By Order of the President

by Kilian, Michael;

  “‘Colonel’ Barren,” the major said, in a greeting that amounted mostly to grunt. “Up our ass again, I see.”

  “All part of the program.”

  “This Kreski?”

  “You got it.”

  The major looked up, then nodded at a canvas camp chair. “Have a seat, sir.” As Kreski did as bidden the marine officer pulled a file folder out from a stack of them.

  “You want to know about Juan Jalisco.”

  “Whatever you can tell me.”

  The major opened the folder, but kept its contents from Kreski’s view. “Juan Pedro Jalisco, born 10 January 1943, Veracruz, Mexico. Also resided in Guatemala and Belize. Been in and out of this region since the overthrow of Somoza in 1979. Worked for underground organizations believed associated with Roberto d’Aubisson in El Salvador. Active in right-wing Contra groups here and across the border. Worked for U.S. government …” He paused. “That’s classified.”

  “I understand.”

  “Main thing is, he’s shown up at one time or another with every outfit down here that isn’t Commie. For a while we were afraid he was spying for the Compas, but couldn’t find a trace of any link to them. He’s strictly right-wing.”

  “Was he involved with any organization called La Puño?”

  “Nothing in here about that. But hell, there’s a hundred of these outfits down here, a lot of them just bandits and smugglers. So who knows.” He paused again. “Here’s what you’re looking for. Jalisco arrived in Barra Mono 29 September in company of Manuel Huerta, former lieutenant Honduran National Guard. Jalisco and Huerta departed Barra Mono in a small vessel with unknown crew, likely a fishing trawler, 3 October. Vessel never returned.”

  He looked up, smiling. “Next we saw of Huerta was in Stars and Stripes. You guys sure know how to shoot the shit out of a bastard.”

  “Not soon enough.”

  “Yeah.” The major returned to the folder. “Here’s what you’re really looking for.”

  He handed Kreski an eight-by-ten black and white photograph. It was of a fat man lying on a beach; on second look, not really a fat man, but a swollen, dark-haired, bare-footed body, the bloated flesh having burst open some seams of its clothing. It was lying face up, half in the water.

  “Juan Pedro Jalisco,” the major said. “The body washed ashore about twenty miles up the coast on 5 October. Two bullet wounds in the head.”

  “Identification’s positive?”

  “That’s only kind we ever make. Otherwise, they stay unidentified.”

  “You made a report on this?”

  “Yes, sir. All the way up through fleet headquarters to NavInt.”

  “What happened to it?”

  “Mr. Director, sir, that’s a question we never ask.”

  20

  Harpers Ferry, West Virginia, more a museum than a town, was built on and about a steep hill at the spectacular confluence of the Shenandoah and Potomac rivers. The two FBI agents on watch there had little interest in the scenery. They drove and parked about the town, seldom leaving their vehicle, observing the tourists, the townspeople, and the National Park Service workers, looking for anyone and anything out of place—looking for people like themselves. Their compatriots were doing the same in other towns along the Amtrak line between here and Washington. The orders had come from Director Copley himself, but that made them no less peculiar. If a U.S. senator wanted to shack up out here with the woodsies, it wasn’t exactly a federal crime.

  No one of any interest had gotten off the morning train, and the afternoon train had not even stopped. The tourists all went to the visitor’s center, and to the fire house where John Brown had made his last stand, and prowled the musty antique shops on the long main street that climbed to the top of the hill. A dark green army sedan came by, but it proceeded across the river and out of town. The agents began to long for duty escorting tours of the J. Edgar Hoover Building.

  Finally, making a patrol along the highway that led west from Harpers Ferry to Bolivar and Charles Town, a car moving fast in the opposite lane caught their attention. The sun was low in the sky, but the woman in the back was vividly obvious with her brilliant red hair.

  “Do you think she fits the profile?” said the agent who was driving.

  “I think she fits it like the clothes she’s wearing,” said the other.

  The driver hit the brakes expertly, sending the car into a controlled slide that became a U-turn. In a moment they came within view of the other car and slowed, hanging back. At the outskirts of Harpers Ferry, the car ahead pulled off onto the dirt drive of an old white house with a sagging porch and vines entwined around its two front pillars. The agents passed by without pause but turned again and drove by once more, just as the woman was getting out. The man with her had a large plastic shopping bag, such as those used by liquor stores.

  “She’s not here for the quilting,” said the agent who was driving.

  “Not the usual kind, anyway.”

  “I’d better call in. I think we’ve found Senator Dubarry’s country retreat.”

  Kreski had conversations with a number of other American officers at Barra Mono. They all said much the same thing. He learned that Jalisco’s body had been shipped to his family in Veracruz. It was a favor provided in recognition of his service to the U.S. government. The many other bodies that turned up in the sector under mysterious circumstances usually were just buried on the spot, quickly. That night, Barren, the marine major, a Special Forces captain, and Kreski went drinking in the installation’s makeshift officers’ club. The other three became baracco—maximum drunk. Kreski worked very hard at not becoming so, but only half succeeded. The helicopter ride back to Tegucigalpa was an ordeal for him, but the night’s drinking seemed not to bother Barren, unless these benders were the reason he always wore sunglasses.

  They had radioed ahead, and Sandoval was waiting for them with a car and driver. Barren remained on the airfield, where he found friends.

  “Well, señor?” Sandoval said, when they were beyond the airport gates. The day was very hot though it was not yet midmorning, and they had all the windows of the small car lowered. The wind blew bits of dust and dirt into Kreski’s face.

  “I’m satisfied,” Kreski said. “About a lot of things.”

  “Yes?” The tall Latin smiled beneath his thick mustache. The more he was with him, the less Kreski thought of him as an American.

  “I’m satisfied that La Puño is not an organization, but rather what Huerta called himself. I’m satisfied that Huerta was a fanatic bent on vengeance who was recruited for Gettysburg. I’m satisfied that the people behind it are likely not from here and that there’s no reason to believe your group was involved. But then, that’s what I thought before I came down here.”

  “But now you have seen things and talked to people. You believe them.”

  “Most of them. There were some contradictions, some evasiveness, some poor memories. But, yes, for the most part, I believe them. Certainly those who count.”

  “And you will make this known back in Washington? To the government? To the press?”

  “I suppose, as best I can. You have more faith in my credibility than I do.”

  “Is there anywhere else you want to go? Anyone else you want to talk to?”

  “Just one person. But he’s dead.”

  “The unfortunate Jalisco.”

  “Yes.”

  “It is too bad, because we would have liked to have talked to him as well. Very much. He did some work for us, you know.”

  “I hadn’t known.”

  “It’s in the files of American military intelligence, but I’m sure they have it classified because of, what shall I call it?—our close association with the American government. Jalisco was able to bring one of our men out of El Salvador after he’d been captured by the Communists. He also made courier runs for us to units operating in Nicaragua. We paid him by the job. He cost a lot of money, but he was very good.”

 
“Did you know anything about his association with Huerta?”

  “Not until after the shooting at Gettysburg, when we made it our business to find out.”

  They passed by a row of houses set close to the road. A strong aroma of cooking smells assaulted Kreski’s senses.

  “Jalisco recruited Huerta for Gettysburg; there’s no doubt of that,” Kreski said. “For whom? Have you the slightest idea?”

  Sandoval shrugged. “Quien sabe? He worked for so many.”

  “Could it possibly have been leftists? The Cubans? All the evidence points to the likes of all those dispossessed El Salvadoran landowners, but the evidence is too clear, too black and white.

  “Again, señor, quien sabe? We have no way of knowing. I think the answer to your question lies in another country.”

  “The United States.”

  “Possibly. Certainly the ultimate answer to everything is there.”

  “Can you help me? In Florida, if need be?”

  “Lo siento, señor, but I’m afraid not. When I return to the States it will be simply to run my hotel. I am not active in political matters there, and it would not be good for you and me to have any contact. Not for me, not for Mr. Brookes, not, I think, for you. Already we in the free Cuban community have had federal agents poking around. And reporters with them. It’s not good.”

  The driver turned onto one of Tegucigalpa’s major boulevards, still clogged with traffic.

  “Is there anyone you might recommend I talk to about Jalisco?”

  “In Florida? No, señor. To my knowledge, he was never in Florida. Never among us. A man like Jalisco. We would know.”

  “I’m not sure where to turn next.”

  “Stay here as long as you wish. We will help you however we can. Jalisco had a woman in Barra Mono. You could talk to her. But he had a woman here in Tegucigalpa. In many places. I don’t know how much good it would do you to talk to them. They were simply his women, comprende? Here, we all …” He shrugged again, this time with a smile.

  “Comprendo.”

  “When do you want to go back?”

  Kreski watched a line of Honduran army jeeps and trucks pass in the other direction. “I guess this afternoon, if possible. Tonight. As soon as I can.”

  “There is no direct flight to Miami anymore, because of the war, they say. You will have to change in Mexico City. From there, you can go almost anywhere in the States.”

  “I know.”

  “Where will you go?”

  “Back to Washington.”

  “It will be very interesting to see what is happening now in Washington.”

  “I just want to go home. I’m a man who misses his wife.”

  Sandoval smiled once more. “Comprendo.”

  When they pulled up in front of the high-rise Kreski reached for his bag on the floor.

  “It was a tiring journey to Barra Mono,” Sandoval said. “Would you like to rest awhile here today? Have dinner with us tonight? Return tomorrow?”

  “No, gracias. I am ready to go home.”

  The other shook his hand with that same macho grasp. “It was a great pleasure, Señor Kreski. You are a good man. Mucho hombre.”

  “Thank you. Thank you for your hospitality.” He handed Sandoval back the pistol the man had loaned him. “Thank you for this. I’m sorry I needed it.”

  “Everyone in Central America has such regrets. Adios, Señor Kreski.”

  “Adios.”

  Sandoval watched out his window until Kreski reached the glass doors at the high-rise entrance. He should not have. A car parked behind them down the street suddenly pulled out and roared by, at least two automatic weapons firing loudly. Kreski threw himself to the rough pavement of the sidewalk, head down, though no bullet came near him. He heard the car screech to a stop, and a man’s voice shout, “Da la Muerte a La Puño! Viva Ortega!” Then, lifting his head, Kreski saw the auto speed off down the street, disappearing behind other parked cars. He could recall only that it was light blue. Slowly, glancing fearfully both ways down the street, he got to his feet.

  Sandoval’s driver, his pistol gripped uselessly in his dead hand, was lying half out of the car, his head in the gutter. Sandoval’s big body had become wedged between the seats. The front windshield was shot out. Blood was spattered everywhere.

  Kreski’s shock turned to anger. He had lost or put aside all of his professional instincts. He should have taken note of the parked car the moment he saw it. He should have warned Sandoval the instant he heard its engine come to life. If he were still with the Secret Service and Sandoval had been the president, he would have been guilty of the worst possible dereliction of duty.

  It was worse than that. Sandoval was his friend. Again he had lost a friend. Again he was at fault.

  Assured the shooting was over, people began to crowd around, all of them much shorter than Kreski. He could hear police sirens, several of them all at once. He backed away, standing at the entrance to the building for a moment. Then, when he saw the first police Jeep round the corner, he retreated inside, as others from the high-rise pushed past him, seeking the street and the cause of the excitement. That death in Tegucigalpa could still occasion excited curiosity seemed almost amazing.

  Kreski rode the elevator up to his floor all by himself, glad he had returned the pistol to Sandoval before leaving the car, then almost wishing he hadn’t. He’d no idea what to do next, what would happen next. Once inside the apartment he bolted the door and poured himself a drink, mostly rum, remembering his first drink with Sandoval, saddened by the thought of it. He had really liked the man.

  Using his less than perfect Spanish, he managed, finally, to get a call through to the Mexican airline and booked a seat to Mexico City on a seven-ten P.M. flight. He packed his other bag, checked through his small canvas one, and then went through the rooms in search of belongings he might have overlooked. He found none. He had nothing left to do, and hours to wait.

  Feeling trapped by the apartment, he went out onto the balcony for the first time, into the heat and the city noise, the hazy brightness, the great sweep of space and rooftops extending into nothingness. But then fear of the unknown dangers of which Sandoval had warned him, which had just made themselves so violently manifest, drove him back into the living room.

  He had never experienced this kind of fear. In all his career he had always been in control. Whenever something went wrong there were always established procedures to turn to, always a certain knowledge of what to do. This helplessness angered him.

  He turned on the television set, finding only Spanish-language soap operas and variety shows, commercials for American cigarettes and whiskey, political messages from the government, but nothing that resembled a news broadcast. Leaving the set tuned to what seemed to be a principal channel, he turned down the volume slightly and sat upon the couch, alternately sipping his drink and looking at his watch, from time to time staring out the glass doors of the balcony.

  “Da la muerta a La Puño! Viva Ortega!” The words had confounded him, defied all logic. La Puño was only Manuel Huerta, and he was already dead, a free-lance fanatic recruited by people who, for whatever reason, wanted Henry Hampton dead, people well enough placed to recruit at least one agent of the U.S. Secret Service as well, and to blow up the wife of the vice president of the United States. How was it death to Huerta to assassinate an anti-Castro Miami Cuban, and in the name of the dictator of Nicaragua? Why would the Sandinistas be avenging the death of the president of the United States?

  But logic was not an end. It was a direction. It led from where one began. Kreski was a religious man only in the most philosophical sense. The rituals and orthodoxies of organized religion offended all his sensibilities, all his logic. Yet in a long night’s talk with a Jesuit, granting the priest the premise of an uncaused cause, an eternal deity, an unborn and undying God, the cleric had been able to argue all of literal Catholicism with compelling and irrefutable logic—given that premise.

  What
if Kreski granted his mind such a premise, assuming that the preponderance of evidence was wrong, that his witnesses had been mistaken, or deceitful? What if there were a secret, fanatical Central American right-wing organization called La Puño, one that reached across many borders and was allied with right-wing fanatics in the United States? One that had broken forth from its cover only to launch an all-out assault upon the leadership of the American government?

  But why? Henry Hampton had been waging resolute counterinsurgency warfare in Central America, warfare that had taken American combat troops into Nicaragua and El Salvador, that had cost many American lives. And Hampton had been massing a force so formidable that, with a few words from Washington, he could instantly transform the conflict into another Vietnam, a Vietnam the United States, this time, would be prepared to win. Why would any right-wing organization interpose itself against that?

  Unless the right-wing La Puño was in itself a creation of the left, a plot within a plot within a plot, a device of Nicaraguan and Cuban manufacture. Felix Dzerzhinsky, the brilliant and ruthless Polish revolutionary who had served as Lenin’s first security chief and established the Bolshevik secret police—had he not created such an organization? It had been the most-powerful, best-financed, best-organized, and most-effective anti-Bolshevik, anti-Communist underground in Russia, effective but for one thing—Dzerzhinsky himself actually ran it. Were the Sandinistas that clever?

  Sandoval’s assassination might simply have been an attempt to reestablish their cover. How convenient that the assassins had waited so carefully for him to exit the car, to walk out of firing range, to be in position to witness the entire performance without suffering injury to himself, to return to Washington to affirm the existence of La Puño, enemy of Managua.

  Kreski set down his glass and began walking about the room, finding it confining. Witness and fool, that was his role, a one-man conduit to the credulous of America, to an American people who had only the uninformed assertions of television networks and newspapers with which to grope their way out of their bewilderment. He was merely serving someone’s interests, and he really hadn’t the slightest idea whose.