Tim turned comically on his heel and plopped his hat on his large round head as he headed for the exit, smiling to himself along the way. He had allowed her the point for this round, knowing that as soon as McLeod returned to the office that she would tell him where he was off to, just like a sibling running off to a parent to tattletale on another quarrelsome sibling. “Isn’t office politics fun?” he muttered to himself sardonically.
He descended the stairwell, foregoing the elevator to avoid as many employees wandering around as possible, down to the basement where he had left his car, a gray 1954 Dodge tank. A thick layer of dust made the paint appear almost a rusty brown. He climbed aboard, turned over the ignition to the “accessories” position, checked the fuel gauge (which read “half full”), and then pushed down the starter with his left foot and turned the engine over. After a long hiatus, the V-8 was a might reluctant to cooperate, but it finally sputtered to life, spewing out a copious blue-gray cloud from the tailpipe, which poisoned the stale air of the underground garage. He let the engine warm up for several minutes before putting the transmission into reverse and backing out of the stall. Then he motored the vehicle up the access ramp and joined the ranks of other cars plying the streets of Washington.
He tooled around the city aimlessly for about forty minutes, checking his rearview mirror often to see if anyone was following him. Apparently no one from any of the various intelligence agencies in and out of Washington, D.C. had taken an interest in him, so he felt confident that he could proceed to the next step in the prescribed plan to meet his contact. He eventually arrived at the Smithsonian Museum and parked in the nearest available space on the street. He locked the door and casually strolled down the sidewalk and entered the facility in the manner of an out-of-town visitor or tourist.
The Smithsonian Museum is a sprawling collection of exhibits endeavoring to somehow accumulate the entire history and the actual accomplishments of mankind under one roof, so to speak. There were quite a number of children under adult supervision in attendance, but Tim did not have any trouble blending in with the crowd. Eventually, he followed the directions to the “Nineteenth Century Inventions” exhibit, and upon arrival, he loitered in the area, feigning interest in the antiques that were displayed.
“Doris” arrived in due time, acting like he, too, was fascinated by the predecessors of modern technology. He was a tall, thin, wiry man, and he appeared as if he had just been rudely woken up from a short nap and thrown on yesterday’s work clothes to escape a nagging, overbearing wife or the unexpected arrival of a husband. Both men circled around the room as if they did not know the other, casually meandering closer together. Although there were ten other visitors in the area at the time, they were clueless as to the men’s true intent. Finally, after fifteen minutes of their peculiar dance, both of them stood before Edison’s gramophone.
“Fine time to call me,” Doris complained in a low voice.
“I didn’t know you kept such late hours,” Tim quipped.
“I was just getting laid, if you have to know.”
“Ah, so that’s how the Company propagates itself,” Tim joked dryly. “And all the time I thought you guys just went out and picked up the riff-raff off the streets to do your dirty work.”
“Nah, we’re a little more sophisticated than that now,” Doris bantered back. “We’re looking for brains now, or haven’t you heard. We already have too many people that didn’t benefit from the best parts dribbling down their fathers’ legs.”
Tim stifled a laugh. “Need a favor,” he came to the point, and at the same time he wondered how much his friend had ejaculated down his own leg because of the coitus interruptus.
“Like I haven’t heard that before. What’s it this time?”
Tim passed him surreptitiously the slip of paper with the name “Ricardo Alvarez” on it that McLeod had written; the original was safely being kept under wraps.
Doris feigned a sneeze, bringing his hand up to his nose. He muttered an expletive after glancing at the paper. Pocketing to it he said, “What do you want to know?”
“Is it safe to talk here?”
“Let’s go to my office,” he said instead. Doris walked out of the exhibit with Tim following at a respectable distance. His contact walked up the broad staircase to the third floor, which consisted of several administrative offices. The hallway was devoid of employees, and Doris tried one of the doors. It was locked. The man pulled out a burglar’s tool outlawed by every State of the Union and inserted it into the lock. A rewarding click unlocked the door, and both men entered the unoccupied office.
“Might as well make ourselves comfortable,” Doris commented, slumping into an armchair and pointing at a similar chair opposite him.
“You seem to know this guy,” Tim declared, hiding his surprise.
“Yeah, well, he’s kind of a hot topic right now. How did you get his name?”
“Through a source,” Tim answered evasively. “We took his body off the Marta.”
“Yeah, I know.” Doris exhaled and rubbed his scrawny face sporting a five o’clock shadow. “So, you are the guys that found him. I suppose you were responsible for impounding the Marta as well?”
“That was the ATF’s doing.”
“Courtesy of McLeod, I’d wager.” He draped his right leg over the arm of the chair and made himself more comfortable.
Tim half-nodded, half-shrugged. “He helped.”
“Gawd-damn it,” Doris muttered. Tim could not tell whether he was pissed or disgusted. “When are you guys going to leave well enough alone? We’ve been watching that ship for a year now.”
“Why’s that?” Tim was all business under the façade of his good-natured curiosity.
Doris eyed him suspiciously for a moment; then he shook off his suspicions and laughed mirthlessly. “This is off-the-record.”
“As always,” Tim promised, spreading his hands.
“What do you know about a war that is about to erupt down in Colombia?”
“Not much. Only rumors, actually.”
“Well, your corpse is probably the last nail in the coffin. What do you know of the poppy fields in Colombia?”
“That they are abundant and pretty productive. They probably support two-thirds of the cocaine that is coming into this country.”
“That’s fairly accurate,” Doris conceded. “You will want to know that there is a certain land baron by the name of Elian Alvarez. Ricardo was his son.”
Tim whistled softly. “That’s not going to sit well with the old man.”
“Tell me about it. Okay. I take it that you’re going to have to know the whole story. Alvarez has been dealing solely with the Mendendez family out of Miami. We managed to insert a couple of our agents into the family just to keep an eye on the operations. We couldn’t believe how lucrative the business was, so we decided to see if we could get a piece of the action.”
“Now why would the Company want to get involved with drug dealing?”
“Think about it. You know how tight your budget is. You can’t squeeze a nickel from those tight-fisted accounting jerks without them squealing to high heaven. It’s the same all throughout the Government. The American people want to feel safe and secure in their homes, but they don’t want to pay the price for us to do our job that’ll meet the threat. The Cuban Blockade was a boon for us, you know. For the first time, the American people were scared enough to start demanding that the Government take measures to protect them from the Big Bad Bear. But that didn’t mean that the purse strings were going to be loosened anytime soon.
“If you want to believe that we are fighting a monolithic dictatorship that doesn’t give a damn who has to die in order to secure communism—which is just another word for exploitation and slavery of the masses—then you have to believe that our adversary isn’t pinching pennies in an all-out drive to acquire weapons and buy the allegiance of countries with the goal to bury us. If the Korean War—and the successful launching of Sputnik—t
aught us anything, it’s that the United States is woefully behind the power curve in a lot of areas. The whole gawd-damned world is divided into two camps, and if the Intel boys are right, everyday we’re losing the numbers game. More third-world countries are beginning to lean left.
“Now, Central and South America are supposed to be our backyard. The Monroe Doctrine and all that horseshit. It’s just a fancy piece of paper with fine writing on it if we don’t back it up.”
“I thought that’s why Kennedy ordered the blockade—to keep Russian missiles out of our hemisphere.”
“That chicken-livered bastard. His brother Bobby had to bully him to do that much. He had a chance to kick the Russian Bear all the way back to Moscow once and for all. But—no—he really mucked up that sad state of affairs. On top of that, we had to close a couple of our lucrative listening outposts that looked right into the heart of Russia.
“Look,” he brought the subject back on track, “there’s two ways of convincing our southern neighbors to be friendly or tow the line: you either walk in with an army at your back or you convince them by other means that it would be in their best interests to remain in the Western camp. You can’t go to a foreign government with just a hand of friendship. You’d better have a shit-load of money in the other hand.”
“So, I gather that the Company decided to earn a little cash to help defray these new expenses,” Tim surmised.
“That and buy a number of toys that we can’t get otherwise.”
“Toys?”
“Sure. Technology is a wonderful thing. Did you know that you could be sitting across town and listen to any conversation in any office building you targeted?”
“Yeah, through wiretapping.”
Doris smirked. “That kind of wiretapping is as old as ancient history. The NSA is helping us develop a whole lot of new toys. Micro-miniaturization is the new catchword. New kinds of poisons that can’t be detectable. And weapons the likes of which have only been dreamed about in science fiction dime novels and those ‘B’ movies Hollywood’s been turning out every week. Plus, you think it’s easy to recruit and sustain supposedly honest people who are willing to betray their own countries? If the taxpayer were even to know the bottom line of the bill it takes to keep him safe and secure in his little private world, he’d have apoplexy.”
“Let’s get back to this Alvarez goon. What’s the Company’s interest in him?”
“Up until six months ago, we were sitting fairly pretty in our little setup. We made a deal with the Mendendez family, giving them protection and helping them with transporting the contraband into the U.S. We also set up their communications network for them. You know, secure channels and equipment so that no other agency but ours could listen in on them.
“Then, Alvarez gets two courtesy calls from representatives from the Cantinelli and the Tanelli families of New York. At first, he rebuffs them, declaring that he has all the business he can handle with his connections in Miami. The representatives then start making him offers he can’t refuse, like more money and more territory. He’s a greedy bastard with dreams of becoming a despot some day and running the whole gawd-damned rotten country. So, he decides to consider their offers. But he wants to deal only with one family, not two.”
“You have his house bugged,” Tim declared.
“Of course!” Doris exclaimed, as if the fact were obvious. “You think we’re running a kindergarten here? You think we play fair by some make-believe rules? This is a life-and-death game we’re playing here. There is no room for mistakes, my friend. People get killed for the slightest offenses and mistakes. Life is cheap in this business, because for every person already in the business, there are two or three waiting in the wings eager to take his place. And loyalty is not taken lightly by the under-barons who keep their underlings tightly controlled.”
“So, why kill the son?”
“Don’t you want to know who killed the boy?”
Tim shrugged. “Okay. I’ll bite. Who killed the cat?”
“You never heard this from me. But we killed him.”
“Huh?” Tim was startled and almost jumped up from his chair.
“You either haven’t been paying much attention, or you’re as dumb as the rest of America. The last thing we need is a shooting war down there and be on the losing side. We have too much at stake. Colombia is not one of the most stable countries in South America, and we can’t afford outside interference from New York to start tinkering with everything we have painstakingly set up. It would be just the plum Castro’s been waiting for to export his brand of Communism into South America. Ricardo’s murder is a warning to all the factions involved that no one is safe. We have an unlimited reach. If the wrong side wins, we could make sure that insurrection and a civil war would happen. But the problem with that sort of thing is that the desired outcome is not a sure thing. The last thing we need is for another Central or South American country to go red.
“Have you ever heard of the Domino Theory?” he interjected.
Tim shook his head.
“It’s something the head-shed thought up. That’s one of the reasons why Kennedy was convinced to send advisors into Vietnam. That and to convince France to remain a neutral player in the division of Germany. They were threatening to annex the Rhine if we didn’t go into Indochina and bail them out. Vietnam is going red, you know. Some guy by the name of Ho Chi Minh is supposed to be a Communist sympathizer. It’s a story that has been blown all out of proportion, of course. But in the end, it will serve our purposes.
“Anyway, the Domino Theory hypothesizes that as one country in a region falls to Communism, so will all the surrounding countries. It’s a great theory to dupe the American public that if our Government doesn’t do something to stop the spread of Communism, we’ll soon be isolated by the Red Menace. Then say good-bye to democracy and Mom’s apple pie.”
“I’m confused. Why did the Company want to kill Ricardo and then let him be found on the Marta in the Boston harbor?”
“Don’t be so dense. Not only do we have to keep the senior Alvarez in line, we have to warn the New York families that they are meddling in affairs that are beyond their ken. Alvarez already believes that one of the New York hired guns is responsible for his son’s death. And we have implicated a number of his rivals to be in collaboration with either one of the New York families. He’s already starting to clean house—with our help, of course.”
“And the Colombian government?” Tim prompted.
“The time will come when we will have little use for Alvarez, and we’ll need an excuse to get rid of him. We’re already cultivating a number of likely candidates who will be sympathetic to our cause, meaning our money and influence. When the time is ripe, we’ll provide that individual with the wherewithal to control the reins of that government, make a pretense of wiping out the poppy fields only to take over the operation, and make the country safe for American democracy.”
Tim wiped several beads of perspiration off his forehead.
“Anything else?” Doris planted his right foot back on the floor in anticipation that this meeting had come to a close.
“One more thing. The Marta. What’s its connection?”
“The Marta is currently owned by a Mendendez family front company. However, we’ve learned that the Tanelli family has been trying to buy her through their own front company: Oriental Imports, Inc. After this little incident, they won’t want to touch her with a ten-foot pole.”
“The ATF is going to have a field day with her, though.”
“They won’t find much. She wasn’t transporting narcotics this time. She off-loaded some weapons we sold the Mendendez family.”
“Why weapons? They planning to ship the weapons to Colombia? Seems easier to just use the Company’s fleet of ships and aircraft under your various front companies.”
“I can’t tell you anything about the weapons. Otherwise, I might have to kill you.” If Doris meant that as a joke, there was little humor in
his tone.
“Anything else?” he repeated.
“No, I guess not,” Tim said despondently.
“Good. Now, let me ask you a question: who are you going to try to pin the murder on?”
“Frankly, my dear,” Tim answered, trying to imitate his best Clark Gable impression, “I haven’t the faintest idea.”
“Good. Keep it that way. We’ll have the right patsy for you at the right—appropriate—time. Just tell McLeod to hold his water for a while.”
CHAPTER NINE
CHINO IN MIAMI
OF ALL THE assignments McLeod had handed out to his team over the years, the one facing Chino had to have been the most difficult, if not the most dangerous. Not that the Chamorro minded. He liked rough assignments. They allowed him to relive his military days as one of the elite in the Army’s Special Forces. He’d had to endure none of the bureaucratic crap and restrictions the military tried to enforce, either because it had to operate within the strict political guidelines set down by Congress or because of the vacillatory policies generated by the ever-changing White House and its reactive knee-jerk responses to world events. Most of the time, Chino felt no one had a clue as to what was really happening in the world at any given moment. Not only did the right hand not know what the left hand was doing, there were too many hands in the mix, each trying to thwart all the other hands. Despite his personal feelings about the government, McLeod felt he was the right man for this particular job.
He had spent a couple of years in Central America with several rebel groups, training them into complementary paramilitary forces to be reckoned with against pro-Soviet or fascist forces in volatile and highly sensitive regions should the United States Government require their services in the future—which they subsequently planned to do. Of course, the Government could not exercise complete control over these wild cards, and more often than not one of the trained leaders of these trained forces would have the idea in his head that he could take over his own country and recreate a government in his own image. The results were often disastrous for all parties involved. Cuba had been a prime example.
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