It's not even a clue. It's a whisper, a trace, a ghost echo, drifting
down through the decades via chance connections so fragile that they
would disintegrate in the puff of a breath. But it's enough to get
legendary former Marine sniper Bob Lee Swagger interested in the events
of November 22, 1963, and the third bullet that so decisively ended the
life of John F. Kennedy and set the stage for one of the most enduring
controversies of our time.
Swagger begins his slow night stalk through a much-traveled landscape.
But he's asking questions that few have asked before: Why did the third
bullet explode? Why did Lee Harvey Oswald, about to become the most
hunted man on earth, risk it all by returning to his rooming house to
secure a pistol he easily could have brought with him? How could a
conspiracy that went unpenetrated for fifty years have been thrown
together in the two and a half days between the announcement of the
president's route and the assassination itself?
As Bob investigates, another voice enters the narrative: knowing,
ironic, almost familiar, that of a gifted, Yale-educated veteran of the
CIA Plans Division. Hugh Meachum has secrets and the means and the will
to keep them buried. When weighed against his own legacy, Swagger's life
is an insignificant expense -- but to blunt the threat, he'll first have
to ambush the sniper.
As each man hunts the other across today's globe and through the
thickets of history, The Third Bullet builds to an explosive climax
that will finally prove what Bob Lee Swagger has always known: it's
never too late for justice.
