He showed his laminated badge to the MP at the gate. The badge was coded to reveal to the trained eye just how much clearance the owner had. After his letter of reprimand, Parmenter had been assigned to what was joshingly called the slave directorate, a support division of clandestine services, and he'd been issued a new badge with a diminished number of little red letters around the edges. His wife said, "How many letters do you have to lose before you disappear?"
T. J. Mackey was waiting at the gatehouse. He wore well-pressed fatigues and had the distant look of a doorman in a gold coat outside a new hotel. Basically he doesn't want his friends to see him.
He took Parrnenter to the JOT area, where junior officer trainees received instruction in everything from the paramilitary arts to counterintelligence. They sat alone in one of four sections of bleacher seats that formed an amphitheater over a pit area. Two young men were grappling in the dust. An instructor circled them in a busy way, speaking a language Larry did not recognize.
"Things broke our way early," he said to Mackey, "but we've reached a static period."
"I've been in touch with Guy Banister."
"Camp Street."
"That's the one. He talked to the Dallas field office of the FBI about this Oswald. They finally got him an answer. He left Dallas April twenty-four or twenty-five."
"There's a Russian wife."
"Left Dallas May ten with their baby."
"Nobody knows where."
"That's right."
"Which leaves us groping."
"I thought you had a line of communication."
"George de Mohrenschildt. But he's in Haiti. Besides I don't want him to know how interested we are in Oswald."
"How interested are we?"
"He sounds right, politically and otherwise. Win wants a shooter with credentials. He's an ex-Marine. I managed to get access to his M-l scorebook and other records."
"Can he shoot?"
"It's a little confusing. The more I study the records, the more I think we need an interpreter. He was generally rated poor. But it looks like he did his best work the day he fired for qualification. He got a two-twelve rating that day, which makes him a sharpshooter. Except they gave him a lower designation. So either the number is wrong or the designation is wrong."
"Or the kid cheated."
"There's something else we ought to discuss, although I told Win it seems way too soon. Accidental hits."
"You want a realistic-looking thing. That means multiple rounds flying from a number of directions."
"Win says hit the presidential limousine, hit the pavement, hit a Secret Service man. Just don't shoot anyone in the car."
"Hit a Secret Service man."
"Hit, don't kill."
"This isn't a controlled experiment," Mackey said.
"If at all possible, you try to wound one of the men in the follow-up car. The way these things work, there are two agents on each running board of the follow-up car. That's four dangling men. And the car is going about twelve miles an hour. And it's only five feet behind the presidential car, which makes it perfectly plausible, an agent taking a bullet meant for the President."
"Where do we do it?"
"Miami."
"Good enough."
"If at all possible, that's where Win says we do it."
"It ought to be Miami."
"Definitely."
"Agreed."
"Sooner or later the President will take a swing through Florida. All the political signs point that way."
Two more young men entered the pit. Mackey said they were South Vietnamese being trained for the secret police. Foreigners attending sessions at the Farm were known as black trainees. A few of them, on sensitive assignments, had been brought to the U.S. under conditions so secure, according to Mackey, that the men did not necessarily know what country they were in. Larry thought this was farfetched. Look at the damn trees, you know you're in Virginia. But he was careful to say nothing to T-Jay. T-Jay was not to be disputed on subjects central to his interests.
He told Parmenter he would stay in close touch with Guy Banister. Banister's detective agency was the Grand Central Station of the Cuban adventure. Every type renegade passed through. Guy would help them locate a substitute for this kid who'd disappeared. Someone rated expert with a rifle and scope. A shooter who could blast a finger off a dangling man.
When Parmenter was gone, T-Jay sat in the bleachers watching the Vietnamese bounce each other around. The hot new station was Saigon. It was the talk around the base. They were putting Cuba in a box, which was okay with him. Let them forget. Let them find a new excitement. It would make the moment in Miami all the more powerful.
Some hours later Mackey was in his trailer in the woods outside Williamsburg. Light beams floated through the trees and then he heard the ghetto clank of Raymo's '57 Bel Air. He opened the trailer door and watched them get out, two men showing the stiff weighted movements of long-distance drivers.
Mackey said, "Just in time for dinner except there isn't any."
The words sounded abrupt and clean in the empty night.
"Maybe just a swallow. Un buchito," Raymo said. "We ate on the road."
The other man, Frank Vasquez, was occupied getting blankets and clothes out of the re'ar seat and then he backed out and stood erect and half turned, his hands occupied, and gave the door a rough shove with his hip and followed with a sweet kick, knocking it shut. Raymo, approaching the trailer, gave a little head-shake at the other man's treatment of the once-gorgeous car.
"Plenty of coffee," Mackey said. "Good to see you. How are things?"
"Good to see you. Long time. How are things?"
"Hello, T-Jay."
"Hello, Frank. I thought you were getting your teeth fixed."
"He never does it," Raymo said.
They embraced, pounding each other on the back, abrazos, absent-minded collisions.
"How are things?"
"Long time."
"Too long, my friend."
Standing by the trailer door exchanging nods, looks, half-sentences, everything so clearly shaped, their words sounding well made in the fine light air.
Mackey made room for their things in the trailer. Then they sat drinking coffee. Raymo was at the fold-out table, a thickset man with a wide mustache. He wore a black cowboy hat, black T-shirt, fatigue pants, combat boots. His lounging outfit. Mackey definitely wanted Raymo in on this. Raymo could not light a match, walk his dog, scratch his head without infusing the act with the single-minded energy of his rage. It was a consciousness they shared un-spokenly, Bahia de Cochinos, the Bay of Pigs, the Battle of Giron- whatever you wanted to call it. Even his stockiness, all that dense flesh, seemed a form of energy and purpose. A flamingo was etched on his T-shirt. He was the one man T-Jay trusted completely.
"We spent part of April with the harvest."
"Picking oranges in central Florida," Frank said.
"We fill ten-box tubs. How many pounds you think that is?"
"He fell off the ladder," Frank said.
"I'm telling you, man, it's hard labor."
"Then what, we go to Live Oak- near the Georgia border."
"We stack these huge bales of tobacco," Raymo said. "Like in huge sheets they're called. They work our ass, T-Jay."
Mackey knew they were working every job they could, night work, spare time, odd job, to save enough money to start a business, maybe a service station or small construction firm.
"Then my wife calls us from Miami," Frank said. "We drive up here right away."
Drive through Georgia and the Carolinas to hear what news T-Jay has for them. It could only be a Cuban operation. Nothing else would make him get in touch with them and nothing else would bring them here.