The Last Thing He Wanted

1

One of the many questions that several teams of congressional investigators and Rand Corporation analysts would eventually fail to resolve was why, by the time Treat Morrison arrived on the island, almost six weeks after she had learned from the Miami Herald that her father was dead and more than a month after she had learned from the FBI that the passport she was using had a trick built into it, Elena McMahon was still there.

She could have left.

Just gone to the airport and gotten on a plane (there were still scheduled flights, not as many as there had been but the airport was open) and left the place.

She would have known since the initial FBI interview that the passport with the trick built into it would not be valid for reentry into the United States, but that in itself might well have seemed an argument to get off this island, go somewhere else, go anywhere else.

She had some cash, there were places she could have gone.

Just look at a map: unnumbered other islands there in the palest-blue shallows of the Caribbean, careless islands with careless immigration controls, islands with no designated role in what was going on down there.

Islands on which nothing either overt or covert was under way, islands on which the U.S. Department of State had not yet had occasion to place repeated travel advisories, islands on which the resident U.S. government officials had not yet found it necessary to send out their own dependents and nonessential personnel.

Islands on which the ranking American diplomatic officer was not said to be targeted for assassination.

Entire archipelagoes of neutral havens where an American woman of a certain appearance could have got off the plane and checked into a promising resort hotel (a promising resort hotel would be defined as one in which there were no Special Forces in the lobby, no armored unmarked vans at the main entrance) and ordered a cold drink and dialed a familiar number in Century City or Malibu and let Wynn Janklow and the concierge work out the logistics of reentry into her previous life.

Just think about it: this was not a woman who on the evidence had ever lacked the resources to just get on a plane and leave.

So why hadn’t she.

The Rand analysts, I believe because they sensed the possibility of reaching an answer better left on the horizon, allowed this question to remain open, one of several “still vexing areas left to be further explored by future students of this period.” The congressional investigators answered the question like the prosecutors many of them had been, resorting to one of those doubtful scenarios that tend to bypass recognizable human behavior in the rush to prove “motive.” The motive on which the congressional investigators would settle in this instance was “greed”: CAUGHT BY GREED, the pertinent section heading reads in their final report. Elena McMahon, they concluded, had stayed on the island because she still expected someone to walk up and hand her the million dollars she was supposed to have received on delivery of Dick McMahon’s last shipment.

“Elena McMahon stayed where she was,” to quote this section exactly, “because she apparently feared that if she left she would be cheated out of or would otherwise forfeit the money she believed she was owed, i.e., the payment she claimed was due her father.”

But that was flat wrong.

The payment due her father was by then no longer the point.

The payment due her father had stopped being the point at the instant she read in the Miami Herald that her father had been certified dead at the Clearview Convalescent Lodge in South Kendall on June 30 1984.

Which happened also to be the date on the passport with the trick built into it.

My understanding is that Dick McMahon will not be a problem.

2

“Stop talking to the goddamn baby-sitter,” her father had said the evening she was about to leave the house in Sweetwater for Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport and the unscheduled flight that would not land in San José, Costa Rica.

She was trying to tell the nurse about her father’s midnight medication.

“Ellie. I want you to listen to me.”

“He won’t swallow it but you can mash it up in a little brandy,” she said to the nurse.

The nurse continued flicking through channels.

“Don’t let any of those guys talk you into staying over down there,” her father said. “You deliver the goods, you pick up the payment, you get back on the plane, you’re back here tomorrow. That’s my deal.”

“I thought Cheers was on two,” the nurse said.

“Get the TV critic out of here and listen to me,” Dick McMahon said.

She sent the nurse to locate Cheers in the kitchen.

“That one’s not really a nurse,” Dick McMahon said. “The one in the morning, she’s a nurse, but that one’s a baby-sitter.” He had leaned back in his chair, exhausted. “Ellie. Okay. You deliver the goods, you pick up the payment, you get back on the plane. That’s my deal.” Each time he said this it was as if for the first time. “Don’t let any of those guys mickey-mouse you into staying over, you follow me?”

She said that she followed him.

“Anybody gives you any trouble, you just tell them.”

She waited.

She could see the network of veins beneath the transparent skin of his eyelids.

Tell them what, she prompted.

“Tell them, oh goddamn.” He was rousing himself with difficulty. “Tell them they’re going to have to answer to Max Epperson. Then you call Max. Promise me you’ll call Max.”

She did not know whether Max Epperson was dead or alive or a hallucination but she promised nonetheless that she would call Max.

Wherever Max might be.

“You just tell Max I’m a little under the weather,” Dick McMahon said. “Tell Max I need him to look out for you. Just until I’m a hundred percent again. Just tell him I said that, you understand?”

She said that she understood.

Barry Sedlow had told her to be at Fort Lauderdale — Hollywood at midnight sharp.

She was to wait not in the terminal but at Post J, if she asked at the Butler operations office they would direct her to Post J.

At Post J there would be a locked gate onto the tarmac.

She was to wait at Post J.

Someone would unlock the gate.

By the time she was ready to leave her father was again asleep in his chair, but when she kissed his forehead he reached for her hand.

“You don’t remember this but when you had your tonsils out I wouldn’t let you stay in the hospital by yourself,” he said. “I was afraid you’d wake up scared with nobody around. So I slept in a chair in your room.”

Elena did not remember this.

All Elena remembered was that when Catherine had appendicitis she herself had slept on a gurney in Catherine’s room at Cedars.

Her father’s eyes were still closed.

He did not let go of her hand.

These were the next-to-last words her father spoke to her:

“You never even knew that, see. Because you were a winner, you took the whole hospital deal like a winner, you didn’t wake up once.”

“I did wake up,” she said. “I do remember.”

She wished she did.

She hoped Catherine would.

She held his hand until his breathing was even, then walked to the door.

“This payday comes in,” he said when she opened the screen door, “for the first time in my life I’ll have something to leave you.”

“I did wake up,” she repeated. “I knew you were there.”

By the way.

I saw your dad.

He says hi.

I’m keeping him in the picture.

In fact I know why Elena McMahon was still on the island.

Elena McMahon was still on the island because of what she had known since the instant she read in the Miami Herald that her father had been certified dead in South Kendall on the same day the passport with her photograph on it was supposed to have been issued in Miami. What she had known since that instant was this:

Somebody out there was playing a different game, doing a different deal.

Not her father’s deal.

A deal her father had not known about.

Her father’s role in this deal he had not known about was to have been something more than just assembling the shipments, the shipments that had over the course of the spring refocused his dwindling energy, his flagging interest in staying alive. Her father’s role was to have begun once he arrived on the ground to collect the million-dollar payday.

Consider her father: a half-crazy old man who had spent his life dealing merchandise that nobody would admit they wanted dealt, an old man whose interest in who used his merchandise was limited to who could pay for it, an old man whose well-documented impartiality about where his merchandise ended up could allow him to be placed on the wrong side of whatever was going to happen on this island.

Who would miss him, who would care?

Who would not believe he had done whatever it was they were going to say he had done?

An old man in a sick season.

An old man with no reputation to lose.

The shipments had just been the cheese in the trap.

She had sprung the trap and her father was dead and now she was set up to do whatever it was that he was supposed to have done.

Somebody had her lined up, somebody had her jacked in the headlights.

Had her in the scope.

Had her in the crosshairs.

What she did not know was who.

And until she knew who, until she located the line of fire, she could not involve Wynn.

She needed Wynn out of the line of fire.

She needed Wynn to take care of Catherine.

3

The question of why Treat Morrison arrived on the island was another area in which neither Rand nor the congressional investigators did a particularly convincing job, but in this case there would have been daunting structural obstacles, entire layers of bureaucracy dedicated to the principle that self-perpetuation depended on the ability not to elucidate but to obscure. “The cooperation of those individuals and agencies who responded to our numerous requests is appreciated,” the preface to the Rand study noted in this connection. “Although some other individuals and agencies did not acknowledge or respond to our requests, it is to be hoped that future assessments of this incident will benefit from their assistance and clarification.”

I also knew at the time why Treat Morrison arrived on the island, but it was not an answer calculated to satisfy the Rand analysts.

Treat Morrison arrived on the island for the buzz.

The action, the play.

Treat Morrison arrived on the island because it was one more place where he could insert himself into a certain kind of situation.

Of course he had a “mission,” a specific charter, and he also had a specific agenda. He always had a specific mission when he inserted himself into this kind of situation, and he also always had a specific agenda. The agenda did not necessarily coincide with the charter, but neither did it, if the insertion was smooth, necessarily conflict. “Certain people in Washington might have certain front-burner interests they want me to address, and that would be my charter,” he once told me to this point, his tone that of someone explaining to a child what goes on at the office. “Typically, however, there might be some other little angle, something they maybe don’t know about or think is back-burner. And I might also try to address that.”

That would be his agenda.

Treat Morrison’s charter in this case was to correct or clarify whatever misunderstandings or erroneous impressions might or might not have been left during the recent tour of the region undertaken by a certain senator and his senior foreign policy aide. There had then been a subsequent trip, made by only the senior foreign policy aide, who was twenty-seven years old and whose name was Mark Berquist. Various questions had been raised, by American embassy personnel in the countries involved, having to do with what the senator and Mark Berquist were doing in these countries and with whom they had been meeting and what, during such meetings, had been said or not said. These questions, which of course derived from a general suspicion that the visits may have lent encouragement if not outright support to what were usually called “unauthorized fringe elements,” had languished awhile on the Caribbean and Central American desks and then, once it seemed clear that no answers would be forthcoming, had been strategically leaked out of Tegucigalpa to the ranking American reporters who covered the area.

“According to well-placed embassy sources,” was the way the New York Times had attributed the questions.

The Los Angeles Times had added corroboration from “a European diplomat experienced in the region.”

The Washington Post had relied on “knowledgeable U.S. observers.”

In the brief flurry that followed, Mark Berquist defined the purpose of his trips as “strictly fact-finding,” “generally focused on business and agricultural matters” but “not in any area of particular interest to you.”

The senator himself said that he had made the trip only to “encourage participation in what is getting to be in our state a very active and mutually beneficial sister-city program.”

The call for a hearing died before it got to subcommittee.

Which might have been the end of it had the visits from the senator and Mark Berquist not been followed, at least in the area on which Alex Brokaw’s embassy reported, by certain incidents, not major but nonetheless troubling, in that they tended to legitimize the “previously reliable source” who had in late June reported the existence of a plot to assassinate Alex Brokaw.

There had been for example the two steamer trunks apparently abandoned in a windward condominium that had been rented, at the time of Mark Berquist’s second visit, by a young Costa Rican woman who had since disappeared, skipped out on the weekly rent. When the owner returned he found the steamer trunks, which he moved into the hallway to be opened and discarded. The trunks sat in the breezeway for ten or twelve days before the janitor got around to opening them. According to the police report on the incident the contents of the two trunks included twenty Galil semiautomatic assault rifles, two AK-47s, seventeen silencers, three walkie-talkies, three bags of ammunition, assorted explosives and detonators and electronic devices, four bulletproof vests, and two sets of scales. According to the embassy report on the incident the presence of the scales argued for a drug connection and rendered the incident not of immediate concern. The embassy report further concluded that the absent Costa Rican tenant was not an asset of any U.S. agency known to the embassy.

That the tenant (no longer absent, since her body had been subsequently found in a ravine off the Smugglers’ Cove highway) was not an asset of any U.S. agency known to the embassy was one thing Treat Morrison doubted.

A few days after the business with the steamer trunks (but before the young woman’s body turned up) there had been the incident outside the Intercon, within minutes of Alex Brokaw’s scheduled speech at a chamber of commerce lunch in the Intercon ballroom. There had been a small crowd, a demonstration of sorts, having to do with the question of who was responsible for the precipitous loss of the tourist business. It was the contention of the demonstrators that the United States was responsible for the precipitous loss of the tourist business. It was the contention of the embassy, and this was the point to which Alex Brokaw had intended to address his remarks, that the loss of the tourist business would be more than compensated for by the economic benefits that would accrue not only to this island but to the entire Caribbean basin were the United States Congress to approve military aid to the Nicaraguan freedom fighters for fiscal year 1985.

Economic benefits that were even now accruing.

In anticipation.

In recognition of the fact that there was already, let us be perfectly up front on this point, a presence.

A covert presence, true.

But only in anticipation of overt.

This was the subtext of the message that Alex Brokaw, alone in the back seat of his reinforced car, had been attempting to condense to an index card as his driver inched through the demonstrators outside the Intercon toward the police barricade set up at the entrance. The actual text of the message he was committing to the index card was this: Just ask your friends the merchants of Panama what the United States Southern Command has meant to them.

“Actually a fairly feeble demo,” the driver reported having heard Alex Brokaw say at the exact instant it began to happen, first the quick burst of semiautomatic fire, then, as the police closed in, the dull pops of the tear gas canisters.

“Nothing like a little tear gas to clear out the sinuses,” is what Alex Brokaw recalled saying.

According to the police report on the incident, inquiries focused on two Hondurans registered until that morning at the airport Days Inn. According to the embassy report on the incident, the two missing Hondurans could not be located for questioning but were not assets of any U.S. agency known to the embassy.

That the two missing Hondurans were not assets of any U.S. agency known to the embassy was a second thing Treat Morrison doubted.

The third thing Treat Morrison doubted was more amorphous, and had to do with the “previously reliable source” who had in late June reported the existence of a plot to assassinate Alex Brokaw. There was from the outset something about this report that had struck many people in Washington and Miami as overly convenient, beginning with the fact that it coincided with the workup sessions on legislation providing military aid to the Nicaraguan freedom fighters for fiscal year 1985. The same people in Washington and Miami tended to dismiss these recent incidents as equally convenient, further support for the theory that Alex Brokaw, in an effort to lay the foundation for a full-scale overt buildup on the island, had himself put the assassination report into play and was now lending credibility to the report with further suggestions of American personnel under siege.

“Clouding his own pond” was what Alex Brokaw was said to be doing.

The consensus that Alex Brokaw was clouding his own pond had by late July reached critical mass, as had the colliding metaphors: the way in which Alex Brokaw was said to be clouding his own pond was by “playing the Reichstag card.”

The problem with clouding your own pond by playing the Reichstag card was that you would have to be fairly dense to try it, since otherwise you would know that everybody would immediately assume you were clouding your own pond by playing the Reichstag card.

That Alex Brokaw was sufficiently dense to so cloud his own pond was the third thing Treat Morrison doubted, and to locate the point at which these doubts intersected would have been part of his agenda. The other part of his agenda would have had to do with the unexpected visit he received, the evening before leaving Washington, from the senior foreign policy aide to the senator whose visit to the area had raised the original questions.

“T.M., I’ll only be on your screen for fifteen minutes,” Mark Berquist had said when he materialized, pink-cheeked and wearing a seersucker suit, in Treat Morrison’s office after the secretaries had left. The air-conditioning was off and the windows were open and Mark Berquist’s shirt had appeared to be constricting his throat. “It might be wise if we got some air.”

“Mr. Berquist,” Treat Morrison had said. “Why not sit down.”

A barely perceptible pause. “Actually I’d prefer we took a walk,” Mark Berquist had said meaningfully, his eyes scanning the bookshelves as if a listening device might reveal itself disguised as a copy of Foreign Affairs.

“I wouldn’t presume to take up your time.”

There had been a silence.

Treat Morrison had looked at his desk clock.

“You’ve wasted two minutes, which leaves you thirteen,” Treat Morrison said.

There had been another silence, then Mark Berquist took off his seersucker jacket and arranged it on the back of a chair. When he finally sat down he avoided looking directly at Treat Morrison.

“Let me give you a little personal background,” Mark Berquist said then.

He said that he had been on the Hill for five years, ever since graduating from Villanova. At Villanova, he said, it so happened that he had been fortunate enough to know the sons of several prominent Cuban exiles, and the sons as well of two ambassadors to Washington from that general area, namely Argentina and El Salvador. It had been these friendships, he said, that ultimately led to his commitment to do his humble best to level the playing field for democracy in the area.

Treat Morrison turned his desk clock to face Mark Berquist.

“Seven,” he said.

“You’re aware that we have an interest there.” Mark Berquist was finally meeting Treat Morrison’s eyes. “A kind of situation.”

“I’d get to it fast if I were you.”

“It may be a situation you’re not going to want to get into.”

Treat Morrison at first said nothing.

“Goddamn,” he said then. “I have actually never heard anyone say something like that.” In fact this was not true. Treat Morrison had been hearing people say things like that his entire adult life, but none of these people had been twenty-seven-year-old staff aides on the Hill. “Call me naive, but I would have thought you’d have to be an actor to say something like that.”

Treat Morrison had leaned back and clasped his hands behind his head. “Ever given any thought to doing some acting, Mr. Berquist? Going on the boards? Smell of the greasepaint, roar of the crowd?”

Mark Berquist said nothing as he stood up.

“Not all that different from politics,” Treat Morrison said. He was now studying the ceiling, squinting slightly at the overhead light. “If you stop to analyze it. I assume you saw certain people down there.”

Mark Berquist yanked his seersucker jacket off the back of the chair, biting off each word evenly. “It’s an old boys’ town here, and you’re one of the old boys, so feel free to take any shot you want. I am just telling you that this is a puzzle with a lot of pieces you may not want to put together.”

“One of the people I’m assuming you saw was Bob Weir.”

“That’s a fishing expedition,” Mark Berquist said. “And I’m not biting.”

Treat Morrison said nothing.

Bob Weir was the “previously reliable source” who had in late June reported the existence of the plot to assassinate Alex Brokaw.

“And just let me add one thing,” Mark Berquist said. “You would be making a serious error in judgment if you were to try to crucify Bob Weir.”

Treat Morrison had watched in silence as Mark Berquist jabbed his arms into the seersucker jacket in an attempt to find the sleeves.

“By the way,” Treat Morrison said then. “For future reference. I’m not an old boy.”

4

Actually I had met Bob Weir.

I had come across him two years before, in 1982, in San Salvador, where he was running not a restaurant but a discotheque, a dispirited place called Chez Roberto, eight tables and a sound system in a strip mall in the San Benito district. Within hours of arriving in San Salvador I had begun hearing the name Bob Weir mentioned, always guardedly: it seemed that he was an American with what was called an interesting history, an apparent gift for being in interesting places at interesting times. He happened for example to have been managing an export firm in Guatemala at the time Jacobo Arbenz was overthrown. He happened to have been managing a second export firm, in Managua, at the time the Somoza regime was overthrown. In San Salvador he was said to be particularly close to a distinctly bad actor named Colonel Álvaro García Steiner, who had received special training from the Argentinian military in domestic counterterrorism, at that time a local specialty.

In the absence of anything more constructive to do I stopped by Chez Roberto on several different evenings, hoping to talk to its proprietor. There were the usual armored Cherokee Chiefs in the parking area and the usual Salvadoran businessmen inside (I never saw anyone dancing at Chez Roberto, nor in fact did I ever see a woman) but on each of these evenings Bob Weir was said to be “out of the city” or engaged in “other business” or simply “not seeing anyone at the present time.”

It was some days after my last visit to Chez Roberto when a man I did not know sat down across from me in the coffee shop at the Sheraton. He was carrying one of the small zippered leather purses that in San Salvador at that time suggested the presence of a 9mm Browning, and he was also carrying a sheaf of recent American newspapers, which he folded open on the table and began to scan, grease pencil in hand.

I continued eating my shrimp cocktail.

“I see we have the usual agitprop from your colleagues,” he said, grease-penciling a story datelined San Salvador in the Miami Herald.

Some time passed.

I finished the shrimp cocktail and signaled for a check.

According to the clock over the cashier’s desk the man had now been reading the newspapers at my table for eleven minutes.

“Maybe I misunderstood the situation,” he said as I signed the check. “I was under the impression you’d been looking for Bob Weir.”

I asked if he were Bob Weir.

“I could be,” he said.

This pointlessly sinister encounter ended, as many such encounters in San Salvador at that time ended, inconclusively. Bob Weir said that he would be more than happy to talk to me about the country, specifically about its citizens, who were entrepreneurial to the core and wanted no part of any authoritarian imposition of order. Bob Weir also said that he would be more than happy to introduce me to some of these entrepreneurial citizens, but unfortunately the ones I mentioned, most specifically Colonel Álvaro García Steiner, were out of the city or engaged in other business or simply not seeing anyone at the present time.

Many people who ran into Bob Weir of course assumed that he was CIA.

I had no particular reason to doubt this, but neither did I have any particular reason to believe it.

All I knew for certain about Bob Weir was that when I looked at his face I did not see his face.

I saw a forensic photograph of his face.

I saw his throat cut ear to ear.

I mentioned this to a few people and we all agreed: whatever Bob Weir was playing, he was in over his head. Bob Weir was an expendable. That Bob Weir was still alive and doing business two years later, not just doing business but doing it in yet another interesting place at yet another interesting time, not just doing it in this interesting place at this interesting time but doing it as a “previously reliable source,” remains evidence of how little any of us understood.

5

When Treat Morrison told me later about his unexpected visit from Mark Berquist he said that he had been a little distracted.

Otherwise, he said, he would have handled it differently.

Wouldn’t have let the kid get under his skin.

Would have focused in on what the kid was actually saying.

Underneath the derring-do.

Underneath the kid talking like he was goddamn General Lansdale.

He had been a little distracted, he said, ever since Diane died.

Diane Morrison, 52, wife of, after a short illness.

Diane, he said, had been one of God’s bright and beautiful creatures, and at some point during the month or two before she died he had begun having trouble focusing in, trouble concentrating.

Then of course she did die.

He had finally straightened out the shifts with the nurses and just like that, she died.

And after that of course there was certain obligatory stuff.

The usual obligatory financial and social stuff, you know what I mean.

Then nothing.

The nurses weren’t there and neither was she.

And one night he came home and he didn’t want dinner and he didn’t want to go to bed and he just kept having another drink until it was near enough to dawn to swim a few laps and go to the office.

Hell of a bad night, obviously.

And when he got to the office that morning, he said, he realized he’d been on overload too long, it was time to get away for a few days, he’d even considered going to Rome by himself but he didn’t see how he could spare the time, and the end result was that he spent about eleven months running on empty.

Eleven months being a little distracted.

As far as this visit from Mark Berquist went, in the first place the kid had caught him working late, trying to clear his desk so he could get the early flight down there, it was imperative that he get the early flight because Alex Brokaw was delaying his own weekly flight to San José in order to brief him in the secure room at the airport, so this had been a situation in which he was maybe even more distracted than usual.

You can certainly see that, he added.

I was not sure that I could.

He had not been so distracted that he neglected to enter into his office log, since the secretaries who normally kept his schedule were gone, the details of the meeting in his own painstaking hand:

Date: Monday August 13 1984.

Place: 2201 C Street, N.W.

Time: In 7:10 p.m./out 7:27 p.m.

Present: T.A.M. / Mark Berquist

Subject: Unscheduled visit, B. Weir, other topics.

“That was just clerical,” Treat Morrison said when I mentioned the log entry. “That wasn’t concentrating, that was just reflex, that was me covering my ass like the clerks do, if you spent any time in Washington you’d know this, you do your goddamn log on autopilot.”

He was cracking the knuckles of his right hand, a tic.

“As far as I was concerned,” he said, “this was just another kid from the Hill with wacko ideas that any sane person had to know wouldn’t get to first base outside the goddamn District of Columbia.”

He fell silent.

“Christ,” he said then. “I should have taken the three or four days and gone to Rome.”

Again he fell silent.

I tried to picture Treat Morrison in Rome.

In the single image that came to mind he was walking by himself on the Veneto, early evening, everybody sitting out in front of the Excelsior as if it were still 1954, everybody except Treat Morrison.

Shoulders slightly hunched, gaze straight ahead.

Walking past the Excelsior as if he had someplace to go.

“Because the point is,” he said, then stopped. When he again spoke his voice was reasonable but he was again cracking the knuckles of his right hand. “The point is, if I’d gone to Rome, this meeting never had to happen. Because I would have been back on my game before this dipshit kid ever got south of Dulles.”

It was he who kept circling back to this meeting with Mark Berquist, worrying it, chipping at it, trying to accommodate his failure to fully appreciate that the central piece in the puzzle he might not want to put together had been right there in his office.

Mark Berquist.

Which went to the question, as Treat Morrison would elliptically put it in the four hundred and seventy-six pages he committed to the Bancroft Library, of whether policy should be based on what was said or believed or wished for by people sitting in climate-controlled rooms in Washington or New York or whether policy should be based on what was seen and reported by the people who were actually on the ground. He had been, he kept repeating, a little distracted.

Had he not been a little distracted, he would have put it together immediately that the report of the plot to assassinate Alex Brokaw had not originated, as Alex Brokaw believed it had, with the previously reliable source who passed it to the embassy. Nor had it originated, as most people in Washington believed it had, with Alex Brokaw.

The report of the plot to assassinate Alex Brokaw had of course originated in Washington.

With Mark Berquist.

Who had passed it to the previously reliable source.

Bob Weir.

Treat Morrison had been that close to it and he had blown it.

He had not been concentrating.

Had he been concentrating, everything else would have fallen into place.

I mean Christ, he said. This isn’t rocket science. This is textbook stuff. A, B, C. One two three.

If you put an assassination plot into play you follow it with an assassination attempt. If you stage an assassination attempt you put somebody out front.

A front, an assassin.

A front with a suitable background.

A front who can be silenced in the assassination attempt.

The assassination attempt which would or would not fail, depending on exactly how unauthorized the fringe elements turn out to be.

A, B, C. One two three.

Night follows day.

Not rocket science.

Had he been concentrating he would have added it up. Or so he was still telling himself.

The very last time we spoke.

6

The rhythm common to plots dictates a lull, a period of suspension, a time of lying in wait, a certain number of hours or days or weeks so commonplace as to suggest that the thing might not play out, the ball might not drop. In fact the weeks between the day Elena McMahon learned that her father was dead and the day Treat Morrison arrived on the island seemed on the surface so commonplace that only a certain rigidity in her schedule might have suggested that Elena McMahon was waiting for anything at all. At exactly six-thirty, on each of the mornings before she left the Intercon, she turned on the television set in her room and watched the weather on CNN International: showers over Romania, a front over Chile, the United States reduced to a system of thunderstorms, the marine layer shallowing out over southern California, the world beyond this island turning not slowly but at an inexorable meteorological clip, an overview she found soothing.

The shallowing out of the marine layer over southern California meant that stratus over Malibu would burn off by noon.

Catherine could lie in the sun today.

At no later than ten minutes past seven on each of those mornings she put on a pair of shorts and a T-shirt and began to walk. She walked five miles, seven miles, ten, however long it took to fill two hours exactly. At no later than ten minutes past nine she had two cups of coffee and one papaya, no more. She spent the two hours between ten and noon downtown, not exactly shopping but allowing herself to be seen, establishing her presence. Her routine did not vary: at the revolving rack outside the big Rexall she would pause each day to inspect the unchanging selection of postcards. Three blocks further she would stop at the harbor, sit on the low wall above the docks and watch the loading or unloading of one or another interisland freighter. After the Rexall and the harbor she inspected the bookstore, the pastry shop, the posters outside the municipal office. Her favorite poster showed a red circle and diagonal slash superimposed on an anopheles mosquito, but no legend to explain how the ban was to be effected.

The afternoons were at first more problematic. For a couple of days she tried sitting out by the Intercon pool, but something about the empty chaises and the unbroken summer overcast, as well as about the occasional appearance of one or another of the Americans who now seemed billeted at the Intercon in force, had made her uneasy. On the third day, in a secondhand bookstore near the medical school, she found an Italian grammar and a used textbook called General Medicine and Infectious Diseases, and after that spent allotted hours of each afternoon teaching herself Italian (from two to four) and (between five and seven) the principles of diagnosis and treatment.

After she moved from the Intercon to the windward side of the island she had her job, such as it was: assistant manager at the Surfrider. By the time she was hired there was already not much left to do, but at least she had a desk to arrange, a domain to survey, certain invented duties. There were the menus to be made, the flowers to be arranged. There was the daily run to the airport, in one of the Surfrider’s three battered jeeps, to pick up the papers and mail and drop packages for shipment. On the windward side she had not the Intercon pool with its empty chaises but the sea itself, the oppressive low roar of the surf breaking on the reef and the abrupt stillness at ebb and full tide and the relief of the wind that came up toward dawn, banging the shutters and blowing the curtains and drying the sheets that were by then drenched with sweat.

On the windward side she also had, once the last backpacker moved on, the available and entirely undemanding companionship of the Surfrider manager, an American named Paul Schuster who had first come to the islands as a Pan American steward and had metamorphosed into a raconteur of the tropics with a ready trove of stories about people he had known (he would not say who but she would recognize the names if he told her) and curiosities he had encountered (she would not believe the readiness with which inhibition got shed under the palm trees) and places he had operated on islands up and down the Caribbean.

There had been the guesthouse on Martinique, the discotheque in Gustavia. Great spots but not his kind of spot. His kind of spot had been the ultra-exclusive all-male guesthouse on St. Lucia, total luxe, ten perfect jewel-box suites, only the crème de la crème there, he would not say who but major operators on Wall Street, the hottest-of-the-hot motion picture agents and executives, pas de hustlers. His kind of spot had also been Haiti, but he got scared out of Haiti when dead chickens began showing up on the gate of the place he had there, the first and for all he cared to know the only first-rate gay bathhouse in Port-au-Prince.

He might not be the smartest nelly on the block but hey, when he saw a dead chicken he knew what it meant and when he saw a hint he knew how to take it.

Pas de poulet.

Pas de voodoo.

Pas de Port-au-Prince.

Paul Schuster made frequent reference to his own and other people’s homosexuality, but during the time Elena had been at the Surfrider there had been what might have seemed in retrospect a slightly off-key absence of evidence of this, no special friend, no boys who came or went, in fact no one who came or went or stayed, only the two of them, alone at meals and in the evening hours when they sat out by the drained pool and burned citronella sticks against the mosquitoes. Until the night before Treat Morrison arrived, Paul Schuster had been unflaggingly convivial, in a curiously dated style, as if he had washed up down here in the vicinity of 1952 and remained uncontaminated by the intervening decades.

“Happy hour,” he would cry, materializing with a pitcher of rum punch on a porch where she was reading General Medicine and Infectious Diseases. “Chug-a-lug. Party time.”

She would reluctantly mark her place and set aside General Medicine and Infectious Diseases.

Paul Schuster would again describe the scheme he had to redecorate and remarket the Surfrider as an ultra-luxe spa for European businessmen.

Top guys. Heavy hitters. Men of a certain class who may not be able to find full relaxation in Düsseldorf or wherever.

She would again say that she was not at all certain that the mood on the island at this very moment exactly lent itself to remarketing the Surfrider.

He would again ignore this.

“Here I go again,” he would say. “Spilling my ideas like seed.” This was a simile that never failed to please him. “Spilling my seed out where anybody in the world can lap it up. But hey, ideas are like buses, anybody can take one.”

The one evening Paul Schuster was not unflaggingly convivial was that of August 13, which happened also to be the one evening he had invited a guest to dinner.

“By the way, I told Evelina we’ll be three tonight,” he had said when she came back from her morning trip to the airport. Evelina was the one remaining member of the kitchen staff, a dour woman who more or less stayed on because she and her grandchildren lived rent-free in a cottage behind the laundry. “I have a chum coming by, somebody you should know.”

She had asked who.

“Kind of a famous restaurateur here,” Paul Schuster had said.

When she came downstairs not long after seven Elena could see Paul Schuster and an older man sitting outside by the empty pool, but because the two seemed locked in intense conversation she picked up a magazine on the screened porch, where Evelina was already setting the table.

“Stop hiding in there.” Paul Schuster’s voice was imperious. “I want you to meet our guest.”

As she walked outside the older man had half risen, the barest gesture, then sunk back into his chair, a rather ghostly apparition in espadrilles and unpressed khaki pants and a black silk shirt buttoned up to the neck.

“Enchanté,” he had murmured, in a gravelly but clearly American accent. “Bob Weir.”

“I’m frankly surprised you haven’t run into Bob before,” Paul Schuster said, a slight edge in his voice. “Bob makes it his business to run into everybody. That’s how he could turn up here one morning and by dinner he’s the best-known American on the island.” Paul Schuster snapped his fingers. “He was at it before he even cleared customs. Running into people. Wouldn’t you say that was the secret of your success, Bob?”

“Make your point, don’t do it the hard way,” Bob Weir said.

In the silence that followed, Elena had heard herself asking Bob Weir how long he had been here.

He had considered this. “A while now,” he said finally.

There was another silence.

She was about to ask him about his restaurant when he suddenly spoke. “I believe I saw you at the airport this morning,” he said.

She said that she was at the airport every morning.

“That’s good,” Bob Weir said.

This enigmatic pronouncement hung in the air between them.

She noticed that Paul Schuster was leaning slightly forward, tensed, transfixed.

“I don’t know that it’s good exactly,” she said finally, trying for a little silvery laugh, a Westlake Mom tone. “It’s just part of my job.”

“It’s good,” Bob Weir said. “Because you can take Paul with you tomorrow. Paul has something to do at the airport tomorrow morning.”

“Oh no I don’t,” Paul Schuster said. It seemed to Elena that he had physically recoiled. “Uh uh. I don’t go to the airport.”

“At ten.” Bob Weir addressed this to Elena as if Paul Schuster had not spoken. “Paul needs to be there at ten.”

“I do not need to be there at ten,” Paul Schuster said.

“We can be there whenever you want,” Elena said, conciliatory.

“Paul needs to be there at ten,” Bob Weir repeated.

“Let me just lay one or two home truths on the table,” Paul Schuster said to Bob Weir. “Paul doesn’t need to be there at all. She’ll be there if and when I tell her to be there. And believe me, there’s still a big if in this situation, and the big if is moi.” Paul Schuster snatched up the empty pitcher of rum punch. “And if she’s there, you know who’ll be there with her? Nobody. Nul. Period. Now let’s just change the subject. We’re out of punch. Get Evelina out here.”

Elena stood up and started toward the porch.

“In my personal view you don’t have as many home truths in your deck as you think you do,” she heard Bob Weir say to Paul Schuster.

“What do I see on that porch,” she heard Paul Schuster say, an accusation. “Do I see that Evelina has already set the table?”

Elena stopped. The hour at which dinner was served, meaning the hour at which Evelina would be free to go back to the cottage with her grandchildren, had become during the preceding week a minor irritation to Paul Schuster, but he had not before made an issue of it. It occurred to her that she could be witnessing some form of homosexual panic, that Bob Weir might know something that Paul Schuster did not want him to know.

“Evelina,” he called. “Get out here.”

Evelina had appeared, her face impassive.

“I sincerely hope you’re not planning to foist dinner on us before eight-thirty exactly.”

Evelina had stood there.

“And if you’re about to tell me as usual the fish will dry out by eight-thirty,” Paul Schuster said, “then let me cut this short. Don’t bring it out at all. Forget the fish. Pas de poisson.”

Evelina’s eyes flickered from Paul Schuster to Elena.

“Don’t look to her,” Paul Schuster said. “She just works here. She’s just one of the help. Same as you used to be.” Paul Schuster picked up the empty pitcher and handed it to Evelina. “If you would be good enough to refill this pitcher,” he said as he started inside, “I’ll call into town for the truck.”

Evelina was halfway into the kitchen before she asked why the truck.

“Because I want you and your bastard brats out of here tonight,” Paul Schuster said, and let the door bang behind him.

Elena closed her eyes and tried to breathe deeply enough to relax the knot in her stomach. She could hear Paul Schuster inside, singing snatches from Carousel. In a locked rattan cabinet in his office he kept original-cast recordings of a number of Broadway musicals, worn LPs in mildewed sleeves, so scratched by now that he rarely played them but frequently sang them, particularly the lesser-known transitions, doing all the parts.

He’s dead, Nettie, what am I going to do, she heard him ask, soprano.

He seemed to be in the vicinity of his office.

Why, you’re going to stay here with me, she heard him answer himself, alto. Main thing is to keep on living, keep on caring what’s going to happen.

He seemed now to be in the kitchen.

“Paul has a genuine theatrical flair,” she heard Bob Weir say.

She said nothing.

“ ‘Neh-ver, no neh-ver, walk ah-lone,’ ” Paul Schuster was singing as he returned. He was carrying a full pitcher of punch. “All’s well that ends well. We dine at eight-thirty.”

“Maybe I should have mentioned this before,” Bob Weir said. “I didn’t come by to eat.”

Elena said nothing.

“I’ve lived down here long enough to know,” Paul Schuster had said. “Sometimes you have to take a strong position. Isn’t that so, Elise?”

Elena said that she supposed it was so.

Paul Schuster picked up the pitcher of punch and filled his glass.

Elena said no more for me thank you.

Paul Schuster wheeled to face Elena. “Who asked you,” he said.

“You’re driving the cattle right through the fence,” Bob Weir said to Paul Schuster.

“I think you must be stupid,” Paul Schuster had said to Elena. He was standing over her, holding the pitcher of punch. “Are you stupid? Just how stupid are you? Are you stupid enough to just sit there while I do this?”

She looked up at him just in time to get the full stream of punch in her eyes.

“And since you’re the one drove the cattle through it,” she heard Bob Weir say to Paul Schuster, “you better goddamn well mend it.”

She had gotten up, the sticky punch still running down her hair and face, her eyes stinging from the citrus, and walked into the empty hotel and up the stairs. That was the night she stood in the rusted bathtub and let the shower run over her for a full ten minutes, the drought and the empty cistern and the well going dry notwithstanding. That was also the night she called Catherine at the house in Malibu and told her that she would try to be home before school started.

“Home where,” Catherine had asked, wary.

There had been a silence.

“Home wherever you are,” Elena had said finally.

After she hung up she pulled a chair to the window and sat in the dark, looking out at the sea. At one point she heard raised voices downstairs, and then the sound of cars backing out the gravel driveway.

More than one car.

Two cars.

Paul Schuster was still downstairs, she could hear him.

Which meant that someone other than Bob Weir must have come by.

She told herself that Paul Schuster had been drinking and would apologize in the morning, that whatever the business about the airport had been it was something between him and Bob Weir and whoever else had arrived after she came upstairs, nothing to do with her, but when she woke in the morning she played back in her mind the sound of the raised voices. She had been listening the night before for Bob Weir’s voice and she had been listening the night before for Paul Schuster’s voice but only when she woke in the morning was she able to separate out a third voice.

My understanding is that Dick McMahon will not be a problem.

Transit passenger, not our deal.

It was when she separated out the voice of the Salvadoran that she understood that she would need to find someplace else to stay.

Someplace where the airport would not be an issue.

Whatever the issue was.

Someplace where the Salvadoran would not appear.

Someplace where she would not have to see Paul Schuster.

Someplace where he could not find out who she was.

At the time later that morning when Treat Morrison walked into the Intercon coffee shop and saw Elena McMahon sitting alone at the round table set for eight there remained a number of things she did not understand.

The first thing Elena McMahon did not understand was that Paul Schuster already knew who she was.

Paul Schuster had known all along who she was.

She was Dick McMahon’s daughter.

She was who they had to front the deal since they did not have Dick McMahon.

Paul Schuster had known this ever since Bob Weir told him to hire her.

Told him to hire her and send her to the airport every morning.

Send her to the airport every morning to establish a pattern.

A pattern that would coincide with Alex Brokaw’s weekly trips to San José.

Until now, Paul Schuster had always done what Bob Weir told him to do. The reason Paul Schuster had always done what Bob Weir told him to do (until now) was that Bob Weir had knowledge of certain minor drug deals in which Paul Schuster had been involved. This knowledge on Bob Weir’s part had seemed to Paul Schuster more significant than it might have seemed because one of the federal agencies with which Bob Weir had a connection was the Drug Enforcement Administration.

However.

This knowledge was not in the end sufficiently significant to ensure that Paul Schuster would have gone to the airport with Elena McMahon on that particular morning.

And believe me, there’s still a big if in this situation, and the big if is moi.

Paul Schuster might not be the smartest nelly on the block, but when he saw a hint he knew how to take it.

Pas de airport.

What had been meant to happen at the airport that morning was something else Elena McMahon did not understand.

Treat Morrison understood more.

Treat Morrison understood for example that “Bob Weir” was the name used in this part of the world by a certain individual who, were he to reenter the United States, would face outstanding charges for exporting weapons in violation of five federal statutes. Treat Morrison also understood that this certain individual, whose actual name as entered in the charges against him was Max Epperson, could not in fact, for this and other reasons, reenter the United States.

What Treat Morrison understood was a good deal more than what Elena McMahon understood, but in the end Treat Morrison still did not understand enough. Treat Morrison did not for example understand that Max Epperson, also known as “Bob Weir,” had in fact reentered the United States, and quite recently.

Max Epperson had reentered the United States by the process, actually not all that uncommon, known as “going in black,” making prior covert arrangement to circumvent normal immigration procedures.

First in the early spring of 1984, and a second time in June of 1984, Max Epperson had reentered the United States without passing through immigration control, entering in the first instance via a military plane that landed at Homestead AFB and in the second via a commercial flight to Grand Cayman and a United States Coast Guard vessel into the Port of Miami. The first reentry had been for the express purpose of setting up a certain deal with a longtime partner. The second reentry had been for the express purpose of confirming this deal.

Making sure that this deal would go down on schedule and as planned.

Ensuring that the execution of the deal would leave no window for variation from its intention.

Impressing the urgency of this on Dick McMahon.

Max Epperson’s longtime partner.

Max Epperson’s old friend.

Who needs the goombahs, we got our own show right here.

Max Epperson’s backup in uncounted deals, including the ones on which he faced charges.

Somebody had to talk reason to Epperson, Dick McMahon had said to Elena the first morning at Jackson Memorial. Epperson could queer the whole deal, Epperson was off the reservation, didn’t know the first thing about the business he was in.

It will have occurred to you that Max Epperson, in order to so reenter the United States, in order to go in black, necessarily had the cooperation of a federal agency authorized to conduct clandestine operations. As far as Treat Morrison went, it would have gone without saying that Max Epperson could have had the cooperation of a federal agency authorized to conduct clandestine operations. Max Epperson would naturally have been transformed, at the time the federal weapons charges were brought against him, into a professional informant, an asset for hire. The transformation of Max Epperson into the professional known as “Bob Weir” would have been the purpose in bringing the charges in the first place. This was an equation Treat Morrison, distracted or not distracted, could have done in his sleep. What Treat Morrison had failed to figure was the extent to which his seeing Elena McMahon in the Intercon coffee shop would modify the equation.

She would still be the front, but Alex Brokaw would no longer be the target.

I’m not sure I know what business Epperson is in, she had said to her father that morning at Jackson Memorial.

Christ, what business are they all in, her father had said to her.