Frame 232

by Wil Mara

  When the caller finally paused to take a breath, Rydell curtly informed him that Hammond and Baker had both been eliminated. This produced the most satisfying response imaginable—silence. Rydell then added another layer to the lie by saying the FBI investigation was nothing more than window dressing on Vallick’s part to keep the public and the media placated. “He’s throwing them a bone to chew on,” Rydell said, amazed by the calm confidence of his tone. The man at the other end seemed to be buying all of it, and that was good. But it was only a temporary respite, Rydell knew. As much as he hated the man, he had never lied to him. But he’d had no choice this time; he needed the breathing room. The moment the call ended, however, he knew a clock had started ticking.

  A full reevaluation of the situation was required then. The fundamental paradigm had changed. No—it was much more than that. Everything had changed, and all factors were working against him. As soon as his lie was noticed, he would become a target—and that was presuming the FBI didn’t figure things out first. They hadn’t come knocking yet, but they were on their way.

  That made the situation with Sheila Baker a much bigger problem than before. He couldn’t just set her free . . . but he couldn’t just kill her either. There’d be a body. Even if Birk successfully disposed of it, there’d be a missing body.

  And Birk was causing problems of his own. He was growing impatient, tired of his babysitting duties. He had no more narcotics to pump into his captive, and she kept making his life difficult. And then there was Hammond himself, the one who had caused all of this. America’s “folk hero,” valiant crusader of truth and justice . . . Rydell could not think of a person he hated more passionately. How the little slime ever got the best of him, he simply could not understand. Rydell’s heart had sunk when he learned that the hit squad deployed by his Cuban contact, Diaz, had failed to take Hammond out, that some “mystery figure” had appeared at the last moment and thwarted the attempt. Now Hammond would go deeper underground than ever. He’d jump at every sound, dodge every shadow. And how much did he know now? Had he found the man he was looking for? And had that man named names? Am I already living on borrowed time?

  On the street below, a middle-aged couple dressed as though they were attending the Academy Awards hailed a taxi. The man said something to the woman, and she laughed uproariously. Happy, everyday citizens on their way to dinner or the theater or wherever.

  At that moment, Rydell experienced something for the first time in his life—the desire to trade places with an ordinary person. He would’ve given anything to be that man, young and handsome and probably wealthy, with an attractive woman at his side, on his way to some interesting place for a night of pleasure. Rydell had never been moved by life’s conventional joys. Having dominion over people like that couple had always been his drug of choice. The ability to use them like chess pieces, to overthrow someone’s existence with the stroke of a pen or a single command delivered through a telephone, to play the role of a deity from the safety of his office . . . that had been his oxygen.

  His thoughts wandered again to his earliest years in the agency, when his elders regarded him as one of their brightest recruits and the future stretched out gloriously before him. So young, so eager, so devoted—and so clean. So very clean. Then he arrived at the same question that had been coming to him for hours—How did it come to this?

  A taxi arrived and whisked the couple off into the night. Rydell watched the red taillights until they dwindled to nothingness. Then he went about calculating all of his options again. There was only one left, and he knew it. What he was really doing was trying desperately to find another, no matter how radical. But he could not, not anymore. The developments of the day had forced him into a corner. And like any other animal in that position, he had only one priority now—survival.

  He took out his cell phone and went to his desk. The hidden file he opened contained classified information that was already known to several others in the agency. Rydell, however, was not supposed to be one of them.

  He dialed the number and waited. It wasn’t answered until the third ring, but Rydell did not dare scold the person on the other end. He didn’t know the man’s name, background, or location. He only knew his professional affiliation—leader of a black-project team, more commonly known as “black ops.” This was the agency’s ugliest stepchild, a living manifestation of plausible deniability. Extortion, espionage, trafficking . . . and assassination. Vallick rarely spoke of them and only utilized their services as a last resort. They were the tool you kept in the back of the bottom drawer.

  “Commander, this is Silver Shield.” Rydell prayed the name was still valid. The person to whom it had been assigned was still actively employed, but the pseudonyms changed from time to time.

  After a pause that felt like hours, the voice on the other end said, “Confirmation.”

  Rydell read off the twenty-digit alphanumeric code slowly and precisely.

  “Accepted,” came the machinelike response. “Mission summary.”

  Rydell swallowed into a throat that had suddenly gone very dry. “You will have multiple targets, in three separate locations,” he said, “which will require the activation of other units. And you will have to complete your objective in less than twenty-four hours.”

  “Understood.” This was said without the slightest hesitation. “Details.”

  “They are as follows. . . .”

  Rydell spelled them out and repeated them once for clarity. Rolled into those details were three names, people who had been part of his life for what felt like an eternity. When he was finished, he was asked for final confirmation—the “go” code. Now it was his turn to pause. This was not because he did not have the sequence in front of him; it was there in plain black characters on the screen. But the magnitude of what he was about to do eclipsed all other thoughts. The illegality alone was staggering.

  “Final confirmation,” the faceless killer said one more time. There was a hint of impatience in his voice. If he had to make the request one more time, Rydell knew, the impatience would transform into suspicion.

  Rydell took a deep breath as silently as possible, then methodically recited what he saw on the screen. It was one of the most surrealistic moments he would ever experience.

  “Accepted,” came the zombielike response. There was a single click and the line went dead.

  No stopping it now, Rydell thought, his heart beating like a drum.

  He put his phone away and closed the document. It was summarily discarded and the recycle bin emptied.

  The next two hours were spent deleting similar files, then shredding physical documents that had been stored for years in a small safe by his refrigerator.

  35

  HAMMOND FOLLOWED Clemente for over an hour. In spite of his earlier conviction that he had already covered every inch of Old Havana, he did not recognize any of the routes they traversed. At times he felt like a mouse in a maze, moving along cramped cobblestoned roads and turning down narrow alleyways. He wasn’t even certain they were still in Old Havana. One certainty that was unimpeachable, though, was that he should continue to exercise caution where his guide was concerned. Throughout the journey, he was careful to remain several paces behind him. Clemente, who had not uttered a single word since the park, did not seem worried.

  They arrived at a soldierly line of low-rise apartment buildings, all of identically antiquated design and delineated only by color. Clemente went up the steps of the first, which was sky blue, and held the door open. “To the top,” he instructed. The fluorescent bulbs in the stairwell buzzed mutedly, and the air reeked of plaster dust and wood varnish. On the top floor—the fifth—Hammond stood back to let Clemente pass. Clemente opened the first door on the right and again invited his guest to enter before him.

  There were multiple rooms, each weakly lit and sparsely furnished. Very Old World, Hammond thought, very European. It was also kept astringently neat, with an agreeably sweet odor. Olivero Clemente wa
s nothing if not fastidious.

  Clemente brushed past and gestured for Hammond to follow. The kitchen was small but serviceable, with painted cabinets, a gas stove, a ballooning Philco refrigerator that could’ve been taken from the set of Leave It to Beaver, and an equally nostalgic boomerang-laminate table bathed in the glow of an aluminum pendant lamp.

  Clemente motioned for Hammond to sit. Then he laid his gun on the counter as unceremoniously as if he were setting down his keys and wallet at the end of the day. He filled an enamel kettle with water and placed it on the stove, igniting the gas flame with a wooden match.

  “Do you like tea?”

  “Uh, sure. That’d be fine. Thank you.”

  Now that Hammond could study his host in a better light, he noticed that a subtle metamorphosis of sorts had taken place. Clemente no longer appeared to be the fierce warrior from the park but rather an ordinary man upon whom the specter of age was steadily gaining. His posture was slightly swaybacked, and there was a hint of gout in his knuckles, a few of which appeared to be swollen. His skin, while generally free of the manifold discolorations common to the geriatric set, sagged in places, as if it were about a half size too large for his modest frame.

  What also struck Hammond as noteworthy was Clemente’s resemblance to the man who had been hiding in the Dealey Plaza storm drain. The broad nose and small, closely spaced eyes, in particular, left no room for doubt about the relationship between the two. Either unaware that he was being evaluated or simply disinterested, Clemente took two saucered cups and a small box of tea bags from the cabinet. After that, and without any kind of preamble, he said, “How did you learn of my brother’s participation in the plot to assassinate your president?”

  Hammond felt as though he’d been struck by a sledgehammer. And there it is, he thought, just like that. He wished he had a recorder going, and for a moment he thought about using his phone. He had a feeling, however, that Clemente was the sort of man who always knew what was going on behind his back.

  “I saw a film of the assassination, and he was in it.”

  “The film of the woman called the Babushka Lady?”

  A second jolt—He knows about her? Hammond was beginning to feel like he’d undergone one too many sessions of shock therapy.

  “You’ve heard of—?”

  “Yes. So he was in the film?”

  Hammond nodded. “In the storm drain on Elm Street.”

  If Clemente felt any emotion toward this information, he kept it to himself. When the kettle began to whistle, he moved it to a dormant burner and killed the flame. Then he dropped a bag of tea in each cup and poured in the water.

  The host set one cup in front of his guest, the other just across from it, and pulled out a chair for himself. Once seated, he paid no attention to Hammond for a time. And in spite of the tea still being well above comfortable drinking temperature, he took long sips with no apparent effect.

  “I didn’t know who he was at first,” Hammond went on. “I had to see an assassination expert named Ben Burdick, a professor at Southern Methodist University in Texas. His book gave me a pretty good idea of the man’s identity. Incidentally, Ben was murdered for helping me.”

  Clemente closed his eyes and shook his head as if Burdick had been an old friend.

  “From there I went to the CIA library in Washington, D.C. That’s when I first saw your brother’s name officially recorded somewhere.”

  Clemente took another sip of tea. “I thought those files were sealed for a hundred years.”

  Here was another missile strike to Hammond’s sensibilities. This one, however, did not pack the punch of the previous two, for he was beginning to understand something—There are people in the world who know the whole story. They were, by simple virtue of either having been on the inside of the conspiracy or very close to it, one crucial level above the thousands of enthusiasts who had spent thousands of hours agonizing over thousands of details. He imagined this to be a very tiny group, maybe only a handful now. And he wondered what they thought when they watched the assassination documentaries on television, listened to the so-called experts spew forth their manifold theories on countless talk shows, or read books like those written by Ben Burdick and others.

  “Dr. Burdick found a page from one of those sealed files that had been mislaid. That’s where he first encountered your brother’s name. When I went to the CIA library to learn more, I couldn’t get past the security filters. But I did find your name in multiple places. That’s why I came to Cuba—to see if I could locate you. And to find out if that really was your brother in that film.”

  Hammond watched Clemente and waited. As he expected, there was no immediate reaction. The man drummed his fingers contemplatively on the table and stared into his cup.

  Then he said, “My brother led a long and interesting life, to say the least.” He sighed. “A long and interesting life.”

  Hammond felt something drop in his stomach. “You say ‘led’ as if it were over. Does that mean . . . he’s dead?”

  The tiniest of smiles materialized on Clemente’s mouth, and his head rocked back as if he found this amusing. “Oh no, he’s not dead,” he said, his tone suggesting that the fact was a great burden to him. “He’s still very much alive.”

  Hammond was unable to keep his own smile from forming. “Okay. . . . So is there any chance I could speak with him? Would you be willing to tell me where he is?”

  He figured another long silence was coming, followed by a polite rejection of the request. He was barely able to believe his eyes, then, when Clemente pursed his lips and began nodding.

  “I will tell you that, yes. It is no problem, Mr. Hammond. He is standing right behind you.”

  Hammond’s expression shifted from ebullient to bewildered. His first thought was that Clemente spoke metaphorically, although the meaning wasn’t immediately clear. He also considered the idea that the man was joking. Olivero Clemente, however, didn’t strike him as the humorous type.

  Then Hammond saw that Clemente was no longer looking directly at him but rather at a spot just over his shoulder. And when he turned, he found the man from Margaret Baker’s film—older, but inarguably the same person—standing in the doorway between the kitchen and the living room. He was dressed in black jeans and a gray T-shirt, the latter matching both his mustache and the thick hair that covered his smallish head. The eyes still held the same fierce glimmer they had on that day in 1963. Hammond also noticed that Galeno Clemente had a silenced revolver in hand and was pointing it in his direction.

  “Some things in this world are better left unrevealed, Mr. Hammond,” he said. “Don’t you think?”

  36

  IT WAS A LONG, frozen moment. No one spoke; no one moved. Even with a gun pointed in his face, Hammond felt no fear. He kept his eyes locked on Galeno Clemente’s.

  Then Clemente brought the weapon down and held it limp at his side. “The human desire to kill . . . it should be buried deep down and forgotten. Don’t you agree, Mr. Hammond?”

  “As a matter of fact I do, yes.”

  The weapon came up again, but only so Clemente could give it a cursory appraisal. “We have made it so easy, though. So very easy. We build the tools, then convince ourselves to use them. If we don’t have the reasons, we find them.” He shook his head. “We justify it.”

  He came into the kitchen and put the gun down alongside Olivero’s, kind of dropping it there as if contemptuous of it. Then he pulled out the chair next to his brother’s, sat down, and massaged his face the way someone does when exhausted. What was particularly fascinating to Hammond was how ordinary this made him seem. At that moment, he was not a historical figure but a flesh-and-blood man.

  “You did not come to Cuba to listen to my philosophies, though. Am I correct?”

  “No,” Olivero cut in, “he did not. And I’m not interested in hearing them either.”

  Hammond felt the insane urge to laugh. Another human moment—typical sibling tension. He thou
ght he caught a glimpse of their core personalities then—Olivero, the commonsense one, grounded and calculating, somewhat machinelike in his black-and-white thinking. And Galeno, passionate and opinionated—the philosopher—given to outbursts from all points across the emotional spectrum. A touch melodramatic perhaps, but sincere. He probably kept a journal, wrote poetry. And yet . . . A killer. A man willing to take the lives of other men, who was ready to shoot the American president. How does that resolve itself?

  “I came here to learn the facts,” Hammond said firmly. “To solve this mystery once and for all. To bring the answers to the American people.”

  Galeno was nodding. “Yes, I know of this, of your crusades to expose truth. Truth can be a dangerous thing, but in the end it is a good thing. The only thing. I have seen you on television, read about you in newspapers and on the Internet. And I can tell you the truth in this case, Mr. Hammond, for I was indeed there that day. That was me you saw in the woman’s film, sitting in the sewer like the rat that I was.”

  “You knew!” Hammond said, incredulous. “You knew she captured you with her camera?”

  “Yes. I saw the lens, like a black eyeball, aimed in my direction. I had a feeling.”

  “Yet you didn’t consider killing her, too, just to eliminate the possibility of her film becoming public?”

  “No. I could not have killed anyone at that point.”

  Hammond’s eyebrows rose. “I’m sorry? I don’t underst—”

  “I know you don’t,” Galeno said. “I know that. But you will. If you are to know the full truth, then you must be told everything.”