“Which is that I am lacking motivation?”
“Aren’t you?” Question for question.
“I don’t think—”
“You do,” Lambert said, blocking another escape.
O’Farrell refused to answer, caught by a sudden, disturbing thought. “How did the Agency find out about my family archive?”
“Didn’t you have some work done on it?” Lambert asked casually.
The copying, O’Farrell remembered. So it hadn’t been some Agency break-in squad poking through the house, prying into everything, maybe sniggering and joking over what they found, while Jill was at work or in Chicago. O’Farrell was relieved. Lambert was lounging back comfortably in his chair, apparently waiting for him to say something. “Well?” O’Farrell said.
“We were talking about motivation.”
“You were,” O’Farrell corrected, deciding how to continue. “And you seemed to think I’d lost it.”
“Haven’t you?”
“Yes,” O’Farrell said bluntly. He’d said it! And he had the acceptable explanation ready. If this sneaky bastard took it, this debriefing could end and he could go home to Jill.
“A breakthrough!” Lambert said.
“Is that surprising, after murdering someone?”
Another of the long, silent stares, broken this time by a slow headshake of refusal. Then the psychologist said, “Is that how you intend to use the accident?”
“I’m not using it for anything!” said O’Farrell, knowing he had lost, too exasperated to deny Lambert’s choice of word.
“You began assembling all that stuff on your great-grandfather, making the lawman comparison, long before the Rivera assignment,” said the man. “Drinking too.”
O’Farrell shook his head, genuinely weary. “Think what you like. I don’t give a damn.”
“You just want to go home, go to bed, and pull the covers over your head.”
O’Farrell went physically hot because that was exactly what he had been thinking. “Maybe just that.”
Lambert rose from his seat, but halfway toward the coffeepot he hesitated. “Would you like a drink? Something stronger than coffee, I mean.”
O’Farrell ached for a drink. He shook his head. “Not even coffee.”
“You do that, do you?” Lambert asked conversationally. “Set yourself limits and feel proud, as if you’ve achieved something, when you stay within them?”
Like everything else during the meeting, it was a small but complete performance to make another point, O’Farrell realized. He was still hot but now with anger against the man it seemed impossible to outtalk. “No,” he said.
Lambert smiled, with more disbelief, and continued on to the coffee machine. Standing there, he said. “I don’t blame you. I’m surprised the doubts haven’t come long before now.”
O’Farrell frowned, further bewilderment. “Whose side are you on!” he said.
Lambert, smiling, walked back to his chair. More to himself than to O’Farrell, he said. “There have to be sides, good or bad, right or wrong.…” He looked up, open-faced. “I’m on your side, if that’s the way you want to think about it. That’s why I want to get the truth, everything, out into the open, so we can talk it all through, lay all the ghosts.”
“Why?” O’Farrell asked suspiciously.
“Why!” Lambert echoed, surprised. “You were flaky before England. With all the guilt after the accident you’re going to become a pretty fucked-up guy, aren’t you? And the Agency worries about fucked-up guys, particularly in your section.”
“Okay,” O’Farrell said, not really knowing to what he was agreeing.
“You’re out of balance,” Lambert said. “For months, maybe longer, it’s been difficult morally for you to go along with what you’ve been doing, right?”
O’Farrell nodded. There was a vague feeling, too vague for relief but something like it, at the admission, at talking at last to someone who understood.
“Why not?” Lambert said, not wanting an answer. “Within the strict lines of morality, how can you justify taking another life? It’s difficult to fit, whichever way you twist it.”
“More than difficult.”
“Is it, though?” Lambert demanded at once. “I said earlier they were clichés, but wouldn’t millions of lives have been saved and the suffering of millions more been avoided if Hitler and Stalin and Amin had been removed? Isn’t there the need for that sort of justice?”
“Decided upon by whom!” O’Farrell came back. “Who are these unknown wise men with clairvoyant powers that can’t be appealed! What gives them the right to sit in judgment!”
Lambert sat nodding, as if he were agreeing, but said, “That’s a weak argument. Won’t stand examination. Have you, personally, ever been asked to move against anybody in anticipation of their evil?”
O’Farrell did not reply for several moments. “No,” he admitted begrudgingly.
“Have you, personally, ever had the slightest doubt of the guilt of the person in any mission you have been asked to undertake?”
“No,” O’Farrell conceded.
“If any of them had appeared in a court of law and the evidence against them had been presented, what would the judgment have been?”
“Guilty,” O’Farrell said. Hopefully he added, “Although it’s debatable whether the verdict would have been death.”
Lambert was ready for him. “Let’s debate it then. According to the judgment of their own country, was it more than likely that the sentence would have been death?”
“I suppose so,” O’Farrell said.
“Judged according to their own standards?”
“Yes,” O’Farrell capitulated.
“You were in Special Forces?”
“Yes.”
“Ever had any difficulty carrying out a morally objectionable order in the army?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“I … it was …” O’Farrell stumbled.
“Because you had the right,” Lambert supplied. “You had a service number and a rank and usually a uniform and that gave you the right. More than that, even. If anything went wrong, as it went wrong yesterday in London, the ultimate responsibility wasn’t yours—”
“But it was yesterday,” O’Farrell broke in. “I didn’t have any right to kill Estelle Rivera.”
“So yon didn’t try to kill her!” Lambert said, equally insistent. “It was an accident.”
O’Farrell sighed, but with less exasperation than before. He definitely did feel better talking to this man, convoluted though at times he found the reasoning. He supposed that by a stretch of the imagination—a stretch he was still unprepared to make—the London incident could be considered an accident. He wasn’t prepared to dispute it anymore. “And I don’t have a rank or a serial number, either.”
“Part of the same problem,” Lambert said. “No official backing or support. Minimal, at best. Guess your great-grandfather operated that way a lot of the time, though.”
O’Farrell thought it was the first time the psychologist had strained too hard to win a point. He said, “A dogtag or a badge. I can think of them as the same.”
“So where are we?” Lambert appeared to feel the same as O’Farrell about his earlier remark.
“You tell me,” O’Farrell said, enjoying the temporary supremacy.
“Talked through for today, I guess.”
“I want to go home,” O’Farrell announced. “There’s nothing left for us to talk about.”
“Give me another day, to sort a couple of things out in my mind,” Lambert said. “Just a day or two.”
“One day just became two,” O’Farrell said.
“Evening of the second day. My word.”
“If it’s not, I’m going to test the quickness of the guys on guard,” O’Farrell said.
“Sure you are,” Lambert said, and O’Farrell regretted the bravado; he had sounded like a child protesting that he was unafraid of the dark wh
en really he was terrified.
In addition to the genuine mourners, there was a large contingent from the Cuban security service and more from the Diplomatic Protection Squad. Rivera didn’t object, although he disliked having so many guardians constantly around him. “Highly professional and skilled” was the forensic description of the assassination; so Belac had gone to a lot of trouble, employing the best. But then, it was logical that the arms dealer would know the best. It was his business to know things like that. Beside him Rivera felt a slight movement, as Jorge clutched his leg. Rivera put his arm around the boy’s shoulders and pulled him closer. Jorge had cried a little in the church but had recovered now, in the churchyard, and Rivera was proud of him. At the touch Jorge looked up through filmy eyes and smiled slightly, and Rivera hugged him again.
Rivera kept his head bowed because it was expected but managed to look quite a way beyond the priest saying whatever he was saying over the coffin, which was resting on the lip of the grave. Rivera hadn’t expected there to be so many people. They were crowded together, solemn-faced, and the immediate grave area was a blaze of flowers; some of the wreaths were quite elaborate. He was glad he’d deputed a secretary to make a note of the names so he could write later.
The coffin was lowered. Rivera felt a nudge of encouragement from someone and took the offered trowel, casting earth into the grave, giving it in turn to Jorge. When the boy moved, there was a chatter of camera shutters. Rivera wondered if the photographs would appear in the papers belonging to Henrietta’s husband. After the bombing they had described him as a playboy diplomat, and he’d made a mock complaint to Henrietta.
Rivera thanked the priest, whose name he could not remember, and hesitated on the pathway back to the cars for people to murmur their regrets as they filed by. He murmured his thanks in return. Some of the women patted Jorge’s head as they passed. Rivera wished they hadn’t and knew Jorge would feel the same way, too.
The cortege had left from the embassy and not the Hampstead house because it still bore the burns and damage of the explosion, so it had been easy for Rivera to give the instructions to his First Secretary.
The man was beside him now Rivera said, “Well?”
“No, Excellency.”
“You sure?”
“Quite sure.”
Rivera was disappointed. He had quite expected the man to attend.
The line was almost over before the First Secretary leaned toward Rivera and said, “Here, Excellency,” and Rivera stretched out a limp hand to accept that of Albert Lopelle, Estelle’s French lover.
The formality over, Rivera hustled Jorge into the car but remained outside himself. To his First Secretary, he said, “You have to be wrong. That can’t be Albert Lopelle.”
“I assure you it is,” said the man. “I have met him several times.”
Rivera looked in disbelief after the Frenchman. He was so fat he walked with a rolling gait, and he was short, not much over five-five, and visibly balding. The handshake had been wet with perspiration, which was perhaps understandable, but Rivera guessed the man perspired a lot.
“Incredible,” Rivera said, finally entering the car. He felt offended that Estelle should have considered leaving him for such a man, empty though their marriage had been.
TWENTY-FOUR
RIVERA HAD never imagined that Pierre Belac would try to kill him, no matter how acrimonious their dealings became. Now, after the attempt, it was very easy to do so. Rivera remained frightened. No longer for himself. But for Jorge, who had almost died as it was. Jorge had to be protected. Permanently, not temporarily by all these squads milling about, squads who’d eventually be withdrawn.
Safety would be easily enough achieved. All he had to do was pay over the withheld ten percent, which he’d agreed to do in Paris and which he’d always intended to do anyway. He’d like to be able to tell Belac that. But he didn’t know where Belac was. And if he were to do so, it would make him appear scared. And that couldn’t be allowed. Rivera wished, fleetingly, there were some way he could go on withholding the outstanding money to teach Belac the lesson the bastard deserved. But he had to think of Jorge. He’d settle everything as soon as the City of Athens left San Diego.
Rivera apportioned Estelle’s death into advantages and disadvantages. An unquestionable advantage was how he came to be regarded by his government. Predictably Havana overreacted, immediately drafting extra bodyguard officers from the Directión Generale de Inteligencia, some of whom entered the country unofficially because the diplomatic complement at the embassy was already complete.
With them came the deputy director of the DGI, a sympathy-offering general named Ramirez, to head their own investigation. The apparently grieving Rivera showed the proper and expected caution, checking first with Havana mat the man was cleared to discuss the arms shipments before offering his carefully prepared story. Arms dealing was a close-knit, jealous, and violent business; the general surely knew that? Here a modest shoulder shrug, eyes sadly averted. Rivera’d known and accepted the danger to himself, never imagining it embracing his family. The attack had only one logical explanation; arms dealer against arms dealer, eliminating the source of such lucrative contracts. Another shrug. Perhaps it was fortunate that the order was so close to completion, removing the reason for jealousy, for murder. Rivera smiled the sad smile of a man bereaved He had suffered. Rivera offered, the sacrifice a loyal servant of the State was sometimes required to suffer. He was heartbroken. But still—unshakably—the same loyal servant.
Ramirez probed for the possible identity of jealous arms dealers. Rivera, determined that his hidden Swiss bank account stay very hidden, said he didn’t know, but intended to find out through the network of contacts he had established. Ramirez said that if a name or names could be confirmed, the DGI had been ordered at the highest level in Havana to match the retribution to the crime and that the DGI had every intention of carrying out that order if it became possible. The extra bodyguards would remain, Ramirez promised, under the control of the local station chief, Carlos Mendez. The official ambassadorial residence was to be fitted throughout with an extensive security system. In the immediate future, dog handlers would be employed to patrol at night. Rivera again smiled his thanks, resenting the protection even more. It was important, he stressed, for him sometimes—quite frequently, in fact—to move about unescorted: arms dealers were secretive men, nervous of identification. For the moment, the general insisted, such encounters had to be restricted. Rivera accepted the edict, realizing it would be wrong to press the argument.
The protection created the biggest disadvantage. In addition to his own people, the British assigned men from the Diplomatic Protection Squad, building a virtual wall between him and Henrietta. And her initial distancing reaction when he telephoned the day after the funeral wasn’t what he had expected, either.
“Maybe it’s a good thing, for a while,” said the woman, almost casually.
“What!” he said, surprised.
“Someone tried to kill you, that’s what you said. What if they try again?”
Rivera sighed. It had been a mistake, trying to impress her. He supposed it was natural she should be frightened. “I don’t think there’s much chance.”
“How can you say that!”
Because Belac will be too scared himself to make another attempt, Rivera thought. “They’ll know the security that’ll be in place now.”
“That doesn’t sound a very convincing reason to me,” said Henrietta. “Who’s trying to kill you? And why?”
It was an obvious question, and Rivera was prepared for it. “You know the opposition that exists against Castro? And what my family were—aristocrats—before the revolution? I’m regarded as a traitor, for joining Castro instead of the opposition.”
Henrietta was quiet for so long that Rivera thought they had been disconnected and said, “Hello?”
“You saying the anti-Castro people tried to kill you for that!”
It hadn’t
sounded as good as he’d expected, Rivera conceded. Improvising, he said, “There’ve been threats in Havana, apparently. I wasn’t identified, but the government thinks it all fits. It’s another reason for thinking there’s not a lot of risk now; having failed here, they’ll choose another target somewhere else.”
“What’s it feel like, knowing people tried to kill you?” Henrietta was a complete sensualist, and for the first time her voice sounded normal.
“Strange,” he said, improvising further because he knew her need. “I felt suspended to begin with, numbed—”
“What about excited!”
“Yes, later. Very excited.”
“Excited like you know I mean?”
“Yes,” Rivera said. There were occasions during their lovemaking when Rivera was nervous about what she’d wanted to do much as he was uneasy now.
“I wish we could meet,” she said, soft-voiced.
“I’ll find a way,” Rivera said emptily. He’d tried for a long time, before telephoning her, to think of something and failed.
“What would it matter if the security people knew we were together anyway?” Henrietta demanded.
It was a valid question; where, precisely, was the problem? “That’s really more of a difficulty for you than for me now. You’re the one who’s got the husband.”
“Only in name, dear.” Henrietta giggled. “I don’t see why it should be a difficulty. They won’t be in the room with us, after all, will they? As far as they are concerned, you’re simply visiting friends.”
It was certainly a way. Rivera realized. And he wanted a way, because already he was missing her. He wished he could gauge how she really felt. Now that Estelle was gone, there were a lot of possibilities they could consider together. Rivera tried to find the drawbacks to Henrietta’s suggestion. Very few, he conceded. Mendez would obviously report to Havana, using the newly restored authority so long denied him, which might possibly prompt a query, but an explanation was easy. He was cultivating Sir William Blanchard, an influential newspaper magnate, in the hope of getting articles favorable to Cuba in the man’s publications. He could, in fact, send his own report to Havana, in anticipation of it being demanded. He said, “I think you’ve found the answer.”
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