Frame 232 (31 page)

There were no cigars inside, but rather a note cast in fairly legible print
 
—
I can take you to Olivero Clemente.

Hammond studied the boy for a moment. “How much?” he asked, still in Spanish.

“One hundred,” came the quick reply.

“How do I know you’re not lying?”

The kid closed the box and held it at his side like a book. His eyes kept shifting about. “My mother and I live in the same apartment building. He rarely goes out, but we see him sometimes.”

This had a ring of reality to it. But Hammond was still hesitant; he’d been fooled too many times. And he’d made a plan that he was in the process of executing; his mind was already moving in that direction.
On the other hand, the worst that can happen is the guy is lying and I’m out another hundred. No great loss.
If that turned out to be the case, he’d view it as nothing more than an annoying detour on the way back to the boat.
And there’s always the chance he’s
not
lying.
Hammond had learned through experience that sooner or later, you usually encountered someone willing to talk.

He unbuttoned the back pocket of his cotton pants and pulled out a hundred-dollar bill. The kid’s eyes just about sparkled when he saw it. While he paused to admire it, Hammond wondered where he’d be able to break it into smaller bills. The kid stuffed it into his own pocket and gestured with his finger.
“Vamos!”

As they moved farther from the city center, the neighborhoods became increasingly run-down and depressing. The roads lost their pavement and became rutted trails of packed earth. Streetlights were dimmer and spaced at greater intervals. Most homes appeared to be unoccupied, many collapsed or just about to. Particularly unsettling was the fact that Hammond’s guide seemed to be growing more nervous. Sometimes he would jerk his head left or right, but Hammond never saw anyone or anything to justify these reactions. He felt increasingly isolated, thoroughly detached from civilization. It occurred to him that he was walking through a completely forgotten section of the world.
And no one knows I’m here.

They came to what appeared to be a park of sorts. There were dozens of dwarf trees arranged in concentric circles, their hanging fruit dried and rotting. Benches had been set in select locations, but they were badly dilapidated and unsuitable for use. There was also a statue in the center of the property
 
—a generic Cuban farmer with a sickle on his shoulder and a proud, determined look on his face.
From the days when Cuba was floated by Russian welfare,
Hammond thought, making a point not to share this political commentary with his companion.
Another Communist experiment that
didn’t pan out.
The kid did not appear to take notice of the memorial, as if he’d been through here a million times.

Then he took off running. Hammond, instantly furious at being deceived again, shouted and began to pursue. Then the other two appeared
 
—young men of about the same age but much greater size. In fact, Hammond saw with skyrocketing alarm, they were massive. They had been hiding behind two of the trees and were on him in an instant. Then the cigar salesman returned, emerging from the darkness as silently as he had the first time. The box was no longer in his hand but rather a long stiletto with a crude wooden handle.

He came forward and brought the blade up quick, stopping just as the tip pressed into the soft of Hammond’s throat.

“Si te mueves estás muerto,”
he breathed into Hammond’s face.
You move and you’re dead.

Hammond swore at him in English. The very thought that his audience couldn’t understand him was satisfying in itself.

One of the muscle heads responded to this obstinacy by driving a fist into Hammond’s stomach. He folded and went down. Then they were on him, their hands swarming greedily over his body. Stiletto man was on his knees a few feet away, digging through Hammond’s bag. When they were certain his pockets had been emptied, all three began kicking him viciously. He tried to crawl away several times, only to be struck harder for his temerity. Then came a hard, metallic click, a sound he knew all too well.

He looked up to find one of the two monsters
 
—he wasn’t sure which
 
—holding a gun inches from his head.

“I think we’ll leave you here,” the brute said, licking his lips with nervous pleasure.

Hammond stared hard at him, refusing to show any sign
of fear. He even smiled a little. There followed a moment, no more than a flicker, when the gunman first looked confused, then enraged. In that instant, Hammond knew he would at least be able to claim one small victory before his life came to an end.

The thug’s mouth twisted into an animalistic snarl. Then a shot pierced the night air.

Hammond flinched at the sound of the report. What happened next surprised him
 
—there was no pain, no suffering, no agony. Nothing at all.
So why do I hear screaming?

When he looked around, two facts immediately presented themselves
 
—the first was that he hadn’t been struck, and the second was that the soulless beast who’d been holding the gun had. He now lay on the ground just inches away, writhing like a worm and screeching at the top of his lungs. Both hands were clamped to his thigh, blood flowing between the fingers.

The other two punks stood in a frozen panic, searching for the sniper. Another shot came, ripping into the upper part of the arm holding the stiletto. Hammond expected the skinny kid to start squawking like his colleague, but something else happened
 
—he took one dazed look at the blood turning his sleeve red and fainted dead away.

The third delinquent wasn’t interested in waiting around to discover what the shooter had in store for him; he turned and fled into the night. Then Hammond heard soft footsteps and saw the figure of a man develop from the darkness.

He was tall and lithe, moving with an almost-feminine grace. His garb was oddly formal
 
—gray slacks and matching jacket and a black shirt open at the throat. It was the face,
however, that commanded attention
 
—a sailor’s gray-flecked beard, the deeply carved lines that come only from decades of hard living, and the large, faultless eyes of a man not easily conned. One who saw everything and found most of it unworthy of further consideration.

He walked to the scene of the carnage he had created and stopped. The weapon he’d used
 
—a Walther PPK
 
—was held slack in his hand. When the thug who’d been shot through the thigh noticed him, he pushed himself halfway up and said something unrepeatable. The man responded by swinging the Walther under the kid’s chin in one vicious blow, causing the punk to snap back, his arms flying almost comically over his head, before coming to rest in a jumbled heap. He did not move again.

The gunman went about the seemingly menial task of gathering up Hammond’s belongings, placing them gingerly into his bag. Then he slung the bag over his shoulder and stood before its speechless owner.

“I am Olivero Clemente,” he said plainly.

An electric charge went through Hammond; he hoped he didn’t look as dumbfounded as he felt.

Clemente held out a hand to help him up. “Come,” he said. “We cannot stay here long. Follow me.”

FREDERICK RYDELL
stood by the panoramic window in his office, hands deep in his pockets. He watched the busy evening activity on the street below with detachment. His office door was still closed even though Theresa had gone home hours ago and there was no one else out there. It was quiet now, almost peaceful; the only noise in the room came from the computer’s exhaust fan. This serenity stood in stark contrast to the fact that he was experiencing one of the most miserable days of his life.

It began just minutes after his morning arrival, when he and nine others were called into an emergency meeting with Director Vallick. Rydell had never seen him so angry.
Apoplectic
was the word that came to mind, like the man was trying to push himself to a stroke. He had a pile of newspapers on his desk, each with a front-page story about how Hammond had new evidence in the Kennedy assassination and how Sheila Baker had been kidnapped as a result and how the government
 
—supposedly the CIA in particular, most said
 
—had something to do with her disappearance.

That’s right, Vallick had said as the veins in his neck
bulged; the media was running with it now. And this attorney from Texas, Henry Moore, was stomping around like a madman. He had a friend in the Justice Department, and this friend had seen the evidence and felt justified calling in the attorney general of the United States. “One step below the president,” Vallick raged, holding up a finger.
“One step!”
Now the FBI was involved. That meant a full-scale investigation into the CIA’s role in the affair.

This was the point in the meeting where Vallick had gone cardiac. He took great pride in the way he had gradually but traceably improved the agency’s reputation during his tenure. No more draconian tactics, no more arrogant disregard for legal boundaries, no more public embarrassments. He insisted that his people could do their jobs within honorable limits. He was realistic enough to know that ethical standards had to be softened from time to time, but he was determined to prove to the American populace that the agency’s outlaw days were over. “I want full transparency and
total
cooperation from each of your departments,” he barked. “If I hear so much as a peep from the bureau that someone is putting up roadblocks, I’m going to eat that person alive. Am I perfectly clear on this point?”

He finished by saying he planned to direct Justice to open a lawsuit against Jason Hammond if his accusations proved baseless
 
—which, he added, he fully expected them to. “I will ruin that man,” he screamed. He was throwing things when the attendees filed out of the office.

Just a few hours later, another dreaded call came from the other hothead in Rydell’s life: the faceless phone screamer. He had been expecting it for days. He sat wordlessly in his chair and endured a historic tongue-lashing. They had lost faith in him, the caller said, believing he had now become
more of a liability than an asset. Rydell stiffened as though caught in a cold wind.
A threat
 
—an actual death threat from that madman.

When the caller finally paused to take a breath, Rydell curtly informed him that Hammond and Baker had both been eliminated. This produced the most satisfying response imaginable
 
—silence. Rydell then added another layer to the lie by saying the FBI investigation was nothing more than window dressing on Vallick’s part to keep the public and the media placated. “He’s throwing them a bone to chew on,” Rydell said, amazed by the calm confidence of his tone. The man at the other end seemed to be buying all of it, and that was good. But it was only a temporary respite, Rydell knew. As much as he hated the man, he had never lied to him. But he’d had no choice this time; he needed the breathing room. The moment the call ended, however, he knew a clock had started ticking.

A full reevaluation of the situation was required then. The fundamental paradigm had changed. No
 
—it was much more than that.
Everything
had changed, and all factors were working against him. As soon as his lie was noticed, he would become a target
 
—and that was presuming the FBI didn’t figure things out first. They hadn’t come knocking yet, but they were on their way.

That made the situation with Sheila Baker a much bigger problem than before. He couldn’t just set her free . . . but he couldn’t just kill her either. There’d be a body. Even if Birk successfully disposed of it, there’d be a
missing
body.

And Birk was causing problems of his own. He was growing impatient, tired of his babysitting duties. He had no more narcotics to pump into his captive, and she kept making his life difficult. And then there was Hammond himself, the
one who had caused all of this. America’s “folk hero,” valiant crusader of truth and justice . . . Rydell could not think of a person he hated more passionately. How the little slime ever got the best of him, he simply could not understand. Rydell’s heart had sunk when he learned that the hit squad deployed by his Cuban contact, Diaz, had failed to take Hammond out, that some “mystery figure” had appeared at the last moment and thwarted the attempt. Now Hammond would go deeper underground than ever. He’d jump at every sound, dodge every shadow. And how much did he know now? Had he found the man he was looking for? And had that man named names?
Am I already living on borrowed time?

On the street below, a middle-aged couple dressed as though they were attending the Academy Awards hailed a taxi. The man said something to the woman, and she laughed uproariously. Happy, everyday citizens on their way to dinner or the theater or wherever.

At that moment, Rydell experienced something for the first time in his life
 
—the desire to trade places with an ordinary person. He would’ve given anything to be that man, young and handsome and probably wealthy, with an attractive woman at his side, on his way to some interesting place for a night of pleasure. Rydell had never been moved by life’s conventional joys. Having dominion over people like that couple had always been his drug of choice. The ability to use them like chess pieces, to overthrow someone’s existence with the stroke of a pen or a single command delivered through a telephone, to play the role of a deity from the safety of his office . . . that had been his oxygen.

His thoughts wandered again to his earliest years in the agency, when his elders regarded him as one of their brightest recruits and the future stretched out gloriously before him.
So young, so eager, so devoted
 
—
and so clean. So very clean.
Then he arrived at the same question that had been coming to him for hours
 
—
How did it come to this?

A taxi arrived and whisked the couple off into the night. Rydell watched the red taillights until they dwindled to nothingness. Then he went about calculating all of his options again. There was only one left, and he knew it. What he was really doing was trying desperately to find another, no matter how radical. But he could not, not anymore. The developments of the day had forced him into a corner. And like any other animal in that position, he had only one priority now
 
—survival.

He took out his cell phone and went to his desk. The hidden file he opened contained classified information that was already known to several others in the agency. Rydell, however, was not supposed to be one of them.

He dialed the number and waited. It wasn’t answered until the third ring, but Rydell did not dare scold the person on the other end. He didn’t know the man’s name, background, or location. He only knew his professional affiliation
 
—leader of a black-project team, more commonly known as “black ops.” This was the agency’s ugliest stepchild, a living manifestation of plausible deniability. Extortion, espionage, trafficking . . . and assassination. Vallick rarely spoke of them and only utilized their services as a last resort. They were the tool you kept in the back of the bottom drawer.

“Commander, this is Silver Shield.” Rydell prayed the name was still valid. The person to whom it had been assigned was still actively employed, but the pseudonyms changed from time to time.

After a pause that felt like hours, the voice on the other end said, “Confirmation.”

Rydell read off the twenty-digit alphanumeric code slowly and precisely.

“Accepted,” came the machinelike response. “Mission summary.”

Rydell swallowed into a throat that had suddenly gone very dry. “You will have multiple targets, in three separate locations,” he said, “which will require the activation of other units. And you will have to complete your objective in less than twenty-four hours.”

“Understood.” This was said without the slightest hesitation. “Details.”

“They are as follows. . . .”

Rydell spelled them out and repeated them once for clarity. Rolled into those details were three names, people who had been part of his life for what felt like an eternity. When he was finished, he was asked for final confirmation
 
—the “go” code. Now it was his turn to pause. This was not because he did not have the sequence in front of him; it was there in plain black characters on the screen. But the magnitude of what he was about to do eclipsed all other thoughts. The illegality alone was staggering.

“Final confirmation,” the faceless killer said one more time. There was a hint of impatience in his voice. If he had to make the request one more time, Rydell knew, the impatience would transform into suspicion.

Rydell took a deep breath as silently as possible, then methodically recited what he saw on the screen. It was one of the most surrealistic moments he would ever experience.

“Accepted,” came the zombielike response. There was a single click and the line went dead.

No stopping it now,
Rydell thought, his heart beating like a drum.

He put his phone away and closed the document. It was summarily discarded and the recycle bin emptied.

The next two hours were spent deleting similar files, then shredding physical documents that had been stored for years in a small safe by his refrigerator.