NINETEEN
The last of three cars pulled up outside the house. “That’s it,” Sam said, turning away from the window. “Everybody’s here.” I was lying back on the bed, smoking one of Melik’s Turkish blends, trying to convince myself that I had a chance of surviving the next twenty-four hours. Sam had told me that these guys were coming to give the final thumbs-up (or down) on the operation, but he wouldn’t say who they were no matter how hard I pressed him. So I was surprised when he threw me my jacket.
“Let’s go,” he said.
“Where?”
“You’re on.”
“On?”
“It’s showtime.”
“Nobody knocked on my door and said, ‘Five minutes, Mr. Teller.’”
“Put the jacket on, Jack.”
I crushed the cigarette in the ashtray I had balanced on my chest, rolled off the bed, and slipped the jacket on over my T-shirt. “I guess they wanna see who you got for the Kovinski role,” I said.
“That’s the idea.”
“I should feel honored.”
“Just don’t f*ck up.” Sam was uncharacteristically edgy, which didn’t do a lot for my nerves.
“How the hell am I gonna f*ck up, Sam?”
“If they decide to abort this thing, you won’t be getting that last meal I promised you. So be cooperative.”
“Cooperative is my middle name,” I said, and Sam opened the door.
An old grandfather clock was striking eleven as we entered the ground-floor library. It was a substantial room, with oak-paneled walls and a twenty-five-foot-high vaulted ceiling. A circular stairway led up to a book-lined gallery around the upper perimeter, interrupted only by a massive stone chimney that was decorated with a variety of antique guns, knives, swords, and instruments of medieval torture.
Five leather armchairs were arranged by the fire at the far end of the room, three of them occupied—by a silver-haired gentleman with his back to me and, to his right, a fat guy with a pencil mustache, who I recognized as agency legend Harvey King. Sitting opposite him was a small, wiry fellow with a gray brush cut, thick glasses, a short-sleeved white shirt, and a red bow tie. He was drinking Pepsi out of a bottle.
“Sit down, Jack,” the silver-haired man said. I knew the face, but I couldn’t place it. Wide cheekbones and broad shoulders, strong, chiseled features, wavy hair, and full lips, he looked like an aging Roman god. Dressed impeccably from head to toe in oversize Italian eyeglasses, a silk tie, blue blazer, and two-hundred-dollar shoes, he oozed money.
“Relax,” he said smoothly in a slight accent. “Have a drink. I can recommend the cognac. It’s one hundred years old.”
“Bourbon,” I said to a butler type who was hovering in a corner. Sam ordered scotch on the rocks and took the seat between the smooth talker and the Pepsi man. The empty chair with its back to the flames was reserved for me.
“A lot of men in your position would try to bullshit their way out of it,” the silver-haired man continued, “but I’m guessing that you’re smart enough to know there is no way out. The question for you is not what will happen, it’s how it will happen. I’d like to see you get through it with as much dignity and as little pain as possible.”
“I’ll go along with that,” I said, accepting my drink. The man in the bow tie tapped his empty bottle with a fingernail by way of ordering a new one.
“Fine.” The silver-haired man smiled warmly, then paused to look around at his colleagues. They showed no expression, which seemed to mean they were satisfied so far. His gaze landed back on me, and just then I realized why I knew the face.
Johnny Rosetti was a highly successful businessman in South Florida, with interests in numerous restaurants, nightclubs, and hotels. But those were just fronts, used to launder the money he made off gambling, prostitution, drugs, extortion, murder … that sort of thing. But as much as Rosetti and his pals pulled in, it didn’t compare to what they lost when Castro tossed them out of Cuba. A hundred million a year was a conservative estimate—tax-free, of course. Naturally, they wanted it back and weren’t too impressed with Kennedy’s efforts in that department, so I wasn’t exactly shocked to find him a member of our little group.
“Isn’t it great?” I said, unable to help myself.
“What?” Rosetti smiled graciously.
“That a small-time pimp like yourself could rise out of the gutter to reach the very pinnacle of society. Imagine—one-hundred-year-old cognac. What a country, huh?”
The smile froze on Rosetti’s face and his eyes went ice-cold. I wished I had the poison pellets because I would’ve been very pleased to put one in his eye then and there. But if anyone was gonna die in the next few seconds, it was me. Fortunately, Harvey King didn’t give a shit about Johnny Rosetti’s wounded pride.
“Let’s get to the f*cking point,” the big man said, shifting his considerable weight toward me. He had a funny, high-pitched voice that didn’t fit his three-hundred-pound frame.
Harvey and I had crossed paths a couple of times in the lead-up to the invasion, but just in passing. He kept a low profile around the agency, steering clear of anything that smacked of camaraderie. He was a hero to the cowboys he ran in and out of Cuba, who loved the fact that a hard-drinking, gun-toting, whore-chasing son of a bitch like Harvey could roam the halls of power, sticking it to the preppies who ran the place. The leadership, with their Ivy League cool, put up with him as a necessary, if unpleasant, character who was an acknowledged wizard when it came to black ops. Both factions were incensed when he got early retirement courtesy of Bobby Kennedy.
“Tell me about Zapata,” he said, referring to the code name for the Bay of Pigs. “What happened with you and Fisher?”
“We didn’t see eye to eye,” I said, not sure where he was going with it.
“He arrested you, didn’t he?”
“He locked me up.”
“Why?”
“Like I said, I didn’t agree with some of the stuff he was doing.” He glared at me for a beat, snorted, then reached into his jacket, pulled out a handkerchief, and sneezed into it. I thought his eyes were gonna pop out of his head. “You were concerned about the Guantánamo operation,” he said, wiping his nose.
“That’s right.”
“How did you know about it?
“Fisher told me.”
“What did he tell you?”
“That a bunch of mercenaries dressed as Cuban regulars were going to attack American forces at the base in an effort to provoke the president into sending in the Marines.”
“You thought that was wrong?”
“Yeah, I thought it was wrong.”
“I want you to give me the names of everyone you discussed that operation with.”
I saw what he was getting at now. Once I was a world-famous dead assassin, every hack in the country would be tracking down anybody I ever said hello to. Harvey wanted names so he could make them disappear before some reporter got to them. He was protecting his operation’s integrity. (Their word, not mine.)
“Go to hell,” I said. He smiled and nodded, looking unexpectedly pleased with my response.
“Did you report your concerns about the Guantánamo operation to anyone in the government?” he continued.
“Yes, I did.”
“The name and agency of that person?”
“Sam Clay of Central Intelligence,” I said. Harvey turned to Sam, who nodded.
“That’s true,” he said. “And I told him to forget about it.”
Harvey rotated back toward me. “Did you take that advice, Jack? Did you keep your mouth shut?”
“Yes,” I said.
“Would you tell me if you hadn’t?”
“No.”
“Regardless of what we do to you, whatever interrogation technique we might use, is there any way in hell that we could be one hundred percent sure that you told us about everyone you ever discussed the Guantánamo operation with?”
“I might give you names, but you wouldn’t know if they were the right ones or if I’d given you all of them.”
“That’s right,” Harvey said. “I agree with you. And what else do you know, Jack?”
“Regarding … ?”
“Let’s stick to Cuba. Would you say that you’re fairly knowledgeable about what went on down there?”
“I was involved in some interesting operations.”
“Would it be fair to say that you have quite a few connections with personnel and events that occurred in the Cuba action?”
“That would be fair to say, yes.”
“How many people know that you were part of Zapata? What would you guess, if you included everyone you came into contact with while you were assigned to the task force?”
“A couple dozen, I guess. Maybe more.”
“So at least two dozen people, probably more, can connect you to the Company’s Cuba operations.”
“That’s right.”
“And there’s every possibility that you talked to people outside the agency about the Guantánamo operation. You don’t have to answer that, I’m just making a point.” He turned toward Sam again. “The point being that this is as f*cked up a choice for cover as I can imagine! What the f*ck were you thinking?!”
“Take it easy, Harvey,” Sam warned. King wasn’t known for his diplomacy, but Sam wasn’t known for taking any shit. “We can make this work.”
“It’s sloppy,” Harvey said. “We’re supposed to be using him for cover and we’ve got our fingerprints all over the f*cking guy!”
“A good guy gone bad,” Sam said. “We can sell it. We’ve got pictures.”
“It opens up too many doors,” Harvey said. “Doors we all want under lock and key. I recommend we abort and come up with an alternative site.”
There was a long, heavy silence. I wondered why Sam didn’t step in, try to get things back on track, then I realized that one way or another, he was willing to sacrifice me in order to buy a bit more time. I was starting to wonder if I had a way out when the Pepsi man piped up.
“We go,” he said in a distinct Texas twang. “If there’s some cleanin’ up to do after, we do it, that’s all.”
Harvey and Rosetti exchanged a look. This clearly wasn’t a guy they could just shrug off. Rosetti spoke first.
“There are programs in Cuba that are happening at this very moment that cannot be compromised—”
“You mean like assassinating Castro?” the Texan interrupted. “Come on now, that’s small potatoes compared to what we’re talkin’ about here.”
“The individuals I represent don’t see it as ‘small potatoes,‘” Rosetti said coolly. “In fact, they see it as very large potatoes.”
“Castro’s gonna be taken care of once this thing gets done,” the man in the bow tie said. “And nothin’s gonna come out we can’t handle. Jack Teller’s an unstable individual with leftist tendencies who was directed by the agents of communism to assassinate the president of the United States. Nothing about his past associations with the CIA—or organized crime, for that matter—will ever reach the public’s ears. And I’m not just saying that. I can guarantee it, one hundred percent.”
Another uncomfortable silence ensued. Harvey finally broke it.
“You wanna tell us more about that?”
The Texan paused for effect, offered up a catbird smile, and polished off his soda. “My people,” he said slowly, narrowing his eyes and enunciating each syllable, “want to rid our great country of this nigger-lovin’ traitor before he can do irreparable harm. In that regard, they have come to an understanding with a certain gentleman who I won’t name, but y’all know who I’m talkin’ about. This individual is in a position to make assurances that no awkward questions will be asked. And that’s the way it is. No awkward questions will be asked.”
Harvey and Rosetti exchanged a look and so did Sam and!
“Now we’ve got a perfect opportunity here,” the Texan continued. “One that ain’t gonna come along again, not before the election. We’ve got a foreign locale that’s right on the Kremlin’s doorstep, we’ve got pictures of our killer associating with a certified Communist agent, and we’ve got a promise that the right people will look the other way. I’ll tell you truly, boys, I don’t know what in hell else you want. Hasn’t anybody in this room got any goddamned guts?”
I was dismissed at that point, escorted back to my room by the unassuming butler, who I assumed was armed to the teeth. There was no shower in the adjoining bathroom, so I filled the tub with scalding water and lay there with a hot washcloth covering my face, trying to get my head around what I’d just heard.
This wasn’t a bunch of renegade spooks getting revenge for Cuba and it wasn’t about payback for double-crossing the mob, either. Both had their reasons to get rid of Kennedy, but this was bigger than the Company or the syndicate. They were just the hired hands.
The man in the red bow tie, he was the insidious face of the true “danger from within.” He could’ve been the local pharmacist, the high-school geometry teacher, or the man behind the screen door explaining why you needed more life insurance. Your good neighbor who mowed his lawn every Saturday, went to church on Sunday, and rooted for the home team, he was a hardworking, God-fearing, full-blooded American who smiled and said “nice morning” over the garden wall as he got into his clean car at seven thirty sharp and drove off, well under the speed limit. His dog never pissed on your grass and his lights were always out by ten o’clock. He was safe and ordinary and he was one of us. And that’s why he was so f*cking dangerous.
My people, he’d said, want to rid our great country of this nigger-lovin’ traitor before he can do irreparable harm. Who were these people that wrapped themselves in the flag like they owned it, soiling it with their brutally repulsive conceit? “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free and we’ll be happy to string ‘em up for you,” that’s who they were. But unlike their emissary, these men didn’t live among us. They existed behind a wall of their own—one built with money, power, and, above all, with hatred. You didn’t have to know their names to know what to call them. They were the good old boys, red-blooded American Fascists who were sick and tired of watching that Catholic, nigger-lovin’ Communist ruin their country, so they were gonna take it away from him and hand it over to somebody they could trust.
And no awkward questions would be asked.