The Last Thing He Wanted (20 page)

He had been picking up his messages at the reception desk, about to go upstairs.

She had seemed to be pleading with the clerk, trying to get a room.

Nothing for you, the clerk had kept repeating. One hundred and ten percent booked.

I found a place I can move into tomorrow, she had kept repeating. I just need tonight. I just need a closet. I just need a rollaway in an office.

One hundred and ten percent booked.

Of course Treat Morrison intervened.

Of course he told the clerk to double up on one of the USG bookings, let him free up a room for her.

He had more than one reason to free up a USG room for her.

He had every reason to free up a USG room for her.

He already knew that she had arrived on the island on July 2 on an apparently falsified American passport issued in the name Elise Meyer. He had already been briefed on the progress of the continuing FBI investigation meant to ascertain who Elise Meyer was and what she was doing there. It went without saying that he would tell the clerk to free up a room for her. Just as it went without saying that he would suggest a drink in the bar while the clerk worked out the logistics.

She had ordered a Coca-Cola.

He had ordered an Early Times and soda.

She thanked him for his intervention.

She said that she had been staying in a place on the windward side and had been looking all day for a new place, but could not move into the place she wanted until the following day.

So she would be gone tomorrow.

She could promise him that.

No problem, he said.

She said nothing.

In fact she said nothing more until the drinks arrived, had seemed to retreat into herself in a way that reminded him of Diane.

Diane when she was sick.

Not Diane before.

When the drinks arrived she peeled the paper wrapping off a straw and stuck the straw between the ice cubes and, without ever lifting the glass from the table, drained half the Coca-Cola.

He watched this and found himself with nothing to say.

She looked at him.

“My father used to order Early Times,” she said.

He asked if her father was alive.

There had been a silence then.

“I need to talk to you alone,” she had said finally.

I told you.

I have no idea.

Maybe she told him who she was because he ordered Early Times. Maybe she looked at him and saw the fog off the Farallons, maybe he looked at her and saw the hot desert twilight. Maybe they looked at each other and knew that nothing they could do would matter as much as the slightest tremor of the earth, the blind trembling of the Pacific in its bowl, the heavy snows closing the mountain passes, the rattlers in the dry grass, the sharks cruising the deep cold water through the Golden Gate.

The seal’s wide spindrift gaze toward paradise.

Oh yes.

This is a romance after all.

One more romance.

3

I
recently tried to talk to Mark Berquist about what happened down there.

I know Mark Berquist slightly, everybody now knows Mark Berquist.

Youngest member of the youngest class ever elected to the United States Senate. The class that hit the ground running, the class that arrived on the Hill lean mean and good to go. Author of
Constitutional Coercion: Whose Rights Come First?
Maker of waves, reliable antagonist on the Sunday shows, most frequently requested speaker on the twenty-five-thousand-dollar-plus-full-expenses circuit.

Where his remarks were invariably distorted out of context by the media.

So invariably, his administrative aide advised me, that the senator was understandably wary about returning calls from the media.

“Wait just one minute,” he said when I finally managed to waylay him, in the corridor outside a hearing, at a moment when the television crews who normally functioned as his protective shield had been temporarily diverted by a rumor that the President’s wife
had just entered the rotunda with Robert Redford. “I only speak to media on background.”

I said that background was all I wanted.

I said that I was trying to get as much perspective as possible on a certain incident that had occurred in 1984.

Mark Berquist’s eyes flickered suspiciously. Nineteen eighty-four had ended for him with the conclusion of that year’s legislative session, and was as distant now as the Continental Congress. To bring up 1984 implied that the past had consequences, which
in situ
was not seen as a useful approach. This unspoken suggestion of consequences was in fact sufficiently unthinkable as to drive Mark Berquist to mount a broad-based defense.

“If this has anything to do with the period of the financing of the 1984 reelection campaign you can just file and forget,” Mark Berquist said. “Since, and let me assure you that this is perfectly well documented, I didn’t even move over to the executive branch until after the second inaugural.”

I said that the period of the financing of the 1984 reelection campaign was not specifically the period I had in mind.

The period I had in mind was more the period of the resupply to the Nicaraguan contra forces.

“In the first place any reference to the so-called contra forces would be totally inaccurate,” Mark Berquist said. “In the second place any reference to the so-called resupply would be totally inaccurate.”

I suggested that both “contra” and “resupply” had become in the intervening years pretty much accepted usage for the forces and events in question.

“I would be extremely interested in seeing any
literature that used either term,” Mark Berquist said.

I suggested that he could see such literature by having his staff call the Government Printing Office and ask for the February 1987
Report of the President’s Special Review Board,
the November 1987
Report of the Congressional Committees Investigating the Iran-Contra Affair,
and the August 1993
Final Report of the Independent Counsel for Iran/Contra Matters.

There was a silence.

“These are matters about which there has already been quite enough misrepresentation and politicalization,” Mark Berquist said then. “And to which I have no intention of contributing. However. Just let me say that anyone who uses the terms you used just betrays their ignorance, really. And to call it ignorance is putting the best face on it. Because it’s something worse, really.”

I asked what it really was.

“The cheapest kind of political bias. That’s what the media never understood.” He looked down the corridor as if for his missing press escort, then at his watch. “All right, one more shot. Your best question.”

“On the record,” I said, only reflexively, since whether it was on the record was of no real interest to me.

“Negative. No. You agreed to the ground rules. On background only.”

The reason it was of no real interest to me whether this was on the record or on background was because Mark Berquist would never in his life tell me the one thing I wanted to know.

The one thing I wanted to know from Mark Berquist was not at what point the target had stopped being Alex Brokaw. I knew at what point the target
had stopped being Alex Brokaw: the target had stopped being Alex Brokaw when Elena McMahon left the Surfrider, did not go to the airport, lost her potential proximity to Alex Brokaw. The one thing I wanted to know from Mark Berquist was at what point exactly
he had known
that the target had changed from Alex Brokaw to Treat Morrison.

I asked Mark Berquist this.

One shot, best question.

Mark Berquist’s answer was this: “I can see you’ve bought hook, line and sinker into one of those sick conspiracy fantasies that, let me assure you, have been thoroughly and totally discredited and really, I mean time and time again. And again, calling this kind of smear job sick is putting the best face on it.”

More colliding metaphors.

On background only.

4

I
t played out, when the time came, very quickly. For the last nine of the ten days he had been on the island they had been meeting at the place she had found, an anonymous locally owned motel, not a chain, the chains were by then fully booked for USG personnel, a two-story structure near the airport so unremarkable that you could have driven to the airport a dozen times a day and never noticed it was there.

The Aero Sands Beach Resort.

The Aero Sands was on a low bluff between the highway and the beach, not really a beach but a tidal flat on which some fill had been thrown to protect the eroding bluff. The bluff ended where the highway curved down to the water just south of the Aero Sands, but on the bluff a hundred or so yards north of the Aero Sands there was a small shopping center, a grocery and a liquor store and a video rental place and outlets for sports supplies and auto parts, and it was in the parking lot of this shopping center that Treat Morrison would leave his car.

He had checked all this out.

He did not want his car seen in the Aero Sands parking lot, he did not want to be seen himself entering the exposed front door of her room.

He wanted to approach the Aero Sands from where he could assess it, have ample time to pick up on any official presence, anyone who might recognize him, anything out of the ordinary.

On the first of the nine days Treat Morrison came to the Aero Sands he brought the DIA agent, who took her statement and flew directly back to Washington, airport to Aero Sands to airport, no contact with the embassy.

On the following days Treat Morrison came to the Aero Sands alone.

At a few minutes before whatever time he told her he would be there she would leave open the sliding glass back door to her room and walk across the concrete pool area behind the motel. From a certain point just past the small pool it was possible to look north and get a partial view of the path on the bluff, and she always did, hoping he might be early, but he never was. She would nod at the woman who every evening pushed both an old man in a wheelchair and a baby in a stroller around the pool. Then she would continue on, down the dozen rickety wooden steps to what passed for the beach. There in the clear, there in the open space between the water and the bluff, Elena McMahon would wait in a place where Treat Morrison could see her as he approached.

As he had told her to do.

The point was that he believed he was protecting her.

He believed this right up to the instant, at seven-twenty on the evening of the tenth day he had been on
the island, a day in fact on which he had made the final arrangement to take her back to the United States with him, take her in black via DIA and get the whole goddamn situation worked out in Washington, when it happened.

After it was over, after the flight to Miami during which he had been mostly incoherent and after the surgery and after the ICU, at some point when he was alone in a private room at Jackson Memorial, Treat Morrison remembered passing the man on the bluff as he walked from the shopping center to where he could already see her on the beach.

There had been nothing out of the ordinary about seeing the man on the bluff.

Nothing at all.

Nothing about the man on the bluff to signal an official presence, nothing to suggest someone who by recognizing him could place her beyond his protection.

Nothing.

He had already been able to see her on the beach.

She had been wearing the same white dress she was wearing in the Intercon coffee shop.

She had been looking out across the tidal flat.

She had been watching the bioluminescence on the water out by the reef.

The man on the bluff had been leaning over, tying his shoe, his face obscured.

There was a full moon but the man’s face had been obscured.

That the man’s face had been obscured was of course something that did not occur to Treat Morrison until after the fact, by which time the man on the
bluff was beside the point, since it had been immediately and incontrovertibly established, according to both the FBI and the local police, who had coincidentally been staking out the Aero Sands all that week on an unrelated drug matter, that the man on the bluff, if indeed there had been a man on the bluff, was not the would-be assassin.

The reason this had been immediately and incontrovertibly established was that the local police who had been so fortuitously on hand had managed to kill the would-be assassin right there on the beach, her white dress red with blood before her clip was even emptied.

What bothered Treat Morrison most was not just the man on the bluff.

What bothered him more, what had begun to bother him even as the anesthesiologist was telling him to count backward from one hundred, what was bothering him so much by the time he was alone in the private room at Jackson Memorial that the doctor ordered sedation added to his IV line, was that over the preceding nine days he had checked out the Aero Sands at many different times of day and night, from every possible angle and with every possible eventuality in mind, and he did not recall having at any point during that week seen the local police.

Who had been so fortuitously on hand.

Suggesting that they had not been there at all.

Suggesting that if they had been there at all they had been there only at a certain moment, only at the moment they were needed.

A conclusion that could lead nowhere, since Elena McMahon was already dead.

I mean you could add it up but where does it get you.

This was Treat Morrison’s last word on the subject.

I mean it’s not going to bring her back.

5

A
MERICAN IMPLICATED IN ATTEMPTED ASSASSINATION
was the headline on the first AP story as it ran in the Miami
Herald,
the only paper in which I initially had occasion to see it. I recall reading it in the elevator of the hospital where Treat Morrison had finally been stabilized for the flight to Miami. It was that morning’s
Herald,
impossible to come by down there except at the embassy, abandoned in the waiting room by Alex Brokaw’s DCM when the helicopter arrived to take Treat Morrison to the airport.