The Last Thing He Wanted

1

When I look back now on, what happened I see mainly fragments, flashes, a momentary phantasmagoria in which everyone focused on some different aspect and nobody at all saw the whole.

I had been down there only two days when it happened.

Treat Morrison had not wanted me to come down at all.

I had told him before he left Washington that in order to write the piece I wanted to write it would be essential to see him in action, see him in situ, observe him inserting himself into a certain kind of situation. He had seemed at the time to concede the efficacy of such a visit, but any such concession had been, I realized quite soon, only in principle.

Only in the abstract.

Only until he got down there.

When I called to say-that I was coming down he did not exactly put me off, but neither did he offer undue encouragement.

Actually it was turning out to be kind of a fluid situation, he said on the telephone.

Actually he wasn’t certain how long he’d be there.

Actually if he was there at all, he was going to be pretty much tied up.

Actually we could talk a hell of a lot more productively in Washington.

I decided to break the impasse.

At that time I happened to own a few shares of Morrison Knudsen stock, and it had recently occurred to me, when I received an annual report mentioning Morrison Knudsen’s role in a new landing facility under construction on the island, that this otherwise uninteresting island to which Treat Morrison had so abruptly decamped might be about to become a new Ilopango, a new Palmerola, a staging area for the next transformation of the war we were not fighting.

I looked at the clock, then asked Treat Morrison about the landing facility.

He was silent for exactly seven seconds, the length of time it took him to calculate that I would be more effectively managed if allowed to come down than left on my own reading annual reports.

But hell, he said then. It’s your ticket, it’s a free country, you do what you want.

What I did not know even after I got there was that the reason he had resisted my visit was in this instance not professional but personal. Because by seven o’clock on the evening of the day he arrived, although only certain people at the embassy knew it, Treat Morrison had managed to meet the woman he had seen eight hours before in the Intercon coffee shop. Two hours after that, he knew enough about her situation to place the call to Washington that got the DIA agent down in the morning.

That was the difference between him and the Harvard guys.

He listened.

2

I have no idea what was in her mind when she told him who she was.

Which she flat-out did. Volunteered it.

She was not Elise Meyer, she was Elena McMahon.

She told him that within less than a minute after she went upstairs to his room with him that evening.

Maybe she recognized him from around Washington, maybe she thought he might recognize her from around Washington, maybe she had been feral too long, alert in the wild too long.

Maybe she just looked at him and she trusted him. Because believe me, Elena McMahon had no particular reason, at that particular moment, to tell a perfect stranger, a perfect stranger who had for reasons she did not know approached her in the lobby of the Intercon, what she had not told anyone else.

I mean she had no idea in the world that had she gone to the airport at ten that morning Alex Brokaw would have been dead that night.

Of course Alex Brokaw was at the airport at ten, because he had delayed his weekly flight to San José in order to brief Treat Morrison.

Of course Alex Brokaw was still alive that night, because Dick McMahon’s daughter had not been at the airport.

Of course.

We now know that, but she did not.

I mean she knew nothing.

She did not know that the Salvadoran whose voice she had most recently heard the night before trying to mediate whatever the argument had been between Paul Schuster and Bob Weir was Bob Weir’s old friend from San Salvador, Colonel Álvaro García Steiner.

Deal me out, Paul Schuster had kept saying. Just deal me out.

You have a problem, Bob Weir had kept saying.

There is no problem, the Salvadoran had kept saying.

She did not even know that Paul Schuster had died that morning in his office at the Surfrider. According to the local police, who as it happened were now receiving the same training in counterterrorism from Colonel Álvaro García Steiner that Colonel Álvaro García Steiner had received from the Argentinians, there was no evidence that anyone else had been present in the office in the hours immediately preceding or following the death. Toxicological studies suggested an overdose of secobarbital.

It was late that first day, when he came back to the Intercon from the embassy, that Treat Morrison again noticed the woman he had seen that morning in the coffee shop.

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

It 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

AMERICAN 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.

Colonel Álvaro García Steiner had also been in the waiting room, watching warily from a sagging sofa as the local police spokesman was interviewed by a San Juan television channel.

The paper was lying on a molded plastic chair and was folded open to this story.

As I picked it up I happened to look out the window behind Colonel Álvaro García Steiner and see the helicopter, just lifting off the lawn.

I walked to the elevator and got on it and started to read the story as the elevator descended.

The elevator had stopped to pick someone up on the third floor when I hit the name of the American implicated in the attempted assassination.

Academy Award night, two and a half years before.

Was the last time I saw her.

Said to have been using the name Elise Meyer.

Embassy sources confirmed however that her actual name was Elena McMahon.

Reports that the suspected assassin had been supplying arms and other aid to the Sandinista government in Nicaragua remain unconfirmed.

Until the next day, when Bob Weir happened to find himself in a position to provide the manifests that detailed the shipments that happened to coincide with weapons recently seized in a raid against a Sandinista arms cache.

Also fortuitously.

Since the manifests confirmed the reports that the suspected assassin had been supplying arms and other aid to the Sandinista government in Nicaragua.

The reports that had been further corroborated by the discovery of Sandinista literature in two adjoining rooms at the Surfrider Hotel recently vacated by the would-be assassin.

Immediately and incontrovertibly confirmed.

Immediately and incontrovertibly corroborated.

Which of course was the burden of the second AP story.

6

I magine how this went down.

She would have come out of the Aero Sands.

At the certain point just past the pool where it was possible to get a partial view of the path on the bluff she would have glanced up.

She would not have seen Treat Morrison.

She would have passed the woman who pushed the old man in the wheelchair and the baby in the stroller and she would have nodded at the three of them and the baby would have turned to look at her and the old man would have touched his hat and she would have reached the last of the rickety wooden steps onto the beach before she realized that there had been a man on the bluff and that she had seen the man before.

She would have not even consciously registered seeing the man on the bluff, she would have registered only that she had seen him before.

The man on the bluff with the ponytail.

The man at the landing strip in Costa Rica.

I could be overdue a night or two in Josie.

Anyone asks, tell them you’re waiting for Mr. Jones.

You’re doing nothing. What I’m doing doesn’t concern you.

She had not registered seeing him but something about seeing him had slowed motion just perceptibly, twenty-four frames a second now reduced to twenty. The baby had turned too slowly.

As in the hour before our death.

The old man in the wheelchair had lifted his hand to his hat too slowly.

As in the hour before our death.

She did not want to look back but finally she did.

When she heard the shots.

When she saw Treat Morrison fall.

When she saw the man on the bluff turn to her.

You get it one way or you get it another, nobody comes through free.

7

After the two AP stories the story stopped, dropped into a vacuum.

No mention.

Off the screen.

That the intended political consequences never materialized was evidence, in retrospect, that Treat Morrison had not entirely lost his game.

“I mean it was just all wrong,” he said to me. “It would have been just plain bad for the country.”

I suggested that he had not done it for the country.

I suggested that he had done it for her.

He did not look directly at me. “It was just all wrong,” he repeated.

Only once, a year or so later, did Treat Morrison almost break down.

Almost broke down in such a predictable way that I did not even bother recording what he said in my notes. I remember him talking again about being distracted and I remember him talking again about not concentrating and I recall him talking again about that dipshit kid never getting south of Dulles.

Goddamn, he kept saying.

You think you have it covered and you find out you don’t have it covered worth a goddamn.

Because believe me this was just one hell of a bad outcome.

The last outcome you would have wanted.

If you’d been me in this deal.

Which of course you weren’t.

So you have no real way of understanding.

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

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

So Treat Morrison told me.

The very last time we spoke.

8

Treat Morrison died four years later, at age fifty-nine, a cerebral hemorrhage on a ferry from Larnaca to Beirut. When I heard this I remembered a piece by J. Anthony Lukas in the New York Times about a conference, sponsored by the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, at which eight members of the Kennedy administration gathered at an old resort hotel in the Florida Keys to reassess the 1962 Cuban missile crisis.

The hotel was pink.

There was a winter storm off the Caribbean.

Theodore Sorensen swam with the dolphins. Robert McNamara expressed surprise that CINCSAC had sent out the DEFCON 2 alert instructions uncoded, in the clear, so that the Soviets would pick them up. Meetings were scheduled to leave afternoon hours for tennis doubles. Douglas Dillon and his wife and George Ball and his wife and McNamara and Arthur Schlesinger ate together by candlelight in the main dining room. Communications were received from Maxwell Taylor and Dean Rusk, too ill to attend.

When I read this piece I imagined the storm continuing.

The power failing, the tennis balls long since dead, the candles blowing out at the table in the main dining room where Douglas Dillon and his wife and George Ball and his wife and Robert McNamara and Arthur Schlesinger are sitting (not eating, no dinner has arrived, no dinner will arrive), the pale linen curtains in the main dining room blowing out, the rain on the parquet floor, the isolation, the excitement, the tropical storm.

Imperfect memories.

Time yet for a hundred indecisions.

A hundred visions and revisions.

When Treat Morrison died it occurred to me that I would like to have seen just such a reassessment of what he might have called (did in fact call) certain actions taken in 1984 in the matter of what later became known as the lethal, as opposed to the humanitarian, resupply.

Imperfect memories of the certain incident that should not have occurred and could not have been predicted.

By any quantitative measurement.

I would like to have seen such a reassessment take place at the same hotel in the Keys, the same weather, the same mangroves clattering, the same dolphins and the same tennis doubles, the same possibilities. I would like to have seen them all gathered there, old men in the tropics, old men in lime-colored pants and polo shirts and golf hats, old men at a pink hotel in a storm.

Of course Treat Morrison would have been there.

And when he went upstairs and opened the door to his room Elena McMahon would have been there.

Sitting on the balcony in her nightgown.

Watching the storm on the water.

And if you are about to say that if Elena McMahon was upstairs in this pink hotel there would have been no reason for the conference, no incident, no subject, no reason at all: Just file and forget.

As Mark Berquist would say.

Because of course Elena would have been there.

I want those two to have been together all their lives.

23 January 1996