

“I think we should consider
 
—”

Then he was cut off by his phone.