At least, Belac reasoned at once, he had the authority to buy in addition and in excess of his thirty-five-million-dollar advance. Which he resolved to do; he would purchase a vast amount of Czech small arms and ten of the fifty tanks that were not coming from America but from a German arms dealer who had them available for sale. They were far cheaper than he’d have to pay for the American vehicles; Belac guessed $10,000 a tank, although, of course, he wouldn’t tell Rivera that. Belac reckoned that as he was taking the risk, by using his own money, then his should be the unexpected and unshared profit.
Rivera remained with the arms dealer for less than an hour, walking back to the center of town, where he caught a taxi to the airport, boarding the midafternoon plane to London. There he was followed back into the city. He did not go to his Hampstead home but to a mews house in Pimlico that was already logged on the CIA’s watch list. It belonged to an aging, self-made English newspaper magnate named Sir William Blanchard. Inquiries showed that he was in Ottawa negotiating fresh newsprint prices with Canadian manufacturers. Lady Henrietta Blanchard, twenty-three years her husband’s junior, was at home, though.
It was nine A.M. the following morning before Rivera left.
SIX
THE HEAD of the CIA’s Plans Directorate was a barrel-chested, bull-necked Irishman named Gus McCarthy. He was thickly red-haired and had a heavily freckled face, with freckles on the back of his hands as well; they were also matted with more red hair. He looked like a barroom brawler—and was able to be—but his looks belied the man. He was a strategist capable of intricate and manipulative schemes, never concentrating upon an immediate operation to the exclusion of how it could be extended and utilized to its fullest advantage. He was perfectly matched by his deputy, Hank Sneider, a precise, slight man who had the ability to recognize the direction of McCarthy’s thoughts almost before the man completely explained them, and correct and improve upon the details. Their nicknames within the Langley headquarters were Mutt and Jeff. They knew it and weren’t offended; there were benefits to being underestimated.
“So what have we got?” McCarthy demanded, not seeking an answer. “One of the largest arms dealers in Europe, a Cuban ambassador who likes the good life, and a British newspaper owner.”
“I think to include the newspaper owner is confusing,” Sneider said. “Blanchard isn’t involved. Rivera’s just humping the wife is all.”
“Maybe not all,” McCarthy mused. “Couldn’t we use that? Blanchard’s got a hell of an empire: television stations and newspapers and magazines here as well as in Europe. Get ourselves a corner there and we’d have an incredible outlet for whatever we wanted to plant.”
They were in McCarthy’s seventh-floor office in the CIA building, high enough for a view of the Potomac glistening its way through the tree line. Sneider ignored the view, pouring coffee for both of them from the permanently steaming Cona machine. McCarthy consumed a minimum of ten cups a day. Sneider carried McCarthy’s mug back to the man’s desk and said, “It’s worth thinking through. But we could only achieve that by pressuring the old guy. The shit we’ve got is on the woman.”
“How much of a lever does she have on her old man?”
“Get things published the way we want, darling, or hubbie gets to know all the sordid details?” Sneider suggested.
“Something like that,” McCarthy agreed, appreciatively sipping. “Be nice to get a picture of her with her ass in the air.”
“Rivera’s too, in tandem.”
“They discreet?”
“Don’t appear to be, particularly. Rivera shacked up at the family home when the old guy was in Canada and she often accompanies him to polo matches. That’s his sport, polo.”
“So what’s that?” McCarthy asked, another rhetorical question. “Sheer couldn’t-give-a-damn carelessness? Arrogance? What?”
“Maybe Blanchard knows and doesn’t mind either,” Sneider speculated. “You know how it is with some old guys: all they want is a decoration on their arm and maybe an occasional feel in the sack to make sure it’s still there and working and the rest of the time the bimbo can party with whom she likes.”
“Difficult to turn that into an advantage,” McCarthy complained.
“What about cutting the deck a different way?” Sneider asked.
“Rivera?”
“Not exactly leading the life of José the Cane Cutter, is he?”
“What’s the objective?”
“Spy in the court of King Castro?”
“To be that Rivera’s got to be back in Havana,” McCarthy said. “Won’t work. To maneuver his recall we’d have to spread the word about his high life. So he goes back in disgrace and wouldn’t be in a position to give us anything anyway. And when we show him the pictures of himself and the lady, he says, ‘She was a good lay, so what?’ “
“So?”
“We divide it,” McCarthy decided. “Let’s message London to get as much dirt as possible on the two of them but not to spook Rivera. And run him and Belac quite separately.”
“Parallel surveillance is going to tie up a lot of manpower.”
“Belac’s big; the biggest. It could be worth it.”
“We going to seek British help?”
“No,” McCarthy said at once. “If it’s going to be big, let’s keep it nice and tight, just to ourselves.”
“Then the way in is through Belac,” the other man said. “There’s already a bunch of stuff on the guy; we’ve got a good handle on his sources. If we can find out what he wants, then it’ll give us an idea what Rivera could be ordering.”
“Belac’s the biggest?”
“Yes,” Sneider said, trying to tune in to the direction of McCarthy’s thinking.
“So logically whatever Rivera—whatever Cuba—wants is substantial,” McCarthy said. “If it were just the usual run-of-the-mill stuff, there’s a dozen smaller guys they could have bought from. Belac means it’s a huge order and that it’s the latest state-of-the-art matériel.”
“You talking Apocalypse?”
McCarthy got up to pour his own coffee this time, looking inquiringly toward his deputy, who shook his head in refusal. McCarthy returned to his high-backed chair and said, “The days of missile crises are over. I think Havana’s looking south, not north. We wont know until we get some idea just how substantial, but it’s got to be more than continuing support in Nicaragua; much more.”
Sneider gestured to indicate the building in which they were sitting. “Time to start spreading the news?”
“Not yet,” the Plans Director said. “There’s not enough news to spread; just speculation. But it’s definitely worth expending the manpower.”
“Most definitely,” agreed Sneider, all doubt gone now.
“And when we get it, we make the most extensive possible use of it,” McCarthy said. “Ripples upon ripples upon ripples.”
O’Farrell had expected his offer of financial support to meet a stronger argument from Ellen and decided with Jill that their daughter’s almost immediate acceptance showed just how desperate she had become. They agreed on $400 a month, and Billy had clung to his mother’s leg and wanted to know why she was crying. The car repairs cost $550, and before they left Chicago Jill went grocery shopping again, stocking up the cupboards and the deep-freeze. During their last conversation, after Sunday-morning church, Ellen said she’d sec her lawyer before the month was out.
They wrote as well as telephoned now, and that first week O’Farrell sent a long letter to John, in Phoenix, aware that the boy would not be able to offer Ellen any financial support but suggesting that his sister might like support of another kind, like a call or a letter. He didn’t say it outright but hoped his son would infer that the occasional checks would not be quite as much as they had been in the past. There was a reply practically by return. John said that what was happening in Billy’s school was nothing unusual and that they weren’t to worry. Jeff had actually come home one day and talked about being offered marijuana; he and Beth were pretty sure he hadn’t tried it but couldn’t be one-hundred-percent certain. John promised to write to Chicago every week, the way they were doing now, and added a postscript that the checks had always embarrassed him anyway and in the future he wouldn’t expect anything at all from his father.