The Consummata

became a political embarrassment, a Cold War liability. If Castro had JFK killed, nobody wanted to say so—at best, it meant that embarrassing proof we’d been plotting to kill a foreign leader would come out, and at worst that a hailstorm of nukes would fall all over the world.”

“Wait,” I said, and I touched her hand, squeezed it. “The money-truck heist—that was well after the Kennedy hit. All of these Cuba plans would have been shut down by then.”

She nodded. “Yes, but there were rogue elements within the Company that still wanted those efforts to move forward. That forty-million-dollar heist was a last ditch effort by those forces to fund an invasion of Cuba by Cuban exiles.”

“Actually a noble cause,” I said, then rolled my eyes. “All except for the part where Morgan the Raider gets framed for the heist.”

“That was a genius stroke,” Kim said, with a wry half-smile. “Somebody must have enlisted your crew and either painted it as a money-making effort, or possibly brought them in as patriots. You were all highly decorated heroes of the European theater.”

“They would have come aboard as patriots,” I said, “stand-up guys willing to re-up with Uncle Sam for one last mission...with one exception—the son of a bitch who wound up with the money. A man who had been disfigured in the war and felt his government owed him in a big way. The man you heard confess, Kim. The man I shot on a windy runway in Nuevo Cadiz.”

Kim had nodded all through that, but now she held my eyes with so much concern in hers, I knew something bad was coming.

She said, “I agree with your high assessment of the character of your old war buddies...with that one notable exception. But Morgan...I’m sorry to have to tell you this...your friend, Art Keefer—last surviving member of your original Army heist crew—was killed last month.”

“Shit,” I said. I felt like I’d taken a body blow. “How?”

Art had helped us with surreptitious transport on the Nuevo Cadiz mission, but I’d stayed out of contact with him since, for his own protection—or anyway, what I’d thought was his own protection.

“A plane crash,” she said. “He was a pilot—what better way? Pilot error, they say, flying one of his small aircraft.”

“In a pig’s ass,” I said.

“You said Art wasn’t in on that forty-million haul, Morgan ...but are you sure?”

“I guess under the circumstances, I can’t be. Maybe that’s why Art helped me out when he shouldn’t have risked it—maybe he felt bad that I wound up blamed for a score I had nothing to do with.”

“But a score somebody signed your name to,” Kim said. “What about the other two on your crew?”

“Deceased. You know that.”

“Just in the last couple of years, right? Again, well after the money-truck heist? Meaning everybody on your crew but you, Morg, is dead now.”

I frowned, thinking it through. “One died of cancer, the other in an automobile accident—I never considered their deaths might have been liquidations.”

She cocked her head, raised an eyebrow. “The Company has given more people cancer than Phillip Morris. And do I have to tell you that a car crash can be staged?”

I shook my head. “Damn. I should have seen that. Damn!”

“Don’t beat yourself up—until Keefer’s convenient death, I didn’t put it together, either.”

She stroked my cheek. Kissed me with a tenderness that made my heart ache almost as much as something else was aching.

“Darling,” she said, “we’ve both been working on this, from our respective positions. I know what you’ve been doing, all these months. Besides keeping your head down, you’ve been moving from coastal city to coastal city, going to museums and rare book stores and university libraries, tracking your namesake....”

“Sir Henry Morgan,” I said, nodding. “Before I shot my old buddy in the head, back in Nuevo Cadiz, he said he’d hidden the forty mil where Sir Henry kept his treasure. I figure the original Morgan’s treasure is long gone, but my old pal found one of the treasure hideaways and buried the loot. I have half a dozen good leads to track down between Panama and Jamaica.”

“Find that money,” she said, “and turn it in, and with my testimony to back you up, you’re a free man again. No more federal hounds on your trail.”

“Right.”

“But, darling, don’t you see, there’s another way...expose the government traitor who set you up! And I believe the name of that traitor can be found, right here in Miami.”

I squinted at her, as if I were trying to bring that lovely face into sharper focus. “You said you were deep cover. What are you doing in Miami?”

“You and I are after the same prey—Jaimie Halaquez, the man who raided the treasury of the Cuban exiles here.”

“I thought the CIA was out of the Cuba business.”

“Overtly we are. Even covertly, not so much now. But these people were our allies, are our allies, and we keep an eye on them, their activities, and those who move against them. And they have something in common with the Company that I work for—they, too, have a traitor in their midst.”

“Halaquez,” I said.

“No,” she said, and shook her head firmly. “Halaquez is just a henchman for a traitor still among them. But if we can find Halaquez, and make him talk...and we can make him talk, Morgan...he will lead us to the one he’s working for. The one who has seen to it that for the last several years, all of the efforts of Little Havana’s Cuban exiles have gone for nothing.”

I laughed without humor. “I had that bastard in my damn hands, but he slipped out of them.”

“Halaquez?”

“Yes,” I said, and filled her in on my side of things.

It took a good ten minutes, going through in a linear fashion, starting with Pedro and company recruiting me to recover the stolen seventy-five grand, and winding up with the beating of Tango in her motel room, with me killing Halaquez’s crony there and Halaquez himself getting away.

“This has to be about more than just the seventy-five thousand dollars,” she said, when I finished, her expression and tone intense. “Two Cuban heavies, imported to back Halaquez up? It has to be much more.”

“The answer,” I said, “is tied up with this Richard Best character.”

“Him I’ve never heard of,” she admitted. “That’s a new lead...and maybe you should keep chasing it down.” She took my face in her hands and said, “We’re very close. You keep up your efforts on the Best front. Can I contact you here?”

“Yes, through the madam—Bunny.”

She nodded. “I know Bunny. This house is an intelligence resource for the Company. Morg, you can reach me at the Raleigh Hotel. I’m registered as Kim Winters.”

That made me smile—Winters was the name I’d married her under, using “Morgan” as a first name.

“Spies shouldn’t be sentimental slobs,” I told her.

Her smile turned up wickedly at one corner. “I never said I was perfect, did I?”

“No. That was me who said that about you.”

She gave me a kiss, nothing hot, just friendly, and slid off the bed.

“Gotta go,” she said.

I followed her to the hidden door. “Why? Look, that bed is as good as any other. We’ve talked our business. So let’s get down to business.”

She shook her head. “I would like nothing better than to crawl under those covers with you and not come out for a week. But we don’t have a week, and I’m just stubborn enough to want to start this marriage off with better than a quickie.”

“Aw, Kim, for Christ’s sake....”

“Morg, do you know who I report to? Do you know who’s in town, running the Halaquez operation? Or did your ego tell you you were the star of the show?”