The Hamlet Warning (2 page)

“The car,” he said to Escortia. “Was it green over green, an old model, about 1979?”

Escortia looked at him with interest. “That is the description.”

“May I borrow a squad of men?” Loomis asked. “I have often seen such a car. It might be worth checking.”

Escortia didn’t hesitate. He turned and called out orders. A sergeant ran toward a parked truck. A half-dozen soldiers lounging by the tailgate jumped in, and before Loomis and Bedoya reached the jeep, the truck was moving across the street to join them.

Bedoya started the jeep. “Where to?” he asked.

“Club Carioca.”

Bedoya laughed aloud as he floorboarded the jeep. “Going to see the girls so early in the morning? What a tiger!”

Loomis ignored him. “There’s usually a green Pontiac parked at the curb about two blocks this side of the club,” he said.

They were moving fast up the 30 de Marzo, the army truck seemingly glued to their rear bumper. “I can’t imagine anyone being so observant coming out of the Club Carioca,” Bedoya said. “What devotion to duty.”

Loomis didn’t answer. He had noticed the Pontiac many times only because he once had owned a car of the same model.

Bedoya put the jeep into a tire-squealing turn to the right, and they sped up Teniente Amado Garcia toward the Duarte Bridge. The truck behind followed Bedoya’s every move. Loomis’s stomach began to churn. Another jog to the right, then a hard left turn, and they were heading northwest out Avenida Duarte. For one bad moment, Loomis thought he was going to be sick. He remembered an old remedy of the Corps.

“Stop just beyond the next intersection,” he told Bedoya. “There, on the right.”

The jeep skidded to a stop. The truck’s brakes complained loudly, but the driver managed to bring it to a halt a scant six inches from the jeep. Loomis stepped out and went into the nearest bar.

“
Dos
Criollas
,” he told the bartender.

He took the two opened bottles, left a peso on the bar, and hurried back out to the jeep. When the soldiers saw him, they broke into a cheer. Loomis grinned and waved the bottles aloft. Another story to be added to the Clay Loomis legend. He stepped back into the jeep. “O.K.,” he told Bedoya.

The beer helped. And the straight street made the ride much easier. Loomis finished the first bottle, pushed it beneath the seat, and started on the second.

“I was hoping that one was for me,” Bedoya said.

“I never permit my men to drink on duty,” Loomis said. “It looks bad.”

Bedoya laughed. “A half-million pesos,” he mused in English. “I didn’t know there was that much money left in the whole country. I thought El Jefe had sent it all to his banks in Switzerland.”

“Don’t joke like that,” Loomis warned.

“I’m not joking,” Bedoya said easily. “You ever hear of a poverty-stricken ex-dictator? Begging in the street? Ever since I was born, and even before that, we’ve had presidents sending money to Switzerland. All the Trujillos. The whole family. Then there were others. And what happens when they get themselves killed? I think Switzerland must be a very rich country. Maybe when I am an old man I can go over there and say, ‘
Amigos
, I am Alfredo Bedoya, who has served his country faithfully and well. If it isn’t too much trouble, please put a million pesos or so into my account, for I have need of it in my old age.’ Surely they wouldn’t miss a million pesos.”

“If you keep up that kind of talk, you’re not going to have an old age to worry about,” Loomis told him.

They turned off Duarte and headed toward the Barrio Obrero, passing long stretches of gaily colored homes. Through poverty and war, Dominicans managed to keep their wooden, jerry-built houses well painted. Any color would do — pink, blue, green, yellow — as long as it was bright. Many women were working in the gardens and hanging wash. The soldiers yelled compliments to those deserving. Loomis finished his beer and marveled at Bedoya’s skill in avoiding collision with wandering chickens, goats, dogs, and naked children.

Bedoya slowed as they approached a collection of low, cinder-block business houses. Loomis searched the street. The green Pontiac was not parked in its usual place. He pointed with his empty bottle. “There,” he said. “Stop just the other side of that big door.”

Bedoya braked toward the curb, holding up one hand to warn the truck driver. Loomis stepped out onto the pavement and levered a round into the chamber of his Heckler. He heard the machine gun bolt work twice; at least the soldier knew how to load his weapon. Loomis scanned the windows along the street as he spoke to Bedoya. “Take old Deadeye here and go cover the back. Count the doorways. Don’t make a mistake. Don’t let anyone come out unless they’re holding onto the top of their heads with both hands.”

Bedoya nodded and sped away, the
soldado
clinging desperately to the machine gun mount as the jeep wheeled around the corner.

Loomis signaled to the soldiers to spread out along the street, which was now deserted. People in the
barrio
seemed to have an uncanny ability to sense impending trouble. The soldiers eyed the windows and roofs nervously as Loomis moved toward the big wooden door. Holding his Heckler in one hand, he hammered the brass knocker against the polished backplate. He waited a moment and was lifting the knocker again when the Browning opened up behind the building. Beneath the noise of the machine gun, Loomis could hear the chatter of several light automatic weapons.

He tried the door. It was locked. He drove his shoulder against it. A sergeant and two hefty soldiers joined him, but the door wouldn’t budge. It seemed as solid as steel. A heavy bar in place behind it would be the only thing that could make a door that unyielding.

“Shit,” Loomis said, wishing he had sent at least two or three more soldiers with Bedoya. He ran to the truck. He got it started, put it in gear, and drove toward the building, angling the right side of the heavy bumper at the door. The soldiers had just enough sense to scatter at the last moment. The truck leaped the curb and rammed into the door, slamming Loomis hard into the wheel.

Stunned for a moment, he was puzzled by a strange noise. He became aware that his chest was resting on the horn button. With the hood jammed through the door, the horn was sounding inside the building. Loomis slid back into the seat and put the truck into reverse, but the motor had died. He could hear bullets hitting the radiator. Fortunately, a part of the splintered door lay across the shattered windshield, protecting him. He restarted the truck, ran it backward six or eight feet, set the brake, grabbed his Heckler, and ran for the safety of the building.

The sergeant lobbed two grenades in through the splintered door. The explosions blew out the high front windows, frames and all, showering the street with glass and debris.

Loomis charged through the opening in the door, running hard.

In the semidarkness he collided with a folding wooden chair and clattered with it to the floor. The fall probably saved his life. A burst of bullets chewed into the wall behind him. Loomis jerked the Heckler around and returned the fire, aiming at the point where he’d seen the muzzle blast. After two quick bursts, he rolled away. There was no return fire.

As he became accustomed to the gloom, Loomis strained his eyes to determine the layout of the building. The room was long and narrow, apparently a former lodge hall. A platform ran the length of each wall. At the far end of the room, where he had seen the muzzle fire, a stairway led down. Loomis remembered that the terrain dropped away into a ravine behind the building; the stairs probably descended to the level of the alley.

The sergeant and two soldiers came in, hugging the floor. They all waited, alert, for the gunfire that did not come. 

“I may have hit him,” Loomis said quietly. “He was in that stairwell. Cover me. I’ll go see.”

Crouching, he zigzagged to the left, giving the soldiers a field of fire. He eased up to the stairway, his Heckler poised, but as he neared the top steps he saw blood splattered on the railing beyond. Cautiously, he peered over the edge. A crumpled body lay at the foot of the concrete steps.

From the back of the building, gunfire erupted again.

Loomis motioned to the soldiers. They came up fast. He led them down the stairway, stepped over the body, and kicked open the door with his boot.

The green Pontiac was parked in the middle of a large room. Half of it was painted black. Three men were crouched behind it, aiming machine pistols at the alley door. As they turned the weapons toward him, Loomis squeezed the trigger of his MP5 and traversed the length of the Pontiac, catching the last man just as he got off a burst that ripped into the concrete above Loomis’s head.

Loomis stepped behind the door frame for protection and rammed in another clip. The sergeant went past him, his Colt .45 automatic poised. But the battle was over. Loomis’s sustained burst had killed all three men. Two more bodies lay in the open doorway. Beyond, Loomis could see the soldier in the jeep, tense, still alert, with Bedoya deployed out to the right with his Beretta Mo.l2S for perfect triangulation of fire.

“
Está
bien
,” Loomis called to them. “We have them all.”

Two in the doorway, three behind the car, and the one in the stairwell. Six dead. He walked out to meet Bedoya. “You all right?” he asked.

Bedoya nodded. Loomis put the Heckler into the jeep and rubbed his shoulder, now beginning to hurt from his hard fall.

“I’m getting too old for this shit,” he said to Bedoya. 

“It took you a while to get down here,” Bedoya agreed. “I thought you’d stopped for another beer.”

“I’m either going to have to cut out this crap or else start getting some sleep at night,” Loomis said.

He walked over to study the tire tracks on the damp ground. A dozen Dominique chickens, driven from their grazing by the shooting, were edging back toward the shade at the rear of the building. One, bolder than the rest, began pecking experimentally at the spent brass. In the garage, the soldiers were working off tension by joking, laughing, and shouting around the blood and carnage. Loomis watched them in disgust. He walked back to the jeep and climbed in to rest, to catch his breath, and to hide his shaking hands. The first hesitant faces were appearing at windows and doors up and down the alley. A group of half-naked children came up the drive and stood, silent, staring at the soldiers and the bodies. Bedoya came over to lean against the jeep. He unbuttoned his shirt and flapped it, trying to dry the stain under the armpits.

“I’ve been thinking,” Bedoya said. “El Jefe probably will be very concerned over that half-million pesos. He should have a big reward posted by now.”

“Probably,” Loomis said. “But I wouldn’t count on collecting it.” He pointed to the tire tracks. “Unless I miss my guess, that money is long gone. We hit the transfer point too late.”

He was right. A thorough search of the building failed to find a single peso.

Ramón El Rojo had obtained another half-million pesos for his revolution. 

Chapter 2

Minus
11
Days
,
22
:
29
Hours

The sultry, oppressive atmospheric inversion over Washington remained stationary throughout the eighth straight day, blocked by a high-pressure ridge at sea beyond Cape Hatteras. On Capitol Hill, and in the residential sections, tensions rose with the temperature. Two police cars were overturned and burned in a renewed outburst of violence along 14th Street, and in one weekend six grocery clerks died in robbery-murders. In Congress, debate on inflationary increases in Social Security benefits dominated headlines from the House, and the Senate continued to stall over approval of the new Secretary of State. The
Washington
Post
predicted that Congress easily would override an expected presidential veto of the foreign aid bill, jeopardizing the chief executive’s chances for a second term. The President was assumed to be considering all the political ramifications of using the veto. The White House press corps was awaiting his decision.

These matters normally would have been of deep concern to President Robertson. But on this Thursday morning in early July he was only marginally aware of routine crises. Instead, his full attention was devoted to a twenty-one-page report on his desk in his hideaway cubbyhole in the Executive Office Building.

Travis J. Robertson loved the power of the presidency but hated the pomp and ceremony of office. His nature required a considerable measure of privacy. Occasionally he needed to escape to a quiet place, smoke a cigar, and think.

The White House was hell for a man who required solitude. He couldn’t move without a posse of Secret Service agents in tow. The guy with the black satchel was continually underfoot in case the United States suddenly needed to bomb the piss out of Russia. Aides, secretaries, and advisers gave him no peace. Nor could he find refuge in the living quarters. His wife claimed artistic interests and habitually held court for important people who talked incessantly about some perverted dead Frenchman or other. Robertson’s preferences ran to poker, good bourbon, and fast cars. He no longer had time for poker. If a man couldn’t drink seriously, Robertson saw no use in drinking at all. He occasionally downed the swill served at political functions, but he hadn’t communed with a good bottle of bourbon in years. His Ferrari was on blocks in a garage back in Lincoln, Nebraska, gathering dust.

Yet Robertson had won a measure of privacy. He had located the twelve-by-fourteen-foot room in the Executive Office Building. It was separated from most of the rampant confusion by a storage space. His hideaway was an open secret among White House staff members, but no one dared violate his demand for seclusion.

So while political pundits all over Washington speculated freely on what he would do about the foreign aid impasse, the President calmly lit his second cigar since breakfast and opened the report from Langley. He had read the entire manuscript a dozen times. Yet he turned back to the beginning. 

That was the one overriding factor in his success: a passion for painstaking analysis. President Kennedy’s major talent had been calculated charm, a knack for constructing a political machine around his own carefully created image. Lyndon Johnson’s forte had been persuasion, the ability to bring key people around to his viewpoint despite all logic. President Robertson knew he possessed neither of those techniques. He had no charm, good looks, or friendly ways. A stand-up comedian had claimed on national television that, during the presidential election campaign, one poster depicted a topographical map of the Dakota Badlands instead of the face of the candidate and that no one had noticed. Robertson wasn’t sensitive about his heavily lined face, but he wasn’t especially amused by the joke. He knew he was generally considered the most laconic President since Cal Coolidge. He had developed a certain public style. By mentally shifting gears he could perform for audiences when necessary. But such efforts went against his nature. However, no one was better at analyzing his fellow men. All through his political career Robertson had spent long nights determining the exact nature of his friends and opponents. He usually knew others better than they knew themselves. He often stayed up all night, thinking. He worked while most of Washington slept. After midnight, there were fewer interruptions, and he could get more done. He also found that when he phoned people at 4:00 A.M., they tended to be more candid. At dawn, when the city stirred, the President went to bed. He limited himself to a few hours of sleep, a practice that probably accounted for his wrinkled face. He had been called “Old Pickle Puss” on the floor of the Senate, where even early in his career he had been chided a few times for his tardy arrivals. A reporter once irritated Robertson into an explanation. “It’s been my observation that nothing interesting or worthwhile ever happens before noon,” he had told the reporter. The remark had returned to plague him during campaigns, but even his worst enemies conceded that on occasion he possessed a dry wit.

He now turned his full analytic powers on this new problem and on this strange man, Clay Loomis.

The report was woefully incomplete, despite its length. Robertson read through the manuscript once more, then tossed it aside as worthless to his purposes. He would learn more, no doubt, when he talked to the men from Langley. He still had thirty minutes before the appointment.

He carefully relit his cigar and opened the packet of photographs. He pulled out the one that had intrigued him most.

Shot four days earlier in Santo Domingo, the color photograph showed Loomis standing at the side of a jeep. The depth of field indicated that a telescopic lens of considerable power had been used. Loomis’s face was in sharp focus. A young Dominican standing beside Loomis was laughing, but Loomis was unsmiling.

Robertson reached for a magnifying glass and examined the face.

There was a solidarity to the features that Robertson liked. Loomis obviously was a big man, six-three or four, and well proportioned. The jawline was firm, with no extra flesh along the jowls — a mark of drive and determination. The muscles around the mouth were strong, with deep lines circling outward and downward from the nose. A sign of forcefulness, self-expression, Robertson believed. The scars over the left eye and along the left cheek were mentioned in the military records contained in the report. The nose had been broken enough to lend it individuality, and Robertson envied Loomis that thick thatch of dark hair. But what held Robertson’s attention were the eyes. They were electric blue, a surprising contrast to the dark features and tropical tan. The eyes fascinated Robertson. He sensed that they revealed depths sufficient to challenge his talents. 

With his left hand he moved the magnifying glass experimentally, altering the image slightly. With his right hand he rolled his cigar, thinking, searching for the elusive truths he felt the eyes contained.

Here was a man who kept much locked up within himself, he concluded. A man who could wait as well as act. Who felt things deeply, yet who maintained a certain you-be-damned, go-to-hell attitude toward the world. And clearly, here was a man used to having his own way. Robertson didn’t know how he knew these things. He simply knew them. Life had sculptured those features, and Robertson read their meaning.

He also sensed in Loomis something else he couldn’t quite define.

The crow’s feet definitely were not laugh lines. They seemed to stem from a narrowing, a guarded wariness. Robertson searched for a word. Distrust? Suspicion? Disillusionment?

Cynicism, he decided. The mark of a man burned by experience. Loomis would not be a man to commit his emotions lightly.

Yet, Robertson somehow would have to gain Loomis’s confidence.

He rolled his cigar thoughtfully for a moment, closed the folder, and pressed a button on his desk. He asked his appointments secretary to escort the men from Langley into the Oval Office. Gathering all the material and his notes, Robertson left the hideaway office and was halfway down the corridor before he remembered his retinue. He waited impatiently for the Secret Service men and the guy with the satchel. Properly flanked, Robertson walked rapidly across the drive and into the White House.

As he entered the Oval Office, he nodded a greeting to the two men from Langley, and dismissed his appointments secretary. “We’ll be more than an hour,” he said. “Hold all calls. Stack appointments. I don’t want to be disturbed.” 

He escorted the visitors to the conference couch, again taking their measure.

The Director, Delbert Wallaby, was tall, well built, even athletic. The thick, graying hair, fashionably long over the collar, lent him an air of distinction. A Harvard man, an eminent attorney, Wallaby was politically oriented and motivated. His appointment had been forced on the Administration, but Robertson had not objected strenuously. Wallaby was intelligent and experienced. Robertson knew that Wallaby often foresaw the shifting tides in the world’s storms long before the so-called experts at State.

His Deputy, Cyrus Ogden, was another matter. Short and heavyset, even chubby, with high forehead and thinning hair, the pipe-smoking Deputy could have been mistaken for a professor of philosophy at some small, remote college. In a city fascinated by power, the Deputy remained virtually unknown. But Robertson was in a position to know that this quiet, outwardly affable little civil servant was one of the most powerful men in the world. Directors came and went at the whims of politics or presidential fortunes. But the Deputy, as chief of the agency’s Clandestine Services throughout the world, toppled budding empires, murdered potential Hitlers, and made the world safe for American investments. There was a reticence, a smugness about the little bastard that Robertson didn’t like.

Robertson motioned them to the couch, walked to his facing chair, and carefully placed the report on the small table within easy reach.

“This is the goddamnedest thing I’ve ever read,” he said.

Neither man smiled.

“Why in hell wasn’t I told about this earlier?” Robertson asked.

Wallaby was not fazed. “First, we had so little information that we hardly put credence to it,” he said. 

“Then, when more became known, and the facts established, we thought we had the matter solved. Naturally, when the affair got out of hand, we made you aware immediately.”

“Are you certain of your information?”

“Absolutely,” Wallaby said.

Robertson tapped the report with a forefinger. “The nuclear capabilities they claim. Is such a thing possible?”

Wallaby nodded emphatically. “Yes, sir. Not only possible, but even probable, we’re told. Our nuclear people say we’re overdue. They’ve long been expecting something like this.”

“And this so-called Hamlet Group. You have no idea who they are? What they want?”

Wallaby shifted in his seat and glanced at his Deputy before replying. “No, sir. Not at the moment. It’s all in the report there.”

Robertson clamped his cigar in his teeth and fixed the Director with a gray-eyed stare that had become an anathema to the White House staff. He then whipped out the cigar and spoke with heat. “I don’t like this, Wallaby,” he said. “I don’t like this at all. Your agency has been a pain in the presidential ass for some time, a source of constant embarrassment. Yet you take on something of this scope without alerting me, or anyone. What in God’s name possessed you?”

Wallaby glanced uncomfortably at his Deputy, who seemed to be enjoying the exchange. “As I said, Mr. President, we had so little information, initially …”

“All the more reason we should have gotten right on it,” Robertson interrupted. “We’ve been wasting valuable time.”

“There’s really not much we can do at this point, Mr. President,” Wallaby said. “Our hands are tied. Everything hinges on what happens in Santo Domingo.”

“We have the alternative you mentioned,” Robertson pointed out. 

“If the ship is destroyed, Mr. President, we will lose what few pieces of evidence we have.”

“So you recommend that we depend on the Dominican Republic, and on this man, Clay Loomis?”

“Yes, sir.”

“I also infer, from your rather incomplete report of our deteriorating relationships there, that we do not enjoy the admiration of Loomis.”

“No, sir.”

“Why not?”

Wallaby hesitated. “It’s a long story, Mr. President,” he said.

Robertson glared at him. “We have time,” he said. “I have the feeling you’re holding out on me. There’s obviously something fishy about our situation with Loomis. I want the full story.”

Deputy Ogden coughed, his device for interruption.

“Perhaps I could help,” he said. He glanced apologetically at Wallaby. “I have known Loomis longer. Twenty years or more. But it’s all rather complicated. I would have to go back to how he came to us, how he came to leave …”

“Please do,” Robertson said.

Ogden shifted in his chair and frowned at the floor for a moment, reflecting. “First, let me say that he is a remarkable man,” he said. “Fantastic career, even in our trade. He enlisted in the Marine Corps when he was fifteen. A big, rawboned kid from West Texas. Made a name for himself in the Corps. Later, there was a captain who took an interest in him, helped him get his high-school equivalency certificate, talked him into going to college on the GI Bill. He earned his B.A. in romance languages, of all damned things, and accepted a commission. Afterward, he got shore duty, Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. Good duty, in those days, I’m told. Plenty of rum and beer, and whorehouse liberties up to Guantánamo City in the mountains.”