O'Farrell's Law (8 page)

That night, in Billy's bed, lying on her back in the darkness, Jill said, “Christ, what a mess!”

“It's not too bad, not yet,” O'Farrell said, trying to be realistic.

“It's not too good, either.”

“I tried to talk to Billy at lunchtime about drugs.”

He felt her head turn toward him in the darkness. “And?”

“He spoke about it,” O'Farrell tried to explain. “This little kid tried to speak about it like he knew what we were talking about and all the time he was playing fucking Star Wars!”

“She's got to go to an attorney, get the proper court payments set up,” Jill insisted. “I don't give a damn how bad his own situation is. I don't see why Ellea and Billy should suffer because of it; he created it all.”

“Yes,” O'Farrell agreed.

“She married too young,” Jill said abruptly.

“The same age as us.”

“I got you; she got a bastard.”

What words would she use if she really knew? O'Farrell said, “Maybe we were wrong, making it possible for her to buy the apartment. It's a hell of a drain on what she earns.”

“What can we do, apart from pressure her about a lawyer?”

“I don't know,” admitted O'Farrell.

“What about money? Couldn't we make her some sort of allowance?”

Not if he went to Petty and said he wanted to quit. “Yes,” O'Farrell promised. “If we can get her to accept it, we could make her an allowance. We'll definitely do that.”

“I love you,” Jill said.

Would she if she really knew? he wondered again.

CIA surveillance picked up the Cuban ambassador the moment he left High Holborn. The alert that he was probably making for London airport was radioed from the trailing car when the official vehicle gained the motorway and confirmed when it turned off onto the Heathrow spur. The observer risked following closely behind Rivera at the check-in desk, to discover his destination, but it was the driver who took over to purchase a ticket and board the plane to Brussels, to avoid any chance recognition. Before the aircraft cleared English airspace watchers were already assembling at Brussels, waiting: the CIA officer from London headed back immediately upon arrival, again to avoid possible identification.

Rivera took a taxi into the center of the capital and went through an effort at trail clearing that earned the professionals' sneers, it was so amateurish. They kept him easily under observation until he entered Pierre Belac's nondescript office. The Agency had not risked installing any listening devices there. Had they done so, they would have heard Belac ask for a downpayment of thirty-five million dollars and Rivera agreeing without any argument, with an added, entrapping assurance that if Belac had any additional expenditures in excess of this advance sum he would be immediately recompensed. Even with a listening device, they could not have picked up Belac's reaction, a repeat of his earlier and intense irritation at not having pitched the demand higher at their embassy meeting.

At least, Belac reasoned at once, he had the authority to buy in addition and in excess of his thirty-five-million-dollar advance. Which he resolved to do; he would purchase a vast amount of Czech small arms and ten of the fifty tanks that were not coming from America but from a German arms dealer who had them available for sale. They were far cheaper than he'd have to pay for the American vehicles; Belac guessed $10,000 a tank, although, of course, he wouldn't tell Rivera that. Belac reckoned that as he was taking the risk, by using his own money, then his should be the unexpected and unshared profit.

Rivera remained with the arms dealer for less than an hour, walking back to the center of town, where he caught a taxi to the airport, boarding the midafternoon plane to London. There he was followed back into the city. He did not go to his Hampstead home but to a mews house in Pimlico that was already logged on the CIA's watch list. It belonged to an aging, self-made English newspaper magnate named Sir William Blanchard. Inquiries showed that he was in Ottawa negotiating fresh newsprint prices with Canadian manufacturers. Lady Henrietta Blanchard, twenty-three years her husband's junior, was at home, though.

It was nine
A.M.
the following morning before Rivera left.

SIX

T
HE HEAD
of the CIA's Plans Directorate was a barrel-chested, bull-necked Irishman named Gus McCarthy. He was thickly red-haired and had a heavily freckled face, with freckles on the back of his hands as well; they were also matted with more red hair. He looked like a barroom brawler—and was able to be—but his looks belied the man. He was a strategist capable of intricate and manipulative schemes, never concentrating upon an immediate operation to the exclusion of how it could be extended and utilized to its fullest advantage. He was perfectly matched by his deputy, Hank Sneider, a precise, slight man who had the ability to recognize the direction of McCarthy's thoughts almost before the man completely explained them, and correct and improve upon the details. Their nicknames within the Langley headquarters were Mutt and Jeff. They knew it and weren't offended; there were benefits to being underestimated.

“So what have we got?” McCarthy demanded, not seeking an answer. “One of the largest arms dealers in Europe, a Cuban ambassador who likes the good life, and a British newspaper owner.”

“I think to include the newspaper owner is confusing,” Sneider said. “Blanchard isn't involved. Rivera's just humping the wife is all.”

“Maybe not all,” McCarthy mused. “Couldn't we use that? Blanchard's got a hell of an empire: television stations and newspapers and magazines here as well as in Europe. Get ourselves a corner there and we'd have an incredible outlet for whatever we wanted to plant.”

They were in McCarthy's seventh-floor office in the CIA building, high enough for a view of the Potomac glistening its way through the tree line. Sneider ignored the view, pouring coffee for both of them from the permanently steaming Cona machine. McCarthy consumed a minimum of ten cups a day. Sneider carried McCarthy's mug back to the man's desk and said, “It's worth thinking through. But we could only achieve that by pressuring the old guy. The shit we've got is on the woman.”

“How much of a lever does she have on her old man?”

“Get things published the way we want, darling, or hubbie gets to know all the sordid details?” Sneider suggested.

“Something like that,” McCarthy agreed, appreciatively sipping. “Be nice to get a picture of her with her ass in the air.”

“Rivera's too, in tandem.”

“They discreet?”

“Don't appear to be, particularly. Rivera shacked up at the family home when the old guy was in Canada and she often accompanies him to polo matches. That's his sport, polo.”

“So what's that?” McCarthy asked, another rhetorical question. “Sheer couldn't-give-a-damn carelessness? Arrogance? What?”

“Maybe Blanchard knows and doesn't mind either,” Sneider speculated. “You know how it is with some old guys: all they want is a decoration on their arm and maybe an occasional feel in the sack to make sure it's still there and working and the rest of the time the bimbo can party with whom she likes.”

“Difficult to turn that into an advantage,” McCarthy complained.

“What about cutting the deck a different way?” Sneider asked.

“Rivera?”

“Not exactly leading the life of José the Cane Cutter, is he?”

“What's the objective?”

“Spy in the court of King Castro?”

“To be that Rivera's got to be back in Havana,” McCarthy said. “Won't work. To maneuver his recall we'd have to spread the word about his high life. So he goes back in disgrace and wouldn't be in a position to give us anything anyway. And when we show him the pictures of himself and the lady, he says, ‘She was a good lay, so what?' “

“So?”

“We divide it,” McCarthy decided. “Let's message London to get as much dirt as possible on the two of them but not to spook Rivera. And run him and Belac quite separately.”

“Parallel surveillance is going to tie up a lot of manpower.”

“Belac's big; the biggest. It could be worth it.”

“We going to seek British help?”

“No,” McCarthy said at once. “If it's going to be big, let's keep it nice and tight, just to ourselves.”

“Then the way in is through Belac,” the other man said. “There's already a bunch of stuff on the guy; we've got a good handle on his sources. If we can find out what he wants, then it'll give us an idea what Rivera could be ordering.”

“Belac's the biggest?”

“Yes,” Sneider said, trying to tune in to the direction of McCarthy's thinking.

“So logically whatever Rivera—whatever Cuba—wants is substantial,” McCarthy said. “If it were just the usual run-of-the-mill stuff, there's a dozen smaller guys they could have bought from. Belac means it's a huge order and that it's the latest state-of-the-art matériel.”

“You talking Apocalypse?”

McCarthy got up to pour his own coffee this time, looking inquiringly toward his deputy, who shook his head in refusal. McCarthy returned to his high-backed chair and said, “The days of missile crises are over. I think Havana's looking south, not north. We wont know until we get some idea just how substantial, but it's got to be more than continuing support in Nicaragua; much more.”

Sneider gestured to indicate the building in which they were sitting. “Time to start spreading the news?”

“Not yet,” the Plans Director said. “There's not enough news to spread; just speculation. But it's definitely worth expending the manpower.”

“Most definitely,” agreed Sneider, all doubt gone now.

“And when we get it, we make the most extensive possible use of it,” McCarthy said. “Ripples upon ripples upon ripples.”

O'Farrell had expected his offer of financial support to meet a stronger argument from Ellen and decided with Jill that their daughter's almost immediate acceptance showed just how desperate she had become. They agreed on $400 a month, and Billy had clung to his mother's leg and wanted to know why she was crying. The car repairs cost $550, and before they left Chicago Jill went grocery shopping again, stocking up the cupboards and the deep-freeze. During their last conversation, after Sunday-morning church, Ellen said she'd sec her lawyer before the month was out.

They wrote as well as telephoned now, and that first week O'Farrell sent a long letter to John, in Phoenix, aware that the boy would not be able to offer Ellen any financial support but suggesting that his sister might like support of another kind, like a call or a letter. He didn't say it outright but hoped his son would infer that the occasional checks would not be quite as much as they had been in the past. There was a reply practically by return. John said that what was happening in Billy's school was nothing unusual and that they weren't to worry. Jeff had actually come home one day and talked about being offered marijuana; he and Beth were pretty sure he hadn't tried it but couldn't be one-hundred-percent certain. John promised to write to Chicago every week, the way they were doing now, and added a postscript that the checks had always embarrassed him anyway and in the future he wouldn't expect anything at all from his father.

To establish—and hopefully to go on improving—his great-grandfather's archive, O'Farrell had written to still-existing newspapers throughout Kansas that had been publishing during the man's lifetime and even wrote further afield, to papers in Colorado and Oklahoma. In addition he approached as many historical societies and museums as he could locate, asking them to publicize his on-going search for information about his ancestor in any newsletter or publication they issued.

By coincidence there were two responses within two weeks of his returning from Chicago. A historical society in Wichita said one of their researchers had come across references to a Charles O'Farrell as a teenage scout in a wagon train and asked if he were prepared to spend fifty dollars on a more specific investigation. O'Farrell replied at once that he was, enclosing his check.

An Amarillo dealer in early-American weaponry wrote saying that he was on the mailing list of every historical society in five nearby states. The man had a mint-condition Colt of the model and caliber he believed O'Farrell's great-grandfather would have used. Did O'Farrell want to buy it to form part of his collection?

O'Farrell replied to that by return as well, politely rejecting the offer. Even before the manner of his parents' death, he'd considered it unthinkable to have a gun in his house, even an antique from which the firing pin had probably been removed.

At church that weekend, O'Farrell prayed that Billy would be kept safe, knowing that Jill would be praying the same. Additionally O'Farrell prayed for himself, asking to be excused any more assignments. He was made uncomfortable by the reading, which was from St Luke: “Judge not and ye shall not be judged.”

SEVEN

I
T HAD
been Rivera's father who'd been the sports fisherman, pursuing the blue marlin and the other big-game fish off the Keys and the Grand Bahama Bank. Rivera had fished, too, quite competently, but he'd never gotten the pleasure from it that the older man had. He'd learned the principles, of course; the use of the proper bait to catch the best fish. And carried that principle on. Which was why he'd initially, unquestioningly, advanced so much money to Belac, with the assurance that any additional personal expenditure would be instantly recompensed. And Belac had responded fishlike. But not like a marlin. Like a greedy, eat-all shark. His father had despised shark as game fish.

The unscheduled meeting was at Belac's request. The arms dealer came confidently into the London embassy office and at once, proudly, announced, “I want you to see what I've achieved.” He produced a list but read from it himself. ‘Two hundred Kalashnikov rifles, with six thousand rounds of ammunition. One hundred Red Eye missiles and two hundred Stinger missiles. Three hundred assorted Czech handguns and three thousand rounds of matching ammunition. There are five hundred grenades and two hundred antipersonnel land mines.…” The man looked up, giving a self-satisfied smile. “And ten tanks. All en route, aboard ship, without the need to go through Japan or the Arab Emirates.” He smiled further. “Your original request only listed five armored personnel carriers. I have secured fifteen, if you wish to increase the order.” He'd already put down a deposit, from his own money again.