The Company: A Novel of the CIA (70 page)

"Don't lose sleep over Bobby, Sal."

"I'm glad to hear I don't need to lose sleep over your kid brother. I'm relieved, Jack. No shit."

Jack laughed pleasantly. "Say hello to Frank for me when you see him."

"Sure I will. You want to talk to Judy some more?"

"No. I'm pretty busy. Take it easy, Sal."

"Yeah, I will. I always take it easy. Dat's what I do best. You take it easy, too, Jack."

"So long, Sal."

"Yeah. Sure thing. So long."

Arturo Padron pedaled his heavy Chinese "Flying Pigeon" through the seedy back streets of downtown Havana, then turned onto the road behind the Libre Hotel where rich Cubans used to live before Castro hit town. Nowadays the houses, set back from the street and looking like wrecked hulks that had washed up on a shore, were filled with squatters who simply moved on when the roofs collapsed. The wraparound porches sagged into the tangled worts and bindweeds of the cat-infested gardens. At the rear of the once-fashionable hotel, Padron, a middle-aged man who wore his thinning hair long over his oversized ears, double-chained his bicycle to a rusty iron fence, then walked through the employees' entrance and down a long flight of steps to the locker room. He opened the locker and quickly changed into the tan uniform and black shoes with "Made in China" stamped in English on the inside of the tongues. The shoes were too tight and squeaked when he walked, and he had been promised a new pair when the next shipment arrived. He tied his black bow tie as he made his way upstairs to the sprawling kitchen off the hotel's cafeteria. Pushing through the double swinging door into the kitchen, he called a greeting to the four short-order cooks who were sweating over the bank of gas stoves. One of them, an old man who had worked at the Libre when it was called the Havana Hilton, looked hard at Padron as if he were trying to convey a message. Then the old man gestured with his chin toward the door of the manager's office. Padron thrust out both of his palms, as if to ask, What are you trying to tell me? just as the door to the office opened and two policemen wearing green Interior Ministry uniforms motioned for him to come in. For an instant Padron thought of running for it. Glancing over his shoulder, he saw two more Interior Ministry police push through the double door into the kitchen behind him; both had opened holster flaps and rested their palms on the butts of revolvers. Padron forced a smirk of utter innocence onto his long mournful face and sauntered past the two policemen into the office. He heard the door close behind him. An elegantly dressed man with a neatly trimmed reddish beard stood behind the manager s desk.

"Padron, Arturo?" he asked.

Padron blotted a bead of perspiration on his forehead with the back of his wrist. "It's me, Padron, Arturo."

"You have a cousin named Jesus who owns a thirty-two foot Chris Craft cabin cruiser with twin gas engines, which he keeps tied up in the port of Miramar. For a price he has been known to run Cubans to Miami."

Padron experienced a sharp pain in the chest, a sudden shortness of breath. He had seen photographs of the man behind the desk in the newspapers. It was none other than Manuel Piñeiro, the head of the regime's secret police. "My cousin, he has a boat, señor," he said. "What he does with it is not known to me."

Piñeiro crooked a forefinger and Padron, prodded forward by one of the policemen, his shoes squeaking with each step, approached the desk. "Your cousin Jesus has admitted that he was instructed to keep the gas tank of his boat and spare jerry cans filled; that he was to remain next to his telephone every evening this week waiting for a signal. When a caller quoted a certain sentence from Corinthians—'For if the trumpet give an uncertain sound. I who shall prepare to the battle.'—he was to immediately put to sea and pick you up on the beach of Miramar, minutes from here by bicycle. He was then instructed to run you across to Miami. For this he was to be paid twelve thousand five hundred American dollars." By now the blood had literally drained from Padron's face.

"I am not a religious man," Piñeiro continued, his head tilted to the side and back, his tone reassuringly amiable, "though in my youth, to gratify my grandparents, I was obliged to attend church services. I recall another sentence from the Holy Book, this one from the Gospel According to Saint Matthew: 'Woe unto that man by whom the Son of man is betrayed! It had been good for that man if he had not been born."' His tone turned hard. "Empty your pockets on the desk."

With shaky hands, Padron did as he was told. Piñeiro separated the items with the tips of his fingers: a pocketknife, some loose change, several sticks of chewing gum, a crumpled handkerchief, some toothpicks, a depleted roll of dental floss, two lumps of sugar wrapped in the cafeteria's distinctive brown paper, an unopened pack of Russian cigarettes, a book of matches, a wristwatch without a strap, a lottery ticket, two small keys fitting the locks securing the "Flying Pigeon" to the iron fence behind the hotel, a half-empty bottle of Bayer aspirins, a frayed photograph of a child in a crib and another of a woman with listless eyes attempting to find a smile for the camera, an internal identity card with a photograph of a younger and thinner Padron peeling away from the pasteboard. "I will now pose several questions, Piñeiro informed the waiter, who was gnawing on his lower lip. "One: How much were you to be paid for the assassination of Fidel Castro?"

"I know nothing of this," the waiter breathed. "I swear it on the tomb of my mother. I swear it on the head of my son."

"Two: Who gave you your orders?"

"I received no orders—"

"Three: Who else in Havana is in on the plot?"

"As God is my witness there is no plot."

Piñeiro greeted the denials with a bemused smile. Using the back of a finger, the chief of the secret police separated the bottle of aspirin from the rest of the pile. Then he unscrewed the lid and spilled the tablets onto the desk. Bending over the pills, he opened Padron's pocketknife and used the blade to sort through them. At first he was unable to detect any difference between them. He glanced up and saw the terror that had installed itself in the waiter's eyes and began again, examining the pills one by one. Suddenly Piñeiro's mouth opened and the words "So that's it!" escaped his lips. He pushed one of the pills off to the side, then a second, then a third. Then he straightened and, looking the waiter in the eye, said, "It will be good for you if you had not been born."

Padron understood that it was a sentence worse than death. Piñeiro signalled for the two policemen to advance. As they started forward, Padron's hand shot out and he snatched one of the aspirins and turning and crouching, shoved it into his mouth and with a sob bit down hard on it. The two policemen lunged for him, seizing his arms as his body went limp. They held him up for a moment, then lowered the dead weight to the floor and looked at their chief, fearful that he would blame them.

Piñeiro cleared his throat. "It saves us the trouble of executing him," he remarked.

His garish silk tie askew and stained with Scotch, his shirt unchanged in days and gray under the collar, his reading glasses almost opaque with grime and sliding down his nose, the Sorcerer leaned over the United Press ticker installed in a corner of the war room, monitoring the bulletins slipping through his fingers. "Anything coming out of Havana?" Dick Bissell called from the cockpit, the command-and-control well facing the plastic overlays filled with up-to-date tactical information. On the giant map, the five freighters carrying Brigade 2506 had inched to within spitting distance of the Cuban coast. The two American destroyers that would guide the invasion force into the Bay of Pigs that night, assuming the President didn't call off the operation, were just over the horizon. Two CIA Landing Ship Docks—filled with the smaller LCUs and LCVPs that would swim out of the LSDs and ferry the invaders to the beaches—were closing in on the rendezvous point off the coast.

The usual weekend bullshit," Torriti called back. Stooping, he retrieved the bottle of mineral water filled with vodka and poured another shot onto the coffee grounds in his plastic cup. "There's one about the joys of deep sea fishing off Havana, another about a Cuban family that's been making cigars for five generations."

Bissell resumed his obsessive pacing, prowling back and forth between the water cooler against one wall and the easel on which all the operational codes had been posted for fast reference. Other members of the war room team came and went as the morning dragged on. Topsiders appeared with last-minute glitches to be ironed out and cables to be initialed. Leo Kritzky brought over the press clippings on Cuba for the past twenty-four hours; Castro had delivered another of his marathon speeches, this one to the air raid wardens association in Havana, extolling the virtues of Socialism. Leo's secretary, Rosemary Hanks turned up with a hamper of fresh sandwiches and a supply of toothbrushes and toothpaste for staffers who were sleeping over and had forgotten theirs. Allen Dulles checked in on a secure phone from time to time to see if Jack Kennedy had come through with the final go-ahead. The big clock on the wall ticked off the seconds with a maddening clatter; the minute hand seemed to emit a series of dull detonations as it climbed the rungs toward high noon, the deadline Bissell had given the President for calling off the invasion of Cuba.

JMARC had gotten off to a rotten start the day before when post-strike reports from the initial D-minus-two raids against Castro's three principal air bases started to filter through. The damage assessment photos, rushed over from the Pentagon after a U-2 overflight, confirmed that only five of Castro's aircraft had been destroyed on the ground; several Sea Furies and T-33 jet trainers appeared to have been hit, but the photo interpreters were unable to say whether they were still operational. And they could only guess at how many planes had been parked inside hangers or nearby barns and escaped altogether. To make matters worse, Adiai Stevenson, the American ambassador to the United Nations, was hinting to Rusk that he, Stevenson, had been made to seem a horse's ass; when the Russians raised a storm at the UN over the attack on Cuba, Stevenson had held aloft a wire service photograph of the two B-26s that had landed in Miami and had sworn that pilots defecting from Castro's air force, and not American-backed anti-Castro Cubans, had been responsible for the air strike. The cover story, which Stevenson (thanks to a vague CIA briefing) really believed, had quickly fallen apart when journalists noticed the tell-tale metal nose cones on the two B-26s in Miami and concluded the planes hadn't defected from Cuba after all; Castro's B-26s were known to have plastic noses. Stevenson, livid at being "deliberately tricked" by his own government, had vented his rage on Rusk. By Sunday morning shock waves from the affair were still reverberating through the administration.

Bissell's noon deadline came and went but the DD/0 didn't seem alarmed, and for good reason: he had informed the President that the freighters would cross the line of no return at noon on Sunday, but he had built in a margin of error. The real deadline was four o'clock. Around the war room people stared at the red phone sitting on a table in the command-and-control well as the clock batted away the seconds. Ebby and Leo poured coffee from one of the Pyrex pots warming on the hot plate and drifted into Leo's cubbyhole office off the war room. "I was ready to quit over this," Ebby confided to his friend, sinking into a wooden chair in near-exhaustion. "I actually delivered a letter of resignation to the Director."

"What happened?"

"He pretty much made the case that this wasn't the moment to abandon ship."

Leo shook his head. "I don't know, Ebby—JMARC could succeed."

"It would take a miracle."

Leo lowered his voice. "The news Bissell's waiting for from Havana—it could change the ball game."

Ebby sipped his coffee. "Doesn't it worry you, Leo—the United States of America, the most powerful nation on the face of the earth, trying to assassinate the bellicose leader of a small island-country because he's thumbing his nose at his Yankee neighbor? It's a classic case of the elephant swatting a mosquito, for Christ's sake."

Leo sniffed. "At my pay grade we don't deal in moral niceties."

"It doesn't seem as if moral niceties are the subject of conversation at any pay grade," Ebby griped.

Settling onto the edge of the desk, Leo absently poked through some papers with the tips his fingers. "Say that Castro survives," he said, talking to himself. "The operation could still succeed."

"Balls! The landing might succeed if we provide air cover. But then what? Castro and his brother, Raoul, and their buddy Che Guevara aren't about to opt for early retirement in Soviet Russia. If things turn against them they'll retreat into the Sierra Maestras and go guerrilla. Tito did the same thing against the Germans in the mountains of Yugoslavia, and he held out for years. With Castro in the mountains and a CIA-supported Provisional Government in Havana, there'll be a slow simmering civil war. Jesus, it could go on for ten, twenty years."

"I hope to hell you're wrong," Leo said.

"I'm terrified I'm right," Ebby said.

Outside, in the war room, the red telephone buzzed. Conversations ended abruptly as every head turned to stare at it. The Sorcerer abandoned the UP ticker and ambled over. Ebby and Leo rushed to the doorway. Controlling himself with an effort, Bissell, his shoulders hunched, walked slowly across the room to stand over the phone. He looked at it, then reached down and picked it up.

"Bissell," he said.

He listened for a long moment. Gradually his features relaxed. "Right Mr. President," he said. "You bet," he said. "Thank you, Mr. President." Then he hung up and, grinning, turned to flash the thumbs-up sign to the staffers around the room.

"So what did he have to say?" Torriti asked.

"Why, he said, 'Go ahead.'" Bissell laughed. And then he swung into high gear. "All right, let's put the show on the road. Leo, pass the coded signal on to the Essex and to Jack McAuliffe on the lead freighter. Also get the word down to Swan Island so the propaganda machine starts humming. And set Hunt off his duff in Miami—I want those bulletins from the Provisional Government on the air as soon as the first Cubans hit the beaches. Gentlemen and ladies, we are about to breathe new life into the Monroe Doctrine."