McGarvey jerked forward. “What—”
Trotter interrupted again. “We’re getting ahead of ourselves here, Kirk. Believe me, I want you to hear the entire story in chronological order. It’s essential that you understand the timing. I want you to be perfectly clear.”
Nothing, of course, was ever perfectly clear for McGarvey. He had built a career in the Company on seeing beyond the obvious in supposedly “clear” operations. He had listened to the sages lecture at the Farm outside Williamsburg. They had called such things “anomalies.” Look for the glitches in the fabric of any operation, and there you will find an anomaly that more often than not will lead to the core of the situation. To the truth.
Basulto was watching them with a strange, expectant look in his eyes, as if he were a condemned man, knowing the ax was going to fall and waiting for its coming.
“There was no photograph of the American?” McGarvey asked.
“No, but Roger had an idea who it was, I think,” Basulto said.
“But he wasn’t sure.”
“No. He had a camera with a very long lens and high-speed film. He showed me how to use it, and the next time they showed up I was to take as many pictures as I could.”
“And in the meantime?”
Basulto didn’t catch McGarvey’s meaning.
“You were to return to the apartment and take some pictures. Meanwhile, what was Harris going to do? Come along with you? Stay there at the del Prado? Go home? What?”
“He was going to stay there for forty-eight hours. If something turned up, I was to come back to him. Eight, noon, then eight again at the park. First the east side, then the north, and finally the west.”
“If nothing came up in that time?”
“It didn’t. Nothing happened. The Ateneo was a closed shop. And Roger went home.”
“You met with him a last time, though?”
“Sunday night at eight o’clock. We went back to his hotel, and I told him that no one had shown up.”
“And how was Harris then? I mean, was he disappointed? What?”
“Nervous,” Basulto said. “He told me that I would probably be pulled out of Mexico City before too long. He hinted that something very big was happening.”
“But he wanted you to stick around at least a little while longer?”
Basulto nodded. “He said we still had a real shot at breaking this thing. If only I could get a clear photograph, we could write our own tickets. He kept saying that. It was a very big thing for him.”
“But it scared him.”
“Scared him silly, Mr. McGarvey.”
“He never told you who you were after … I mean other than Baranov?”
Basulto shook his head. “He said the Russian was a very big cookie. He kept saying how Baranov was so young, and yet he was running the entire Soviet system of networks in the Caribbean. He took over everything that Oumansky set up in the forties.”
“Constantine Oumansky,” Trotter interjected. “He was the Soviet ambassador to Mexico. Killed in 1943 in a plane crash. He set up the entire Carib. network.”
“Which was still going strong under this Baranov in the late fifties?” McGarvey asked.
“It’s still going strong now, from what we gather,” Trotter said.
“There is a connection … then to now? A bridge?” McGarvey asked incredulously.
“The Golden Gate,” Day chirped.
They waited for Basulto to continue.
“I was to call the San Antonio number from different telephones around the city every day. When it was time to leave I would be given the word.”
“And then where were you to go?” McGarvey said. “Back to Miami?”
“Guatemala City.”
Again McGarvey was startled. It showed on his face because Trotter sat forward, his eyes bright.
“They were starting to train for the Bay of Pigs invasion. A camp had been set up on a coffee plantation at Helvetia.”
“He must have been among the first to arrive.”
“Harris was involved from the beginning because of his operations in Cuba under Batista. He pulled Basulto into it to provide them with the local knowledge they’d need,” Trotter said.
7
The rain had finally stopped, and the sun had begun to peek out from under the clouds. From where he sat, McGarvey could look out the window, across the road at the trees growing up along the wall of the valley. The branches were dripping, the leaves glistening in the light. Marta would be at the apartment, worried about him. Or perhaps she had gone shopping. She would stop at the odd moment to cock her head (it was a characteristic gesture of hers that he found attractive) and think about him. Or at least he hoped that was the case. He hoped she wasn’t looking for him. It would make it that much more difficult when he came home this afternoon.
Trotter had gone into the kitchen to get more coffee, and Day had jumped up and was grazing among the books on the shelves, leaving Basulto and McGarvey alone for just a moment.
“You weren’t too unhappy about leaving Mexico City?” McGarvey asked softly.
Basulto poured some cognac into his cold coffee. He raised his head. “No, but I wasn’t overjoyed at the prospect of going to Guatemala. They’re a bunch of farmers down there. They don’t know anything.”
“About Mexico City. Did you ever get the feeling that someone was watching you? That someone down at the Ateneo knew what you were doing?”
Basulto smiled. “You could be Roger’s twin, you know, Mr. McGarvey. He asked me the very same question. He was worried that I’d be tumbled sooner or later.”
“But you weren’t?”
“Worried?” Basulto laughed harshly. “I was worried the entire time I was there. Let me tell you, they were some desperate characters.”
“How do you know that?”
Basulto’s eyes narrowed. “You could see it just by looking at them. Roger told me to be very careful of this Russian. He said the man had eyes and ears everywhere.”
“Did you believe him?”
“What’s this?” Day said, bounding back across the room. “Getting acquainted, are we?’”
“Just waiting for the coffee so we can get on with it,” McGarvey said.
Something flickered in Basulto’s eyes. Cunning? Fear?
Day turned. “Trotter, for God’s sake, let’s speed it up here,” he shouted.
Moments later Trotter appeared in the doorway with another carafe of coffee. He hurried in, poured more for Day, Basulto, and himself, and then settled down.
“Helvetia,” he said, out of breath, starting them off again. “Harris was there waiting for his boy to show up. But there was no further debriefing. No words. Nothing about the Ateneo Español. It was taboo. Here was Basulto, one of Harris’s experts from the Cuban days, down to help out with the big project.”
“Didn’t you find that odd?” McGarvey asked, directing his question to the Cuban. “In Mexico City he was excited. All of a sudden it’s over?”
Basulto shrugged. “There was the American working hand-in-hand with Baranov. I figured him for a double. I didn’t think Roger wanted that spread around. And I didn’t know who to trust.”
McGarvey was barely able to keep from making a sarcastic remark about trust coming from the lips of such a blatantly untrustworthy opportunist.
At first the remote training camp up in the Guatemalan mountains was nothing more than a collection of shacks at which a handful of Cuban radio operators were being trained. But throughout that year, and all through 1960, people kept streaming in. Eventually more than fourteen hundred recruits were in combat and infiltration training, and a big airstrip was carved out of the hillside. Basulto spent most of his time briefing the combat troops on the terrain and the waters around the Bahía de Cochinos (the Bay of Pigs) southeast of Havana. In the old days he had run a number of operations in the region for Harris, so he knew the bay fairly well.