The city of Dallas, bathed in the bright, optimistic sunshine of a Texas autumn, was blissfully unaware that it had become the stage for a secret war. In the final twenty-four hours before the arrival of President John F. Kennedy, while the city decorated its streets and prepared its welcome, three elite teams of ghosts moved through its hidden arteries, executing the precise, brutal movements of Ezra Prentice's counter-assassination symphony.
The first movement began at 10:47 PM the night before the visit. The target was The Sicilian Table, an upscale Italian restaurant in a quiet Dallas suburb known for its excellent veal marsala and for being the unofficial headquarters of Carlos Marcello's top Dallas lieutenant, a vicious capo named Paulie "The Fist" Falcone. Inside, Falcone and his associates were holding court, drinking expensive wine and laughing. Outside, in the darkness of the service alley, two members of Team Alpha, moving with the silent efficiency of wraiths, were making the final connections. The device was not a crude car bomb; it was a sophisticated gas-based explosive, designed to cause a spectacular, fuel-fed inferno with a concussion that would shatter every window for a block, but with a relatively low probability of lethal shrapnel. The goal was chaos, not carnage.
At precisely 10:52 PM, a fireball erupted from the restaurant's kitchen, blowing the rear wall of the building outwards in a shower of brick and plaster. The ensuing fire was instantaneous and ferocious. Panic erupted inside the restaurant as mobsters and patrons scrambled for the exits. As the first fire trucks began to scream their way across the city, the second phase of the attack on the Dallas underworld began.
Acting on a meticulously detailed anonymous tip—complete with floor plans, security shift schedules, and secret accounting ledgers, all provided by Ezra's network—a combined task force of FBI agents and Treasury Department officers descended on a non-descript warehouse in the industrial district. It was the central counting house and illegal casino for Marcello's entire North Texas operation. The federal agents, expecting a routine raid, were stunned by the sheer scale of the illegality they uncovered. They arrested over two dozen high-level mobsters and seized millions of dollars in untaxed cash.
The effect was instantaneous and devastating. The entire command-and-control structure of the Dallas mob was thrown into absolute chaos. Paulie Falcone, instead of coordinating any potential action for the following day, was now desperately trying to find his lawyers and account for his losses. His lieutenants were either in federal custody, in hiding, or frantically trying to figure out who had so completely and utterly betrayed them. They were no longer predators preparing for a hunt; they were a decapitated snake, writhing in confusion and fear. Any peripheral role they might have played in an assassination plot was now a tactical and logistical impossibility. Mission accomplished.
While the hornet's nest of the Mob was being kicked, the second movement of Ezra's symphony began. Team Bravo, commanded by one of von Hauser's most skilled infiltration specialists, a German named Krieger, targeted the city's militant anti-Castro Cuban exile cells. These men were fanatics, and a direct assault would be unpredictable. Krieger's weapon was not force, but their own deep-seated paranoia.
At 1:15 AM, a "panicked" phone call was made to the private residence of Juan Romero, the fiery, charismatic leader of the most violent of the Dallas exile groups. The caller, one of Krieger's agents speaking flawless, Havana-accented Spanish, claimed to be a sympathizer from inside the Cuban consulate in Mexico City.
"They know you are planning something for Kennedy's visit," the agent whispered, his voice tight with feigned terror. "Castro is not a fool! He has sent a DGI hit squad to Dallas. A team of his best assassins. They are not here for Kennedy. They are here for you, Juan! Their mission is to eliminate the exile leadership and blame it on the chaos of the presidential visit."
Romero, a man predisposed to conspiracy, was skeptical. "How do I know you are telling the truth?"
"They are driving a blue Ford Fairlane," the agent hissed. "Texas license plate, number… " He read off the number. "They are armed. Be careful. They are professionals." He then hung up.
The car, of course, belonged to the leader of a rival, and equally militant, Cuban exile faction, a man with whom Romero had a long-standing and bitter feud. Krieger's team had been tailing him for a week, waiting for this moment.
The seeds of paranoia, planted in the fertile soil of exile politics, bore immediate and violent fruit. Instead of preparing for any action against the President, Romero and his men armed themselves for a different war. They began a frantic, internal witch hunt for Castro's phantom assassins, seeing traitors and DGI agents in every shadow. By sunrise, a gunfight had broken out between the two rival Cuban factions near a safe house in Oak Cliff. The Dallas police, already stretched thin by the mob incidents, were now forced to deal with a running battle between warring groups of armed Cuban militants. Team Bravo's mission was a spectacular success. The Cuban threat had been effectively neutralized, turned inward to consume itself in a fire of Ezra's own making.
The third and final movement was the most delicate. Team Charlie, led by a cool, methodical operative, had been tracking their target for thirty-six hours. They had documented Lee Harvey Oswald's erratic movements, his bizarre, solitary leafleting for the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, his trips between his small room in a boarding house and his new job at the Texas School Book Depository. He was a perfect patsy: unstable, politically motivated, and a social phantom.
The team leader, adhering to Ezra's preference for clean, non-lethal solutions, made his decision. At 8:30 AM on the day of the motorcade, he used a cut-out—a local, low-level informant—to place an anonymous call to the Dallas Police Department.
"Yeah, I wanna report a suspicious individual," the informant said, his voice a convincing imitation of a concerned, working-class citizen. "I seen him comin' and goin' from the old book depository building on Elm Street. Scrawny fella. Looks a little crazy. This morning, I saw him carryin' a long package, looked like a rifle wrapped in a blanket. With the President comin' today… it just don't feel right."
The goal was simple, elegant, and designed to be untraceable. The police would dispatch a car. They would find Oswald, either with the rifle or without. They would take him in for questioning on a minor firearms charge or simply for suspicious behavior. He would be off the street, in police custody, long before the President's limousine ever made the turn onto Elm Street.
The team leader and his men, stationed in a hotel room with a view of the Book Depository, watched and waited, confident in the final phase of their master's plan.
From his own remote command post, Ezra received the three mission reports. Team Alpha: success. The Dallas mob was in chaos. Team Bravo: success. The Cuban exiles were at war with each other. Team Charlie: success. A police car was en route to neutralize the potential patsy.
Every threat he had identified had been proactively, surgically, and successfully neutralized. His unseen, illegal, and unilateral intervention had worked perfectly. He had imposed his own order on the chaos. He believed, in that moment, that the President was finally safe.