The White Vixen (23 page)

Their conversation quickly steered to the battle on Carpenter’s Island. Ian was hesitant to speak about it at first, but she prodded him with a few gentle questions, sensing that he needed to talk about it, and then it came spilling out. He got to the part about his being shot, and then fell silent, looking out at the ocean, clutching her hand in his.

“Yes, I was afraid,” he said. “But I have to say, I was more afraid for my men than for myself. I feared the possibility of losing them, even one of them, through some bad decision of mine. And it happened.”

“You said you took only three casualties, including yourself,” Jo said.

He looked at her, his eyes sad. “The two Chileans,” he said. “They were under my command, too.”

“You deployed all your men as best as you could,” she said, trying to defend him to himself. “You just told me it was a no-win situation for you, without support from the ship.”

Gazing back out at the ocean, he said, “Yes, that’s true, I think. I don’t know what Admiralty will think about it, when they hear Captain Stone’s report. This was a bollocksed mess from the start, Jo, and somebody will have to take responsibility.”

“It won’t be you,” she said, taking his arm and pulling herself close to him. “You did the best you could. So did your captain. Neither one of you determined the rules of engagement. Somebody in London did that.”

“And you expect the politicians to admit fault, when they can blame the military? My, what a foolish girl you are.” He patted her hand. “Speaking of rules of engagement,” he said, “what are ours?”

“What do you mean?”

“We have one hour until I’m due back at hospital,” he said. “I’m rather tired of looking at the ocean.” He turned to her, touching her chin, tilting it upwards. “I’d much rather look at you.”

She looked into his eyes, and her heart began to race. It was there. “Perhaps we can find a place with a little more privacy,” she said.

He was dozing, and she lay in the crook of his arm, the late afternoon sun slanting through the blinds, painting them with irregular bands of shadow. She’d pulled up the sheet to partially cover them, but she still felt the room’s wheezy air conditioner chilling the patina of perspiration on their bodies. Resting her head on his uninjured right shoulder, she gently ran her fingers through the silky hair on his chest. He stirred, mumbling something that sounded like, “That feels good.”

“I was afraid to see you again, Ian,” she whispered, thinking out loud more than anything. “Afraid of my feelings for you, what they wanted to be, to grow into. I—“

His breathing stopped, then started again, and she realized he was awake now. When she didn’t continue, he gave her a gentle squeeze. “Go on,” he said. “Please.”

She had to tell him, even if it meant opening the old wounds. If they were to have any future together, he had to know. “I was hurt before,” she said, her voice almost trembling. “Twice. There was this boy at Stanford, a young man, really, I was only nineteen…”

“Your first?”

“Yes,” she said. “He was a poli-sci major, very much the leftist, very much against the Vietnam War, and there I was, the prim and proper daughter of a CIA officer, and in Air Force ROTC to boot.”

“Opposites attract.”

“We were together for most of my sophomore year, and in spite of everything I fell in love with him.”

“And it ended,” he said for her.

She suppressed a shudder as the memory spun out again. “At the end of the academic year, my ROTC battalion was holding an honors ceremony. I was scheduled to get two, my parents were there, it was a big evening, and then some protestors got into the hall.” Through her sudden tears, she told him about the ugly epithets, “baby-killer” and much worse, and the rotten tomatoes sailing through the air and spattering on her dress uniform and her shock at seeing Jimmy’s bearded face as the protestors were rushed by a group of angry cadets.

“He tried to explain it to me later,” she said. “How it had to be done, in the name of the revolution.”

“What were they revolting against?” Ian asked.

“The war. President Nixon, the Establishment, the military, anyone in authority. He said sacrifices had to be made, and if our love was the cost, that’s what had to be. He asked me to quit ROTC, join his group. I said no. I never saw him again.”

He held her close. “That was difficult, I’m sure,” he said.

“I was heartbroken.” She sighed heavily, pushing the memory aside.

After a quiet minute, he said, “There was another?”

“Yes,” she said. “The second was Franklin, a few years later. I was doing graduate work at the Academy in Colorado Springs. He was…well, he was one of my instructors.”

“Oh, my,” he said, unable to keep a tinge of mirth from creeping in.

She slapped him on the chest, but not very hard. “Franklin was just about everything a woman could want,” she said. “Oh, God. I’m sorry.”

He squeezed her. “You did say ‘just about’, didn’t you?”

“Yes,” she said, relieved. “He was good-looking, well-educated, an officer—a major, Marine Corps, a visiting lecturer for a course I was taking. He was also in my tae kwon do class. We dated for three months.”

“Not very long,” he said.

“It was pretty intense,” she said. “Franklin was like that. He was on his way up. Wanted to be Commandant of the Corps someday.”

“And then?”

She sighed. “Then the semester was coming to a close. He was taking a post in the Pentagon. I thought he might ask me to come with him, that he could arrange my transfer…”

“But he didn’t,” Ian said.

“No. He…” The searing memory of that night in Vail came back to her. She shuddered. “He told me he couldn’t see me anymore. You see, he was black, and I’m not, of course, and he didn’t want—didn’t want his children to be of mixed heritage.”

“Cheeky bastard.”

She didn’t respond to that. Franklin had possessed a raw power that she found intoxicating. It wasn’t just his supremely conditioned body, the one he’d built as an All-American cornerback at the Naval Academy. It was the force of his personality, his intensity, and even his arrogance as a black man striving to succeed in a white man’s world. He was an immensely proud man, and she suspected that his pride called for him to be careful in his selection of a mate. Some would have called it racism, and perhaps there was some of that in there, but deep down she knew Franklin was just being the kind of man he was driving himself to be, unwilling to let anything stand in his way. And while she admired him for that, her admiration had not stopped the pain.

She sighed again. It felt good to tell Ian about them, and as he held her tight, she sensed he knew what kind of pain she must have gone through, how it had affected her relationship with him, right up to this very day, this very hour. He understood.

“And what about you, kind sir? How many birds have you let fly away?”

He chuckled. “Oh, I suppose there were one or two fairly serious flings in there, but honestly, Jo, the Royal Marines have been it for me since I was a lad. A family thing, you know. Dad was in the last war, Gramps in the one before that. Fortunately, they both came home. Never talked about it much. I knew I’d be making the military a career. Went to a Royal Marines recruiting office when I was eighteen and a crusty old sergeant asked me if I was tough enough. That did it for me.”

“Not much room for romance,” she said, knowing full well how the demands of active duty played havoc with relationships.

He rolled onto his side, facing her. “I’ve decided it’s time to make room,” he said, as he lowered his lips to hers.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

Estancia Valhalla, Argentina

February 1982

Ernesto saw t
he ad in the classifieds of
Clarin
, one of several newspapers delivered to the estancia daily from Buenos Aires and other major cities in Argentina. The staff was free to peruse them on their own time the day after their arrival, when it was presumed the Baumanns and their frequent guests would have finished with them. There was also a weekly shipment of newspapers and magazines from West Germany and the United States, along with
The Times
of London and
Le Figaro
from Paris. Ernesto made a point of reading three papers a day.
Clarin
was a tabloid and a bit too sensational for Ernesto’s tastes, but they did have an excellent cultural section on Sundays, and he always checked the classifieds in Wednesday’s edition.

Most of the time, his search was fruitless, but today a small box in the Personals caught his attention. It was a simple, two-sentence entry: “Manuela, you are the reason I live. Please forgive me. Guillermo.” Anyone who paid close attention to the listings might possibly note that Guillermo seemed to be in trouble with Manuela every couple of months.

The ad held a different meaning for Ernesto. This Sunday evening, he would leave the estancia and drive one of the Baumann vehicles to Buenos Aires to visit his parents. As he had Sunday evenings and all Mondays off, the trip to the city was a regular occurrence, and he would usually stay the night with his elderly mother and father. Sometimes when he visited, he would place a votive candle in the window of his bedroom. The aroma helped him sleep, and also served as a signal for a certain individual who walked his dog along the street flanking the apartment building. The next morning, Ernesto would take a stroll to a nearby park and sit for a spell next to a fountain. He would be joined by a certain man, perhaps the same one who had walked past his parents’ building the night before, and they would talk. Ernesto would occasionally leave his newspaper on the bench, and the other man would courteously retrieve the paper and take it with him upon his own departure, dropping the newspaper into a trash receptacle after carefully removing whatever documents or other materials it had been hiding.

On other occasions, like this one, Ernesto would see the ad from the lovelorn Guillermo and know that the man with the dog wanted to see him the following Monday morning in the park. Every meeting with the man was tense, although over the past year Ernesto had grown a bit more at ease, especially as he saw his bank account grow. His parents were getting older, and the medicines they needed were expensive.

The following Monday was clear and warm. Ernesto breakfasted with his parents, listened to them tell the latest news from the family again, repeating many of the stories he’d heard the night before, and then took his leave of them for his constitutional. By ten o’clock he had found a seat on an empty bench. His companion joined him a few minutes later.

“Good morning, my friend,” the man said in flawless Spanish Lunfardo.

“Good morning,” Ernesto said. In nearly a year
of these meetings, he had yet to find out the man’s name. He was probably English—it stood to reason, really, and he was most certainly not Brazilian—and about his age, which was near fifty. Whereas Ernesto was slender and dark haired, this man was somewhat plump with streaks of iron gray in his hair. He wore nondescript slacks, a long-sleeved white shirt and a straw fedora.

“Thank you for coming,” the man said. “I needed to ask you a question. Have you ever heard of Pilcaniyeu?”

“I have never been there,” Ernesto said cautiously. “It is very far away.”

“A thousand kilometers to the south,” the man said conversationally, as if discussing the weather or the latest football scores. “An interesting place, so I’m told. A small town, nestled in the foothills of the mountain range, and a large research and development facility nearby. A military facility. Have you heard of it?”

Ernesto fidgeted on the park bench. “I’ve, ah, overheard some conversations,” he said.

“I would be very interested in any other details you might come across,” the man said. “This information is quite important. It would be worth double your usual payment.”

“I am a loyal Argentine,” Ernesto said, trying to control his anger. He was angry at the man, and his employers, for the hold they had on him. The Baumanns paid him well, but not well enough to care for his parents, too.

“I know you are, my friend,” the man said, giving Ernesto a comradely pat on the arm. “We believe that the information you can provide about this place may actually save lives. Perhaps a great many of them.”

Ernesto took a deep breath. He could get up and walk away now. The man had made that clear when they’d first met, nearly a year ago. Ernesto was under no compulsion to cooperate. However, it went unsaid that without their expensive medications, his parents’ health would steadily decline. They probably would not live another two years, and he would then be alone. Forever. The Englishman not only paid him more than enough to cover the cost of the medicine, but had arranged for certain drugs to be made available to Ernesto at an exclusive pharmacy. If he walked away now, that would all vanish overnight.

“All right,” the butler said. “I will see what I can do.”

The man watched Ernesto walk out of the park, then took his own leave. Nothing but words had passed between the two men, but even so there was risk of arrest. The Bureau of Internal Security was stepping up its surveillance of British nationals in Buenos Aires, and the man—Donald Travis was listed on his passport, but that was false—took the appropriate measures as he made his way back to the embassy. When he arrived, confident he had not been followed, he reported to the second floor office of the Assistant Director of Cultural Affairs, a man who in reality was the head of the MI6 intelligence office in Argentina.