“Sparky never came here. Gomer always went over to Sparky’s apartment at the BOQ. So they could watch the Playboy Channel, I guess. He slept over there a lot, too.”
“Please try to think, Mrs. Gomez. Was there anything, anything at all, that struck you as different or unusual about your husband in the last month or so?”
“Well, Julio Iglesias did start calling here about a month ago. That was fairly unusual.”
“I beg your pardon? Julio Iglesias? You mean the singer?”
“Well, he called himself that. But he sure didn’t sound like any Julio Iglesias I’ve seen on TV, believe me.”
“What, exactly, did he sound like, Mrs. Gomez?”
“Cuban. Very strong Cuban accent. Tough guy.”
“How often would he call?”
“Every now and then. He’d call at all hours. I think there were two of them.”
“Two?”
“Two guys both pretending to be that singer. Their voices were different, you know?”
“Mrs. Gomez, this could be very important. Did you ever accidentally overhear or eavesdrop on any of those conversations?”
“No. I wouldn’t do that. Besides, he always took the calls in another room.”
“Ira,” Elliot said to Chynsky, “we need the log on all incoming and outgoing calls from this number in the last two weeks. Thanks.”
Ira got up, went into the kitchen, and got on the phone. Elliot opened his leather bag and pulled out an object in some kind of freezer bag.
“Have you ever seen this object before, Mrs. Gomez?”
It was a metal box, about the size of a brick. Little buttons on it. Banged up. It looked like it had been dropped from a ten-story building.
“Mrs. Gomez?”
“No. I’ve never seen it before. What is it?”
“Did your husband have any hobbies? Like model airplanes or model boats?”
“I already told you. His hobbies were beer and the Playboy Channel.”
“This is a radio control device, Mrs. Gomez. You could use it to fly a remote control airplane. Or you could use it to, say, program a bomb.”
“Why are you showing it to me?”
“It was found in the mud, a hundred yards from your husband’s body.”
An hour later, Rita and her two daughters were standing on the sidewalk, waiting for Mrs. Nettles to pick them up. The girls had on their best dresses. They had four pieces of luggage. Three suitcases plus an old bowling ball bag for Gomer.
The two suits from Washington and the CDC investigator had finally left, but not before the spaceman scared the kids half to death when he went out to the garage. They’d come running into the kitchen screaming their heads off. The yellow suit was right behind them, holding some old newspapers. Cuban newspapers, he said. And some moldy twine.
“Granma,” he said. “The Cuban daily, Havana edition. Dated five weeks ago. Heavily folded and imprinted. Looks like something cylindrical was wrapped in it.”
“Bag it,” Elliot said.
When Elliot started asking her questions about a bunch of old newspapers, that’s when she’d told them, hey, old newspapers, big effing deal, pal. B.F.D. She’d had enough. She’d spent all morning at her husband’s funeral. Now she only had half an hour to pack up all her family’s stuff and head to the Kennedy. Enough.
He thanked her for her time and tried to be nice. She guessed he was only doing his job. But if he thought Gomer had anything to do with anything at all that was a Special Report on CNN, he was flat crazy. Gomer wasn’t smart enough and certainly not sober enough to pull off anything as big as this big magilla thing seemed to be.
Lost in a jumble of thoughts, she was startled by the sound of a car horn. A big white Chevy Suburban cruised right up to the curb, flags flying from all four windows. The passenger side window slid down, and Cindy Nettles stuck her head right out. She had her blond hair in pigtails, with big red, white, and blue ribbons.
“Hop in, guys! C’mon! Mom says we’re gonna be late!” Cindy said.
Ginny Nettles was nice enough to climb out and help her stow their luggage in the back with all the rest. Then Rita and the kids climbed into the backseat, one on either side of her. Ginny got back behind the wheel, and they were off.
The traffic, once they got going, was a nightmare. MPs and marines wearing gas masks were at every intersection trying to keep the endless converging lines of private vehicles and buses full of evacuees moving. Rita was grateful that no one was honking or yelling, no one was trying to cut in front of them. If she had expected panic, she saw none. These were military families, Navy families, and they acted like it.
There was confusion at various checkpoints over who was going where. Ginny and Rita were headed for the Kennedy, berthed at Wharf Bravo, and Ginny knew how to get there. But there were also evacuation vessels at Northwest Pier Lima, Northwest Pier Victor, and Southwest Pier Lima. There were no directional signs, adding to the disorder and confusion.
At Wharf Bravo, there was a sense of barely controlled chaos on the pier. In the massive shadow of the famous warship, endless rivers of women, children, and the elderly were streaming up various gangplanks. Rita watched them disappearing with agonizing slowness into the many cavernous mouths in the Kennedy’s hull. Twice, various officers recognized the CO’s wife and tried to move them up in the line. Ginny refused both times, and it took another hour before they were out of the broiling sun and inside the Kennedy.
Seated behind a long table were six officers checking the evacuees’ identification before admitting them aboard. At either end of the table were Marines armed with machine guns. The six officers checked every piece of identification carefully, Rita noticed, even Ginny Nettles’s.
Little Cindy presented herself alongside her mother and handed the officer a pink plastic wallet. It matched the pink plastic suitcase she was carrying.
“Okay,” the officer said, opening the wallet. “Let’s see who you are, young lady.”
“Lucinda Nettles,” Cindy said. “My daddy is Admiral Nettles. Do you know him?”
“I certainly do,” the officer said, smiling. “Thank you, Lucinda. Next in line?”
“I hope it’s all right if I brought an extra suitcase,” Cindy said. “I had to because of my best friend.”
“Sweetheart,” Ginny said, bending down. “This nice officer is in a hurry. There are lots of people behind us. Let’s move along, darling.”
“Want to see him?” Cindy asked the officer, putting her suitcase on the table.
“Maybe later,” the officer said. “After we’ve—”
But Cindy had already popped the latches of her bright pink suitcase. A large white bear that had been crammed inside her extra bag exploded out onto the table.
“What’s his name?” the officer asked, with a smile of forced amusement.
“Mr. Teddy,” she said, hugging him tightly. “He’s my very best friend in the whole wide world!”
“Welcome to the Kennedy, Teddy,” the officer said with a smile.
Everyone got a big chuckle over that one.
52
All was still inside Archangel, the C-130 Hercules turboprop transport plane owned and operated by the elite counterterrorist group known in international special warfare circles as Thunder and Lightning.
Archangel had been built by Lockheed in the early fifties and was one of many C-130s still flying in every part of the world.
It was a black, moonless night, and as the big plane lumbered along at thirty thousand feet, she was nearly invisible.
