“So I don’t get the VAX!”
“That’s all,” Belac agreed, hurriedly. “But there’s the money you’re keeping back. As well as the percentages; and there’s four million I’m owed on the transportation costs. It comes in total to fifteen million. At the moment I am something like five million out of pocket—my own money.” He felt something like heartburn having to say the words.
“And three million in pocket from the money already advanced for the VAX purchase,” Rivera pointed out.
“No!” tried Belac, reluctant to sacrifice anything. “I had to pay that for the portions of the system that were supplied, before the ban.”
“Rubbish,” Rivera said. “You might have had advances and staged payments to other dealers, for most of the stuff, but the VAX was from a bona fide supplier and you would have dealt with them in the normal way, payment on completion at ninety days.”
“I have a proposal,” Belac said, retreating. “I will refund the VAX money, as a gesture of good faith. In return I ask you to relax this penalty situation; release the other money.”
Rivera did not respond at once. It was unthinkable that he should trust the man. Thank God he had withheld the money and retained a lever to gel the tanks. Just yesterday he’d received detailed delivery instructions. He said, “We had a deal. You broke it.”
“I didn’t know I was under investigation, did I!” Belac said, exasperated.
“Are you under investigation?” Rivera asked quietly.
It was Belac’s turn briefly to remain unspeaking. “I see,” he said, controlled himself. “Let me return your question. Where does that leave us, with our arrangement?”
“Short of forty tanks, fifteen Stinger missiles, and a computer,” Rivera said.
“I will supply the tanks and the missiles,” Belac said.
“I have specific instructions,” Rivera insisted. “After loading in San Diego, the City of Athens has to sail direct to Lobito; it’s a port in Angola, West Africa. The American departure must be reported by the master direct to Havana. When I receive confirmation of the sailing, I’ll release the money you are owed. Less the VAX payment. So, how long?”
“A week,” said Belac. He knew the way to screw the bastard! Screw him and end up with more profit than he’d imagined possible!
“The fifteenth, then,” Rivera said. “On the fifteenth I shall have the final money transfer ready, awaiting my authorization, into your account. If I do not receive that sailing confirmation, no money will be transferred. Is that all fully understood?”
“You won’t be able to contact me,” Belac said. “I’ll know where to contact you.”
“Have you ever heard of such a screw-up!” Sneider demanded.
“Not for a long time,” McCarthy agreed, accepting the sixth coffee of the day. “We didn’t actually emerge smelling of roses in Brussels, though, did we?”
“There seems to be enough to move against Shepherd.”
“Small change,” McCarthy said. “Little more than petulance.”
“O’Farrell goes ahead?”
“Petty wants to talk. But I think so. I’d still like it to be the other way.”
“Can we afford to take any more chances?”
“I’d go for it if I thought it stood a chance.”
TWENTY
THE TRAINING—the professionalism—was there when O’Farrell called upon it, and he hoped it would last. There was a long day and an even longer evening to get through, but he didn’t have a drink. He concentrated on his surroundings, satisfying himself that the surveillance had been withdrawn. He kept one boardinghouse reservation, as insurance, but canceled the rest, as he did the remaining rental cars. Desperate as he was to get back to America, he booked a flight for the following afternoon, nonstop to Washington. He wouldn’t have to cancel it, he knew. Everything was going to go fine.
The urge to go ahead—to get it over with and get out—had been enormous the day Petty said okay. But he hadn’t. Just. There’d been the necessary break in his intense surveillance and the pattern he’d established, so O’Farrell forced the self-control and checked again that what was important to know hadn’t changed. He watched Rivera go in and out of the Hampstead house, confirming by the continued casualness that neither the gate nor the front door was alarmed. The BMW was as usual parked outside at night, and the police foot patrol went by at predictable forty-five minute intervals. The night of the clearance, a police car surprised him by passing in between the regular patrols. It appeared to slow outside Rivera’s house as well. Of course, O’Farrell had to guarantee over a further two nights that the car’s presence was an accident and not an increase in police presence. The car didn’t appear again. He spent the days shopping for the necessary, disposable equipment, always in crowded supermarkets where there was no chance of his being remembered: rubber gloves, electrical leads and clamps, magnetic-headed screwdrivers, adhesive tape, a penknife, and a small, concentrated-beam flashlight. The final purchase was a cheap, cardboard briefcase to carry everything. The other things he needed had arrived from Washington.
And now he was ready. Tonight. After tonight it would all be over. Finished. Thank God.
Incredibly, after all the inner turmoil, he felt no apprehension and he was actually surprised. He felt the heightened awareness there always was when the moment came close, the adrenaline surge he positively welcomed because it made him more alert, but none of the gut-churning emotions of the previous weeks, which had, he accepted, brought him close to collapse. And he seemed to have succeeded in putting aside in his mind and consciousness the wife and the child as well, so they were no longer a factor in his reasoning.
Now, he thought again. Tonight. Still no apprehension. The uncertainty, the self-doubt, had to have been a passing phase then, brought on by God knows what. O’Farrell was glad it had passed. He hoped it didn’t come again.
O’Farrell set out late, past midnight, allowing time for Rivera to be home and for the BMW engine to be cold. He drove more cautiously than usual, acknowledging this to be possibly the most dangerous part of what he intended to do; he was driving a doubtfully roadworthy rented car containing Czechoslovakian-made explosives and Soviet detonators. And other materials that could, without too great a stretch of a policeman’s imagination, be described as housebreaking equipment. Unquestionably the most dangerous part. He waited, expectantly, but there was nothing like the uncertainty he’d known recently. It was virtually always like this at the last moment, he reassured himself, just the same: always, in these last few hours, holding a gun or working with explosives that could take a human life. There was a flicker of unease when the phrase “human life” went through his mind but it was very slight and didn’t last.
O’Farrell drove bv the house on Christchurch Hill the BMW was there—but didn’t slow. He continued on to a turn, turning again and then again, completing the square, parking farther away than he had before. He wanted the concealing protection of the other cars that lined the road there, where his vehicle would be one of many, not isolated for a registration check by a cautious policeman. The lights extinguished. O’Farrell remained behind the wheel, checking the time against the unseen but scheduled passing of the police patrol. At the precise moment he knew they would be going by Rivera’s home, he left the car, a smooth, quick movement. Whatever he carried in this area at this time of night would have aroused curiosity, but O’Farreii thought the briefcase was the most acceptable. It bulged heavily, but so did a lot of briefcases; he wished he had been able to age it more successfully. He was glad of the darkness.
O’Farrell walked alert to everything around him, not consciously using the shadows—which in itself would be suspicious—but ready to withdraw into them if necessary. He did, after about fifty yards, when outside lights abruptly blazed ahead of him and there was a noisy, shouted parting between guests and hosts. But when a car suddenly came around the comer, filling the road with its headlights, he did not withdraw. He realized he would have
already been seen and that to do so would clearly be suspicious. The vehicle was unmarked and there was no obvious interest from anyone inside. He pulled into the cover of an overhanging tree after it had passed, to watch for the glare of suddenly applied brake lights, but none came. At the comer of the road upon which Rivera’s house was built, O’Farrell paused, checking the police progress. Twenty-five minutes before their next patrol, allowing five minutes for any unforeseen change in their pattern. And he had about one hundred yards and a gate to negotiate. Time to spare, he calculated, walking on. O’Farrell saw car lights far ahead. He would easily have been able to dodge, but trees did not overhang in such profusion as before and there was less shadow. He decided it was better to walk on, as if he had every right to be where he was. There seemed to be a perceptible slowing but the car didn’t stop; he didn’t immediately look back, as he’d done before, worried of their watching him in their rearview mirror. He waited until he was two houses from Rivera’s official residence. There was no sign of any vehicle. People either. Ahead, the road was deserted. He checked the time again. Still ten minutes.
He consciously slowed when he reached the edge of Rivera’s property, ears strained for any movement or sound—guards, dogs, whatever he had missed in his surveillance. There was a dog barking but it was far away; nearer, and louder, water was running. A fountain, O’Farrell guessed; it might have been in Rivera’s garden but could have been in that of a neighbor. He stopped just short of the gate so as not to be silhouetted by it, but able to reach out to test if it were locked after all. As he did so, far up the road, he saw the black, moving outlines of two pedestrians—it had to be the returning policemen. He did not hurry. As close to the wall as he was, he would merge completely with it. The latch lifted with barely an audible click and there was no sound at all as the gate gave inward, on oiled hinges. O’Farrell opened it only enough to ease through, closing it just as soundlessly before moving sideways to the protection of the shrubbery, and off the crunching gravel. He dropped, perfectly comfortable, into a squatting crouch, waiting for the police to pass, ears again tensed to hear a voice or a footstep. Unaccountably he was swept by a feeling of déjà vu and searched for the memory. It came very quickly. How he’d learned to crouch, for hours if necessary, and how he’d listened on deep reconnaissance missions behind the lines in Vietnam, he recalled: in Vietnam, where for the first time he—O’Farrell closed his mind to the recollection.
The sound came indistinctly at first, meaning the officers were a long way off, and O’Farrell was pleased; if he’d been unaware of their approach, the warning would have been more than early enough to evade or avoid. Overhead an airliner growled toward London airport and O’Farrell was able to see the triangle of its landing lights. Less than twenty-four hours, he thought, this time tomorrow, in fact, he would be home in Alexandria, with the newly preserved archive to go back to and the cars to clean on Saturdays and only die problems—the seemingly easier, ordinary problems—of Jill and Ellen and John to worry about. Normality, blessed normality.
“… know she’s screwing around,” came a voice, at last.
“What are you going to do about it?”
“I’ve got nothing to confront her with,” came a policeman’s reply.
“So you’re going to wait until she gets pregnant or catches the clap?”
“‘Course not,” said the voice, fading.
“What then?”
The reply was too indistinct to hear. Forty-five minutes, O’Farrell calculated. The BMW was not directly in front of the house, as it usually was, but to the side near the garage. It was a doubtful advantage. The vehicle was out of the direct line from the road, making it easier to work on undetected either from the house or by any passerby, but increasing the distance, he had to move across the noisy gravel. O’Farrell used the grassed garden border until there was no more and hesitated with each seemingly echoed step toward the car. Around him everything slumbered, undisturbed.
O’Farrell squatted again, this time with his back against the vehicle’s fender, to prepare the charges. Before separating the plastic into three, he put on the rubber gloves,-flexing his fingers against their thickness, wishing he had the thinner surgical type. He didn’t attempt to get into the car to reach the electrical system from the front; it would have brought the light on and meant lifting the hood, both impossible. O’Farrell waited until he was beneath the vehicle before turning on his flashlight. The gas pump was clearly visible, about eighteen inches from the fuel tank. O’Farrell taped the charge into the space between the two, and then, with the penknife, stripped the gas-pump lead back to its wires; the positive was the nearest to him. He scraped away the blue covering, attached the contact from the detonator to the bare wire, and sealed the join with adhesive tape. From this detonator he trailed a lead tightly along and beneath the car to a point directly under the driver’s seat, where he attached against the chassis his second charge. From it O’Farrell brought his continuous lead up through the engine housing to meet with the explosives he had already introduced through a bigger access and strapped in front of where the driver sat. A perfectionist, O’Farrell checked the placing and the connections from the rear to the front. The ignition activated the gas pump and the gas pump activated the detonator-placed charges. The entire vehicle was one huge bomb.
O’Farrell, finally satisfied, came crabwise from beneath the car. He was not hurrying, knowing he had to wait another passing of the police before he could leave. This was the first time, he reflected idly, that he had used his knowledge of cars and engines professionally, and wondered why; what he’d fixed up tonight was infallible. But this was no place for idle reflection. O’Farrell gathered everything back into the briefcase, propping it against his legs. There was absolutely no question of his being allowed to pass any police with it in his hand, he decided; it might be sufficient to cause an insomniac resident to raise an alarm, too. O’Farrell carefully cleaned the handle, trie only part he had touched with his bare hands, and went beneath the car again, strapping it tightly to the fuel tank in die recess available around the exhaust-pipe arch.
He settled down on his haunches in the shrubbery, where he had before, for the police return, unable to see but using the time to brush off the grit and dirt that stuck to him from being beneath the car. The cleanup wouldn’t. he knew, withstand any close scrutiny, but he didn’t expect there to be any.
The police pacing approached, as monotonously repetitious as their conversation.
“… why not ask the wife to have a word with her?”
“What if I’m wrong?”
“So you’re mistaken.”
“Not something I like talking about to the wife.”
“Don’t talk about sex to your wife!”
“Rarely a subject that comes up between us, as a matter on fact.”
O’Farrell was against the gate as the sound faded, edging into die road as soon as he felt it safe to do so; they were a blurred, moving blackness, as mey had been when he first saw them. O’Farrell went in the opposite direction, walking just short of the pace diat would have attracted attention, eager for the first corner. He slowed slightly when he rounded that and relaxed further when he turned into the road where the rental car was parked. For several moments, when he got inside, he sat without firing the ignition, letting the tension seep away.
The car started, first time, and O’Farrell drove a roundabout route, not taking the roads that would bring him past Rivera’s house again. The constables might note the number of a car driving so late. And he had a feeling beyond the need for such caution. He didn’t want any association, not even the association of driving by again. It was over. Finished. He was going home.
Petty considered the FBI debacle reason enough to suggest another meeting with McCarthy, although he didn’t say that when he called to arrange it. The Plans director of the CIA said he thought they did have things to talk about, although his schedule was blocked out for lunch for a month. Petty suggested
the rooftop bar of the Washington Hotel for an evening drink, and McCarthy agreed at once; had Petty seen what the Post had written after its summer reopening a few weeks back? Petty said he hadn’t.
Petty arrived early, to get a suitably private table near the rail before the usual cocktail invasion, wondering if his ulcer would resist the happy-hour snacks that were available. Those he could see seemed to be in a fair amount of sauce, so he postponed any decision. He asked the waitress, hopefully, if pipe smoking were permitted and was told no. He ordered mineral water.
McCarthy arrived late, bustling expectantly past the line that had formed, confident Petty would have a table and ignoring the hostile looks from the people waiting.
The wickerwork seat creaked under his weight. “Kept you long?” he asked, the nearest he’d get to an apology.
“Not at all,” Petty said.
The Plans director signaled for a waitress, ordering a Bloody Mary. Gesturing to the Treasury Building and the White House beyond, and then encompassing the monument as well, McCarthy said, “Great view, isn’t it? That’s one of the things the Post said. Great view.”
“Great,” said Petty. He could actually see the spot where he’d briefed O’Farrell; it seemed a long time ago.
Their drinks were served, and the waitress left. McCarthy said, “Didn’t work out at all well in California, did it?”
“Many recriminations?” Petty asked.
“Practically a permanent tribunal,” McCarthy said, drinking noisily. “We can’t feel very good over it, though. Our guys fell on their ass in Brussels.”
“Picked him up yet?”
McCarthy shook his head. “He’ll have gone back into the woodwork now.”
“What about O’Farrell?” Petty asked. “I could have one of the surveillance teams make contact if you wanted to call it off; we’ve let him run, but we know from the early days the places where he’s staying.”
McCarthy gestured for refills, shaking his head against the suggestion as he turned back to the other man. “That’s why I wanted to see you. So far the score for our side is zero.…” He nodded in the direction of the White House. “At the moment everyone is down the toilet together; a success would be good for us*. You spoken?”
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