He eyed Alek one more time before climbing into the taxi. As the cab drove off, he loosened his bow tie, closing his eyes. The boy would be there tomorrow. Calendar and the CIA didn’t make that kind of mistake. Their hooks were into this kid deep. Like they were in Lammeck.
* * * *
CHAPTER ELEVEN
April 4
Miramar
LAMMECK AWOKE TWO HOURS before Heitor was expected. In his boxers, he carried his coffee mug to the porch to watch the sun rise. He wished he’d known Havana before the revolution, when well-to-do Americans like him had used the island as a playground. What a place, he thought, gazing across the turquoise water, listening to the sawing of insects in the trees and grass, feeling the sun on his bare thighs. In Rhode Island he’d be freezing, looking outside at slush or mud, thinking about being elsewhere. He realized that, from now on, that other place would be Cuba. The island had grown on him, the coffee, cigars, people, climate, food, music, intrigue. No wonder Spain took it, America took it from them, Castro seized it, and America wanted it back so desperately. Perhaps, if Lammeck survived and the revolution did not, he might find a way to buy this house.
Lammeck went into the kitchen. He tugged the duffel out of the cabinet and lifted it to the Formica-top table. Undoing the drawstring, he poured the contents out.
A zippered canvas rifle sack slid out. Lammeck partially undid the zipper and peeked in at a customized Winchester Model 70 bolt action, with a skeleton wire collapsing stock and a custom five-shot magazine. Good choice, he thought; the Win 70 was a reliable weapon popular with U.S. Army snipers in Korea. A folding bipod for prone shooting was secured to the barrel. He ran a finger over the bolt. Oil filmed his fingertip. The gun was clean. The serial number, as expected, had been filed off the receiver ring behind the barrel. He closed the sack. Behind it came a smaller case containing a Weaver 10K telescopic sight. Another good selection, with parallax control built in. A stubby range telescope and tripod emerged next. Two boxes of .308 rounds. The last things in the duffel were five paper bull’s-eye targets. From beneath his kitchen sink Lammeck pulled out a ten-ounce plastic bottle of Clorox. He poured the bleach down the drain and put the empty bottle into the duffel, along with a dispenser of masking tape.
Lammeck repacked the bag and secured the drawstring. He showered, then cooked himself a big breakfast. When Heitor pulled up in a cherry red 1953 Ford Sunliner convertible, Alek was already in the car. Lammeck put the duffel in the trunk; a Styrofoam cooler was packed there. He yanked a thumb at the boy to tell him to get in the backseat.
Heitor beamed as Lammeck climbed in. The crimson and chrome car was as garish as anything on the road. Lammeck shook his head as Heitor pulled from the curb. The man remained committed to doing everything possible in the public eye. Maybe he was right. Johan had said it: the wreckers moved in secret. Heitor Ferrer, as much as any conspirator Lammeck knew of, did not. And while others paced in Fidel’s prisons, Heitor rode freely in the sun, his own plot still intact. Lammeck admired the Ford and let go some of his anxiety.
“Where’d you get this beauty?”
Heitor lifted his hands off the wheel, palms to the blue heavens. “A gift. It was left in a driveway with the keys in it. The owner, I assume, is driving something far less spectacular in Miami right now. Che once told me it is too vulgar for a revolutionary to drive. He wants me to garage it. I view this as one more rationale for the revolution to fall. This is not a socialist car.”
Lammeck turned to greet Alek. The boy had his head back and his eyes closed. He was paler than Lammeck recalled from last night at the Tropicana. Alek lived in Minsk, where like Providence the weather was mired in the last gasps of winter. He wore blue jeans and a green OD T-shirt, probably Marine issue. The sun painted bright across him on the white upholstery and, again, Lammeck had the thought of how small the boy was. He did not know Alek’s story, and Heitor had advised him to learn only what was necessary. But looking at Alek Hidell, how little there was of him, how he soaked up the sun and wind, Lammeck guessed the boy hungered, for something.
Lammeck considered the thousand assassins he carried in his head as his comrades, tutors, and only family. He’d noted long ago that they were a young bunch: Guiteau who shot Garfield, von Stauffenberg whose exploding briefcase barely missed killing Hitler, Gandhi’s murderer Godse, Fanya Kaplan who plugged Lenin—they were all in their mid-thirties or forties. But the vast majority of killers were closer to Alek’s age. The teenage disciples of Hassan-i-Sabah, the Old Man of Alamut, who invented the term assassin. The royal knights who cleaved Thomas à Becket to please Henry II. Jakob Yurovsky, the Soviet soldier who led the firing squad against the Romanovs before dumping their bodies into a Siberian well. The boys Lammeck trained to be saboteurs and executioners behind enemy lines in World War II. Like Alek, all were young, impressionable, and sent by the viejos.
Heitor drove them along the Malecón, toward Havana Bay. He Followed the waterside road south, tracing the harbor until the docks faded behind and the convertible headed east, into humbler neighborhoods. The streets were not teeming with American and Soviet cars but bicycles, horse-drawn wagons, loose chickens, women carrying mesh grocery baskets, dusty men hauling building supplies across their shoulders, and children punting soccer balls. Here, at the fringes of Havana, the people’s skins turned darker, the pace slowed. The small houses seemed clean and in repair. The streets were swept. No one walked barefoot, or stood aside useless. No one begged.
“No poverty,” Lammeck said.
“That is Fidel’s great aim,” Heitor replied. “And no wealth.”
They entered a broad freeway and sped up. The road bore them quickly into the countryside until the land opened to savannah and sparsely spread farms. Tractors and mules plowed for the early spring planting. Along the road, school-age youths and workers in overalls by the dozens stood hitchhiking with thumbs out.
They drove southeast. Lammeck turned several times to check on Alek, but the boy appeared asleep. Lammeck looked over the landscape, impressed and surprised at the size of Cuba. Far off to the north, a mountain range serrated the horizon. Fifty miles outside Havana, the fields became immense. The convertible passed towns, factories, convoys of trucks on the highway; all of this fired Lammeck’s amazement at Castro’s achievement, to have wrested this entire island from a power with the might and determination of America. To have done it with peasants and cane-cutting macheteros for his troops. Lammeck watched the land roll by, imagining the depth of sentiment Castro must have tapped into. In the first green blooms on the cropland, the scattered electric lines, factories, villages, horses, tractors, mountains in the distance, he sensed the people of this island rise.
Was this boy in the back the one to undo all that?
Ninety minutes outside Havana, Heitor turned off the highway. The Ford left the gravel road a mile later, whipping whorls of dust. In the back, Alek sat up and looked around. His face registered nothing. Lammeck noted the boy’s natural stillness. A sniper’s trait.
Minutes later, Heitor stopped beside a copse of cottonwood trees. In every direction Lammeck saw acres of cane brake. Much of the flat earth had been seared black.
Heitor swept a hand over the landscape. “In winter, the cane stumps are fired to burn away the dead leaves. It is not an attractive place, Professor, but you will have full use of this field. The people who farm it have been instructed to ignore what they hear today.”
Lammeck climbed out of the Ford, standing on bare soil. Sugar cane stalks, scorched and chopped close to the ground, dotted the vast field. Lammeck bent to inspect one. A yellow, tender shoot emerged out of the cindered stump, the renewal of the cane.
Alek got out behind him and busied himself yawning and stretching. Lammeck took the keys from Heitor and opened the trunk to lift out the duffel bag and cooler. Heitor spoke from the driver’s seat: “I will come back for you in three hours. There are water, beer, and sandwiches in the cooler. Train him and the weapon for a f
ive-hundred-meter shot.”
Lammeck slammed the trunk. With Alek, he watched the scarlet car streak from the scorched landscape.
“What’s with that guy?” the boy asked.
Lammeck pointed at the duffel for Alek to lift it. He took the cooler.
“He doesn’t want to know anything about you. Don’t take it personally. It’s for your own protection.”
The two carried their loads under the shade of the cottonwoods. Alek sat on a root, elbows on spread knees. He looked around at the burnt field, displeased, as if this was not much of a way to spend a vacation.
Lammeck busied himself with the duffel. He slid out the canvas rifle bag first, handed it over to Alek. The boy set the case across his lap and did not open it. This told Lammeck he knew what was inside, he’d specified the contents. Lammeck began to attach the range scope to its tripod.
“How ‘bout you, Mikhal? You don’t seem scared of me.”
The fittings of the scope and tripod matched well. Lammeck spread the legs and set the assembly upright. He pocketed the caps from the eyepiece and barrel, then worked to sharpen the focus on another stand of trees at the far side of the field. Looking into the range scope, he said, “I’m not.”
He heard the boy unzip the rifle case.
“How come?”
“I have my reasons.”
“It does make sense, though, if we’re spies and all, not to get too cozy with each other. ‘Case something goes wrong.”
Again, the botulinum pill in Lammeck’s pocket, the blade in the small of his back, prodded him. They were his only protections. Neither was comforting. Lammeck brought his eyes up from the scope.
“Do you know what to do, Alek? If something goes wrong?”
He watched the boy slide the rifle from the canvas sack. Alek fiddled with the Winchester, extending the wire stock, hefting the gun for balance, taking long moments before answering.
“Yeah.”
Lammeck made no more inquiry. He emptied the rest of the duffel, laying out the boxes of .308’s, the paper targets, and the Clorox bottle and tape. Alek reached for the plastic bottle.
“What’s this for?”
“I’ll show you later.”
Lammeck watched the boy handle the Win 70. Alek attached the Weaver 10K scope using a pocketknife. He was confident with the weapon. Though his arms were thin and not well muscled, he hefted the gun fluidly to his face, took up a sitting shooting position to aim. His cheek nestled the pad on the wire stock, his eye settled unblinking behind the scope. He didn’t wave the gun about but picked a spot at a far edge of the field. He was oblivious to Lammeck’s observance, blotting out everything but what lay beneath his crosshairs.
Lammeck, too, was mesmerized for these moments. This boy and rifle, attached so naturally, were so insignificant, just slivers really. But what the two of them were intended to do, the impact of a twitch of Alek’s slender finger, would be monumental. This was the historic power, perverse and out of all proportion, of the assassin.
The boy pulled back the bolt to chamber a phantom round.
He pulled the trigger. The Win 70’s hammer clicked.
~ * ~
Quarters Eye
CIA Headquarters
Ohio Drive
Washington, D.C.
Calendar checked the tuck of his white shirt, then knocked. He paused before turning the knob. He didn’t push the door all the way open, just enough to peek in, as if there might be a fire on the other side.
“Bud, come in.”
Calendar entered the office of Richard Bissell, chief of Clandestine Services. He’d never been in Bissell’s office before, but this didn’t bother him; Calendar’s place was in the field. Calendar noted the broad view of the Potomac, Virginia on the far shore.
“Take a seat.” Bissell did not stand. On his very clean desk stood a model of the U-2 spy plane, conceived and built under Bissell’s guidance. The U-2 had been hailed as the single greatest breakthrough to date in intelligence gathering. Bissell’s star at CIA had risen high. Now, it was tethered to Calendar.
Calendar settled in the leather chair at the edge of the desk. He set his forearms on the armrests and laid his heels flat to the floor. This was the same posture as Lincoln in his huge marble memorial, uncomfortable.
“Bud.”
“Yes, sir.”
“You know, I don’t know your real first name.”
“Brewster, sir.”
“You’re ex-military, right?” He didn’t wait for a reply. “Normandy. Bulge. Rhine. All the way with Patton’s Third, I understand.”
“Yes, sir. Those were great days.”
Bissell nodded. “I never knew the general well. Met him only a few times while I was working on the Marshall Plan.”
Calendar never met Patton either, so had nothing to add. Bissell’s war was bureaucratic, Calendar’s was muddy. He’d seen Patton from a distance, following him across France into Germany.
“I heard Patton was a racist and an anti-Semite,” Bissell said. “Pretty shoddy things for a man of his position.”
“I don’t know about any of that, sir.”
“He was also a firm anti-Communist.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Bud,” Bissell asked with an inscrutable blink, “do you know what the moral about Patton is?”
“No, sir.”
“He was anti-Communist. That dwarfs anything else he was.”
Bissell stood. He made no invitation or gesture that Calendar should do likewise. He walked to face one of his high windows, fingers latched behind his back, looking out at the glinting river.
“Yesterday the State Department issued a White Paper on Cuba. Schlesinger wrote it. They’re preparing public opinion in advance of the invasion. Lots of rhetoric condemning our old friend Batista. Castro started out with promise but has turned his back on the Cuban Revolution for his own ends. You know the song.”
“Yes, sir,” Bud said to Bissell’s back.
“There was one thing, though…I think the phrase was: ‘We acknowledge past omissions and errors.’ What do you think that was about?”
Calendar knew, and so did Bissell. So why was the chief asking? Schlesinger was making a passing admission of what was common hindsight: that it was the United States’ self-serving social and economic policies on the island, plus the fact that the U.S. quashed every bid for independence there for the past six decades, that shoved Cuba to the brink of revolution. To a large extent, America created Castro.
“How dare they,” Bissell said. “How dare Kennedy and his whelps admit something like that on the eve of an invasion. Only one thing matters, Bud. One thing. That we are anti-Communist.” Bissell turned from the river. “Kennedy held another meeting this morning at the State Department. He brought in a dozen advisers. The President conducted a poll of whether to go ahead with the invasion.”
“And?”
Bissell cracked a grin. “They approved it. Word for word. They set a date. April 17.”
Monday after next. Calendar shot from his chair; a man couldn’t stay seated for news like that.
The two faced each other. Bissell, ramrod stiff, said, “Bud, you and I have worked together quite a few times. I have no recollection of you ever letting me down.”
“Nor do I, sir.”
“In this particular instance, however, I’m not hearing encouraging reports out of Havana.”
Bissell would not say it, no one in Washington would, but he was asking: Why isn’t Fidel dead?
“I’m coming at it from a couple different angles, sir.”
“I don’t need to know.”
“I’ve got everything in place. It’s just a matter of days.”
“Are we sufficiently detached?”
“Deniability is guaranteed, sir.”
Bissell brought one hand from behind his back. He aimed a long finger at Calendar, a finger that had brought down kings and governments.
“I assume you need no reminder how
important your role is.”
“None, sir.”
“Kennedy agreed to the invasion in large part because of the Executive Action component. I’ve assured the President of my personal confidence in you.”
Calendar had nothing to say. Bissell shifted the finger from dead center in Calendar’s chest to the door behind him.
“Good hunting.”
~ * ~
10 miles west of Jagüey Grande
Cuba
Lammeck walked in long strides. Beside him, the boy kicked at blackened cane stumps, looking bored.
When Lammeck had counted one hundred steps, he drove two cane stalks into the dirt and taped a paper bull’s-eye between them. He marked off another four hundred strides, where he pushed two more posts into the dirt and fixed a second bull’s-eye between them. Behind this last target another two hundred yards stood a small forest as backstop. The .308 rounds would still be supersonic when they struck those trees. Lammeck turned back for the cottonwood stand half a kilometer away by the dirt road.
The Betrayal Game - [Mikhal Lammeck 02] Page 14
