“Jason, I’m going to make some lemonade,” Annabelle said, and she started to rise from where she was sitting by the window, and it was then that he put his hand on her shoulder and said, “Wait, you just wait,” with his eyes looking directly into hers, his voice so low she could hardly hear him, the heat a stifling, penetrating force that seemed to capture each of his whispered words and hold them suspended in the air like bloated poisonous balloons.
“You love this country?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“I love this country, Annabelle, I really do. Why are we here in this lousy city of New York, if not for love of this country, would you tell me that? You think I like this city, with its dirt and its noise and... Annabelle, I hate this city, that’s the truth, you know that.”
“I know that, Jason,” she said quietly.
“But this is where the influence is, right? This is where you have to be if you hope to convince anyone that what you believe in is right.” He paused. His fingers still gripped her shoulder. “Now, we can go along doing what we’ve been doing — I’m not saying that’s bad, Annabelle. I think we’ve had an effect, I think it’s all to the good. But I have the feeling it’s the same thing as watching the world go by and allowing other people to make the decisions for us, other people to shape our destinies. We can go right on doing that, mind you. I’m not saying it’s bad to do that.”
“What are you saying, Jason?”
“I’m saying I would rather shape my own destiny.”
“How?”
“By taking action.”
“What kind of action?”
“More than the leaflets, Annabelle. More than the meetings.”
“Then what?”
“I want to contact the others.”
“What others?”
“Alex and Goody and Arthur and the rest.”
“Why?”
“They’ll help me,” Jason said.
“Help you?”
“With this plan I’ve been working on. Annabelle, I think I know how to get the results this country wants, and I know how to do it with only a handful of men, fifty, sixty men at the most. What do you think of that?”
“I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about,” Annabelle said, and she pushed his hand off her shoulder and rose and walked to the refrigerator. He sat silently by the window while she searched for lemons in the vegetable tray, watched as she cut them and began squeezing them. He sat silently while she mixed the lemonade in a pitcher beaded with moisture. The ice clinked against the inside of the pitcher. Her hand kept moving the spoon in a circular motion as she stirred.
“I’ll contact Arthur first,” he said, almost to himself.
Annabelle said nothing. She poured two glasses of lemonade and brought one to him.
“I was always closest to him,” Jason said, taking the glass. “Of all of them. And he was the only one who realized what was going on, who realized they’d set a trap—”
“Are we going to talk about that again?”
“No, we are not going to talk about that again,” he said.
“Good.”
“Because I know, of course, it bothers you.”
“Yes, it bothers me,” she said.
“Yes, I know that. But it’s too damn bad about what bothers you because I’m going to have to contact Arthur whether it bothers you or not. Arid all the others too. I need help. I can’t do this alone.”
“I don’t know what it is you need help with,” she said. “You haven’t told me yet.”
“This isn’t handing out leaflets on street corners,” he said, and he grinned.
“Then what is it?”
He rose and walked to the window. He looked at her with a curiously boyish expression on his face, almost mischievous, and then he closed the window.
She should have thought of the right thing to say then in the summer of 1961, the first time she heard the plan. But she had listened to him and then had said only the wrong thing. She had listened to him and said, “You sound like a fanatic.”
“No,” he had answered, his eyes serious, his mouth set, “I am not a fanatic.” And then, his voice very low, he had said, “I’m an American citizen who is extremely concerned about the future of this nation.”
He rose and walked to the window, opening it again, making it absolutely clear he would say nothing more about his plan that day.
Now, in the cabin of a boat that would be putting out to sea in a matter of hours to execute a part of that plan, Annabelle rolled over onto her back and looked up at the overhead and listened to the wind and wondered what time it was and wondered where the truck was now and wondered what would happen in the daylight hours to come and wondered if she could do all that was expected of her and wondered why she had not said something back in 1961, when there was still time.
Dawn on Ocho Puertos that Sunday of October sixth was expected at 6:17 A.M.
The truck was a 1964 Chevrolet, her rack fitted with inch-and-a-quarter tubular supports over which hung the tarpaulin cloth that covered the top, front, sides and rear of the rack. The cab, wheel rims, and stakes of the truck — showing only occasionally when a sharp wind lifted the tarpaulin — were painted red. The truck had been rented from the Paley Systems Corporation on South Bayshore Drive ten days ago. Last night the lettering had been stenciled onto the side of the cab. The name and address of the firm had been invented by Jason and together became something of an inside joke: PETER TARE, 832 MISSION.
Goodson Moore was the one driving the truck.
Clay Prentiss was the man sitting beside him in the cab.
They were both wearing khaki trousers and shirts. Neither of them spoke very much. They had made this identical run with a loaded truck exactly seven times during the past week, and they knew precisely how long the trip should take because they had loaded up at the warehouse at 2:30 A.M. each of those times and left Miami at 3 A.M. The warehouse, like the truck, had been rented. Unlike the truck, they had had to take the warehouse for a month, which was not too bad because they had managed to find uses for it during that time. The first time they made the trip down, they had tried changing speeds whenever the speed limit changed, but that had not worked too well because the speed limit jumped to sixty-five miles per hour just outside Cutler Ridge, and Jason had said sixty-five miles an hour was too fast to be driving on those narrow black roads with water on both sides of them, especially once they got past Key Largo. Jason was in charge, of course, so Goody and Clay listened when he talked. The next time down, Goody tried maintaining an average speed of fifty miles an hour, dropping down to thirty-five when the limit called for it, and goosing the truck up to sixty once they had passed Cutler Ridge. Jason said this was still too fast. Jason said they would drive the truck clear into the Caribbean, that’s what they’d do, and that would be the end of the whole damn shooting match. Goody and Clay had listened while he yelled at them — well, that wasn’t quite true; Jason rarely yelled. Jason just stared at you with his cold blue eyes, nothing on his face moving except those eyes, and they seemed to jump right out of his skull to nail you to the wall. They had listened and said, Well, Okay, Jason, how fast you want us to go?
No faster than forty-five at any time, he had said, right? Try to average it out so you’ll be making forty miles an hour. That’ll put us in Key Largo an hour and a half after we leave Miami, and then figure fifteen minutes each to Tavernier and Islamorada, and forty-five more to Marathon. That’ll bring us right to the Seven Mile Bridge about three hours after we start, right?
Okay, they had said, if that’s what you want, Jason.