The first shot, a sharp, cracking sound, was a dissonant note in the symphony of the cheering crowd. On the black-and-white television screen in Ezra's command center, the image wavered. The President's hand, frozen in a wave, suddenly clutched at his throat. The cheerful announcer's voice at the broadcast booth faltered, a note of confusion creeping in. "Something appears to have happened in the presidential motorcade…"
Then the second shot. And the third.
The world dissolved into a frantic, blurry nightmare of chaos. The cheers of the crowd turned into a wave of panicked, high-pitched screams. The television camera, operated by a suddenly terrified cameraman, swung wildly, capturing disjointed, incomprehensible images: people diving to the ground, policemen drawing their weapons and running in circles, the First Lady in her pink suit scrambling across the trunk of the speeding limousine.
Ezra sat frozen, his body rigid, his mind refusing to process what his eyes were seeing. His knuckles were white where he gripped the arms of his leather chair. It wasn't supposed to happen. It was impossible. He had foreseen the threat. He had deployed his best men. He had accounted for every variable. He had stopped it.
But he had not. The television screen was a testament to his catastrophic failure. The news anchor, his voice cracking with a mixture of horror and disbelief, finally made the announcement that would cleave American history into a "before" and an "after." The President was dead.
The first, confused reports began to flood into the Kykuit command center from his teams on the ground in Dallas. The city was in lockdown, a maelstrom of sirens and conflicting information. Then, the definitive news came. A suspect had been apprehended. A twenty-four-year-old ex-Marine, arrested in a nearby movie theater after a scuffle. His name was Lee Harvey Oswald. He was an employee at the Texas School Book Depository. A rifle had been found on the sixth floor.
The report, delivered in a clipped, professional tone by the leader of Team Charlie, struck Ezra with the force of a physical blow. He felt the air leave his lungs. In a single, sickening, blinding flash of insight, his mind, a supercomputer of strategic analysis, processed the new information and laid out the entire, horrifying, soul-crushing truth.
His analysis of the original threat had been perfect. The Mob and the Cubans were planning something. They were going to use Oswald, the unstable, pro-Castro loner, as their perfect, disposable patsy. His teams had executed their missions flawlessly. They had successfully neutralized the true conspirators, throwing the Dallas underworld and the Cuban exile community into such complete disarray that they had been unable to act.
But his masterstroke had created a fatal, unforeseen consequence.
The city-wide chaos his teams had so brilliantly engineered had overwhelmed the Dallas police, causing the patrol car that should have arrested Oswald that morning to be diverted. His attempt to remove the patsy from the board had failed, not due to a strategic error, but due to the very fog of war he had created.
The devastating, soul-shattering irony washed over him in a wave of nausea. By neutralizing the loud, clumsy, amateurish plotters, he had inadvertently cleared the field. He had silenced all the other guns in the city. He had created the perfect, quiet, operational environment for the one, silent, professional killer he never saw coming. The chaos he had designed to protect the President had been the very thing that had allowed him to be killed. He had not prevented the assassination. He had, in a terrible, profound, and undeniable way, enabled it.
He sat in the silence of his command center, the triumphant reports from his teams from the night before now feeling like ash in his mouth. He was the architect of the modern world, a man of unimaginable power, and his own genius, his own proactive, well-intentioned plan to save the President of the United States, had been the very instrument that ensured his death.
As the news of the tragedy and Oswald's capture solidified into the official, accepted narrative of history, one final, chilling piece of intelligence arrived at Kykuit. It came from Baron von Hauser, a quiet, encrypted telex from his listening post in Europe. Their sources deep within the West German intelligence service, who monitored KGB communications, had intercepted a faint, panicked burst of traffic out of Moscow.
The message, once decoded, was simple. Major Dmitri Orlov, the brilliant young KGB analyst, had been found dead in his Moscow apartment. The official cause of death was suicide. A note had been found in which he confessed to being a "traitor to the state," driven by guilt to take his own life.
Ezra understood instantly. Orlov was the ghost. The unforeseen variable. The man whose professional pride, wounded by Ezra's own deceptions, had driven him to act alone, to activate a sleeper agent as a final act of revenge. And the KGB, terrified of being implicated in the assassination of an American president and plunging the world into nuclear war, had done what all such organizations do. They had cleaned up their own loose end. They had murdered Orlov and fabricated a suicide note, erasing the one and only trail that could ever lead back to them.
The official story would now forever be the one that Ezra himself had unwittingly helped to cement: the story of the lone, unstable gunman, Lee Harvey Oswald, the patsy who was now, in the eyes of the world, the sole assassin. There would never be any proof of a wider conspiracy, because Ezra himself had dismantled it. There would never be a trail back to Moscow, because the KGB had erased it.
The architecture of the tragedy was now complete, and he was its secret, silent, and sole living designer.
Ezra stood and walked from the communications room back to his study. The television was off now, the triumphant newspapers from his Senate victory long since cleared away. But the echo of the announcer's frantic, horrified voice still hung in the air, a ghost that would never leave. He was not just an architect. He was a creator. And he had just created a world without John F. Kennedy.
His long, complex, and undeclared conflict with Kennedy was over, a conflict born of alliance and suspicion, of service and manipulation. But a new, far more terrible conflict—a war with his own conscience, with his own hubris, with his own legacy—had just begun. And it was a war he knew, with a certainty that chilled him to the core, that he would never be able to win. He had saved the world from nuclear war only months before, but he had just murdered its soul in a sunlit street in Dallas.