The Last Thing He Wanted (16 page)

“Elena McMahon stayed where she was,” to quote this section exactly, “because she apparently feared that if she left she would be cheated out of or would otherwise forfeit the money she believed she was owed, i.e., the payment she claimed was due her father.”

But that was flat wrong.

The payment due her father was by then no longer the point.

The payment due her father had stopped being the point at the instant she read in the Miami
Herald
that her father had been certified dead at the Clearview Convalescent Lodge in South Kendall on June 30 1984.

Which happened also to be the date on the passport with the trick built into it.

My understanding is that Dick McMahon will not be a problem.

2

“S
top talking to the goddamn baby-sitter,” her father had said the evening she was about to leave the house in Sweetwater for Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport and the unscheduled flight that would not land in San José, Costa Rica.

She was trying to tell the nurse about her father’s midnight medication.

“Ellie. I want you to listen to me.”

“He won’t swallow it but you can mash it up in a little brandy,” she said to the nurse.

The nurse continued flicking through channels.

“Don’t let any of those guys talk you into staying over down there,” her father said. “You deliver the goods, you pick up the payment, you get back on the plane, you’re back here tomorrow. That’s my deal.”

“I thought
Cheers
was on two,” the nurse said.

“Get the TV critic out of here and listen to me,” Dick McMahon said.

She sent the nurse to locate
Cheers
in the kitchen.

“That one’s not really a nurse,” Dick McMahon said. “The one in the morning, she’s a nurse, but that
one’s a baby-sitter.” He had leaned back in his chair, exhausted. “Ellie. Okay. You deliver the goods, you pick up the payment, you get back on the plane. That’s my deal.” Each time he said this it was as if for the first time. “Don’t let any of those guys mickey-mouse you into staying over, you follow me?”

She said that she followed him.

“Anybody gives you any trouble, you just tell them.”

She waited.

She could see the network of veins beneath the transparent skin of his eyelids.

Tell them what, she prompted.

“Tell them, oh
goddamn.”
He was rousing himself with difficulty. “Tell them they’re going to have to answer to Max Epperson. Then you call Max. Promise me you’ll call Max.”

She did not know whether Max Epperson was dead or alive or a hallucination but she promised nonetheless that she would call Max.

Wherever Max might be.

“You just tell Max I’m a little under the weather,” Dick McMahon said. “Tell Max I need him to look out for you. Just until I’m a hundred percent again. Just tell him I said that, you understand?”

She said that she understood.

Barry Sedlow had told her to be at Fort Lauderdale–Hollywood at midnight sharp.

She was to wait not in the terminal but at Post J, if she asked at the Butler operations office they would direct her to Post J.

At Post J there would be a locked gate onto the tarmac.

She was to wait at Post J.

Someone would unlock the gate.

By the time she was ready to leave her father was again asleep in his chair, but when she kissed his forehead he reached for her hand.

“You don’t remember this but when you had your tonsils out I wouldn’t let you stay in the hospital by yourself,” he said. “I was afraid you’d wake up scared with nobody around. So I slept in a chair in your room.”

Elena did not remember this.

All Elena remembered was that when Catherine had appendicitis she herself had slept on a gurney in Catherine’s room at Cedars.

Her father’s eyes were still closed.

He did not let go of her hand.

These were the next-to-last words her father spoke to her:

“You never even knew that, see. Because you were a winner, you took the whole hospital deal like a winner, you didn’t wake up once.”

“I did wake up,” she said. “I do remember.”

She wished she did.

She hoped Catherine would.

She held his hand until his breathing was even, then walked to the door.

“This payday comes in,” he said when she opened the screen door, “for the first time in my life I’ll have something to leave you.”

“I did wake up,” she repeated. “I knew you were there.”

By the way.

I saw your dad.

He says hi.

I’m keeping him in the picture.

In fact I know why Elena McMahon was still on the island.

Elena McMahon was still on the island because of what she had known since the instant she read in the Miami
Herald
that her father had been certified dead in South Kendall on the same day the passport with her photograph on it was supposed to have been issued in Miami. What she had known since that instant was this:

Somebody out there was playing a different game, doing a different deal.

Not her father’s deal.

A deal her father had not known about.

Her father’s role in this deal he had not known about was to have been something more than just assembling the shipments, the shipments that had over the course of the spring refocused his dwindling energy, his flagging interest in staying alive. Her father’s role was to have begun once he arrived on the ground to collect the million-dollar payday.

Consider her father: a half-crazy old man who had spent his life dealing merchandise that nobody would admit they wanted dealt, an old man whose interest in who used his merchandise was limited to who could pay for it, an old man whose well-documented impartiality about where his merchandise ended up could allow him to be placed on the wrong side of whatever was going to happen on this island.

Who would miss him, who would care?

Who would not believe he had done whatever it was they were going to say he had done?

An old man in a sick season.

An old man with no reputation to lose.

The shipments had just been the cheese in the trap.

She had sprung the trap and her father was dead and now she was set up to do whatever it was that he was supposed to have done.

Somebody had her lined up, somebody had her jacked in the headlights.

Had her in the scope.

Had her in the crosshairs.

What she did not know was who.

And until she knew who, until she located the line of fire, she could not involve Wynn.

She needed Wynn out of the line of fire.

She needed Wynn to take care of Catherine.

3

T
he question of why Treat Morrison arrived on the island was another area in which neither Rand nor the congressional investigators did a particularly convincing job, but in this case there would have been daunting structural obstacles, entire layers of bureaucracy dedicated to the principle that self-perpetuation depended on the ability not to elucidate but to obscure. “The cooperation of those individuals and agencies who responded to our numerous requests is appreciated,” the preface to the Rand study noted in this connection. “Although some other individuals and agencies did not acknowledge or respond to our requests, it is to be hoped that future assessments of this incident will benefit from their assistance and clarification.”

I also knew at the time why Treat Morrison arrived on the island, but it was not an answer calculated to satisfy the Rand analysts.

Treat Morrison arrived on the island for the buzz.

The action, the play.

Treat Morrison arrived on the island because it was
one more place where he could insert himself into a certain kind of situation.

Of course he had a “mission,” a specific charter, and he also had a specific agenda. He always had a specific mission when he inserted himself into this kind of situation, and he also always had a specific agenda. The agenda did not necessarily coincide with the charter, but neither did it, if the insertion was smooth, necessarily conflict. “Certain people in Washington might have certain front-burner interests they want me to address, and that would be my charter,” he once told me to this point, his tone that of someone explaining to a child what goes on at the office. “Typically, however, there might be some other little angle, something they maybe don’t know about or think is back-burner. And I might also try to address that.”

That would be his agenda.

Treat Morrison’s charter in this case was to correct or clarify whatever misunderstandings or erroneous impressions might or might not have been left during the recent tour of the region undertaken by a certain senator and his senior foreign policy aide. There had then been a subsequent trip, made by only the senior foreign policy aide, who was twenty-seven years old and whose name was Mark Berquist. Various questions had been raised, by American embassy personnel in the countries involved, having to do with what the senator and Mark Berquist were doing in these countries and with whom they had been meeting and what, during such meetings, had been said or not said. These questions, which of course derived from a general suspicion that the visits may have lent encouragement if not outright support to what were usually called “unauthorized fringe elements,” had languished
awhile on the Caribbean and Central American desks and then, once it seemed clear that no answers would be forthcoming, had been strategically leaked out of Tegucigalpa to the ranking American reporters who covered the area.

“According to well-placed embassy sources,” was the way the New York
Times
had attributed the questions.

The Los Angeles
Times
had added corroboration from “a European diplomat experienced in the region.”

The Washington
Post
had relied on “knowledgeable U.S. observers.”

In the brief flurry that followed, Mark Berquist defined the purpose of his trips as “strictly fact-finding,” “generally focused on business and agricultural matters” but “not in any area of particular interest to you.”

The senator himself said that he had made the trip only to “encourage participation in what is getting to be in our state a very active and mutually beneficial sister-city program.”

The call for a hearing died before it got to subcommittee.

Which might have been the end of it had the visits from the senator and Mark Berquist not been followed, at least in the area on which Alex Brokaw’s embassy reported, by certain incidents, not major but nonetheless troubling, in that they tended to legitimize the “previously reliable source” who had in late June reported the existence of a plot to assassinate Alex Brokaw.

There had been for example the two steamer trunks apparently abandoned in a windward condominium
that had been rented, at the time of Mark Berquist’s second visit, by a young Costa Rican woman who had since disappeared, skipped out on the weekly rent. When the owner returned he found the steamer trunks, which he moved into the hallway to be opened and discarded. The trunks sat in the breezeway for ten or twelve days before the janitor got around to opening them. According to the police report on the incident the contents of the two trunks included twenty Galil semiautomatic assault rifles, two AK-47s, seventeen silencers, three walkie-talkies, three bags of ammunition, assorted explosives and detonators and electronic devices, four bulletproof vests, and two sets of scales. According to the embassy report on the incident the presence of the scales argued for a drug connection and rendered the incident not of immediate concern. The embassy report further concluded that the absent Costa Rican tenant was not an asset of any U.S. agency known to the embassy.

That the tenant (no longer absent, since her body had been subsequently found in a ravine off the Smugglers’ Cove highway) was not an asset of any U.S. agency known to the embassy was one thing Treat Morrison doubted.

A few days after the business with the steamer trunks (but before the young woman’s body turned up) there had been the incident outside the Intercon, within minutes of Alex Brokaw’s scheduled speech at a chamber of commerce lunch in the Intercon ballroom. There had been a small crowd, a demonstration of sorts, having to do with the question of who was responsible for the precipitous loss of the tourist business. It was the contention of the demonstrators that the United States was responsible for the precipitous
loss of the tourist business. It was the contention of the embassy, and this was the point to which Alex Brokaw had intended to address his remarks, that the loss of the tourist business would be more than compensated for by the economic benefits that would accrue not only to this island but to the entire Caribbean basin were the United States Congress to approve military aid to the Nicaraguan freedom fighters for fiscal year 1985.

Economic benefits that were even now accruing.

In anticipation.

In recognition of the fact that there was already, let us be perfectly up front on this point, a presence.

A covert presence, true.

But only in anticipation of overt.

This was the subtext of the message that Alex Brokaw, alone in the back seat of his reinforced car, had been attempting to condense to an index card as his driver inched through the demonstrators outside the Intercon toward the police barricade set up at the entrance. The actual text of the message he was committing to the index card was this:
Just ask your friends the merchants of Panama what the United States Southern Command has meant to them.

“Actually a fairly feeble demo,” the driver reported having heard Alex Brokaw say at the exact instant it began to happen, first the quick burst of semiautomatic fire, then, as the police closed in, the dull pops of the tear gas canisters.

“Nothing like a little tear gas to clear out the sinuses,” is what Alex Brokaw recalled saying.

According to the police report on the incident, inquiries focused on two Hondurans registered until that morning at the airport Days Inn. According to
the embassy report on the incident, the two missing Hondurans could not be located for questioning but were not assets of any U.S. agency known to the embassy.