Madness is Better than Defeat

by Ned Beauman

  And why a local vagrant would have tattoos in Arabic script on his biceps – prison or merchant navy tattoos, by the looks of them – nobody had explained that either.

  ‘Step aside!’ Tapscott said to McKellar. ‘You have no right to be here!’

  ‘Granted, but neither do you.’

  ‘I said step aside!’ Tapscott tried to push past McKellar, so McKellar gave him a hard shove. As he stumbled backward, I wheeled him around to the nearest of the morgue’s two autopsy tables and forced him down so he was bent over it with his chin resting on the ventilated steel rim. He tried to rise, but McKellar lined up for a right hook between his eyes, and he faltered.

  ‘I am here on State Department business—’

  ‘So are we, buddy,’ I said. ‘I’m a case officer here in Cuba. You’re on my patch. So why don’t you tell us exactly what business you’re referring to?’

  Tapscott didn’t speak.

  ‘I know you can’t see his face from there,’ McKellar said to me, ‘but he’s giving us what I’d characterise as a thin, contemptuous smile.’

  ‘We know you work for Branch 9,’ I said. ‘We know they sent you over here to clean up after this mess with the Zamoranos. We know you bribed the police to misidentify this guy who – I now can’t help but notice – doesn’t even look especially Cuban. Egyptian, maybe, or Libyan, if I had to guess.’

  On the night the assassinations had taken place, I’d been down in Pinar del Río, a hundred miles to the south-east. I had first visited the town two years earlier to investigate rumors of Soviet-sponsored agitation in the tobacco plantations, but I kept finding excuses to return because I so enjoyed climbing the ridges nearby. McKellar managed to raise me on the telephone from CIA headquarters in Foggy Bottom and explained that from what he was hearing – and Winch had a gimlet ear – certain documents found on the body of the assassin had proved worrisome to the Branch 9 boys, so with the connivance of the Deputy Chief of Mission at the American embassy in Havana they were launching an urgent Spicko (meaning a clean-up operation, after the Apex Chemical detergent powder). He arranged to rendezvous with me in the capital the following afternoon. The first thing he told me after he got into my car outside the airport was that Tapscott, a Branch 9 cub, had been sitting a few rows behind him on the flight from Washington National. We were too late for those identifying documents, which the police must have destroyed before they could be entered into evidence. So instead we started following Tapscott around.

  By this point it was common knowledge in the agency that Branch 9 was running some sort of training camp out in the jungles of Central America. But specific details were like hens’ wisdom teeth. Lately, however, various wayward graduates of the camp had been turning up dead or jailed in the strangest places, Tunis and Juba and Luang Prabang. And when one of these strays got mixed up in something that threatened to spark a lot of publicity – say, the assassination of two members of Batista’s inner circle – Branch 9 would dispatch one of their own to tamp down any potential revelations about the freelancer and his curriculum vitae. In the past, they’d done a pretty spotless job. But this was the first time it had happened on my turf.

  Branch 9 had begun in 1951 as a task force within the Western Hemisphere Division of CIA. Not one of the officers assigned to it had been a particularly noteworthy character. But in those offices, between those men, something dark and furious must have been birthed, because over the next few years the task force had extended its mission, hoarded its power, shaken off any oversight, until it was ascending through the body of the agency like some hungry teratoma or parasite homunculus. I’d never seen anything like it in all my years in intelligence. By now Branch 9 wasn’t a task force, it was a nascent branch of government, an imperium in imperio with an outsized influence over the foreign policy of the United States.

  McKellar and I were both ambitious. ‘“It is essential to the future of every free society,”’ my old friend liked to say, quoting one of the founding principles of CIA, ‘“that the agency should help to maintain their institutions and their national integrity against aggressive movements seeking to impose totalitarian regimes upon them.” And it is essential to the future of the agency,’ he liked to add, ‘that you and I become Director and Deputy Director some day.’

  But although in all our years at CIA we hadn’t wavered from that aim, neither of us had yet been appointed Chief of Station anywhere, or even Deputy Chief of Station, let alone any position of real clout back in Foggy Bottom. Within the agency, McKellar and I had accumulated a great deal of power, but it was a power of a chthonic kind, seldom observed, seldom acknowledged. And, unfortunately, chthonic power didn’t get you promotions. In the Barrio Chino in Havana I had seen them burning hell money, the banknotes that could only be spent in the underworld, and in hell money I regarded myself as a billionaire. Fifty was the sort of age at which a job like Director of Central Intelligence began to suit you, so in the next decade I would have to find a way of converting all my hell money into something the federal government would accept as legal tender. With Branch 9 running the banks, that would not be possible. In fact, we could see a future in which all the promotions and budgets and clearances would go straight to the Branch 9 cronies and the rest of us would be left to fight over the scraps, a future in which anyone who dared defy them would be forced briskly out of the organisation. The agency was only ten years old, but there was already a graveyard, figuratively speaking, of guys who’d fallen victim to its internecine politics; I’d made McKellar promise to slit my throat and dump me in the Chopawamsic Creek before I ended up like one of those sad sacks, drinking myself to death in some basement office with drippy pipes, mumbling to myself about all the betrayals I’d suffered.

  Sometimes I joked that if I put as much effort into my responsibilities in Havana as I put into spying on my own colleagues back home, every seditionist on the archipelago would probably just give up in despair. But my priorities were well-founded. In the long term, the enemy was world communism, but in the short term, the enemy was Branch 9. And McKellar and I believed that the training camp in the jungle was turning into Branch 9’s biggest liability. In other circumstances, I might have been very curious to know exactly who the dead gunman was, and exactly where he hailed from, and exactly who hired him to rub out the Zamoranos. But right now, all of that was secondary.

  ‘You’ve been working hard on your Spicko,’ I said. ‘Branch 9 sent you here because they don’t want anybody finding out that this fucker was one of the family.’

  ‘If you’re suggesting we had anything to do with killing the Zamoranos—’

  ‘No, I’m not. I’m only suggesting you’d rather this guy didn’t exist, because your training camp was where he learned to shoot. And if somehow that came out in the investigation, it would cause you a lot of embarrassment. So you had the cops write him up as some bum off the avenue. Except there’s still the small matter of the tattoos. A lot of people are going to see them before he’s in the ground, and maybe not all of those people take bribes.’

  ‘What were you going to do about them?’ said McKellar. ‘All that Arabic. It’s so squiggly.’

  ‘Yeah, I’d really love to know,’ I said.

  ‘Come on, Hank. Tell us.’

  ‘As a matter of genuine professional curiosity.’

  ‘Please, Hank.’

  ‘We’re begging you, Hank, just give us this one—’

  Tapscott muttered something.

  ‘Huh?’

  ‘Waves,’ Tapscott said irritably. ‘I was going to make the Arabic stuff into waves, all right? Like on the ocean.’

  ‘Not a bad idea,’ I said. ‘If it was me, I would’ve just burned everything off with salicylic acid and called it a day, but I applaud your attention to detail. Now that we’ve broken the ice, Winch and I just have a couple of other questions we’d like you to answer. This Branch 9 camp in the jungle. Where is it, and who set it up? Was it Atwater?’

  I had known Colonel
George ‘Jawbone’ Atwater in OSS. Beneath a banal and droning manner he concealed a preternatural thirst for blood; he was one of those guys for whom peacetime was a drag and wartime was better but the Book of Revelation would have been just perfect. Some years later, during the final weeks of the Bangassou Civil War – when the place had been blown to shivers, but nobody knew yet that the uranium under the hills was a chimera – Jawbone got so impatient for results that he drove across the border on a motorcycle and personally took command of a loyalist paramilitary outfit called La Garde de Nuit, by all accounts an ineffectual bunch up until that point. The agency wasn’t usually too finicky about incidental casualties when the freedom of an entire people was in the balance. However, some photos got back to Washington of the aftermath of a Garde de Nuit raid on a convent that was thought to have arms hidden in the cellars, and these photos must have been truly spectacular – enough to turn some almost unturnable stomachs – because when Jawbone refused on principle to disclaim his part in the raid, it was decided that he could never again run operations in the field. Except that decree hadn’t lasted very long, because I knew he’d helped to train the rebels who ousted Guatemala’s President Jacobo Árbenz in 1954, and his name kept coming up in connection with Branch 9’s guerrilla camp.

  ‘I’m not telling you a goddamn thing. And when I get back to Washington …’

  But then McKellar undid his tie pin and held up the sharp end so it glinted in the light.

  ‘Oh, are you going to torture me with that?’ Tapscott said with a smirk in his voice.

  ‘No, we’re not going to torture you,’ McKellar said. ‘We don’t operate like that.’

  ‘What are we going to do?’ I said. I could feel Tapscott tensing as if he had it in mind to break away from me, so I locked his arms up even harder behind his back.

  ‘We’re going to tattoo him,’ said McKellar. ‘“CIA Branch 9” on his forehead. It might not be good for his cover, but it’ll be a fine testament to his loyalty.’

  ‘Don’t you need special equipment for that?’ I said.

  ‘No, you just kind of poke it in. I bet that’s how this guy’ – the cadaver – ‘got his.’

  ‘But, Winch,’ I said, ‘one of the first rules of interrogations is that you leave no marks. Tattooing a guy’s face could hardly stand in more severe contradiction to that rule.’

  ‘That’s true,’ McKellar said, dipping the tip of the stickpin into the bottle of ink. ‘But if he doesn’t like the design, he can just make it into waves or something like that. Keep still, please, Hank. Don’t worry – it won’t hurt nearly as much as you’d think, and this pin is solid silver, which has an antiseptic property.’

  Tapscott held firm until McKellar made the second dot on his forehead. Then he shouted, ‘Hey! Hey!’ He breathed heavily for a few seconds. ‘All right. All right, you traitorous sacks of shit. Just don’t tell anybody you heard it from me.’

  ‘I give you my word that we won’t.’

  ‘You two are fucked in the long run anyway, you know that?’

  ‘Be that as it may. This camp …’

  ‘It’s in north-eastern Honduras. Out in the ass-end of nowhere.’

  ‘Who set it up?’ I said. ‘Was it Atwater?’

  ‘No. The camp existed long before Branch 9.’

  ‘So who runs it?’

  ‘Indians.’

  ‘Don’t give me that.’

  ‘It’s the truth,’ Tapscott said. ‘They’re called the Pozkitos. The camp’s been there since at least the middle of the forties. They were training anybody who’d pay. Branch 9 didn’t come aboard until later.’

  ‘After Guatemala?’

  ‘Before.’

  ‘Indians?’ McKellar said. ‘Come on. You can’t just set up a guerrilla training camp overnight like it was a shoeshine stand. Where would they get the guns from? Where would they get anything at all?’

  ‘Maybe they had an investor. I don’t know. Anyway, now Branch 9 is their only client. Branch 9 are training up a standing army for United Fruit.’

  McKellar and I exchanged a glance. Key to the ascendancy of Branch 9 within CIA was their close relationship with the United Fruit Company. Although its aftermath had been a little prickly, the United Fruit-backed Guatemalan coup of 1954 was regarded in Foggy Bottom as a model for future operations: American intelligence and American business working as equal partners to advance their joint interests around the world. ‘Just look at Guatemala …’ was a phrase you heard in those corridors with pestiferous regularity. And if it was their work on the coup that helped put Branch 9 on top, it was United Fruit’s influence at the State Department that helped keep them there. Eisenhower recognised CIA’s value, but on the whole he preferred to advance his foreign policy through State, with the result that there were certain steps we couldn’t take without State’s participation. These days, a triangle operated in which Branch 9 would tell United Fruit what they felt was necessary; United Fruit would go to State to ask for it; and State would call on Branch 9 to do it. This worked a lot better for Branch 9 than going to State directly, which is what the rest of us still had to do.

  ‘What the hell does United Fruit need with an army?’ I said. ‘With Árbenz gone, there isn’t a single government in Latin America that won’t suck their banana.’ In a country like Honduras, where United Fruit was one-sixth of the economy, where they’d built all the railroads themselves, they could do whatever they wanted. Among leftists the company was nicknamed El Pulpo, the Octopus.

  ‘Things can change pretty fast. They’ve seen that before. But, hey, I’m not disagreeing with you. This army always sounded like a boondoggle to me. Their biggest enemy is white sigatoka, and you can’t shoot that with a rifle.’

  ‘How did Branch 9 get friendly with these Indians?’ McKellar said.

  ‘REMOTER.’

  ‘That a code name?’

  Tapscott nodded.

  ‘For what?’

  ‘I don’t know. Only the top guys know about REMOTER.’

  ‘Is it an operation or a person or what?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Would you prefer serif or sans serif?’ McKellar said, stirring his stickpin around in the ink bottle. ‘I think serif would look better on you.’

  ‘I’m telling you I don’t know! It’s just a word I’ve heard people say sometimes. All I ever picked up is that REMOTER’s what got us involved with the camp in the first place.’

  ‘All right,’ I said. ‘This camp. Do you know exactly where it is? Did you ever see it on a map? Latitude and longitude, maybe?’

  ‘No. But there’s some godforsaken little town on the banks of Patúca. San Esteban, I think. The camp must be over that way because the fixer we used was a guy who lived there. He knew the jungle and he knew the Indians so he’d set himself up as a liaison and we carried on using him even after Atwater arrived. Poyais O’Donnell. Irishman with no loyalties. I heard that back before the war he was mixed up in some—’

  ‘¿Quién es usted?’

  I looked up. A night watchman stood in the doorway of the morgue, goggling at our ménage à trois – or à quatre, if you counted the corpse.

  We talked our way out without too much difficulty. Tapscott took the opportunity to slither out of our grip, although at least McKellar managed to dump a few ounces of ink down the back of his white seersucker suit as he left. In any case, he’d already given us so much that we didn’t care.

  Sometimes, you just have to sever one tendon and all the rest will soon snap – and McKellar and I were convinced that, for Branch 9, the guerrilla training camp was that tendon. Once we found it, we could begin sawing away at it. I hadn’t yet met the expatriate Tapscott had named but I’d met many like him and the very definition of a fixer was a man who could be bought. Even the hours until morning now felt like an almost unendurable wait, because the sooner I could get on a flight to Honduras, the sooner our rally would be at hand.

  Three weeks after I arrived in San Esteb
an, however, half a night’s delay no longer seemed quite as significant.

  Wilson kept assuring me that in all the time he’d been a resident of San Esteban, this was the longest Poyais O’Donnell had ever been away on business. Every morning he prognosticated that the Irishman would return either that day or the next, unless perhaps he’d been detained by some misfortune or emergency, in which case at the very least news of him could be expected. In my years at the agency I’d learned that the ingenuous bonhomie of the upper-class Brit was a more resilient technology for concealing an agenda than perhaps any other ethnic mien in the world, but there was no question in my mind that Wilson’s earnestness was authentic. Because he was currently the only other white man in San Esteban, we ate and drank and played rummy together quite often, despite two social obstacles.

  The first was that he was a lifelong teetotaller who’d never even tasted the local cane liquor. The second was that my fairly generic cover identity as a notary agent hadn’t been built to stand up to more than a few conversations – moreover, because my trip to San Esteban had no official sanction, it wasn’t backstopped at the Agency – so when I was called upon to tell stories from my invented past, I was adding terraces and conservatories to a pup tent. I had no trouble improvising, but I also knew that when you cobbled a stopgap into a permanent architecture, when you allowed a short delay to molder exponentially, you were generating, under that surface drowse, all manner of tensions and contradictions.

  I still hadn’t detected even the faintest subsonic vibration of a guerrilla training camp somewhere to the north-east, and I didn’t want to wait for O’Donnell forever, out here at the foxed edges of the atlas, where the eastern seaboard could fall to the Soviet tank corps and I’d probably hear the news several days later from some crone at the market, where the humidity not only made the afternoons feel endless but went so far as to warp the clockwork of my wristwatch as if in general contest with anthropic time, where the drawing-room mirror continued to tarnish at its imperceptible pace, where I had nothing to do but take strolls around town like a widower in retirement and back in my rented room I got so bored that in my lowest moments I genuinely contemplated starting a novel to see if I could get further than Wilson. But I also didn’t want to go back to McKellar with nothing after wasting three weeks on this escapade. So I was still there on March 26th when the American boy flopped into San Esteban like a hairball coughed up by the forest.