The calls continued. Mr. Lee. Mr. Elman. Mr. Gordon. Someone was in Toronto and someone else was in Los Angeles and many people were in Miami. At four o’clock Elena heard the door buzz. At the moment she allowed herself to look up she saw Barry Sedlow, without breaking stride as he walked toward her, lay an envelope on the table next to the telephone the Salvadoran was using.
“Here is my concern,” the Salvadoran was saying into the telephone as he fingered the envelope. “Mr. Elman. You and I, we have confianza.” The Salvadoran placed the envelope in an inner pocket of his silk jacket. “But what I am being fed from Mr. Lee is a bunch of disinformation.”
Later in Barry Sedlow’s car on the way to Hialeah she had asked who the Salvadoran was.
“What made you think he was Salvadoran,” Barry Sedlow said.
She told him.
“Lot of people say they came up from San Salvador this morning, lot of people read Salvadoran papers, that doesn’t make them Salvadoran.”
She asked what the man was if not Salvadoran.
“I didn’t say he wasn’t Salvadoran,” Barry Sedlow said. “Did I. You have a bad habit of jumping to conclusions.” In the silence that followed he slowed to a stop at an intersection, reached inside the Dolphins warm-up jacket he was wearing and took aim at the streetlight.
One thing she had learned growing up around her father: she recognized guns.
The gun Barry Sedlow had taken from inside his warm-up jacket was a 9mm Browning with sound suppressor.
The engine was idling and the sound of the silenced shot inaudible.
The light shattered and the intersection went dark.
“Transit passenger,” Barry Sedlow had said as he transferred his foot from brake to accelerator. “Already on the six-thirty back to San Sal. Not our deal.” When I say that Elena was not one of those who saw how every moment could connect I mean that it did not occur to her that a transit passenger need show no visa.
Cast your mind back.
Refresh your memory if necessary: go to Nexis, go to microfiche.
Try to locate the most interesting news stories of the period in question.
Scroll past any stories that led or even made the evening news.
Move down instead until you locate the kind of two-inch wire story that tended to appear just under the page-fourteen continuation of the page-one story on congressional response to the report of the Kissinger Commission, say, or opposite the page-nineteen continuation of the page-one story about the federal court ruling upholding investigation of possible violations of the Neutrality Act.
The kind of two-inch wire story that had to do with chartered aircraft of uncertain ownership that did or did not leave one or another southern airport loaded with one or another kind of cargo.
Many manifests were eventually analyzed by those who followed such stories.
Many personnel records were eventually accessed.
Many charts were eventually drawn detailing the ways in which the spectral companies with the high-concept names (Amalgamated Commercial Enterprises Inc., Defex S.A., Energy Resources International) tended to interlock.
These two-inch aircraft stories were not always identical. In some stories the aircraft in question was reported not to have left one or another southern airport but to have crashed in Georgia or experienced mechanical difficulties in Texas or been seized in the Bahamas in relation to one or another narcotics investigation. Nor was the cargo in these stories always identicaclass="underline" inspection of the cargo revealed in some cases an unspecified number of reconditioned Soviet AK-47s, in other cases unspecified numbers of M67 fragmentation grenades, AR-15s, M-60s, RPG-7 rocket launchers, boxes of ammo, pallets of POMZ-2 fragmentation mines, British Aerospace L-9 antitank mines, Chinese Type 72A and Italian Valmara 69 antipersonnel mines.
69s.
Epperson had floated a figure of three dollars per for 69s and now he was claiming the market had dropped to two per.
I’m not sure I know what business Epperson is in.
Christ, what business are they all in.
Some people in Washington said that the flights described in these stories were not occurring, other people in Washington (more careful people in Washington, more specific people in Washington, people in Washington who did not intend to perjure themselves when the hearings rolled in) said that the flights could not be occurring, or could only be occurring, if indeed they were occurring, outside the range of possible knowledge.
I myself learned to be specific during this period.
I myself learned to be careful.
I myself learned the art of the conditional.
I recall asking Treat Morrison, during the course of my preliminary interviews with him at his office in Washington, if in fact, to his knowledge, anyone in the United States government could have knowledge that one or more such flights could be supplying arms to the so-called contra forces for the purpose of overthrowing the Sandinista government in Nicaragua.
There had been a silence.
Treat Morrison had picked up a pen and put it down.
I flattered myself that I was on the edge of something revelatory.
“To the extent that the area in question touches on the lake,” Treat Morrison said, “and to the extent that the lake has been historically construed as our lake, it goes without saying that we could have an interest. However.”
Again he fell silent.
I waited.
We had gotten as far as claiming the Caribbean as our lake, our sea, mare nostrum.
“However,” Treat Morrison repeated.
I debated with myself whether I would accept an off-the-record or not-for-attribution stipulation.
“We don’t track that kind of activity,” Treat Morrison said then.
One of those flights that no one was tracking lifted off from Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport at one-thirty on the morning of June 26 1984. The aircraft was a Lockheed L-100. The official documents filed by the pilot showed a crew of five, two passengers, a cargo of assorted auto parts, and the destination San José, Costa Rica.
The U.S. Customs official who certified the manifest did not elect to physically inspect the cargo.
The plane did not land in San José, Costa Rica.
The plane had no reason to land in San José, Costa Rica, because an alternative infrastructure was already in place: the eight-thousand-foot runways laid by the 46th Combat Engineers during the aftermath of the Big Pine II maneuvers were already in place. The radar sites were in place. The water purification and delivery systems were in place. “You got yourself a regular little piece of U.S.A. here,” the pilot of the Lockheed L-100 said to Elena McMahon as they waited on the dry grass off the runway while the cargo was unloaded.
“Actually I’ll be going right back.” She felt a sudden need to distance herself from whatever was going on here. “I mean I left my car at the airport.”
“Long-term parking I hope,” the pilot said.
What was also in place was the deal.
We don’t track that kind of activity.