no danger of anything accidentally spilling on the clippings. He kept them in a thick book, covered in genuine Moroccan leather. He opened it familiarly but at random, eyes not immediately focusing on the words. It was the obituary. It was practically a eulogy, running almost to two columns: THE MAN WHO BROUGHT LAW TO THE TERRITORY was the headline. O’Farrell became conscious of the words shifting and realized his hands were shaking, very slightly. Just the weight of the book, he told himself, trying to concentrate upon the account again but finding it difficult because of another intrusive thought.
O’Farrell forced himself to confront it. Had his great-grandfather ever questioned what he had to do, been unsure whether he could go on doing it? The way O’Farrell was starting to question what he was called upon to do?
There was one part of the diplomatic bag, a specially sealed and marked satchel, which no one but the ambassador was allowed to open, and the ambassador, upon strict orders from Havana itself, always had to be available instantly to receive it.
Jose Gaviria Rivera recognized the necessity for such precautions but was frequently inconvenienced by them. As he was tonight. He’d allowed a two-hour fail-safe between its expected arrival and the time he had to be in the reserved Covent Garden box alongside a mistress about whom, almost disconcertingly, he felt differently than he’d felt about any other. But because of fog the damned aircraft had been diverted to Manchester. So he couldn’t make the curtain. She’d said she understood when he’d telephoned, coquettishly insisting she would punish him for it later, but Rivera actually enjoyed
Rivera sighed, striding back and forth in front of the window of his office. Perhaps he should be philosophical in another way: perhaps the sexual punishment for one act would make up for missing the first of another. Had he allowed himself to consider the emotion, which of course was unthinkable, Rivera might have imagined himself in love with Henrietta.
It was almost an hour before the diplomatic bag arrived and his personal “Eyes Only” satchel was hurried to him. Rivera let the breath go heavily from himself, forming a whistle, as he read the demand. It was far greater than ever before, far beyond the usual small arms and handguns and low-caliber ammunition, although they were included. This time he had to supply ground-to-air missiles and sophisticated communication equipment; there was even a request for tanks, if they could be supplied.
Rivera sat back, gazing sightlessly at the door, momentarily curious. Where was it all destined to go? Nicaragua was an obvious recipient, despite the supposed peace accord with the Contras. Maybe Honduras. Or Panama, perhaps; the government there might, after thumbing its nose at Washington, consider an arms buildup a sensible insurance. What about the guerrillas in Colombia, the country upon which it all depended anyway?
Rivera shrugged. It did not really matter, wherever it was. His part began and ended with European arms dealers. And even before making the most preliminary of inquiries, Rivera knew the cost would be incredible. He smiled. And not all of that incredible expenditure was actually going to be spent upon the weaponry he was being ordered to buy.
Rivera knew precisely his importance in Havana’s drugs-for-arms-arms-for-drugs chain: without him there wouldn’t even be a chain. So it was right that such expertise be properly rewarded. Ten percent was the usual fee he awarded himself, but this was a much bigger consignment than any he’d handled before. It was going to take a lot of organizing. He considered that his unofficial commission should go up commensurately. He didn’t doubt that those at the other end of the chain, those Cuban diplomats entrusted through embassies and legations and missions with the drug distribution, were making far greater personal profits than he was. Not that Rivera was jealous. He knew he would not have enjoyed being a money raiser, actually dealing in cocaine. That would have been much too dangerous.
THREE
O’FARRELL’S OBSERVANCE of order and routine extended into his private life. It was a Saturday, and on Saturdays his first job was to clean the cars. He always did it early because it meant backing the vehicles out of the narrow garage onto Fairfax, with a view of the Old Presbyterian Meeting House. By midmorning, particularly in the spring and summer, Alexandria became thronged with tourists, and he liked to finish before they arrived. Not that he wasn’t proud to live in such a historic township. The reverse. O’Farrell got real pleasure from residing in a township where George Washington and Robert E. Lee had once lived; he knew all its history and its landmarks and talked knowledgeably on the few occasions when he had been trapped by early visitors. But those occasions had been very few; O’Farrell shunned casual contact, even with anonymous tourists: certainly with anonymous tourists carrying cameras that might record him.
Today there was an additional reason for wanting to be outside. After the two and a half martinis of the previous night he’d awoken with an ache banded like a cord around his head, and he needed to get out into the air.
It was warm, despite being early, and apart from the headache O’Farrell was comfortable in jeans and shirt sleeves. There was, of course, a pattern to the cleaning. He hosed the car down first, to soften the dirt and dust, washed it off with soapy water, and then hosed it down again before toweling away the excess water. He completed the drying with a chamois cloth and finished off by polishing with more toweling.
O’Farrell enjoyed engines. They performed to predetermined orderliness, dozens of independent parts making up a complete whole. He supposed that tinkering with the workings of his car and Jill’s had been his only hobby until he’d started upon the ancestral archive. He greased them and balanced them and tuned them, and as he finished off the cleaning O’Farrell decided that the care and attention paid off. The paintwork of both had practically the same showroom sheen, which they wouldn’t have had if he’d stop-started them through some plastic-brushed car wash. There wasn’t any rust, not so much as a warning stain behind any of the decorative metalwork. O’Farrell reckoned he would easily get another four years out of each vehicle before trading them in.
By which time he would be fifty, O’Farrell calculated, reversing the Ford back into its garage. Retirement age; another word association from the previous day. Not slippers and pipe and walking-the-dog sort of retirement. He’d have to wait another ten years for that, patiently reviewing and assessing the Plans Directorate finances full-time. But spared that other function, that other function he increasingly felt unable to perform. Dear God, how much he wanted to be spared that again! What were his chances? Impossible to compute. The last time had been more than a year ago—the first occasion he had felt nervous and hesitated and almost made a disastrous mistake—and between that assignment and the one before there had been an interval of almost three years. Always possible, then, that he wouldn’t be called upon again: possible but unlikely, he thought, forcing the objectivity. So why didn’t he simply quit? Go to Petty and Erickson and tell them how he felt and ask to be taken off the active roster? He knew there were others, although naturally he wasn’t aware of their names. Not as good as he was, according to Petty, but O’Farrell put that down to so much obvious bullshit, the sort the controller doubtless said to them all.
So why didn’t he just quit? Had his great-grandfather ever backed down? O’Farrell wondered, attempting to answer one question with another. Bullshit of his own now. Until these handshaking doubts, O’Farrell had always found it easy to consider himself a law officer like his great-grandfather, merely obeying different rules to match different circumstances. Now he acknowledged that if he made the analogy with objective honesty, what he did and what his ancestor had done in the 1860s were hugely different. So that answer didn’t wash. What did? O’Farrell didn’t know, not completely. There was a combination of reasons, not sufficient by themselves but enough when he assembled them all together, the way the individual parts of an automobile engine came together into something that made functional sense. Different though his job might be from that of his great-grandfather, he
