Kaiser winces. “It’s a tough sell, Penn. You know that. But the director hasn’t ruled it out. Stone is pushing as well.”

“Does the director know about Stone’s Working Group?”

“He does now. After the discovery of those rifles in Royal’s basement, I decided to pull the trigger and bring him into the circle. But last night’s deaths created a lot of anxiety in Washington. The director’s pretty pissed off, but he’s not going to ignore what we’ve found. I think he’ll get there on your father as well.”

“It’s not like Dad’s got a lot of time, John.”

“I know.” He pats my arm. “Why don’t we go upstairs?”

We move toward the elevators. “Any idea how long this will take?”

“If you let Dwight speak his piece without interruption, an hour ought to do it.”

“He’s going to tell me about Carlos Marcello and the Kennedy assassination?”

“And your father.”

“What about my father? What haven’t you told me already?”

Kaiser looks uncomfortable as we step into the elevator. “Look,” he says, pushing 4, “when it comes to the Kennedy case, it’s Stone’s show. Let him tell you his way.”

I don’t even try to hide my exasperation.

“By the way,” says Kaiser, as the car starts to rise, “Stone got the skinny on Eladio Cruz, the Cuban student who ordered the Mannlicher-Carcano Royal ended up with, and then disappeared in New Orleans. Somebody in the Working Group knew an old FBI informant who worked undercover against Castro in Havana. He said Eladio Cruz was a DRE agent for Castro. Cruz’s job was recruiting high school and college-age kids who’d come to America with their parents. He disappeared on November nineteenth, 1963, but he wasn’t reported missing until the twenty-first. At the time, his friends assumed that either exiles had killed him or he’d gone back to Cuba. But Cruz never returned to Cuba, not in 1963 or later. So he didn’t just disappear from New Orleans. He disappeared off the face of the earth.”

The elevator stops, and the doors open to the fourth floor.

“Where do you think he went?” I ask, motioning for John to walk ahead of me into the orange-carpeted corridor.

“Into the sixty-four hundred acres of swamps behind Marcello’s Churchill Farms,” he says, “just like a lot of other guys did.”

As Kaiser takes the lead, I slip my hand into my inside pocket and hit the RECORD button on my Sony. That’s one advantage of the old analog units; the buttons are big enough to operate by touch. “Did his disappearance have to do with the Carcano?”

Kaiser points to his right. “Room 406.”

“Come on, John,” I say, following him.

“Are you serious? A known pro-Castro agent buying a rifle exactly like the one that would be used to kill John Kennedy, then disappearing only days before the assassination?” Kaiser holds up his hand and stops me a few paces from Stone’s door. “Listen, you may not realize how bad Dwight—”

My TracFone is ringing. Kaiser pauses, waiting for me to answer.

“Go on in,” I tell him. “I’ll be right there.”

He sighs with frustration.

Retreating down the hall toward the elevators, I click SEND. “This is Penn.”

“It’s Walker Dennis. I’m headed out to another warehouse fire on Frogmore Road. But that’s not why I’m calling.”

My gut hitches in dread. “What’s happened?”

“I just got a call from Claude Devereux.”

“Brody Royal’s attorney? What did he want?”

“You won’t believe it. That old Cajun bastard told me that Snake Knox, Sonny Thornfield, and the other Double Eagles on my list will be at my office at seven A.M. tomorrow to surrender themselves for questioning.”

For several seconds I’m speechless. “That’s hard to believe.”

“Well, they’re coming. Devereux didn’t call them Double Eagles, of course. He claims they have nothing to hide, and that they want to clear their names as soon as possible.”

“Did he say Billy Knox would be with them?”

“Billy wasn’t on my list. We don’t have anything on him yet.”

“What do you have on the others?”

“Not much, to be honest. Leo Spivey’s home computer has turned up some suspicious accounting—coded stuff—and we’ve found a few suspect connections to the old guys. We still have a lot of evidence to go through, and I’m pressuring the hell out of the cookers and dealers we rounded up this morning.”

“Walker . . . those punks know that ratting out the Knoxes means a bullet in the head—if they’re lucky. Stay with the computers.”

“We will. I just wanted to make sure you’re gonna be at my office in the morning. If those fuckers have their high-dollar lawyer present, I want to make sure I’ve got mine.”

A rush of conflicting emotions floods through me. I still believe in my strategy of pressuring Forrest Knox so that he’ll have to turn his attention away from the hunt for my father. But something tells me Dwight Stone wouldn’t have traveled all the way here without having something important to say. And now Kaiser has hinted that it may be about my father. Until I hear Stone out, I’m reluctant to commit to what he may think is a serious mistake. In the silence of my thoughts, I hear Walker breathing impatiently.

“You’re not getting cold feet, are you?” he asks.

“No, no. I’m just thinking this may be more complicated than I first thought.”

“Tough shit. You’re the one who got me started on this drug war, and now I’ve got two dead deputies and the state police crawling up my ass. We’re fully committed. So make sure you’re standing outside my interrogation room at seven A.M. Otherwise, you get no more information or assistance from me henceforth.”

“Don’t worry, I’ll be there.”

He clicks off.

Looking back toward Stone’s room, I see Kaiser still standing in the hall, watching me. I’m pretty sure he couldn’t have heard anything I said.

“Everything okay?” he asks as I approach.

If I related Walker’s news about the Double Eagles to Kaiser, he would blow his top, and probably upset Stone in the process. “Yeah, no problems.”

“About Dwight,” Kaiser says, blocking the door with his hand. “He looks pretty rough. He’s on the transplant list, but they haven’t found him a liver yet. His tumors are growing, and this operation tomorrow is sort of a last-ditch holding action. I gather his odds are about fifty-fifty going in. It was crazy for him to come here, but nothing was going to stop him. I lobbied the director to give him this last gift.”

I hadn’t realized things were quite that bad. “How’s his mental state?”

“Oh, he’s still sharp as a razor. That’s the tragedy of it. He may run on a little about the JFK stuff, but be patient with him. You’ll know a lot more about your father when you walk out of here than you did when you came in.”

With that cryptic comment, Kaiser drops his arm and ushers me into room 406.

After moving through the short passage between the closet and the bathroom, I see a man who bears little resemblance to the one who saved my life in 1998. Back then Stone was a tough, tanned, wiry old bird who looked like he could whip men twenty years his junior. Now he’s so jaundiced that his face and hands look as though someone swabbed them with Betadine. He’s propped against the headboard with the covers pulled up to his waist. His eyes have sunk deep into his skull, and his silver hair looks thin and wispy. I haven’t seen many men who look this far gone emerge from a hospital again.

“Hello, Penn,” he says in a reedy voice that’s but an echo of his once powerful baritone. “Come over here and shake my hand.”

I walk around the bed and carefully take his right hand in both of mine. Gently squeezing the papery skin, I notice bruises at both inner elbows, probably from multiple needle sticks. His face, too, is bruised in places, but his hollow eyes still burn with the light of a gas flame. In my peripheral vision I note a plastic urinal behind the lamp on the bedside table and a folded wheelchair leaning against the wall. It’s hard to believe this is the man who took a bullet while trying to save my life in the icy river that ran beside his Colorado cabin.