The Bone Tree

by Greg Iles

  Then she turned and walked toward the elevators.

  “And the flower, Ms. Glass?”

  Jordan pressed the elevator button, then looked back at the desk clerk. “You can send that up, too.”

  She’d decided to return to Mississippi after all. She would take the bird-of-paradise and leave it beside Caitlin’s grave. The brave girl deserved some symbol of the exotic journalist’s life she’d always wanted, even if in truth that life did not exist.

  CHAPTER 81

  COLONEL GRIFFITH MACKIEVER watched Special Agent Kaiser’s face as he studied the computer screen on the desk in the study of the Valhalla hunting lodge.

  “How long have you had this video?” Kaiser asked, shaking his head as he replayed it.

  “I got it yesterday,” Mackiever replied.

  “Where?”

  “I’d rather not say just yet.”

  Kaiser looked up momentarily, then reviewed the video again. “Those are definitely your SWAT officers?”

  Mackiever nodded. “I’m sure of it. That’s definitely one of our spotting scopes, and I know I’ve heard those voices before.”

  “And they just killed those kids in cold blood.”

  “I think that’s the only possible interpretation of that footage. I’m trying to identify the two speakers based on their voices, but I have to be careful. I’m not sure who I can trust in my tech division.”

  Kaiser pushed the computer away and leaned back in the chair. “If that goes public, it’ll do irreparable damage to the state police.”

  “I realize that. I’ve been struggling with this decision, and in all honesty, I’d prefer not to use it.”

  “But . . . ?”

  “It may be the only way to bring down Forrest Knox. And if it is . . . then I’ll use it.”

  Kaiser nodded thoughtfully. “How can you tie Forrest Knox to this video if you don’t know who the men in it are?”

  “The video was found on a computer in Knox’s residence.”

  Kaiser looked up sharply. “You searched his home?”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  Kaiser mulled this over. He obviously had enough experience to know he should not ask questions he did not want the answers to. “Why bring it to me?” he asked finally.

  “I have a feeling you want to stop Knox as badly as I do.”

  Kaiser’s reaction was difficult to read. “Let me ask you a question, Colonel. I’ve read Forrest’s LSP record. You promoted him twice after you took over the state police. You elevated him to his present position. Can you explain that?”

  Mackiever had asked himself this a thousand times. And the answer was depressingly simple. “He was the smartest son of a bitch under my command. He tested off the charts on paper, and he was the best man in the field, bar none. By any objective standard, he ought to be sitting in my chair.”

  “I see. But . . . ?”

  “It took me a few years to recognize his problem, because he’s so good at hiding it.”

  “Which is?”

  “He’s a pure sociopath. But he’s not like the robot types we’ve both arrested before. He’s got a genuine warmth that people relate to. He’s more like a highly intelligent wolf than a shark. A thinking predator, if you get my meaning.”

  Kaiser smiled strangely. “That’s basically the definition of a human being.”

  This brought Mackiever up short. “Well . . . multiply that times ten, and maybe you’ll know what I’m trying to get across. Am I wrong about you wanting to nail Forrest?”

  Kaiser closed the computer, slipped the flash drive into his pocket, and stood. “No, sir. You’re not. I’ve got a lot of evidence to process, but this could be the straw that breaks that bastard’s back. We’ve got to find the men in this video.”

  “What do you want me to do?” Mackiever asked.

  WELL AFTER MIDNIGHT, A steady knocking awakened Jordan from alcohol-induced sleep. When she got to the door in one of John’s T-shirts, she found a Cuban army officer standing in the hall. The captain was in no mood to be patient, but she forced him to take the time to convince her that the Cuban president was summoning her to his estate for a legitimate purpose, and not for some fantasy of a late-night booty call. After she dressed, Jordan carried her camera bag into the hall, but the officer shook his head and said she would have to rely on her memory. No recording devices of any kind would be allowed—not even a notebook and pen.

  The car that carried her west past the Bay of Pigs was a black vintage Cadillac limousine with bulletproof glass. The captain did not once look into his rearview mirror to check Jordan out. She didn’t know whether this was out of fear of his commander in chief, or because he’d driven so many women to see Castro in this way that he no longer had any interest in the process.

  Their destination proved to be a mansion on the beach with its own private marina, a palace guarded by at least a dozen soldiers and fully staffed by maids and a butler. This was an eye-opening experience, considering that the tenant was theoretically the leader of a Communist revolution.

  The butler escorted her to a well-appointed study whose walls displayed dozens of framed photographs dating to the 1950s and ’60s. Rubbing the sleep from her eyes, Jordan walked slowly down the wall and tried to identify various African and Central American leaders. She recognized Patrice Lumumba, Thomas Sankara, Evo Morales, and of course the pale Soviet premiers grinning as they smoked cigars with Fidel. She was a little surprised to see Castro with his arm around Che Guevara, since she’d heard the Cuban president had been jealous of his more glamorous comrade-in-arms.

  “Thank you for coming,” a voice behind her said in Spanish.

  She whirled to find the president standing inside the door, watching her.

  “I’m told you were sleeping,” he said. “I’m afraid I’m at the age where sleep has deserted me, at least as anything but a torment.”

  Jordan elected the direct approach. “Why have you brought me here?”

  Castro came farther into the room, then sat in a heavily padded chair and put his slippered feet on an ottoman. All she could think about was how frizzy his white beard looked beneath the pasty face. Gone was the virile, black-haired firebrand who had so impressed her twenty years ago.

  “The things you asked me today started me thinking,” he said. “I found myself unable to stop. I finally decided that the time has come to pass on some information to the U.S. government. I will not do it officially, but . . .” The president looked up at her with a flash of his old intensity. “It’s my understanding that your husband may be working with some older men who remember the Kennedy years as clearly as I do. They call themselves the Working Group. Do you know anything about that?”

  While Jordan considered how to respond, the president motioned for her to take the seat opposite him.

  “Maybe,” she said. “I know he’s working with a retired agent named Dwight Stone.” She perched on the edge of the chair. “Stone’s very ill, and my husband wants to find out who was responsible for what happened in Dallas before time runs out for Stone.”

  Castro gave her a tight smile. “Just so.”

  “You obviously know more than you told me today, or in your note.”

  “Oh, yes, the flower. How childish of me, yes?”

  “It was beautiful.”

  The president inclined his head. “So . . . let us speak of assassination. I myself have survived over six hundred attempts on my life since taking office.”

  “Six hundred?”

  “That I know of. Nearly a dozen of those were planned and carried out by the CIA at the direction of the Kennedy administration. Some of those were facilitated by what you call the Mafia. This is well documented, of course. Not news, as you say.”

  “Yes, I’ve read about that.”

  “Then let me tell you something about which you have not read.”

  Jordan waited.

  “In 1967, a man with a rifle tried to assassinate me in the Plaza de la Revolución. H
ad my security services not been warned by one of the man’s confederates, he probably would have succeeded. He was set up to shoot me from seven hundred yards away, and he had the skill to make such a shot.”

  “What nationality was the shooter?”

  “French Corsican.”

  “I see. Was he killed?”

  “Not immediately. He was wounded during his capture. Then he was questioned by the security services. He subsequently died during this process, but not before telling most of what he knew.”

  Jordan had the feeling that the Corsican’s confession was what she had been brought here to hear.

  “And?”

  “The story he told was quite interesting. He had been hired to kill me by two American Mafia leaders. Santo Trafficante and Carlos Marcello.”

  Jordan felt an unexpected thrill. “Have you confirmed that he was telling the truth?”

  This time Castro’s smile had a reptilian quality to it. “He was telling the truth, you can believe me. But I wasn’t very interested in his story. The Mafia has wanted its casinos back ever since 1959. They will never get them. Sometime after I die, Cuba will revert to capitalism and the Walt Disney company will have Mickey Mouse running the damned casinos.”

  For a moment Jordan wondered if the Cuban leader were drunk. In any case, he now seemed to be lost in his own memories. She decided the best thing to do was let him ramble.

  “The story that interested me also involved Señor Marcello. By 1967, I had of course heard the craziest theories imaginable about who killed Kennedy. Like Robert Ludlum stories, you know?”

  “Yes.”

  “Justice Warren’s commission probed many of these theories. But one name that never appeared in the Warren Commission Report was Carlos Marcello. It was as though this man had been rendered invisible during the investigations. But the Corsican told me a very simple story. He said Robert Kennedy had been in the process of deporting Marcello permanently from the United States, and the only way Marcello could stop this was to neutralize the attorney general. To do this, he decided to kill the president. It was no Machiavellian stratagem by the CIA, the military, or corporate America. It was simply a matter of survival.”

  “Did this Corsican claim to have been the shooter?”

  “No. That was partly what convinced me he was telling the truth. He was not claiming to be the assassin and asking to be spared because of it. He was simply emptying his brain to spare himself further pain.”

  Jordan shuddered at the thought of the agony concealed behind the clinical coldness of that phrase.

  “He said the shooter was a man who had trained exiles in preparation for Playa Girón at camps in Louisiana. He was one of the white-robed racists, a KKK man. He was also a former U.S. marine, like Oswald. Unlike Oswald, however, he was supposedly a man of great competence.”

  “Did the Corsican give this man a name?”

  The president vouchsafed Jordan another tight smile. “Sí, he did.”

  “What was it?”

  Castro closed his eyes for a moment, then shook his head. “I think it best not to go that far at this time.”

  Jordan struggled to contain her frustration. “If you learned this in 1967, why has it never been made public?”

  “For several reasons, mi cariño. First, my security services did not want anyone knowing that a foreign assassin had come so close to killing me. Second, quite frankly, it served the purposes of the Revolution to have the American public mistrust its leaders. Far better for the man in the street to fear that the CIA or some corporate big shots had murdered their King Arthur, and not some Sicilian gangster trying to save his business.”

  Jordan sat quietly, trying to process what she’d been told, and why. “And the Corsican died?”

  “Sí. Badly.”

  “What do you want me to do with this information?”

  The president studied his fingernails for a while. Then he said, “I want you to pass it to your husband. Tell him not to try to contact me for confirmation. I will not confirm it. I tell you now, tonight, because you presented me with a completely unofficial way to let the right people know what we know.”

  Jordan didn’t know whether to thank him, ask more questions, or prepare to leave.

  “You are a beautiful woman, Ms. Glass. You have aged very well since that day we met in 1987.”

  “Was that the year?” Jordan asked. “I wasn’t sure.”

  “Yes. I, sadly, have not aged nearly so well. Were I ten years younger I would ask you to stay the night.”

  Jordan shifted on the chair. She’d been afraid this was coming. “You know I’m a married woman.”

  Castro gave her a jaded smile. “Different women view marriage in different ways. I notice you have not taken your husband’s surname.”

  “No. But I’m afraid I’m the one-man variety, nevertheless.”

  The light of flirtation died in his eyes. “Pity. Well . . . you’ve heard what I wanted to tell you. My driver will take you back to your hotel.”

  Jordan got to her feet before he could have any second thoughts and moved toward the door. As she passed the president, he touched her arm, and looked up at her.

  “Any more questions before we say good-bye?”

  She knew she should go on, but she stopped anyway. She fought the urge to ask what he was doing living in opulence while his people struggled, but she figured she knew the answer already. Power corrupts, regardless of nationality or philosophy. Instead, she asked, “What will you do if someone makes this information public?”

  The old man shrugged. “It’s an American problem. I leave it in their hands. I only have one regret.”

  “What’s that?”

  “I wish I had let Mrs. Kennedy know this information before she died. Perhaps it might have brought her some peace.”

  She gave the dictator a last generous smile, then walked into the hall and hurried toward the mansion’s door. She thought of Caitlin as she passed between the luxurious antiques and crystal lamps, but once she was outside, in the tropical air, she remembered that Dwight Stone was fighting for his life in a Denver hospital. As the army officer shut her into the backseat of the limo, she wondered whether the Corsican’s story would bolster Stone’s will to live. If not, at least it might give him some peace before he died.

  IN THE WELL OF the night, Walt looked up from Tom’s unquiet bed and saw Pithy Nolan’s electric wheelchair silhouetted in the door to the hall. This time the old woman did not remain at a distance, but whirred softly into the room and came around the bed so that she would be close to Walt. Her eyes glimmered in the spill of light from the hallway.

  “I smelled your cigar in my room earlier, Captain.”

  “I’m sorry about that. I needed to settle my nerves.”

  “Don’t apologize. It’s good to smell men in this house again. It reminded me of Tom. He never smokes in my presence anymore, but I can always smell that cigar on his clothes.”

  Walt smiled to himself. Many times during his life he had looked up or turned at the smell of certain cigars and expected to find Tom Cage standing there.

  Pithy Nolan let her gaze fall on Tom for half a minute. “I’ve heard some upsetting news,” she whispered. “About the girl Penn was set to marry.”

  “I know about that.”

  “Have you told Tom?”

  “He knows. It’s weighing mighty heavy on him, too.”

  The old woman regarded Tom again. Walt had the feeling she saw very deeply, despite her lack of medical knowledge.

  “How much danger is he in?” she asked. “I don’t feel that he’s dying, but . . .”

  “He could die, all right. He should be in a hospital. But this is the way he wants it.”

  Pithy nodded. “He’s a stubborn man.”

  “Do you know why he’s doing this?” Walt asked.

  The wise eyes returned to Walt’s face. “Do you not?”

  “Up to a point, I guess. But no further.”

  Pithy
Nolan reached down and sucked a deep inhalation from the oxygen mask on her lap. Then she said, “He’s not doing it for himself. Tom Cage almost never did anything for himself. This man takes care of people. That’s his purpose on earth. And he’ll die fulfilling it, if the gods require it.”

  Walt thought about this. “Makes it a mite tough on the people who care about him.”

  Pithy nodded, the ghost of a smile upon her lips. “Those who love heroes must walk a stony road.” Then the smile vanished, and her eyes pierced Walt to the quick. “Sometimes we must share their end, as well.”

  At some level, Walt figured, he had always known this. “I understand.”

  “I read Classics at university,” Pithy said, a hint of wistfulness in her reedy voice. “Do you remember the Spartans?”

  “I think so, ma’am.”

  “I didn’t care much for them. The Spartans didn’t deserve the glorification they got. But they did have a rather succinct saying that’s never left me. Nothing is more apt when things come to the sticking point.”

  “What was that?”

  The piercing eyes found his eyes. “‘Come back with your shield—or on it.’ Did you ever hear that saying?”

  “Yes, ma’am. And I’ve been in that situation myself. With Tom, as a matter of fact.”

  “You must have acquitted yourself well.”

  Walt wasn’t so sure.

  “My husband never returned from the war,” Pithy said quietly. “He’s resting somewhere at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean. But his shield is with him. He’s sleeping in it. A Curtiss Warhawk.”

  In his mind, Walt saw a brave American boy in an aging P-40 being cut to ribbons by a swarm of quicker-turning Zeros. He jumped when Pithy reached out and laid her papery hand on his. It felt featherlight, and neither warm nor cold. But through her thin skin Walt felt something like an electric current running into him.

  “I’m going to send Flora in with food and tea,” she said. “Then you need rest, Captain. Marshal your strength. There’s no telling what might be required of you before this business is concluded.”

  The regal old woman gave him a sad smile, then turned her chair with the touch of a finger and whirred out of the room like a queen borne upon a royal litter.