Valley of the Templars

27

“As Benjamin Disraeli, the British prime minister, once said a long time ago, ‘The world is governed by very different personages from what is imagined by those who are not behind the scenes.’ How true it is,” sighed J. Hunter Kokum, the sixty-three-year-old national security adviser to the president, magically elevated to that position after the untimely retirement of the previous adviser, General George Armstrong Temple, for “reasons of health,” a common White House ailment that seemed to bring down so many great men. Perhaps, Kokum thought, smiling, it was some kind of power flu that only people in high positions caught.

Behind Kokum’s back in the hallowed halls of the White House West Wing, Kokum was often called the Gray Ghost. His hair was gray, his suit was gray and his face was gray. He even wore a gray silk tie and had a gray silk puff in the breast pocket of his jacket. He wore gray eel-skin Romano loafers and carried a Geoffrey Beene stingray-skin billfold, also gray. This led to his other nickname, Reptile Man, which he rather favored for its superhero overtones.

Kokum left his office, turned right and trotted up the short flight of steps. He passed the closed door of the vice president’s Ceremonial Office-rarely used-passed the closed door of the vice president’s secretary-rarely there-and turned into Harley McGraw’s office, the president’s chief of staff.

Unlike Kokum’s tornado-struck office, McGraw’s office was as neat as a pin, and so was McGraw. He was the same age as Kokum but much more robust. He had a wide face, a three-quarters bald head and the broad nose of a sixth-generation Mick from Chicago, which is exactly what he was.

His grandfather had been a cop, his father had been a cop and, not one to be typecast, Harley McGraw became a banker, and a good one. By the time he was thirty he was a millionaire, by the time he was forty he was the whispering wizard giving the mayor a direction to go in and by the time he was sixty he was another kind of wizard, whispering into the ear of a presidential candidate.

The whispers must have been the right ones, because his candidate won and he was made secretary of commerce for his efforts. During the wholesale slaughter of the West Wing staff after what had become known as the Kremlin Khristmas and with the elections looming, the president, like every other president before him, wanted Chicago in his pocket, so Harley McGraw was made chief of staff.

“So,” said Kokum, sitting down across the wide desk from McGraw. “Who would have figured it? Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, she walks into mine.”

“Our friend the doctor was a plant, I understand.”

“Looks that way, although I can’t get in touch with Patchin; he’s pulling one of his cloak-and-dagger things. It looks like that Pilkington girl of his was right from the start-he was never a defector at all.”

“Smart to lay it off on the Brits. He comes under the auspices of MI6 all wrapped up with a ribbon and a bow.”

“They knew which beaches we were going to hit in the Bay of Pigs before we did. Every president since Eisenhower has thought of them as uneducated peasants, but these guys have been around since Columbus. Havana was a thriving city when Peter Minuit picked up Manhattan from the Indians for next to nothing.”

McGraw sighed and leaned back in his chair. “I would have thought it was going to be Pakistan, or Yemen, or even Iran, but Cuba?”

“Americans don’t like thinking about Cuba,” said Kokum, who’d thought a lot about the subject recently. “In the schoolyard when you get tricked out of your lunch money by the smart kid, the bully gets upset. We had our favorite Christmas toy stolen and Fidel won’t give it back.”

“And we can’t take it back because that would make us bullies,” said McGraw. “The old bastard with the beard really put one over on us.”

“I’m not quite so sure of that,” pondered Kokum. “Since Kennedy’s promise that the United States would never invade Cuba and the embargo after the missile crisis, think what it’s done for the economy. It’s perfect protectionism. Under the mask of political idealism the embargo keeps Florida and Louisiana sugarcane growers happy, not to mention Hawaii. It protects the California produce industry-it would be a hell of a lot cheaper to ship avocados and tomatoes and all sorts of other fruit and produce ninety miles across the Florida Straits rather than three thousand miles across a continent. Not to mention keeping Las Vegas and Atlantic City and all those idiotic Indian casinos alive and kicking.”

“So we just let Cuba die a natural death?” McGraw asked, lightly scratching the top of his shiny bald skull.

“It’s not going to be a natural death. It’s going to be a bloody palace coup and maybe even another revolution. There’s a group of rebels in the mountains who call themselves Zapatistas after some dissident who starved himself. They seem to be doing some serious damage. It’s starting to look like we might have a brand-new Libya right in our own backyard.”

“And no chance of a coalition to go in and calm things down, I suppose.”

“Who?” Kokum asked. “Half the tourists in Veradero are Canadians, Mexico is so corrupt we could never trust a word they said, Venezuela hates our guts and Brazil and Argentina could give a shit. Who do we join up with, the Barbados? The British Virgin Islands? Haiti maybe?”

“So you’re telling me we’re going to have a military dictatorship down there for another fifty years?”

“Or a series of them,” said Kokum.

“Who gets to tell the president?” McGraw asked. “This could be worse than the BP spill, and in an election year. Shit!”

“You’re the chief of staff,” said Kokum. “You tell him.”

“You’re the national security adviser. You tell him.”

“I’ll flip you for it,” suggested Kokum.

“We’ll both tell him.”

“Jesus wept,” said Colonel Frank Turturro, staring down at the hideous image on his iPad. The image, sent from the Desert Hawk III mini-drone he’d sent out twenty-four hours after the last time his men had reported in, left nothing to the imagination. The men, all equipped with under-the-skin RFID-Radio Frequency Identification Devices-in their biceps, had led the tiny drone to them within half an hour of the aircraft’s launch.

The pictures had been uploaded to the requisite satellite, the signal boosted to take it to the Blackhawk Security Systems Compound War Room and then relayed back to him. The three headless corpses were barely identifiable, but the heads weren’t decomposed enough to make it impossible, despite the spawning maggots: the one on the left was Nick Cavan, the one in the middle was a corporal named Dick Rush and the third man was Toby Greer, an old combat veteran Turturro had worked with in Afghanistan. There was no sign of Anthony Veccione, the “Therapist.”

“Do we have a signal on Master Sergeant Veccione?”

“Yes, sir,” said the young communications officer standing stiffly at attention in the camouflaged operations tent. “Loud and clear, sir.”

“Good, get me a GPS fix on him as soon as possible. If he’s heading back in this direction, I want an escort sent to meet him along with a medic.”

“Yes, sir. Anything else, sir?”

“Yes,” said Turturro, thinking hard. “Send me Ed Broadbent.” Broadbent was the best of the Tucano pilots. If anyone could find the son of a bitch who’d desecrated his men’s bodies, it was him.

The old man with the frayed straw hat and wearing the white cotton shirt and the torn cotton pants sat sidesaddle on the swayback of the tired-looking gray burro, giving it an occasional slap across the neck with a long willow switch when it began to slow as it shuffled slowly along the dusty road carrying its bound bundle of cane across its ancient rump.

The burro-whose name was Graciano, which meant “pleasing and agreeable,” which he was not-came to a dead halt when he saw the four people step out of the jungle and onto the road. Three men and a woman, all heavily armed with very modern-looking weapons. The neg carried a very old machete in his belt that was brown with rust or dried blood, and the blanco pirata with the ruined face had a large knife in a sheath.

The old man, whose name was Federico Fernandez Cavada, stared at the four people and wondered for a moment if this was the day God wished him to die. He mentally shrugged his shoulders. Who cared? He had lived in the world longer than he could remember, had a wife, watched her die, had children, watched them forget where they came from, heard of a revolution that was supposed to change his world but had done nothing one way or another, even heard stories of men on the moon and Cubans on the teams of the American major leagues, but what of it? If God meant him to die today, then so be it, as long as somebody took care to feed Graciano.

“Senores buenos dias y la dama,” said Federico politely.

The black one answered, “Good day to you, as well, my friend.” He smiled.

Federico found it somewhat interesting that the man did not call him “Comrade” as the officials in Hatillo or Moron did, but then again, it had been a long time since he had been to either one of those places. Maybe things had changed. It was also interesting that the man’s accent marked him as originally coming from Havana. He decided to remark on it.

“You are a long way from home, my friend,” said Federico.

Graciano’s body squirmed and he farted, then blew air from his nostrils. “This is true, but I would very much like to know how far away I am.”

“And how could I tell you that?” Federico said.

“If you told me where I was, then I would know,” said the black man.

“You are lost?” Federico said, a little incredulous. What were people like this doing lost in the jungle?

“We are lost and hungry,” said the black man.

“There is lots of food to be had in the jungle for people with such weapons as yours.”

“We have been trying to be discreet in our movements, old grandfather.”

Federico nodded. They were being pursued by others like them. He would be a fool to put himself between such people, but the black man was very polite and it was obvious he was well educated. “Who looks for you?”

“Bad men, old grandfather,” said the black man.

And there was the age-old question of course, thought Federico. Bad men never thought they were bad, but everyone thought they were good. “And how am I to know that you are not the bad men and the people pursuing you the good?”

“You are a wise man, old grandfather, to ask such a question, but the answer is an easy one.”

“And what is the answer?”

“If we were the bad people, we would have blown you off your old burro by now and butchered his stringy old flesh for our dinner.”

The black man smiled.

Federico smiled. “That is a good answer,” he said. “Come with me to my home and we will talk and I will give you some food.” He put the willow switch lightly to Graciano’s neck and the burro moved slowly off again. Eddie and the others fell in behind him.

“That didn’t sound like any Spanish I ever heard,” whispered Carrie.

“That’s because it wasn’t Spanish-it was Cuban Creole,” said Black. “It’s the second language here and it goes back a long way.”

“Could you understand what Eddie was saying?”

“No, but it was obviously all the right things.”