The Negotiator (9 page)

In the last week of the month, Cobb, Moir, and Salkind met Scanlon and Miller for a private dinner at Miller’s invitation in a suite of cloistered luxury at the Remington Hotel in Houston. Over brandy and coffee Miller guided their thoughts to the notion of John Cormack’s continued occupation of the Oval Office.

“He has to go,” Miller intoned. The others nodded agreement.

“I’ll have no truck with assassination,” said Salkind hurriedly. “In any case, remember Kennedy. The effect of his death was to push through Congress every piece of civil rights legislation he couldn’t get through himself. Totally counterproductive, if that was the point of the hit. And it was Johnson, of all people, who got it all into law.”

“I agree,” said Miller. “That course of action is inconceivable. But there must be a way of forcing his resignation.”

“Name one,” challenged Moir. “How the hell can anyone bring that about? The man’s fireproof. There are no scandals in back of him. The caucus assured themselves of that before they asked him to step in.”

“There must be something,” said Miller. “Some Achilles’ heel. We have the determination; we have the contacts; we have the financing. We need a planner.”

“What about your man, the colonel?” asked Scanlon.

Miller shook his head. “He would still regard any U.S. President as his Commander in Chief. No, another man ... out there somewhere ...”

What he was thinking of, and what he intended to hunt down, was a renegade, subtle, ruthless, intelligent, and loyal only to money.

Chapter 3

March 1991

Thirty miles west of Oklahoma City lies the federal penitentiary called El Reno, more officially known as a “federal corrections institution.” Less formally, it is one of the toughest prisons in America—in criminal slang, a hard pen. At dawn on a chill morning in the middle of March a small door opened in the frame of its forbidding main gate and a man emerged.

He was of medium height, overweight, prison-pale, broke, and very bitter. He stared about him, saw little (there was little to see), turned toward the city, and began to walk. Above his head, unseen eyes in the guard towers watched him with small interest, then looked away. Other eyes from a parked car watched him far more intently. The stretch limousine was parked a discreet distance from the main gate, far enough for its license plate to be out of vision. The man staring through the rear window of the car put down his binoculars and muttered, “He’s heading this way.”

Ten minutes later the fat man passed the car, glanced at it, and walked on. But he was a pro, and already his alarm antennae were activated. He was a hundred yards beyond the car when its engine purred into life and it drew up beside him. A young man got out, clean-cut, athletic, pleasant-looking.

“Mr. Moss?”

“Who wants to know?”

“My employer, sir. He wishes to offer you an interview.”

“No name, I suppose,” said the fat man.

The other smiled. “Not yet. But we do have a warm car, a private airplane, and mean you no harm. Let’s face it, Mr. Moss, do you have any place else to go?”

Moss thought. The car and the man did not smell of the Company—the CIA—or of the Bureau—the FBI—his sworn enemies. And no, he had no place else to go. He climbed into the backseat of the car, the young man got in beside him, and the limo headed not toward Oklahoma City but to Wiley Post Airport to the northwest.

In 1966, at the age of twenty-five, Irving Moss had been a junior provincial officer (a GS 12) with the CIA, fresh out of the States and working in Vietnam with the CIA-run Phoenix program. Those were the years when the Special Forces, the Green Berets, had been steadily handing over their hitherto rather successful hearts-and-minds program in the Mekong Delta to the South Vietnamese Army, who proceeded to handle the notion of actually
persuading
the peasants not to cooperate with the Viet Cong with considerably less skill and humanity. The Phoenix people had to liaise with the ARVN, while the Green Berets switched more and more to search-and-destroy missions, often bringing back Viet Cong prisoners or suspects for interrogation by the ARVN under the aegis of the Phoenix people. That was when Moss discovered both his secret taste and his true talent.

As a youth he had been puzzled and depressed by his own lack of sexuality, and recalled with unappeased bitterness the mockery he had suffered in his teenage years. He had also been bemused—the fifties were an age of relative innocence among teenagers—to observe that he could become immediately aroused by the sound of a human scream. For such a man the discreet and unquestioning jungles of Vietnam were an Aladdin’s cave of pleasure. Alone with his rear-echelon Vietnamese unit, he had been able to appoint himself the chief interrogator of suspects, aided by a couple of like-minded South Vietnamese corporals.

It had been, for him, a beautiful three years, which ended one day in 1969 when a tall, craggy young Green Beret sergeant had unexpectedly walked out of the jungle, his left arm dripping blood, sent back by his officer to get medication. The young warrior had gazed for a few seconds upon Moss’s work, turned without a word, and crashed a haymaker of a right-hand punch onto the bridge of his nose. The medics at Danang had done their best, but the bones of the septum were so shattered that Moss had to go to Japan for treatment. Even then, remedial surgery had left the bridge of his nose broadened and flattened, and the passages were so damaged that he still whistled and snuffled as he breathed, especially when excited.

He never saw the sergeant again, there had been no official report, and he had managed to cover his tracks and stay with the Agency. Until 1983. In that year, much promoted, he had been with the CIA buildup of the
contra
movement in Honduras, supervising a series of jungle camps along the border with Nicaragua from which the
contras
, many of them former servants of the ousted and unlovable dictator Somoza, had run sporadic missions across the border into the land they had once ruled. One day such a group had returned with a thirteen-year-old boy, not a Sandinista, just a peasant kid.

The interrogation had taken place in a clearing in the bush a quarter of a mile from the
contra
camp, but on the still tropical air the demented shrieks could be clearly heard in the camp. No one slept. In the small hours the sounds finally ceased. Moss walked back into the camp as if drugged, threw himself on his cot, and fell into a deep sleep. Two of the Nicaraguan section commanders quietly left camp, walked into the bush, and returned after twenty minutes to demand an interview with the commander. Colonel Rivas saw them in his tent, where he was writing up reports by the light of his hissing Petromax. The two guerrillas talked to him for several minutes.

“We can’t work with this one,” concluded the first. “We have talked to the boys. They agree,
Coronel
.”

“
Es malsano
,” added the other. “
Un animal
.”

Colonel Rivas sighed. He had once been a member of Somoza’s death squads, had dragged a few trade unionists and malcontents from their beds in his time. He had seen a few executions, even taken part. But children ... He reached for his radio. A mutiny or mass defection he did not need. Just after dawn an American military helicopter clattered into his camp and disgorged a stocky, dark man who happened to be the newly appointed CIA Deputy Chief of Latin American Section, on a familiarization tour of his new bailiwick. Rivas escorted the American into the bush and they, too, came back after a few minutes.

When Irving Moss awoke it was because someone was kicking the legs of his frame cot. He looked up Wearily to see a man in green fatigues looking down at him.

“Moss, you’re out,” said the man.

“Who the hell are you?” asked Moss. He was told.

“One of them,” he sneered.

“Yep, one of them. And you’re out. Out of Honduras and out of the Agency.” He showed Moss a piece of paper.

“This doesn’t come from Langley,” Moss protested.

“No,” said the man, “this comes from me.
I
come from Langley. Get your gear into that chopper.”

Thirty minutes later Agent David Weintraub watched the helicopter lift away into the morning sky. At Tegucigalpa, Moss was met by the Chief of Station, who was coldly formal and personally saw him on a flight to Miami and Washington. He never even went back to Langley. He was met at Washington National, given his papers, and told to get lost. For five years, much in demand, he worked for a variety of less and less palatable Middle Eastern and Central American dictators, and then organized drug-runs for Noriega of Panama. A mistake. The U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency put him on a Top Target list.

He was passing through London’s Heathrow Airport in 1988 when the deceptively courteous guardians of British law stepped in front of him and wondered if they might have a quiet word. The word concerned a concealed handgun in his suitcase. Normal extradition procedures went through at record speed and he was landed back on U.S. soil three weeks later. At his trial he drew three years. As a first offender he might well have drawn a soft penitentiary. But while he was awaiting sentence two men had a discreet lunch at Washington’s exclusive Metropolitan Club.

One was the stocky man called Weintraub, now risen to the post of Assistant Deputy Director (Operations) of the CIA. The other was Oliver “Buck” Revell, a big former Marine flier and Executive Assistant Director (Investigations) with the FBI. He had also been a football player in his youth, but had not played long enough to get his brain mashed. There were some at the Hoover Building who suggested it still worked quite well. Waiting until Revell had finished his steak, Weintraub showed him a file and some pictures. Revell closed the file and said simply, “I see.” Unaccountably, Moss served his time in El Reno, also housing some of the most vicious murderers, rapists, and extortionists currently under lock and key in America. When he came out he had a pathological loathing of the Agency, the Bureau, the British ... and that was just for starters.

At Wiley Post Airport the limousine swept through the main gate on a nod and pulled up beside a waiting Learjet. Apart from its license plate number, which Moss at once memorized, it bore no logo. Within five minutes it was airborne, heading a whisker west of due south. Moss could tell the approximate direction from the morning sun. The direction, he knew, was toward Texas.

Just outside Austin is the beginning of what Texans call the hill country and it was here that the owner of Pan-Global had his country home, a twenty-thousand-acre spread in the foothills. The mansion faced southeast, with panoramic views across the great Texan plain toward faraway Galveston and the Gulf. Apart from a sufficiency of servants’ quarters, guest bungalows, swimming pool, and shooting range, the estate also contained its own landing strip, and it was here the Learjet landed shortly before noon.

Moss was conducted to a jacaranda-framed bungalow, given half an hour to bathe and shave, then led to the mansion and into a cool, leather-upholstered study. Two minutes later he was confronted by a tall, white-haired old man.

“Mr. Moss?” said the man. “Mr. Irving Moss?”

“Yes, sir,” said Moss. He smelt money, a lot of it.

“My name is Miller,” said the man. “Cyrus V. Miller.”

April

The meeting was in the Cabinet Room, down the hall and past the private secretary’s room from the Oval Office. Like most people, President John Cormack had been surprised by the comparative smallness of the Oval Office when he had first seen it. The Cabinet Room, with its great eight-sided table beneath Stuart’s portrait of George Washington, gave more room to spread papers and lean on elbows.

That morning John Cormack had invited his inner Cabinet of close and trusted friends and advisers to consider the final draft of the Nantucket Treaty. The details were worked out, the verification procedures checked through; the experts had given their grudging concurrence—or not, in the case of two senior generals who retired and three Pentagon staffers who had chosen to resign—but Cormack wanted last comments from his special team.

He was sixty years old, at the peak of his intellectual and political powers, unashamedly enjoying the popularity and authority of an office he had never expected to hold. When the crisis had enveloped the Republican party in the summer of ’88, the party caucus had looked around wildly for someone to step in and take over the candidacy. Their collective eye had fallen on this congressman from Connecticut, scion of a wealthy and patrician New England family who had chosen to leave his family wealth in a series of trust funds and become a professor at Cornell until turning to Connecticut politics in his late thirties.

On the liberal wing of his party, John Cormack had been a virtual unknown to the country at large. Intimates knew him as decisive, honest, and humane, and had assured the caucus he was clean as the driven snow. He was not known as a television personality—now an indispensable attribute of a candidate—but they picked him nevertheless. To the media he was a bore. And then in four months of barnstorming campaigning, the unknown had turned things around. Forsaking tradition, he looked into the camera’s eye and gave straight answers to every question, supposedly a recipe for disaster. He offended some, but mainly on the right, and they had nowhere else to go with their votes anyway. And he had pleased many more. A Protestant with an Ulster name, he had insisted as a condition of his coming that he pick his own Vice President, and had chosen Michael Odell, a confirmed Irish American and a Catholic from Texas.

They were quite unalike. Odell was much farther to the right than Cormack and had been governor of his state. Cormack just happened to like and trust the gum-chewing man from Waco. Somehow the ticket had worked; the voters went, by a narrow margin, for the man the press (wrongly) liked to compare with Woodrow Wilson, America’s last professor-President, and the running mate who bluntly told Dan Rather: