After the President opened the box, his year-round tan seemed to fade and he said, “Sweet Jesus Christ almighty!” and looked up quickly at Ambassador Dokubo, whose eyes had been recording every nuance of the scene for his half-completed memoirs.
The severed ear rested in the Gucci box on a bed of surgical cotton. It was a large ear, quite drained of blood and no longer pink — indeed, almost white — and the Ambassador’s eyes traveled from it to the left ear of the President and matched them up. It’s his brother’s, he finally decided. Those idiots have cut off the brother’s ear.
The Ambassador made a slight clearing noise far down in his throat and said, “It would appear to be an ear, Mr. President. A human ear.”
The President’s right hand seemed to move unbidden up to his own right ear, which he touched reassuringly. Not taking his eyes from the box, he picked up the buff envelope and ripped it open. He read its contents at a glance, read them again, more slowly, and then tossed the letter across the desk toward Ambassador Dokubo. The Ambassador wasn’t at all sure whether he was intended to read the letter, but when the President spun around in his big chair and stared out the window at the White House south lawn, Dokubo almost snatched up the letter and hungrily read its crabbed writing, trying to burn every word into his memory.
There was no date, and the letter’s salutation was a brusque “Mr. President.” The body of the letter read:
Your notorious CIA jackals have kidnapped Gustavo Berrio-Brito, the freedom fighter known to the oppressed millions of the world as Felix. We have taken as hostage your brother and his female companion. Unless you immediately release Gustavo Berrio-Brito, we will send your brother back to you piece by piece. Herewith is a token of our determination.
The letter was signed simply but rather grandly with the Libyan ruler’s last name, “Mourabet.” Underneath in a far different, somewhat shaky Palmer method was written, “These suckers aren’t kidding.” The postscript was signed “Bingo.”
Ambassador Dokubo put the letter carefully back down on the desk as the President slowly turned around in his chair, his expression grim, his face ashen.
“You read it?”
Ambassador Dokubo nodded. “I did, Mr. President.”
The President rose. So did the Ambassador. The President looked at the Nigerian thoughtfully for a few moments and then spoke, carefully choosing his words. “I’m not sure yet just what steps we will take, Mr. Ambassador. But it could be that we might call on you to serve in an intermediary role of some kind. Would you agree?”
Dokubo nodded gravely. “My country and I are at your service, Mr. President.”
“Thank you. And I’m also sure that I can rely on your complete discretion.”
“Complete, Mr. President.”
After leaving the Oval Office, Dokubo hurried to his waiting Mercedes. Before the chauffeured car had even reached the south gate, Dokubo, using his attaché case as a desk, was making frantic notes about the morning’s meeting, which he had already decided to make the epiphanic chapter in his memoirs.
The President, meanwhile, had again turned away from his desk to stare out at the south lawn. When he turned back, his face was no longer ashen. Instead, it had resumed its normal tan except for the rosy flush that had crept up his neck to his ears. His mouth was stretched into a thin, furious line as he picked up the telephone.
When the secretary answered, his voice was a snarl. “Get me that fucking Coombs out at that fucking CIA.”
6
The deceptively slight man with the sleek gray head and the small prim mouth had heard all of the words before many times. Words of the barracks, the barnyard, the oil rig, the pool room, and the saloon. Short, harsh-sounding words mostly, with three consonants and a single vowel. He never used them himself and disapproved of their use by others, on the grounds that they betrayed a lack of imagination. Yet he was neither surprised nor dismayed that the words were coming now in a furious stream from the mouth of the President of the United States.
If anything, the words bored him, even though they were being used to describe his own incompetence and lack of character. So after a short span of listening, he tuned the words out and thought instead about his roses.
The slight man whose roses often won prizes was Thane Coombs, who nine months before, on his fifty-eighth birthday, had been named Director of Central Intelligence. Coombs was also nearly the last of the World War II OSS veterans who once had permeated the Central Intelligence Agency. That he had lasted long enough to be named Director was tribute more to his political skills, which were adroit, than to his intelligence, which, while not quite true brilliance, still left him far cleverer than most.
When after six minutes the President showed no signs of running down, Coombs let his mind drift to an idle examination of the fact that the man sitting behind the Woodrow Wilson desk had been only three years old when a twenty-two-year-old Lieutenant Thane Coombs had parachuted into France near Dijon as a member of a three-man Jedburgh team. But since this was only a notional comparison and really not very interesting, Coombs decided to interrupt the President in mid-word. The word he interrupted was “asshole.”
“It wasn’t us, Mr. President.”
The President completed the word he had begun, but stopped in mid-sentence. He gaped, a mouth-wide-open gape of surprise and disbelief, until he realized what he was doing and clamped his mouth shut into a harsh line of total suspicion.
“Not you?” he said, making it somehow an accusation rather than a question.
“No, sir,” Coombs said, choosing his next words with precision. “The Agency had nothing whatsoever to do with the abduction or disappearance of the Venezuelan national Gustavo Berrio-Brito — sometimes known as Felix. Nothing whatsoever.”
“The Libyans think you kidnapped him.”
“I deeply regret that our still rather flamboyant reputation may have endangered your brother and—”
The President cut him off. “Who?”
“Who kidnapped Felix, you mean?”
That drew a sharp impatient nod from the President.
“I have no idea. None.”
“But it wasn’t you?” McKay said, still almost hoping that Coombs was lying.
“No, sir. You see, Felix— We may as well call him that, don’t you think?”
“Yeah. Sure.”
“Well, Felix is, or perhaps now I should say was, the leader of a five-man or five-person terrorist group which insists on calling itself Red Anvil Five.”
“Always some cute fucking name.”
“Yes, I tend to agree. The group consisted of Felix, of course; a Japanese man; a German; a Frenchwoman, and another Venezuelan who was also a woman and also Felix’s sometime mistress. Her name was Maria Luisa de la Cova.”
“Was?”
Coombs nodded. “She was found dead early this morning in London. In Hammersmith, to be precise. By some children. She had been tied to a chair and garroted. Also tortured. Burned.”
“Why?”
“We don’t know.”
“Can’t you guess?”
Coombs hesitated, because he never liked to guess about anything. “It’s possible that she may have been the one who betrayed Felix to his abductors, whoever they might be.”
“This Anvil Five bunch killed a lot of people, as I recall.”
“Seventy-two to be precise,” said Coombs, who always strove to be just that. He started ticking the dead bodies off on his left hand. “Fourteen in Manila. Thirty-two in that EL AL plane at Brussels. Sixteen in the Gatwick shootout. Six more in Rome — not counting nine kneecappings there. And those four in Beirut, who were probably Israeli agents, although that was never confirmed.”