“Got it.”
Again Patterson’s voice shifting: “You okay?”
“Yeah. Honest. Like I said. Just a favor. A gag on these guys.”
“Don’t do anything I would.”
“I’m not that crazy.”
“Ha—oh, what are you going to label this mystery package you’re shipping?”
“I don’t know. Something outlandishly boring.”
“Boring’s bad, son. Red flag. Tell ya what works. Label it ‘Decomposed Human Remains,’ toss in a couple a fish heads to give it a little stink, no State Department goon’s gonna want to mess with that shit. Promise. You there? I know it sounds goof but trust the Pete on this: ‘Decomposed Human Remains.’ That’s the ticket.”
Michael was still laughing at the irony when he hung up.
He told Hector he’d do it. The deputy head of Argentine military intelligence finished his sip of mate, pushed the straw aside, and took in the junior CIA officer’s face. “Thank you, Michael.”
There was still a complication: even if Billy Patterson faked an authorizing “approval” cable from Norris, any courier pickup would be logged at the main embassy security desk—courier in, courier out. The only realistic way to do this anonymously would be to piggyback Evita onto a courier shipment that was already scheduled and hope nobody looked too closely. The problem with this was the reality that Buenos Aires station wasn’t exactly the Grand Central Station of spydom these days; legit station courier requests were relatively few and far between. There was, however, one scheduled for a week from Tuesday that might work.
Panama City station handled all of Branch 5’s Technical Support Division needs: communication hardware, secret writing kits, disguises, bugging equipment, etc. A year ago WH Division decided to experiment with basing an area TSD officer at Buenos Aires station. An insanely eager-beaver fresh from training, the kid they sent was all over everything, trying to turn the simplest op into a TSD issue and generally driving Norris insane. He ordered crate after crate of audio, photo, and other technical equipment, including, bizarrely, five hundred pounds of car keys—one for every vehicle made anywhere in the last twenty years. The station had been quickly running out of space to store all this crap—and Norris close to strangling the kid—when the young TSD officer did the favor himself by breaking his hip in a boat accident at Los Olivos. So the TSD went home to Panama City but all the boxes stayed, as Norris sent out cable after cable asking, begging, if someone, anyone, wanted this stuff.
This month he finally got as nibble: five crates of photographic equipment to be shipped via Genoa to the CIA Milan substation in Italy aboard the SS Conte Biancamano. So if Hector wanted Evita out by secure diplomatic courier before Christmas, it would have to be to Milan and it would have to be a week from Tuesday—nine days away.
Michael had already decided he would squeeze Norris for a few emergency personal days, meet the casket in Milan, sign for it, and pass it off to Hector. End of story.
Except why he was doing it.
“You’re going to do it, aren’t you?”
He was staring at the ceiling in bed, Karen beside him. She was right, and it was coming off him like radium.
“It’ll get us out of here.”
“Is that really why?”
“I don’t know.”
“You should know why, Michael.”
They fell asleep, and he dreamed hard. Someone in the house, coming for him, stuffing a rolled newspaper down his throat, splitting his larynx…
He shot awake gulping for his life. The bed was soaked, and in the dark it felt like blood. He rolled over—Karen not there—and it panicked him. He coughed her name blind with fear. “Karen!”
She was in the doorway with a glass of water, and he was back in his skin in his home in his bed. “Michael? What? What is it?”
He coughed, unclenched his muscles. “Sorry. I…a dream. Sorry…”
She always got a drink of water at night from the kitchen, and never had he dreamt like that. Acid death in his mouth.
“This doesn’t feel good, Michael.”
“I know.”
“But you’re going through with it.”
“Yes…I think so, yes.”
September 13, 1956
12.
First stop a pay phone. Nine thirty a.m. Washington time. Other end: “Yeah?”
“This the poison dwarf?”
“Speak, you Latin fuck.”
“Cable coming through in twenty under my name.”
“Here we go.”
Up to the fourth floor of the First Boston Bank building, a.k.a. Embassy of the United States of America.
“Morning, Mike.” Lofton—Michael’s only hello on the floor. A wave from Wintergreen, something like a nod from Miller. Michael sat at his desk, tried to look his usual bored self as he slipped a colored pencil from his coat and wrote a cable.
Knock on Norris’s door. “Come in.” Today was the third morning since their restaurant confrontation and their first words.
“Got a cable.”
“For?”
“OTS.”
If Norris looked closely he’d notice the cable was unnecessary bureaucratic double-talk. Without looking closely at all he’d notice it was written not in blue ink but blue pencil. He didn’t. His eyes never left Michael’s as he initialed the sheet and handed it back.
Ducking into the toilet, Michael erased the blue pencil code interface numbers, wrote in expired ones, and handed it to the cable secretary, Esther. If she didn’t look too closely and catch the expired numbers, the transmission would lock out of phase en route and dump on Patterson’s end as a bowl of ink gumbo.
If Norris’s eyes had never left Michael’s, Esther’s never even found his end of the room. Hunched chain-smoking over the encoding machine, an arm reaching out behind was her greeting. “Cable?”
“Yeah.” He dropped it in her palm and walked out.
“Message received.” Patterson on the pay phone.
“A mess?”
“You could finger-paint with the stuff.”
“Thanks, man.”
“You’re committed now, wonder boy.”
Next night. Tuesday. Hapag-Lloyd courier pickup set for a week later. Hector weird on the phone—a call to Michael’s house, his voice broken glass.
“I have to see you, Michael.”
No footsie this time. “Where?”
An address in Belgrano—not far from Michael’s—dead this hour, the well-heeled in well-tucked beds. The house was faux French colonial, iron balconies and painted granite. It sat at the end of a cul-de-sac. Michael parked at the lane’s mouth.
The gate was open and the front door ajar. Michael knocked, and Hector himself answered. He stood there strangely a moment, as if Michael had called on him unexpectedly, then blinked hard, and with difficulty opened the door wide. “Please. Come in.” As Michael did he saw the door had been forced half off its hinges.
The furnishings were mismatched and unkempt. If there were servants—and a house this size had to employ servants—they’d taken the month off.
“Who lives here?”
“Come. Please.”
Hector grasped his arm and led him across the hall to a sitting room darkly paneled and overstuffed. A pile of empty gin bottles, crusted dinner plates, and rancid mate gourds littered the floor. At its center reclined a middle-aged man who had neither shaved nor washed, nor done much recently but drink. His eyes were filmy, ruptured pools.
“Well.” Phlegmatic and authoritarian. The man had a cocked Luger in his lap. It was then Michael noticed six or seven bullet holes around the door frame.
“Michael, this is Colonel Moori Koenig.” Head of military intelligence, Hector’s latest on-paper boss.
Michael knew Koenig, had met him a few times since the coup, but hadn’t recognized him. The stubble. The rice dried on his chin. The whole four a.m. craziness of this.
Koenig sat straight up and squinted down Michael
with eyes adrift in private hysteria. “Do you have proper papers?”
“Michael is a friend of ours, Moori.”
Koenig grasped his Luger. “I’ve watched Her well, Hector. Never have I left my post.”
“I know, Moori.” Michael couldn’t take his eyes off the gun. Hector led Michael out into the hall.
“A good man, Moori.”
“He’s out of his fucking mind.”
“Moori is the third person who knew.” One dead. One insane. The third watching Michael now out of his good eye.
“You gotta think about expanding your circle of friends, Hector.”
“And so here you are.”
“Where is she?”
Hector withdrew a key and opened the hall closet on their right. It was larger than Michael expected, a walk-in. Instead of clothes, the glow from the hall revealed a long pine box. “Moori, Olivar, and I moved her here eighteen days ago. Moori was to stay with her until transport could be arranged. The servants were dismissed, food brought in. During that time…something happened to him.”
“He went quietly nuts.”
“Not so quietly. After a week he began calling me, Olivar, and finally this evening, the president himself, to say he was on the job. There had been screams but tonight there were shots. When I came the door was barred…” The box had dings, souvenirs of its restlessness. “It must be moved, Michael.”
“The courier pickup is next Tuesday.” A week away.
“It cannot wait. Not here.”
Creak.
Koenig appearing like a ghost, Luger out. Shaking. “She’s mine.”
“Shit!”
Hector calm. “Moori, she is all of ours. The nation’s.”
“Goddamn it, put that fucking thing away.” Nobody had ever stuck a gun in Michael’s face. The barrel was short and smooth, its mouth itchy darkness.
“Moori! Please!” Hector ordered. Moori let his arm drop without ceremony. Points of light gathered around Michael’s vision.
“Fuck…”
“Do you dream of Her?” Koenig muttered. Michael felt caged in the closet. His eyes shot to the front door. The colonel carried on, lost in himself: “I do. Even when I’m awake, She talks to me.” Koenig’s eyes moistened. “It’s hard sometimes…”
And he just turned and walked back into the sitting room.
“Somebody picks up another gun, this whole thing’s history, understand?”
“It won’t happen again, Michael.”
“You don’t know how I’m hanging my ass out on this.”
“I do, Michael. And I appreciate it.”
“Just no more guns, okay?” Michael steadied himself. He didn’t like Hector seeing him rattled. “What the hell happened to him?”
“Moori was always a man who believed in his nightmares. Leaving him alone here…possibly a mistake.” The palms-out Latin shrug: What’s a mother to do?
“So where do we move her?”
Olivar dead, Koenig checked out, Hector’s apartment in the very center of Casa Rosada.
“I have no one left I trust, no place in Argentina that is safe.”
“She’s gotta sit somewhere for the next week.”
“She would be safe on American soil.”
Michael not catching the drift at first, then: “The embassy?”
“Yes.”
“You’re crazy.”
“Surely there is a place where—”
“Forget it. A corpse on the fourth floor? What do you suppose I camouflage it as? Norris’s coffee table? What the hell do you expect from me?”
Hector lowered his eyes, stroked the dog head of his cane with a hand suddenly old. “A great deal, I’m afraid.”
“I’m sorry.”
Michael walked out the battered front door, stood on the porch for air. A seagull landed on the stone walk, anxious and depressed at how it could have so misplaced the Atlantic. The garden beside it had run wild, and in the halo of the street lamp you could see flowers.
Cut flowers.
Stacked everywhere along the walk. On the steps. Under Michael’s feet. Something chilled in his chest. He hadn’t seen them coming in, and that was only an hour ago.
“Unsettling, isn’t it?” Hector behind him on the porch now.
“Incredible.”
No sound. No scurry of feet. Silence. Hector faced him now.
“You were nothing when you came here, Michael. Frozen out by your own colleagues, ignored by my government, written off by your Washington superiors. Sent as a sheep to wolves to bloody the water. You were smart, Michael, but you were not that smart. That unfortunate incident with the Polish ambassador was enough alone to crush you and send you home a failure, your first field rotation a disaster. What would it have been then? Division accounting? Shuffling papers on other people’s operational successes? By sharing our information I not only saved your position here, I guaranteed your superiors’ forgiveness. You survived, Michael. And Buenos Aires isn’t forever. With the files I can give you, you’ll be able to name your next assignment. Moscow, London, far away from the Norrises and Millers. The world’s yours, Michael. All because of me. So yes, I am asking a great deal of you right now, but not out of friendship, but because I made you.”
“You crazy one-legged bastard. You don’t fucking own me. I did okay here.”
“Gulliano? A third-rate postal clerk? Who else? That husband and wife team in naval intelligence? I knew about that, Michael. I gave them to you. Oh yes, and Yuri: a Russian who buys you dinner and complains about his wife. Please, Michael, be serious. Think a moment what your career would be without me. Think what would happen if I just disappeared.”
“Is that a threat?”
“I would never blackmail you, Michael. I only wish you to see things as they are.”
In a red second Michael knew he could punch Hector, knock the crippled spook on his ass. But the feeling dribbled away too fast, leaving a hot numbness.
“Underneath all that detachment about your job is a very ambitious young man, Michael. You want out of Buenos Aires, and I’m the one that can do it. For instance, this week twenty-six military officers, led by General Valle, will be arrested and shot by my office for planning a Peronist coup against the government. Nobody knows these names. Not even President Aramburu. But I do. And I’m prepared to give them to you. Think of the shock waves this will ring through your division. Think of Norris’s humiliation that they came to you. And that’s just the beginning. Help me now, help my country, and I’ll provide for you even more intelligence of a quality you have never seen: KGB plans to infiltrate the port unions, shake-ups in the Chilean DINA. I even have the full list of names in Fruende’s Nazi ratline smuggling operation, a list you can leverage with Norris and his old colleagues in the FBI legal attaché office if you need to. With this I can take you all the way, Michael Suslov. All the way.”
When Michael spoke he didn’t recognize his own voice.
“…Okay.”
In Koenig’s garage was a small Leyland pickup. They put a blanket over Her, and Michael carried the load out. She wasn’t heavy—like a box of balsa wood you could hear slip when they tilted it. All the roadblocks were gone now and the drive downtown was easy, Michael at the wheel.
Hector was quiet, his gaze falling out the passenger window, when Michael spoke. “Do you dream about her?”
Hector lifted from his thoughts. The whip of passing lights strobed his face.
“Yes, Michael. I do.”
He left Hector with the truck parked around the back of the First Boston, went in front with his key, and opened the loading dock. It shrieked and howled, but the only person inside at this hour would be Wintergreen at his security desk.
There was a rolling cart and they set her on it, backed into the freight elevator, and hit number four. Hector stayed on the loading dock, nodded as the doors closed in his face. Michael’s plan was to put her in the same storage closet where they’d put the TSD boxes heading to Milan. It w
as a risk of course, leaving an extra crate of this size here this far out from Tuesday, but it was all he had right now.
The elevator stopped. Michael opened the doors. The freight let off in a small alcove one turn from the station security desk. Michael peeked around the corner, saw Wintergreen’s eyes down in a comic book.
“Get yourself killed sneaking around like that at this hour, Spook. That or get hired as a janitor.” Leaving the cart out of sight, Michael came around from the alcove. Wintergreen looked up. “Jeez, you run up here or what?”
Michael looked at his shirt. It was soaked with sweat. “I’m not feeling very good.”
“Go to bed. Drink lots of fluids.”
“I need to drop something off.”
“At five a.m.?”
“Norris coming in tomorrow?”
Wintergreen threw a glance over his shoulder. “Ask him yourself.”
“What?”
“He’s in his office.”
“Here? Now?”
“Lofton and Johnny Miller too.”
It was more silly than frightening. The odds…
“Well, look who has a nose for parties after all”—Lofton, leaning in the corridor. “Good spy trait that, a nose for parties.” Michael considered smiling and backing out, but decided it’d look guilty.
“Just insomnia.” Michael consciously loosened his shoulders, thought about Hector waiting in the Leyland. “Little late for a staff meeting, isn’t it? Or is this the night you all burn incense to J. Edgar?” He walked up to Lofton, wiping the sweat off his palms onto his trousers.
“Easy, hotshot. I’m the one that half-ass likes you, remember?” Next to Lofton he had an angle into Norris’s office. Bud was there, so was Johnny Miller, Esther, the embassy FBI legal attaché, and a guy he didn’t recognize. They were drinking champagne, some twangy, Okie 78 on a record player.
“So what’s going on?”
“Johnny Miller collared his Kraut this morning.”
“Schmidt?”
“Eckhardt.” A little further up the attorney general’s list, but a universe from names like Eichmann or Mengele. “Turns out our lamster SS pal was getting by laundering rackets money for the Gambino mob through his export biz. Busts open a whole Wise Guy–South American money trail. Champagne’s direct from Hoover. Hot rumor was Eisenhower himself was gonna call, but we ended up with Nixon.”
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