The Bonaparte Secret (15 page)

“Maybe the Chinese have found a way to build a car cheap enough for the Haitians to afford it.”

“Cars aren’t crated for shipment. Whatever was unloaded was in containers.”

Lang leaned back in his chair, his hands intertwined across his stomach. “Miles, even back in the dark ages when I was still with the Agency, the resolution of the intel from satellites could distinguish a Ford from a Chevy from three hundred miles up. Whatever was in those containers should have been visible when they were unloaded.”

Miles shook his head. “Should have been. But the Haitians, or whoever was on the ground, dragged them up into the mountains. Those hills are high enough to be in the clouds. The SAMOS-F didn’t have the technology to photograph through cloud cover.”

“I’m sure it’s classified, but I’ll bet we do now.”

Miles was playing with his tie again. “Without saying we do or don’t, I can say that wherever the contents of those containers are now, they aren’t where we can see them.”

Lang pondered this a minute. “What about HUMINT, human intelligence? Surely you have someone on the ground.”

“Until now, Haiti didn’t rate more than a single full-time asset. He disappeared. We have a stringer or two but no idea how reliable they might be. So far, whatever was in those containers might as well have vanished.”

Lang stood, seeing where this was headed. “Miles, I am glad to see you, and Gurt is thrilled to join us for lunch. We’d be pleased if you could stay awhile, have you as our guest. That being said, I am not, repeat,
not,
going to Haiti.”

“But what makes you think—?”

Lang held up an index finger. “You make your first visit to the U.S. anyone can remember.” A second finger. “You aren’t telling me this story to pass away the time until Gurt joins us.” Third finger. “And you just got through telling me you are shit out of luck when it comes to assets already on the ground. I may have been out of the game for awhile but the rules never change: when you need assets, you get them wherever you can. Now, did I miss anything?”

Miles held up both hands, feigning surprise. “Did I say anything about you going to Haiti?”

Lang sat back down, smirking. “No, of course you didn’t. I suppose I got some exercise jumping to conclusions. I should never have thought it would have crossed your mind to try to employ a retired agent, someone with no publicly known ties to any U.S. intelligence agency, and therefore plausible deniability, to go snoop around to see what’s going on between the largest remaining communist state and one of the world’s craziest dictators, right on our Caribbean doorstep. I know that’s something you would never do.”

“Do what?”

Neither man had noticed Gurt step into the office.

“Gurt!” Miles embraced her—a little too enthusiastically, Lang thought. “You’re more beautiful than I remembered!”

“Beware of Miles bearing compliments,” Lang said dryly as Gurt disentangled herself. “Our friend here wants to send me on an all-expense-paid trip to sunny skies, summer temperatures, white beaches, the whole lot.”

Gurt looked from Lang to Miles and back again, aware she had missed something. “Only you? Why not us both?”

“That could be arranged,” Miles said.

Lang sat back down. “Go on, Miles, explain.”

Miles did, ending with, “However you two got tangled up with the Guoanbu and their man Jianfei, it may well be related to my problem.”

“Just how do you figure that?” Lang asked, leaning back in his chair, hands now clasped on top of his head. “Seems like a bit of a stretch.”

“Maybe so,” Miles replied. “But the Chinese have historically shown little or no interest in operating in the Western Hemisphere until they took over management of the canal some years ago. We have cracked Cuban, Soviet, even Israeli spy rings operating in the country, but never Chinese. Now, all of a sudden, one of their operatives is caught in your house only a few weeks after we find they have some sort of an interest in Haiti. I know how much you, Lang, believe in coincidence.”

“Not at all, but what you’re suggesting is still pretty lame.”

Miles held up both hands again, this time in submission. “You’re right, lame as a one-term politician. I’m probably grasping at straws.”

Lang narrowed his eyes. Miles wasn’t one to give up so easily. “But?”

Miles watched Gurt slide into the other chair, nylons whispering as she crossed her legs. “If there’s no connection between the Guoanbu’s sudden interest in you and what’s going on in Haiti, then you, Lang, or better yet, both of you, get a few days in the sun at Agency expense.”

“And on the off chance you’re right?”

“Then you’ll know.”

“Know what?” Gurt asked. “It is a . . . a . . . what do you say? A ‘stretch’ to think we will find out why Chinese state security broke into our house by going to Haiti.”

“And why us?” Lang wanted to know. “The Agency must have a dozen or so employees who’d love to spend a few winter days in the Caribbean.”

“Because you, both of you, can easily pass for Europeans on a holiday.” Lang started to protest but Miles dashed forward. “Look, you owe me a favor, remember? I’m the one who stuck out his neck to identify those people as Chinese intel. We, the Agency, can’t currently spare any Ops personnel who could pass for a German couple taking advantage of Haiti’s low hotel rates.”

“The rates are low,” Lang observed, “because few people want to go there. And you can’t spare any operatives because this is ninety-nine percent certain to come up empty.”

“I have never been to the Caribbean,” Gurt announced.

Lang was surprised. Not that Gurt had never been to the Caribbean but that she was showing interest in Miles’s suggestion. “If you want the Caribbean, believe me, Haiti is
not
the place to begin.”

Gurt gave him a quizzical look. “Is it not warm and sunny there this time of year? Do they not have beaches like I see in the magazines?”

Lang could see Miles was anticipating victory. “Yeah, but . . .”

“And is it not possible that the people in Venice who tried to kill us were Chinese?”

“Certainly possible,” Lang had to agree.

Miles clapped his hands. “Good! It’s settled then. I’ll make the arrangements. Now, where am I taking you to lunch?”

“Not so fast,” Lang cautioned. Turning to Gurt, he said, “We’ve just come back from several days in Venice. I don’t want to impose on our neighbors to keep Manfred again so soon . . .”

Gurt turned to Miles, saying conversationally, “Lang believes his son cannot live a few days without him. When he is away, he has to call the child at least twice a day. It as though Manfred is some sort of vegetable that will perish without his attention.” To Lang, she said, “Manfred will get along fine with Wynn Three, his best friend. Besides, we are keeping the neighbor’s little boy for two weeks this summer.”

News to Lang.

What wasn’t news was the fact they were going to Haiti. Gurt had made up her mind.

From the diary of Louis Etienne Saint Denis

December 20, 1802

The First Consul’s
¹
favorite sister is again troublesome! For some years the sexual conduct of Pauline, the second of the three sisters, has been the talk of all France. Though charming and beautiful, the woman is without discretion. In June of five years past, the First Consul was at Mombello Palace near Milan when he walked in on his sister in the process of having congress with one of his generals, Leclerc
.
²

Feigning fury, the First Consul demanded her honor be salvaged, and on June 14 of that year, they were married at the home of the then general, all as previously described in this diary. The couple do not match each other. Leclerc is serious, his face in a perpetual frown, while his bride is frivolous and quick to laugh. She continues her flirtatious ways, while he blushes at attention from other women.

In October of this year, realizing how tenuous is this union and aware of the scandal already growing concerning Pauline’s ill-concealed infidelities, the First Consul appointed Leclerc to put down the slave insurrection in Saint-Domingue
.
³

She refused to go despite the pleas of her new husband, who in desperation appealed to her brother. Pauline also refused him. Under no illusions as to the scope of the scandals Pauline would create if left alone, Napoleon ordered a sedan chair to be brought to his sister’s home by ten of his largest grenadiers. The soldiers strapped her into the chair and marched her to a carriage in which she was sent to the port and bodily carried aboard ship, screaming and cursing
.

The First Consul is well shed of her.

A strange thing happened as the ship slipped its moorings and let the tide take it from the quay. I was sitting in the carriage with the First Consul when General Leclerc appeared at the rail with what looked very much like the selfsame box the First Consul had held so dear when we departed Egypt. Leclerc held it aloft for the First Consul to see. The First Consul replied with a salute, and Leclerc turned and disappeared from view
.

1
Joséphine thought her husband was to arrive at Le Havre and rushed there to meet him in hopes of squelching the news of her multiple adulteries. Napoleon was in Paris before she caught up to him.

2
Junot was the only general of Napoleon’s staff at this time who did not eventually achieve the rank of marshal of France. Could it be Napoleon blamed him for his wife’s indiscretions, a killing of the messenger?

3
She was born Marie-Josèphe-Rose Tascher de La Pagerie. “Joséphine” was the name Napoleon gave her.

4
Robespierre was overthrown and sentenced to the guillotine himself. A much-admired orator, he was on the scaffold addressing the mob when someone shot him in the jaw. He went to his death mute. Thus ended the Terror.

5
Martinique.

6
Small by the standards of Versailles, perhaps. Even today the formal garden surrounding Malmaison is impressive.

7
In June or July of 320 BC, Perdiccas arrived on the banks of the Nile to do battle with Ptolemy to retrieve Alexander’s mummified body. He was defeated by a combination of better intelligence by Ptolemy, having to cross a river with tricky currents and the voracious appetite of the Nile crocodiles, who fed on the living and dead for days afterward.

8
In spite of the mania for “logic” and “science” in postrevolutionary France, Napoleon had his personal astrologer, whom he consulted on matters both military and civil.

1
In November of 1799, Napoleon, aided by troops of General Leclerc, staged a coup, overthrowing the revolutionary government and bestowing this title upon himself.

2
Charles Victor Emmanuel Leclerc was only twenty-nine at the time of the nuptials. Pauline, or Paulette as she was known to her family, was twenty-one. He was not her first choice of husbands.

3
Haiti. At this time, the name included what is today the Dominican Republic. There is some evidence Leclerc’s mission was somewhat more ambitious and included a stepping-stone conquest of what are today Puerto Rico, Cuba and then the newly independent United States by way of French Louisiana. This theory might be indirectly supported by the fact Napoleon sold Louisiana within months of France’s withdrawal from Haiti, thereby ceding her last interest in the Western Hemisphere, other than an enclave in South America and a few insignificant islands.

CHAPTER THREE

Westview Cemetery, Atlanta
The next morning

Lang turned off I-20 onto Martin Luther King Jr. Drive, made a left and drove through the arch that marked the entrance to Atlanta’s largest cemetery. Passing the newer grave sites marked only by bronze plaques, he entered the older section, rolling hills dotted with an eclectic selection of gravestones, statues and funerary monuments. He parked the Porsche behind a vintage Cadillac. It and the Porsche were the only cars in sight. He climbed a slight rise, walking toward a giant oak tree whose winter-bare limbs seemed to be supplicating the heavens.

A few yards to his left, an elderly woman in black leaned on the arm of young Latino in chauffeur’s uniform as she hobbled up the hill, using her free hand to clutch a flat of pansies. He had seen her here on more than one occasion.

Just short of the tree, Lang stopped in front of three headstones. Dawn, his first wife, Janet, his sister, and Jeff, her adopted son. Lang came here to visit just before every trip he took out of the country. It was as if he were saying a possible farewell to the only kin he had before Gurt had re-entered his life with Manfred. For reasons he could not have explained, he never mentioned these trips to the cemetery. Although he was sure Gurt would understand, he felt some vague sense of disloyalty to his present family that had kept him silent on the subject of visiting his previous one.

Facing the three graves, he sat on the base of a statue of an angel, its arms reaching out as though imploring observers to follow through a closed door behind it, an early and exuberant display of early-twentieth-century family wealth by people he had never heard of.

Not far away, the old woman was directing the planting of the pansies around the marble figure of another angel, this one weeping.

If Lang could have spoken to his wife, his sister and much-loved adopted nephew, what would he tell them? Dawn, he knew, would be proud of his success in the legal world, thrilled he had the son she could not give him. Conversely, she would be less than happy about the violence that had stalked his life. Like the affair in Venice.