Hoyle swam through a tide of dumbstruck pedestrians and made it to the sidewalk. He found the newspaper, folded and lying in the gutter. As he bent to pick it up, a spit-shined boot came down, nearly pinning his hand.
Hoyle looked up in shock. Colonel Arquero stood above him.
Hoyle lifted the newspaper. Two machine-gun-toting National Police officers moved to the curb. Santavanes trotted up, his hand in his coat.
“Fácil, muchachos,” Santavanes said. “Somos amigos.”
The muzzles of the guns flicked off Hoyle and on to Santavanes. The triggers tightened. Arquero’s face remained oddly pleasant, although Santavanes and the two uniformed policemen were quite capable of shooting one another.
“I’m a bit surprised to see you here,” Arquero said to Hoyle.
With a certain amount of embarrassment, Hoyle looked at Santavanes; not only had they lost everyone they were tailing, they had blundered into Arquero’s web. The National Police obviously had the plaza under constant surveillance. Hoyle had not picked up on this, nor had Charlie.
Arquero cleared his throat. “May I have the newspaper, please?”
Perhaps Arquero knew of the envelope stuffed inside the paper; perhaps he did not.
“This?” Hoyle tapped the rolled-up paper against his hand.
“Give it to me, please,” Arquero hissed.
The machine pistols remained pointed. Hoyle handed over the paper. Arquero put it under his arm and walked away.
Smiling broadly, Hoyle climbed into the Impala.
“How’d that little bastard put the swerve on us?” Santavanes asked.
Hoyle did not answer.
Santavanes looked over. “What are you grinning about?”
Hoyle reached into his lapel and pulled out the envelope. “This,” he said. By some sleight of hand, he had removed the envelope from the newspaper, right under Arquero’s nose. Right under the muzzles of a pair of machine guns. An audacious and elegant move.
“Very nice,” Santavanes said. “Did Mama give you a magic set for Christmas?”
AT THE SAFE house at Plaza España, the envelope was steamed open. Inside was an Austrian passport bearing the name Michel Nemick. The passport was filled out and appeared genuine—all that was missing was a photograph. This document Hoyle laid aside. Of more immediate interest was an innocuous letter from “Beatríz” to Tania—fifteen harmless lines about looking forward to seeing her after vacation. The envelope and letter were examined under ultraviolet light; this revealed no secret writing or invisible inks. Inch by inch, the paper was scanned with a binocular microscope. Particular attention was paid to the periods and the meticulously dotted “i”s, “j”s, and the accents over letters written in flowing longhand.
In the thirteenth line, Santavanes found a microdot placed over the “i” in the word vacación. As Hoyle watched, the microdot was laid on a clear slide, floated in mineral oil, and placed on a projector. The wall flashed white as the slide was clicked into the light stream; projected on the wall were three typewritten pages. The first page contained two columns of names, with noms de guerre in capital letters. It was a list of all forty-one of Che Guevara’s combatants, real names and code names, and a list of twelve Communist Youth volunteers who had made the trip to the Zinc House and now waited Guevara’s return in the Ñancahuazú Valley. The second page was a letter from the general secretary of the Bolivian Communist Party saying that they would no longer support combatant operations. The third page instructed Tania to deliver the two personnel (D’Esperey and Sandoval) to the guerrillas’ base and then return to La Paz. Tania was then to use the enclosed Austrian passport to leave Bolivia.
It took until just after midnight to examine the letter, and Hoyle told Santavanes to draft a message summarizing its contents to Smith. Hoyle excused himself, saying he had a previous engagement, and Santavanes set about typing and encoding the contents of the microdot for transmission to Vallegrande. It had been a fruitful day’s work.
CURFEW HAD BEEN lifted, but there were few people or vehicles on the street. Hoyle drove back to the Hotel Cochabamba and found Maria waiting in their rooms. Her small overnight bag was zipped closed and placed by the door.
“I’m sorry I’m late,” Hoyle said. An evening they’d planned to spend together was gone. “Work,” he said, “and I could not get away.”
They embraced. “I have to get back to my apartment. I’m going to have to leave in a few minutes,” she said.
“Well, then we have a few minutes. There’s still some champagne.”
“No, save it,” she said. “For next time.”
A military truck passed below on the street.
“When will I see you again?”
“I don’t know. Can you call me?” Maria asked.
“I’ve rented a post office box near the ministry. I can leave messages for you there.”
“So much intrigue.”
“I’m sorry.”
She kissed him. “I’m not,” she said. “I’m not sorry.”
He still had questions to ask, questions about Alameda, questions about visas and passports issued by the minister’s office, and questions about a hundred things, but this was not the time to ask.
“I’m afraid that this might become too much for you…” he said, his voice trailing off.
“It might. But I want to continue.”
“So do I.”
“May I speak honestly to you, Paul Hoyle?”
“Of course.”
“I am afraid that it will end badly, this thing between us.”
“Don’t say that, please.”
“No, I am a grown person, and I see that this is becoming complicated. It is complicated because of what you do for a living, and because of the way that I live. It is complicated because we must sneak about like mice. I am used to it, I am a mistress—”
“Maria, please—”
“No, listen to me. I am someone else’s mistress, and that makes me several other things, a liar and sneak, and I am used to it. I look in a mirror, and I see what I am. And for that reason alone, I know that one day you will grow tired of this and of me.”
Hoyle held her and stopped her talking by kissing her. “Please, don’t say any more,” he said.
“You can’t pretend it isn’t true.”
“I won’t listen to you put yourself down.”
Hoyle held her and was astonished again by the warm, complex spice of her smell. “Are you sorry this happened?” he asked.
“No.”
“Then let’s go on,” he said, “let’s go on carefully.”
“I want to go on with you, Paul Hoyle. I want it more than anything, and that frightens me. It frightens me also that my time is not my own. My time belongs to Alameda. It bothers me that I must steal what time I can to give to you.”
It all revolved around time, the lives of mistress and spies. Both Hoyle and Maria performed sleights of hand, both stole time, hoarded it, trafficked in it, both used it as a cloak, pretending to be one place when they were actually another. Hoyle did it professionally, and Maria did it to live. Both played cards from a crooked deck. Hoyle knew that Maria was right. He knew from a life of professional intrigue that time always ran out. He had lived this, and Maria was discerning enough to see that ahead of them was the very real possibility of disaster.
“I won’t hurt you,” he whispered.
“Then you must take me to my apartment, for I am a proper lady, and it will not do to have my neighbors set to gossiping.” Maria had intended this as a joke, but it fell a bit awkward, close as it was to the truth.
He helped her on with her coat.
“Will you save the champagne for me?”
“I’ll even find a sword to open it.”
Gallantry took precedence over operational security, and Hoyle drove Maria back to the apartment on Cochabamba. He promised to leave a note for her the following afternoon. As they approached her building, there was no one on the street and no light
s on, and Hoyle impetuously kissed her on the stairs. He would remember this kiss for the rest of his life, fraught as it was with the danger of being observed and the escalating sentiment between them. Hoyle held her hand as she pulled away, and after she had gone in the front door, Hoyle drove to an all-night café and ate an entire silpancho, he was so ravenous.
27
DARKNESS AND NEARLY SILENCE.
Tania was naked, thrown into a room without light or air. Tall enough for her to stand, perhaps ten feet long by eight feet wide, but in total, all-consuming darkness, so it was not possible to know exactly. She had been blindfolded when they shoved her inside, and when the door closed, the cell was as dark as a crypt. It may well have been a tomb, for feeling her way around in the darkness, Tania found that there were two corpses tossed on the floor. She could not tell if they were male or female, only that they were human and decaying.
She crouched in the corner and listened to water drip from the walls. She had been stripped, beaten, and assaulted, though not raped. Not yet. Tania had not anticipated being arrested, but after her capture, almost everything had gone as she expected.
Tania had been trained in the methods of interrogation, as well as in techniques likely to be used against her, and the Bolivian National Police were playing from a predictable if brutal script. She had been roughed up, beaten, had her clothing pulled off. Blindfolded, Tania had been marched through a corridor and exposed to the hooting and verbal assaults of male prisoners. She had expected the questions shouted at her, punctuated by blows and threats of rape and murder and acid and electric shocks. Through it all, she had played innocent but listened carefully to what her interrogators asked and what they did not ask.
Outside the cell, a door clanged, and there was shouting. In the darkness, a rat skittered close by her. Tania’s body was scratched and bruised; her lip was cut where one of the policemen had slapped her. They would soon search her apartment, and they would find her photographic darkroom. Her codes and the microdot viewer were concealed in a false-bottomed suitcase, and they would eventually find these as well. Worse was to come, much worse, and Tania knew that the anticipation was part of the process. The next round of questioning would be fiercer still. They would leave her in the cell until their questions were in order. They would let her cook, as the saying went. It was part of the process, part of the rendering.
Perhaps Robert had not been arrested. Perhaps he was working right now to have her released. Perhaps the comrades would raise money to bribe the guards.
Tania must not give in to fear, but just as determinedly, she did her best not to hope. She put her hands around the back of her neck. Her wrists were bruised from the handcuffs, and she could hear the blood pounding through her veins.
Above everything else, she must not hope. Hope was the only thing that could break her.
28
IN THE SMALL hours before dawn, Hoyle rolled over and listened to the sound of wind through the hotel window. For what remained of the night, he slept badly, and when he did at last succumb, he dreamed that he had lost something important—he did not know if it was an object or a person, but something had been entrusted to his care, and through negligence or bad luck, he’d misplaced it. He woke feeling guilty.
There was the smell of Maria still on the pillowcases, and this made him feel even more guilt.
Hoyle dozed again, he did not know for how long, and as he fell into sleep, a thousand images of the day flashed under his eyelids. A hypnogogic parade. He saw again scenes of the street, the lunch taken with Cosmo Zeebus, the trail of Galán through the warren of the mercado, and, hauntingly, the passport hidden within the newspaper, the passport that had a name but not a face. He saw again the sudden, concise violence of the woman’s arrest. He saw her dark hair thrown back as a policeman clasped a hand across her mouth. He saw the newspaper drop into the gutter and her blouse fold open. These things occupied Hoyle’s mind, and then, as quickly, they discolored and bled away.
There was an indefinite period of warm, comfortable darkness, and then Hoyle had something that was very close to a nightmare. He dreamed that he was again a cadet at his military school: It was a fall day, gray, as everything was gray in his dream. The uniforms, the food, the books, the blankets, all shades of gray. Hoyle was again a cadet, but he was grown—an adult, sentenced somehow eternally to prep school. The uniform did not fit him, the shoulders too narrow and the pants too tight. His cadet collar cut into his neck. His brother cadets were as they had been in Hoyle’s student days: adolescents, young men, carbuncular and awkward. Hoyle was the age of his professors, almost the age of the warhorse sergeants and officers who had taught him military science. Yet he marched with the other cadets to Latin class, to government, taught by the formidable Colonel Wease, to algebra and Beowulf and dissected frogs. Semesters passed in this dream. He was trapped in a wrinkle of time, a grown man unable to escape from a world of petty rules, dress parades, spit and polish, and rifles without firing pins. Hoyle came away slowly from this dream; it did not so much end as unravel, a purgatory interminable and inane.
Hoyle woke to the real world with something like relief, but his consolation changed at once to alarm.
A man was standing at the end of his bed.
It was Diminov, the KGB officer he’d seen in the market.
Hoyle blinked and at once threw off the bedclothes; he made a rush at Diminov, but there were two other men in the room. Hoyle struck the closest one and knocked him across a table. A truncheon came down on the back of Hoyle’s neck, and his breath escaped in a guttural shout. The blow staggered him, and his knees buckled. Hoyle went out for a second, the wits and wind knocked from him, and the two men lifted him half conscious and tossed him bodily onto the couch.
Hoyle sat in a heap, his T-shirt bunched up where fists had grappled him, and with a high-pitched ringing in his ears.
Diminov sat down casually in a chair next to the bed. “My old friend Mr. Hoyle,” he said. “How I miss Europe. Latin America is filthy. And things are so much more…hands-on than they were in Vienna.”
Hoyle’s eyes darted, looking for an angle. The man standing behind Diminov unholstered a pistol and thumb-cocked it.
“Please sit and listen, Mr. Hoyle,” Diminov said. “It would be a pity to have Sergev shoot you in the head.”
Hoyle leaned back into the couch. His jaw worked against a bit of chipped molar. It was like sand in his teeth.
“Although we remain enemies, ideological enemies, I find that our interests coincide to a remarkable degree.” Diminov’s voice was high-pitched. To Hoyle, it seemed annoyingly feline.
“The National Police arrested a colleague of mine yesterday,” Diminov continued. “Her name is Tania Vünke. She is an operative for Cuban intelligence. A very enterprising young woman. You see, she also works for KGB. We are her principal employer. I believe you at CIA call that a ‘false flag’ operation, don’t you? Just so.”
“Why tell me? You want me to put you in for secret agent of the month?”
“It should be obvious. I want you to have her released.”
“Get bent.”
“Mr. Hoyle, I didn’t come here to ask for a favor. I came here to make a proposition. If you have Fräulein Vünke released, I will give you the location of the guerrilla leader.”
“Che Guevara.”
“You impress me, Mr. Hoyle. You really do.”
“Why would you want to help us screw up a perfectly good revolution?”
“That’s where our interests coincide. My government does not see the benefit of a Bolivian revolution. Not right now.”
“You’re willing to sell out Guevara?”
“You seem surprised,” Diminov purred.
“He’s a Communist—”
“He is an anachronism. A romantic. A throwback to the time of revolution for the sake of itself. My country finds his radical positions inappropriate to the realpolitik of the modern world.”
“You support Cu
ba,” Hoyle said.
“We support Castro. Do you really think Castro wants Guevara alive?”
“Why would he want him dead?”
Diminov reached into the bowl on the coffee table and helped himself to a clementine. He peeled it with his thumb as he spoke. “Our countries very nearly went to war. Nuclear war. The issue was over spheres of influence.” He broke the peeled fruit into three sections. “The first world, you in the West. The second world, the socialist and progressive nations.” He placed the smallest section on the table. “And the third world—Africa, Southeast Asia, all countries that are postcolonial, developing nations. Holes of shit you call them. Places like Bolivia.
“The United States and the USSR have come to an agreement. An arrangement regarding influence in these three worlds. There will be border issues, but what’s been proposed will allow both our countries to exist outside the shadow of nuclear confrontation.”
“What’s this have to do with burning Che Guevara?”
“Stability between these worlds. Cuba and its revolution were at the root of our disagreements, Mr. Hoyle. Castro and especially Guevara are enthusiasts for world conflagration. They want revolutions to sweep the third world. But their outlook is not strictly Marxist-Leninist. It is Maoist. A small point for you, perhaps, as a capitalist exploiter, but an important point for the faithful. The USSR does not feel that the political and economic conditions are right for a worldwide revolution. Not now. Not while a hot war is raging in Vietnam. The Soviet Union does not want a South American revolution. And not a Cuban-sponsored revolution, in any case.”
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