The Consummata

far as I was concerned, seven feet tall.

“After we eat, Senor Morgan, we must prepare you for your departure. The militia are still about, so you will remain here until we are sure it is safe for you to leave.”

“You’re sticking your neck out pretty far.”

“That is not a new experience, senor,” he said with his smile turned sideways. “Your accommodations will not be lavish, I am sorry to say—simply a secret space off the bedroom of my wife and me...but quite safe. They have already searched there twice and have not found it. And it will be more spacious than your other hiding place.”

That wouldn’t be tough.

“Mind answering me something, Pedro?”

“Most certainly.”

“Why the necessity for all these hiding places?”

For a moment he said nothing—he had his own secrets.

But then he shrugged again. “We, too, are fighting an enemy. We are not pursued, and yet, in our way, we are fugitives.”

I nodded. “Chased from your homes.”

“Our homeland has been ravaged, our properties confiscated, friends and relatives executed. Even in this country, the enemy has ways of getting to those it considers a threat. At such times, senor, a hiding place is most necessary. The place where you were housed before? That was previously used to keep our limited treasury.”

My eyebrows went up. “Your treasury’s pretty damn empty, if you can fit me in there.”

Now the smile disappeared. His face grew tight, his eyes black with hatred. “Once it was...what is the word? Flush. A small treasure a pirate such as yourself might find well worth...raiding. Treasure that would have bought the safety of many lives.”

“What happened to it?”

“Money that can be the source of much good is often a lure for evil. It was stolen, senor.”

“Who did it?”

“His name is Jaimie Halaquez. A bad man, senor. A devil that walks the earth. A man I would kill with these hands, if I had the chance, with no fear of losing my place in Heaven.”

He held his hands before him and strangled the air.

Then his grip loosened into fingers and the bitterness that etched his face disappeared and he smiled again.

“Come, Senor Morgan—you must eat. It has been a long time for you, between meals, no? But there was no other way. You need to seem to be gone. Vanished. And we need to appear as simple, unknowing peasants, not harborers of fugitives. And I do apologize for you having to stay for so long in that...that coffin.”

“It’s okay, Pedro.”

“It is?”

“Yeah. Any coffin you can crawl back out of? That’s one of your better coffins.”

This joke he got, and he led me into the next room, where a small feast awaited. I may not have been the hero they made me out to be, but I wasn’t about to turn down this delicious a hero’s welcome.

CHAPTER TWO

The federal prosecutors had not been shy about discussing the criminal-style activities I’d conducted for my country during the war. That was the heart of their case against me, after all. The shipment of currency from the Washington mint to New York consisted of forty million dollars in common bills, a paper volume that filled a medium-sized armored truck.

Why the G had made me for the heist was simple—I had pulled similar scores twice, during the war, getting troopmovement plans and coordinates on German blockhouses from their armored cars—utilizing booby-trap gimmicks to stop vehicles at given points, D-Y gas to knock out the drivers and passengers, with the means of entry a compact torch unit the Allied command had executed for me from my schematics. Complicated heists, requiring six-man teams.

Those two hits provided the template for the money truck score, right down to the torch.

So all these years later, a grateful government sent me to maximum security...only they hadn’t been able to keep me there; and the next time the “militia” had caught up with me had been dumb luck on their part, and rotten luck on mine.

They’d tried to do it through know-how and technology— first the NYPD, because the Big Apple was where the hijacking went down, then every great government agency you ever heard of and several you haven’t, and all the resources that implies.

And they hadn’t been alone—private investigators lured by the reward got in the fray, and Mob types who figured they could slam me in a chair, give me a blow-torch refresher, and get the location of the hidden loot out of me.

Nobody had succeeded.

Luck had prevailed where skill had failed. Luck in the form of a coked-up kid in a stolen heap in a high-speed chase with a squad car that spooked the driver into making too wide and wild a turn, sending himself over the curb and the heap onto its skidding side, taking one not-so-innocent bystander along for the ride through a store window in a shower of glass.

Luck.

You can’t buy it. And you can’t avoid it. It finds you, and does its capricious thing, a coin flip coming up tails and giving you the bad luck of getting clipped by that coke freak, only to come up heads and let you survive, with just a minor concussion, cuts, abrasions, and a couple broken ribs. No internal injuries at all.

Luck.

The coin flips again, comes up tails, and an intern looking for a gold star goes to the trouble of fingerprinting an accident victim whose I.D. somehow got lost in the shuffle, and those prints get sent to a local precinct house and on to Washington, and you? You’re not even awake yet.

And when you do wake up, that coin has come up tails again, and you’re back in the less than loving arms of your Uncle Sam.

So I’d agreed to take on the Nuevo Cadiz mission. The end game was getting a top research scientist out of a supposedly impenetrable prison called the Rose Castle. My ability to break out of prisons suggested to the federal boys that I might be able to just as effectively break into one.

The deal was I’d get fifteen years off my thirty-year sentence. And as deals went, it stunk. But I liked the idea of the government paying for a Caribbean vacation, and I also liked the odds of me slipping their grip at the end of the mission....

Nuevo Cadiz was Cuba before the revolution, a dictatorship flush with the dough brought in by casino-driven tourist trade. A good number of those tourists were hoodlums on the run, paying for the privilege of sanctuary, and mobsters using the casinos as money laundries. I went in as one of those shady tourists, a guy who maybe had forty mil to fence. My CIA handlers teamed me with one Kimberly Stacy, an agent who would travel along as my wife. To keep the cover authentic, Kim Stacy and I got married in Georgia by a justice of the peace.

We were still married, Kim and me.

My lovely doll of a bride would never have made it in the fashion mags—not tall enough, and way too many curves... long dark sun-streaked hair tumbling to her shoulders, her face an oval blessed with large almond eyes, as violet as Liz Taylor’s, a small, well-carved nose, and a lush mouth that could convey wry amusement with just the slightest rise at either corner.

I could close my eyes and see her in our Nuevo Cadiz hotel room, staring up at me from the bed, lounging in that sheer black negligee, its nylon hugging her with static insistence, a bottle of champagne nearby, the radio whispering Latin rhythms.

But all for show. To make the honeymoon look good.

On an early meeting, in the planning stages, I’d asked her casually if there were any “special instructions” on