I said, “Your bosses figured that a wife would say or do anything for her husband. As simple as that.”
She sighed and nodded, nestled against me, one full breast mashed against my chest. She smelled great—no perfume, just a freshly scrubbed scent.
“It was all I could do,” she said, “all I could risk, to conduct an after-hours, off-the-books investigation. There are two things that I think will shock you. First, on the money-truck heist—”
“There was an inside man. A government traitor.”
The natural long lashes were tiny whips as she blinked at me. “What? How did you—”
“The route the armored car took from the Washington mint to New York was top secret. Standard operating procedure would be to have at least three such routes, and alternate in a shifting, unknowable pattern. Same goes for when the truck would leave and be scheduled for arrival. Also, the knowledge that this particular shipment would be forty million in common bills, nothing over a fifty. You don’t pull down a score like that without inside information.”
She was smiling, more admiration than love in it, and her head was shaking. “You are one smart bastard, Morgan. You’ve known this all along?”
“Oh, only since the day I heard they were after me. But for me, it’s a theory. You sound like you’re passing along a fact.”
The almond eyes narrowed. “I can’t say that it’s a fact of the kind that might hold up in court—not yet. And the people I talked to are unlikely to go on the record. But let me just say that you’re in the right city for us to be having this conversation.”
I frowned. “Sounds more likely to be a Washington D.C. conversation than a Miami one.”
“No, Miami all the way....Morg, I believe that forty mil was a very inside job. That it was a CIA black op.”
“What?”
Now she had surprised me.
“That money,” she said, “was earmarked for the Cuban freedom fighters’ cause. Just a few years ago, remember, the Company was funding and shaping the efforts to take Castro down, but it was strictly sub rosa—the White House starting with Vice President Nixon and on to both JFK and his attorney general brother knew all about it, from exploding cigars designed to kill Castro to the secret commando training camps in the Florida Everglades...all of it top secret.”
I was ahead of her now. “But then the Bay of Pigs came along, and the Cuban Missile Crisis, and—”
“And the president shot down in a Dallas street, and all of the plans to assassinate Castro and invade Cuba became a political embarrassment, a Cold War liability. If Castro had JFK killed, nobody wanted to say so—at best, it meant that embarrassing proof we’d been plotting to kill a foreign leader would come out, and at worst that a hailstorm of nukes would fall all over the world.”
“Wait,” I said, and I touched her hand, squeezed it. “The money-truck heist—that was well after the Kennedy hit. All of these Cuba plans would have been shut down by then.”
She nodded. “Yes, but there were rogue elements within the Company that still wanted those efforts to move forward. That forty-million-dollar heist was a last ditch effort by those forces to fund an invasion of Cuba by Cuban exiles.”
“Actually a noble cause,” I said, then rolled my eyes. “All except for the part where Morgan the Raider gets framed for the heist.”
“That was a genius stroke,” Kim said, with a wry half-smile. “Somebody must have enlisted your crew and either painted it as a money-making effort, or possibly brought them in as patriots. You were all highly decorated heroes of the European theater.”
“They would have come aboard as patriots,” I said, “stand-up guys willing to re-up with Uncle Sam for one last mission...with one exception—the son of a bitch who wound up with the money. A man who had been disfigured in the war and felt his government owed him in a big way. The man you heard confess, Kim. The man I shot on a windy runway in Nuevo Cadiz.”
Kim had nodded all through that, but now she held my eyes with so much concern in hers, I knew something bad was coming.
She said, “I agree with your high assessment of the character of your old war buddies...with that one notable exception. But Morgan...I’m sorry to have to tell you this...your friend, Art Keefer—last surviving member of your original Army heist crew—was killed last month.”
“Shit,” I said. I felt like I’d taken a body blow. “How?”
Art had helped us with surreptitious transport on the Nuevo Cadiz mission, but I’d stayed out of contact with him since, for his own protection—or anyway, what I’d thought was his own protection.
“A plane crash,” she said. “He was a pilot—what better way? Pilot error, they say, flying one of his small aircraft.”
“In a pig’s ass,” I said.
“You said Art wasn’t in on that forty-million haul, Morgan ...but are you sure?”
“I guess under the circumstances, I can’t be. Maybe that’s why Art helped me out when he shouldn’t have risked it—maybe he felt bad that I wound up blamed for a score I had nothing to do with.”
“But a score somebody signed your name to,” Kim said. “What about the other two on your crew?”
“Deceased. You know that.”
“Just in the last couple of years, right? Again, well after the money-truck heist? Meaning everybody on your crew but you, Morg, is dead now.”
I frowned, thinking it through. “One died of cancer, the other in an automobile accident—I never considered their deaths might have been liquidations.”
She cocked her head, raised an eyebrow. “The Company has given more people cancer than Phillip Morris. And do I have to tell you that a car crash can be staged?”
I shook my head. “Damn. I should have seen that. Damn!”
“Don’t beat yourself up—until Keefer’s convenient death, I didn’t put it together, either.”
She stroked my cheek. Kissed me with a tenderness that made my heart ache almost as much as something else was aching.
“Darling,” she said, “we’ve both been working on this, from our respective positions. I know what you’ve been doing, all these months. Besides keeping your head down, you’ve been moving from coastal city to coastal city, going to museums and rare book stores and university libraries, tracking your namesake....”
“Sir Henry Morgan,” I said, nodding. “Before I shot my old buddy in the head, back in Nuevo Cadiz, he said he’d hidden the forty mil where Sir Henry kept his treasure. I figure the original Morgan’s treasure is long gone, but my old pal found one of the treasure hideaways and buried the loot. I have half a dozen good leads to track down between Panama and Jamaica.”
“Find that money,” she said, “and turn it in, and with my testimony to back you up, you’re a free man again. No more federal hounds on your trail.”
“Right.”
“But, darling, don’t you see, there’s another way...expose the government traitor who set you up! And I believe the name of that traitor can be found, right here in Miami.”
I squinted at her, as if I were trying to bring that lovely face into sharper focus. “You said you were deep cover. What are you doing in Miami?”
“You and I are after the same prey—Jaimie Halaquez, the man who raided the treasury of the Cuban exiles here.”
“I thought the CIA was out of the Cuba business.”
“Overtly we are. Even covertly, not so much now. But these people were our allies, are our allies, and we keep an eye on them, their activities, and those who move against them. And they have something in common with the Company that I work for—they, too, have a traitor in their midst.”