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  For the other women of November—Maureen Baron, Carole Baron, Meredith Bernstein, and Barbara Grossman.

  Posterity shall know as little of me as I shall know of posterity.

  —WILLIAM S. GILBERT

  Do not worry. You have always written before and you will write now. All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence you know.

  —ERNEST HEMINGWAY, A Moveable Feast

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  Ernest Hemingway, tired of life at Key West, where friends of his second wife kept him from his work, retreated to Cuba in 1939. In April that year, at the insistence of a friend named Martha Gellhorn, he rented a house at Finca Vigía, which is in the hills of San Francisco de Paula south of Havana. He eventually bought the property and it was his principal residence until he killed himself in Idaho in July 1961. His house is preserved today as a museum by the government of Fidel Castro.

  Castro apologists insist that Ernest Hemingway was a longtime “friend of the revolution.” This is based on his affinity for the down-and-out waterfront characters he wrote about, drank with, and sailed with. However, Hemingway was a closet patrician and his associations with gangsters and revolutionaries, simple fishermen and smugglers, however genuine at the time, was a form of “slumming” for the doctor’s son from Oak Park, Illinois. A number of the late writer’s friends have said Hemingway’s obvious distaste for Batista in the days before the Cuban revolution was matched only by his later distaste for Castro’s people.

  Despite his sympathy for the Loyalist cause in the Spanish civil war, Hemingway was a ferocious anticommunist.

  Hemingway killed himself three months after the Bay of Pigs fiasco, in which Cuban troops, financed and directed by the Central Intelligence Agency, attempted an armed counterrevolt against the fledgling Castro government. It was proven later that Castro’s intelligence service was superior to the Americans’ in that time and place.

  After the Bay of Pigs, American intelligence used members of organized crime to attempt the assassination of Castro. One scheme involved poisoning his cigars. The motives of the crime syndicate were obvious: They had flourished in Batista’s Cuba with its prostitution, casinos, and drug trade. To this day, the American crime syndicate is deeply involved in gambling operations in the Caribbean, as well as in the drug trade.

  1

  A MAN UNDER CONTRACT

  The president of the United States, his face shining under the television lights, gripped the lectern and turned in a characteristic way toward the reporter on the panel, as though he had not heard the question. After a pause and a duck of his head, he began a long and rambling discourse.

  Frank Collier was watching the president’s image on the screen in the corner of his darkened office in Langley, Virginia. “Jesus.” He exhaled the word. “Jesus,” he said again as though trying to form a prayer. “What the hell is he doing, talking about that? Does he know what he’s doing?”

  The darkness did not answer. The television carried the condensed sound of the president as he explained in a rambling unpunctuated way about the Central Intelligence Agency in Latin America, in the Caribbean, about the existence of a manual for guerrilla fighters, about freedom fighters, and about the fact that the CIA had hired a writer for the guerrilla manual who may have overstepped his authority.…

  “Does he know what he’s saying? He should listen to what he’s saying!” Frank Collier again addressed the darkness. His voice was rising.

  The president was speaking of a manual whose existence had become the talk of the Washington press corps in the long, tedious week before the second presidential debate of the campaign. There had been little else to attract attention because the campaign, despite the presence of a woman in the second position on the Democratic ticket, was not remarkable.

  The manual was a simplistic guide with cartoon illustrations distributed among anti-Sandinista guerrilla rebels in Nicaragua. It had allegedly been written by the CIA—and now the president was dropping the allegedly. The manual urged the “elimination” of people in the Sandinista government in the troubled country on the western rim of the Caribbean Sea.

  The president rambled on, explaining that the word elimination did not necessarily mean killing.

  Frank Collier squirmed in the heavy oak chair and picked up the green telephone receiver in the darkness. It triggered a ring at the other end of the line. “Why the hell is he explaining this—why is he doing this?” Frank Collier shouted into the telephone.

  “Damage control,” the voice at the end of the line said with a measure of calm. “We’ll call D.C., get some PIO on this—”

  “This is network television, this is the fucking presidential debate—”

  “Take it easy, Frank,” said the voice.

  Outside Collier’s second floor corner office in CIA headquarters, the summer night crackled with the sounds of insects and the cries of owls hunting in the moonlight. Beyond the leafy suburbs, beyond the Beltway, the lights of Washington winked orange and villainous.

  “I meant to say—” corrected the president suddenly, backing away from the wreckage of words spilled in the past forty-five seconds, while the Democratic candidate blinked at him, while the panel of journalists pretended to listen, while Frank Collier tapped his fingers nervously on the green blotter on his desk, and suddenly pushed his swivel chair away from the desk and away from the television screen in the corner.

  “He ‘meant to say,’ ” Frank Collier shouted into the green telephone receiver.

  “The Old Man can take care of him,” said the voice at the end of the line.

  “He’s thirty points up in the polls, he’d be reelected if he was embalmed, what the hell is he telling them all this for?” said Frank Collier.

  “We have ordered an investigation,” the president said again.

  “Oh, God,” said Frank Collier. “Listen to him.”

  “Frank, I want you to relax, try to take it easy—”

  “I put that goddamned rummy on the manual in the first place. You know what he knows? I mean, you know how much he knows about everything? Not just Nicaragua, not just Cuba, but everything?”

  “Frank, I don’t want to know all that—”

  “Son-of-a-bitch has been sitting in the Caribe since Batista, now the president is going to investigate him? Son-of-a-bitch, I only used him on the little job because he could write, and you can’t find writers anymore—”

  “He’s vetted, Frank, he’s very clear, he’s all right—”

  “Nobody,” said Frank Collier, his voice rising, “nobody is all right when they get their back to the wall and their tit caught in the wringer.” The unexpected metaphors made a momentary silence in the room. Even the television president paused, as though puzzling out the words.

  “So take care of him. He’s been freelance for a while, hasn’t he?”

  “I can’t.” Pause. “Not right away. Two weeks ago, R Section sent a man down to talk to him. Try to get a line on him. Fucking R Section fucking in our business.”

  “I didn’t know that, Frank,” said the voice at the other end of the line, putting distance between them.

  “Agent named Coh
n. Our freelancer is playing both of us, it seems. I don’t have to tell you—”

  “Don’t tell me, Frank,” said the voice with meaning.

  “And we’re going to find those responsible,” said the president.

  Frank Collier felt physically sick then. “Put a gag in his mouth, please, somebody.”

  “Take it easy, Frank,” said the voice on the line. “Nothing will happen. The Old Man will talk to him. Wait and see. Nothing is going to happen.”

  “You’re not in the line of fire on this,” Frank Collier said. He felt very alone in the dark office on the second floor of the Central Intelligence Agency complex in a Virginia suburb of Washington, D.C. He held the receiver tightly.

  “No,” agreed the voice.

  “Things are going to happen. On St. Michel. Very soon. The writer is on St. Michel.”

  “I don’t want to know—”

  “On fucking St. Michel. I use a guy once three years ago and he disappears and surfaces on St. Michel and I got an agent from R Section down there just when we are supposed to make things pop. You got to believe in Fate after a while, you know that?”

  “It’ll look better in the morning, Frank.” A soothing voice. “I’ve been there before, babysitting an operation. But this is the Caribbean we’re talking about, the whole basin from Venezuela up to Key West. Nobody cares, Frank. Take my word for it. We are not talking about nuclear with the Big Red Machine, we are talking about the Caribbean, Frank. Niggers and spics and white sand beaches. Believe me, nobody thinks a thing about the Caribe until it’s cold in New York in January.”

  “An operation. My operation,” Frank said, saying too much again. He stared at the screen. The president was finished. The camera was pointed at the Democrat. Frank Collier felt drawn and cold.

  “Wait and see,” said the soothing voice. “Nothing is going to happen.”

  2

  COLONEL READY

  Lausanne was caught in a bright September stillness on the edge of autumn, lingering a moment with the last of summer. The city sprawled on the hillside like a tired whore. It was cool in the shade, warm in the sun. The waters of Lac Léman below the city were still and glistening and there were boats sailing on childlike puffs of breeze.

  Devereaux saw the other man from the corner of his eye. He noticed him because the other man moved too quickly. The other man stepped out of the McDonald’s across from the train station just as Devereaux passed the entrance.

  The other man bumped him, grabbed him.

  Devereaux, acting on instinct, bent his knees in that moment and reached up with both hands to grab the other man, expecting a second, heavy blow or the nearly painless slash of a razor-edged knife.

  He grasped the sleeve of the other man’s dark jacket and pulled his weight back, tripping him in one movement and letting the other man’s weight fall on him as he knelt and shifted. In a fraction of a second, Devereaux would lift suddenly and throw the other man over his shoulder.

  Except the other man stepped back at the last moment and the weight shifted back and Devereaux was pulled upright. They faced each other, flushed, breathing hard, their hands on each other’s sleeves.

  Colonel Ready grinned.

  Devereaux did not move. He had no expression in his gray eyes. He stared like a cat at an empty window.

  “Nearly as fast as you used to be,” Colonel Ready said. He smiled. Neither man let go of the other.

  “And you’re slower,” Devereaux said, because Ready expected something to be said.

  “We all get old. Besides, this wasn’t an ambush in Nam, was it? Just a joke between friends.”

  “We’re not friends,” Devereaux said.

  Colonel Ready stood still and let the smile fade. He dropped his hands first. His classic redhead’s face was freckled, which might have made him look absurdly young, even as Devereaux’s prematurely gray hair and wintry face made him look older than he was. But Ready’s youthful looks were mitigated by the cold cast to his eyes, cold blue to Devereaux’s arctic gray. And there was a broad, white scar that ran from the right corner of his mouth to the disfigured remains of his right ear.

  “Not friends then,” Ready said in a metallic voice. “Old comrades in arms.”

  Devereaux dropped his hands.

  The two men stood apart from each other in front of the McDonald’s. It was noon and shoppers were crowding into the metro funicular. The trains ran down the long hill to Ouchy at the foot of Lausanne and the shore of Lac Léman. Other trains rose several hundred feet to the shopping district above. A woman in a black dress and orange sweater brushed between the two men, muttering in annoyed French, and pushed her way into the line at the ticket booth for the metro.

  “Are you lost?” Devereaux said.

  Ready grinned. “Never lost within eyeshot of the Golden Arches. A little bit of home, makes you nostalgic, doesn’t it?” He paused, still grinning. “I just had me a burger now, waiting for you. I know it sounds odd. But I miss burgers. Where I am now, I mean.”

  “Where you are now is here,” Devereaux said, waiting.

  “Not the same as home, is it?”

  Devereaux said nothing.

  “I had a hard time finding you.”

  “Why did you look for me?”

  “I need you, Devereaux. That’s obvious isn’t it?”

  Devereaux said nothing.

  “Thought I’d lost you for good. I mean, everyone thinks you’re dead, did you know that? At Langley, even.”

  Devereaux waited with gray calm.

  “I knew you had survived,” Ready said, grinning again.

  Devereaux knew the smile. It was never sincere. It worked very well for Colonel Ready.

  Once, in the jungle, a file of Cong had surprised Ready while he squatted in the bushes, defecating. Ready had simply grinned at them. The Cong were surprised. For a moment, they had stared at the grinning red monkey of an American with his trousers bunched around his boots, his white behind hanging out of the fatigues. It was a moment of comic surprise in a farce. The hesitation lasted as long as a double take. It was one beat too long for the Cong. Ready rose in that moment and began to spray the six guerrillas with exploding rounds from his contraband Uzi submachine gun. As someone at G2 noted later, the fantastic part of the encounter was that after the shooting, Colonel Ready squatted down again in the blood-splattered bushes and finished his business.

  “If everyone thinks I’m dead, perhaps you shouldn’t have come looking to find me alive,” Devereaux said.

  “I have faith, Devereaux. I can move mountains. I knew you survived the business in Zurich when I heard the details. ‘Killed in a hotel room.’ Except your body was carelessly identified, don’t you think? The only people who’d believe that crap are the kind of chumps you find at Langley. Or maybe on Dzerzhinsky Square.”

  “And you shared your faith?”

  “No, Devereaux. Faith is a selfish thing with me. I like to be alone, you know that. I thought it was as simple as cherchez la femme—‘look for the woman.’ It’s not your girl’s fault, Devereaux, I wouldn’t want you to be angry with her. But I’m very good at what I do, you know that.”

  “You went to so much trouble,” Devereaux said. His voice was cold and somber.

  “Yes. It was a lot of trouble. A year ago, right after you died in Zurich, she went to live in Spiez. Why did she do that? She had a job in Washington. I bet she wasn’t ranging too far from someone. Switzerland is a nice little place to be dead in.”

  “I’m not in the old game,” Devereaux said, in order to end the conversation that showed no sign of ending.

  “Hell, man.” Smile. “I know that.” Pause. “You’re dead, after all.” Ready smiled with the sincerity of a dentist.

  Devereaux had studied him in those moments. His clothes were too light, even for the wispy warmth of early September in the Swiss Alps. His shirt and trousers were tropical weight khakis with a military cut and Ready had attempted to disguise them with a dark civilia
n sports coat that left too much room in the gut. Colonel Ready was cut lean, as he had been in the long ago days when he shifted between the Defense Intelligence Agency and Langley in Vietnam. He had been liaison to R Section and Devereaux there. Devereaux had never trusted him. He had been a spy on the Section and on Devereaux. It had been a game between them. They had been good players because both had survived—the game and the war around them.

  “Aren’t you curious?” Ready said.

  “No.”

  Devereaux turned then and started again for the zebra crossing at the corner. He had been heading for the red stone train station when Ready grabbed him. The train from Geneva was due in twenty minutes. He had told her he would meet her.

  “Damn it,” said Ready after him. “I’d be curious at least.”

  “I told you,” Devereaux said. He stopped and turned. “I’m not in the old game.” His voice was just above a whisper.

  “You owe me, Devereaux. You have owed me for a long time.” And this time, there was no smile and the voice was so quiet that it cut through the din of traffic along the Avenue.

  “Both of you are in it now. I mean, I know you’re not dead, don’t I?”

  “She’s not part of this, Ready.”

  “I’m afraid that can’t be avoided. I wouldn’t wait for the train from Geneva. She might not be on it.”

  And then the cold filled Devereaux the way it did in the old days, in the Section. The cold found every empty place in him and settled into him until it became a comfort to him. Rita Macklin would not be on the train from Geneva.

  Ready shrugged as though he might apologize. “I need leverage on you, Devereaux. It’s nothing to do with her but it has to be her, you understand that. You know how it is.”

  “Where is she?”

  “Let’s just say she’s not on the train from Geneva. Let’s leave it at that for the moment and then we can talk about her and about other things,” Ready said.