O'Farrell's Law (38 page)

“All the hidden extras, able to go on supporting everyone in the family and no longer having to be the executioner?” Lambert offered.

How was it that Lambert could sum it all up in about twenty words when he'd thrashed about for hours and still couldn't put it in a comprehensible sentence? O'Farrell said, “I hadn't thought about it as simply as that.”

“You'd still be involved, of course,” Lambert pointed out. “You wouldn't be pulling the trigger or whatever, but with Petty and Erickson you'd be agreeing to the targets and initiating the operations.”

“I know that,” O'Farrell said.

“Still killing, then?” Lambert pressed. “The only difference would be that you wouldn't be doing it yourself. You don't find any difficulty there?”

“I thought we agreed on the need—and the justification—when I was here after the London mistake?”

Lambert nodded. “I thought we did, too. I was curious whether you'd changed your mind.”

“No,” O'Farrell said. “I haven't changed my mind.”

“Not easier, perhaps, to be the judge rather than the man carrying out the sentence?”

Lambert hadn't summed it all up, not in those first twenty or so words. It had taken him just a few more. Now he'd succeeded: everything laid out in the open, like items on a display stand. With that realization came another, the awareness of why he'd had so much difficulty expressing himself. It had all been so much bullshit the previous night, slumped in the den, pretending to examine all the options. He hadn't examined anything, apart from the bottom of his martini glass. He'd refused to let himself think the thoughts that Lambert was making him examine now. O'Farrell said, “I would think both are equally difficult. It isn't easy to kill a man. Or deciding if he should be killed.”

“I never supposed it was,” Lambert said.

The other man appeared briefly discomfited, and O'Farrell couldn't understand why. As if in reminder, O'Farrell said. “I've definitely told them I wouldn't do it: go to Spain and eliminate Rivera.” He detected an old petulance in his voice.

“You've already told me, several times,” Lambert said.

It seemed to be a moment—and a matter—for long and heavy silences, thought O'Farrell. As with Petty the previous day, it was Lambert who broke it.

The psychologist shook his head and said, “I'm not going to do it.”

“Do what?” O'Farrell asked. Now it was he who was discomfited.

“Make your decision for you. That's what you want me to do, isn't it? Tell you what to do. And I won't do that.”

There was the temptation to argue, to insist that wasn't why he'd sought the meeting, but O'Farrell knew it would have been a hollow protest, impossible to maintain. His reliance upon Lambert, a man he scarcely knew, was something else he had refused to admit to himself until this very moment, and he was disturbed by the awareness. It was a reversal of everything to which he was accustomed. Everyone—all the family—relied upon him. He was the strong one, the person who provided the guidance and the answers. He didn't like the opposite, the implied weakness. He said. “I wanted to talk through the options. You were the only person I knew with sufficient clearance.” He even sounded reliant!

“And we've done just that, talked through the options. All of them,” Lambert said. “Now it's time to decide. For
you
to decide.”

“I told you—” O'Farrell began, but Lambert interrupted him.

“If it
were
an ultimatum, absurdly put though it was, you can change your mind,” the psychologist said. “Petty's meeting isn't until Friday. And Petty can't have given the assignment to anyone else, because you told me yourself there isn't time to brief anyone else.”

“You sound as if you think I should do just that: change my mind,” O'Farrell said.

Lambert shook his head. “I told you I'm not going to do it, not decide for you,” he said. “It doesn't matter a damn to me whether you change your mind or not. My official association with you ended when you left here the last time. What I am trying to do, because you asked to see me, is show you the way to face up to the reality of the situation. You've already made it clear you're not going to do it, which would normally effectively retire you from the department. Fine, if that's what you feel like doing. But there's the promotion possibility. And I know all the reasons why that's personally important. Petty says he'll do his best for it not to be affected. I don't know him well, but from what I do know he seems to be a pretty straight guy. So let's trust him. Again, fine. You wanted all the options? There they are, spelled out for you again.”

O'Farrell used the psychologist's phone to call Lafayette Square, using Petty's direct and unlisted line. “I'm prepared to do it,” he announced.

“I'd hoped you would be,” Petty said.

“Amsterdam!” Rivera echoed, to the arms dealer's announcement.

“And I want the money,” Belac insisted.

“You know it's available,” the ambassador assured him. “Are you there now?”

“Not yet,” Belac lied. “Listen carefully: take a note. Six-eight, three-two, four-four.”

“What's that?” Rivera asked, although he already guessed.

“A telephone number you are to ring, in three days' time,” Belac said. With the
City of Athens
and its load of shit still miles from anywhere on the high seas, the Belgian thought, gloating.

“What's wrong with an address?” Rivera queried.

“I told you already,” Belac reminded him. “I'm not having you lead the Americans to me.”

He'd questioned sufficiently, Rivera decided. Belac was on the hook once more and he didn't want the man slipping off. “In three days,” he agreed.

“Don't try and cheat me,” Belac said.

The cocky bastard, thought Rivera. He said, “I've never tried to cheat you. It's been a misunderstanding.”

“I don't want any more misunderstandings,” Belac said.

Rivera summoned the DGI chief the moment he disconnected from the Belgian's call. Carlos Mendez listened intently to Rivera's edited account of the conversation and said, “We'll need to leave tomorrow, early. I'll make the travel arrangements. And speak to Havana.”

Rivera frowned. “Belac isn't expecting me for another three days.”

Mendez gave a palm-up gesture. “I don't mean to be presumptuous, Excellency,” he said. “But this has to be my way. All of it.”

Rivera's frown deepened. Presumption was precisely the attitude of the other man. He had to let it pass without correction for the moment, but he made a mental note not to let it continue.

Rivera left the embassy early, wanting as much time as possible with Jorge. He got to the Hampstead house just after the boy's bath. Jorge came down the stairs still warm, smelling clean. And smelling of something else. It was the soap Estelle had used, Rivera realized at once. Had Jorge used it accidentally, picking up a piece that had been overlooked after Estelle's death? Or had he intentionally ransacked some bathroom cabinet, searching it out?

They went through the established ritual of such evenings, Rivera sitting with a drink while Jorge recounted the events of the day, and then Rivera talking of anything that had happened at the embassy that he thought might interest the boy, which was not very much.

Rivera announced the following day's departure, without saying where he was going, and apologized for the suddenness of the trip. Jorge, already warned of the Madrid conference, accepted the news quite contentedly. He asked his father when he would be returning and Rivera said definitely the day the conference ended, the sixteenth.

“Three days before school lets out,” Jorge said brightly.

Rivera knew of the extended, August-into-autumn holiday, of course, but he'd forgotten the precise dates. “We'll really make it a vacation!” he promised. “You choose the place.”

Jorge was briefly silent with the seriousness of a twelve-year-old. Then he said, “Why not Paris, where we're going to live?”

It made perfect sense, Rivera thought. They might even look at likely property, although house hunting was a fairly boring activity for a boy of Jorge's age. “Paris it is,” he agreed. “I'll have the arrangements made while I am away.”

“Did you talk to Mama about our going to live there?” asked Jorge.

The introduction of Estelle almost off-balanced Rivera. Aware that to show any surprise would be a mistake, he said at once, “No. I hadn't decided about it.”

“I think she would have liked it, don't you?”

“Yes,” Rivera said, with difficulty. “Yes, I think she would. She was fond of Paris.”

“Will you take me to the places you went to with Mama? I'd like to see them; know that she'd seen them, too.”

“Yes,” Rivera promised. “We'll go to every one.”

“I loved Mama,” the child declared.

“I loved her, too,” Rivera said, for Jorge's benefit.

THIRTY-ONE

N
OTHING WAS
as Rivera expected. He'd anticipated flying direct to Amsterdam, but they didn't. They went—just he and Mendez—by train and cross-Channel ferry, and again not directly. From Calais, on a journey that required two changes, they traveled through France, going into Luxembourg at Namur and into Germany at Aachen. It was late into the evening before they reached Hannover.

The hotel was very small and dirty, halfway along the Davenshedterstrasse. They went out to eat, choosing a restaurant at random. It was bad. Rivera started to feel vaguely unclean; his skin itched, particularly on his arms, and he went twice to the toilet to wash his hands.

“Has all this really been necessary?” he demanded. Throughout the day he'd had to follow Mendez's lead and he hadn't enjoyed that, either. Mendez clearly had, every minute of it.

“If it weren't, I wouldn't have insisted upon it,” said Mendez, almost insolently. “There are far more checks at airports than at train border crossings and you've no reason, official or unofficial, to be in Holland anyway. Isn't it better for your presence to remain completely unknown?”

“I suppose so,” Rivera said begrudgingly. “I expected more than just yourself.”

“I'm not alone,” Mendez said. “There are to be others in Amsterdam.”

“From London?”

Mendez pushed away his largely uneaten meal. “Cuba itself. It's safer that way.”

Rivera felt the first flicker of apprehension. There might be a mistake and he, José Gaviria Rivera, might get caught up in an apparently squalid incident. Which wouldn't remain squalid at all, once the investigation started.

“You mean they're special…?” Rivera's voice ebbed away, in his search of the word.

“Yes,” Mendez said helpfully. “What about protection? Belac, I mean. Does he have a lot of people around him?”

Rivera considered the question, recognizing its implication. “Never,” he said, surprised now that he thought about it. “We've only ever met alone, just the two of us. And according to what he told me, he's staying away from Brussels, where he might have some protectors, because of the American investigation. That's why we're meeting in Amsterdam.”

Mendez gave a teeth-baring smile. “That's good,” he said. “We'll have to make sure, of course. But that sounds good.”

The hotel sheets, white in a long distant past, were gray, and the narrow bath was stained and actually dusty from lack of use. Rivera slept remarkably well, the pillow covered with a clean shirt and the one towel between himself and where he lay. When he showered the following morning, the water created an instant grime scum around his feet from the dirt in the bath.

The hotel in Amsterdam was much better. It was a
pension
on Wolvenstratt run by a Dutch doll of a woman, white-aproned, big-busted, and with a polished-apple face permanently creased by smiles. She allocated them adjoining rooms and hoped they found everything they wanted in Amsterdam. Rivera said he hoped so, too.

It was a day of pale, near-autumn sunshine and warm breezes, perfect for a country of gardeners and flower growers. Rivera and Mendez found a pavement cafe between the canals, but the intelligence man insisted upon their sitting inside and at a table at the back.

“Belac's somewhere in Amsterdam,” Mendez said. “You're not due to be here yet. Coincidence really does occur, sometimes. I don't want to risk your being accidentally seen by the man.”

Irritating though it was to be subordinate to Mendez, the man did appear to be consummately professional, Rivera admitted to himself. The diplomat nodded understanding and said, “So we're here. What now?”

“For you, very little until the meeting with Belac,” said Mendez. “I have to locate the others already here, although there's little preparation we can make until you speak with Belac and make your arrangements.”

“Shall I be involved in the planning?” Rivera tried to make the question natural enough, but he was anxious for the answer. What if the professionals from Cuba seized Belac, instead of what he expected them to do! The truth about the withheld money would emerge in minutes.
How
could he have been so stupid as to have tried to manipulate it as he had!

“I'd prefer it if you weren't, but it's necessary,” Mendez said “They have to follow your lead; they've got to know you.”

The warmth of the day, and their sitting inside rather than out in the air, could account for the perspiration bubbling on his upper lip, Rivera decided. He said, “What about me reason for their being here at all? And what they have to do? Do they know I have to recover something, before they move?”

“They've been told Belac has cheated us, severely. But not how. Nothing at all about arms shipments. And nothing. either, about Belac's part in what happened”—Mendez hesitated, considerately—“what happened in London.”