could seem to be looking at Rita when he was actually looking past her.
“Todd, I’m not kidding,” Rita said. “I’m drunk and hungry, and I’m going to faint any minute.”
Bacon waved at the bartender. “Can we dine at the bar, seсor?”
The bartender brought two menus.
“Can’t we get a table?” Rita asked.
“Rita, baby, I’m working, here; you know about work, don’t you? Order anything you like, and order one for me, too.”
“You spooks are all alike,” Rita said. “Work, work, work, day and night.”
Bacon ran a hand up her skirt and found, to his surprise and delight, that she was wearing stockings and a garter belt, instead of panty hose. “Hey, hey,” he said.
“Not now,” she replied. “Not until I’ve had some food.” She waved the bartender over and held up two fingers. “Dos specialitees,” she said in mangled Spanish, “and a bottle of vino blanco primo.”
Bacon snapped his attention back to the man at the bar to check out the left ear. Unfortunately, the man’s hair covered the ear entirely. Just what the mark would do, Bacon thought.
Plates of guacamole appeared before them on the bar, and Rita dug in with a vengeance. “Oh, God, that’s good,” she said. “I might make it through the evening.”
Bacon tried it, and she was right; it was good, and he was very hungry, too. The man with the beard was saying something to the bartender, and he strained to hear it. It was English, but that was the best he could do. Bacon was beginning to believe with all his heart that the man he was looking at was his mark. The man looked like a cross between Colonel Sanders and Grandpa on The Waltons. He had seen the reruns on Nickelodeon when he was a kid.
“So Toddy,” Rita said, “where’d you go to school?”
“Alabama,” Bacon replied absently.
“Joe Namath Alabama?”
“One and the same.”
“So you’re southern white trash, or what?”
Bacon fixed her with his gaze. “Southern white aristocracy,” he replied, “not that you’d know the difference.” The man at the bar reached under his hair with a finger and scratched at his ear, but there wasn’t time for Bacon to fix on it before it was covered with hair again.
“You mean your people owned slaves and all that?”
“Lots of slaves and lots of all that,” Bacon replied.
“So they were rich?”
“They were, for a time. They had to get it all back after the war.”
“The Civil War?”
“The War Between the States,” Bacon replied, “or the Struggle for Southern Independence, take your pick.”
Then something awful happened. A pretty blonde in her thirties came into the bar and sat down beside the man with the beard, giving him a peck on the cheek. “Hey, sweetheart,” she said.
“This is Mrs. Williams,” the man said to the bartender. “We were married just before we left New York.”
Mrs. Williams shook hands with the bartender.
“Is this your first time in Panama, seсor?” the bartender asked.
“It certainly is,” Williams replied. “We’re taking a private tour of the canal tomorrow.”
“I hope your rooms are satisfactory.”
“Yes, we have a real nice suite on the top floor.”
Bacon’s heart sank. “Shit,” he said under his breath.
“What?” Rita asked.
“Never mind, baby,” Bacon said. “You just eat your dinner, then we’ll go back to my place.” At least the evening wouldn’t be a total loss.
“Deal,” Rita replied, mopping up the last of the guacamole and receiving a plate of some sort of stew.
“What the hell,” Bacon said, starting on his stew. “You win some, you lose some. There’s always tomorrow.”
Teddy Fay watched the young couple at the bar from his table. “Mrs. Williams” was an American hooker he occasionally spent a night with in a hotel room, and he was looking forward to this night.
Teddy noticed the bartender head for the men’s room. He excused himself from the table, walked over to the bar, to where the credit card machine was kept, and quickly fingered through the pile of receipts. Bacon-that was one of the names on the embassy’s website. Bacon belonged to Owen Masters.
Teddy rejoined his date, but his mind was elsewhere.
47
Teddy Fay lay in bed, spent but wide awake, watching CNN while the girl snored lightly beside him. He was profoundly disturbed by what he was seeing.
A tall, handsome black man in a gorgeously cut suit was speaking to a luncheon crowd of black businessmen in Birmingham, Alabama.
“It is time,” the man was saying, “that we put America and the administration of President Lee on notice that gradual is not fast enough, that transition has gone on too long, that half a dozen black CEOs of large corporations is not full integration into the business life of this country, that new legislation is essential for the reinstatement of programs to help young black citizens participate fully in education and careers…”
CNN cut back to its correspondent. “There you hear the Reverend Henry King Johnson making an appeal to an influential and wealthy audience for campaign contributions. Meanwhile, at the White House, President Lee and his advisors are poring over opinion polls that have to be shocking to them, polls that for the first time actually put the president behind Bill Spanner in the election race and all because the Reverend Johnson is siphoning off enough black votes to make a loss for Will Lee a very real possibility.”
Teddy’s heart was pounding; it was time to go home. He switched off the TV, got out of bed, and got dressed. He left some money on the dresser for the girl, let himself out of the suite, and headed to his little apartment. There, he began by putting everything he no longer needed into a trash bag and leaving it outside for pickup. Then he packed some clothes and all the equipment needed to maintain his identities and disguises. From among his few weapons he chose the very small Colt Mustang. 380 and slipped the holster onto his belt. He put the screw-on silencer and an extra magazine into his coat pocket and pulled a baseball cap on over his wig.
He packed his goods into the old station wagon he owned and drove them to the little airport outside the city where he kept his Cessna 182 RG stored in a ramshackle hangar. He packed the airplane carefully, then rolled the airplane out with the tow bar and over to the fuel pumps, where he filled the wing tanks and the ferry tank in the rear seat that doubled the airplane’s range. Then he returned the aircraft to its hangar, closed it, and drove back to Panama City.
He parked the station wagon near where he kept the scooter and wiped it clean of fingerprints, then he started the scooter and drove to within a few blocks of the American embassy. The sun was well up now, and rush hour had started. He parked near the embassy and looked for transportation to steal. He found an elderly but well- kept Honda light motorcycle and spent no more than a minute getting it started. That done, he drove to within fifty yards of the embassy and pulled into a side street that allowed him a view of the area.
He had not been there for more than half an hour when he saw young Bacon get out of a taxi and start up the front steps of the embassy. Teddy held his position. For sentimental reasons, he did not wish to harm a bright young man just starting his career with the Agency.
He waited another forty-five minutes before he saw Owen Masters get out of a cab across the street from the embassy and start picking his way through traffic. Teddy started the motorcycle.
