The Mordida Man (5 page)

He's completely mad, the Ambassador thought, staring at Arifi's tic, which now threatened to turn into an uncontrollable twitch.

“I appreciate your confidence in my discretion,” the Ambassador murmured and heaved himself up out of the chair.

Arifi rose, too, and laid a cautionary hand on the Ambassador's arm. “One more thing, Your Excellency. We would be exceedingly grateful if you would wait until, say, ten o'clock before calling on the President.”

That would give them nearly six hours, the Ambassador thought. At, say, 550 miles per hour, that would put them over—what? Morocco, or perhaps Algeria, if they go that way.

“The President is, as you know, a very busy man,” he said. “I am not at all sure when my appointment can be scheduled.”

“As long as it's no sooner than ten o'clock.”

“I shall do my best.”

Arifi smiled. His tic throbbed wildly. “One cannot possibly ask for more.”

It was not until 11:45 that morning that Ambassador Dokubo was ushered into the Oval Office. The appointment had been arranged through the urging of the Secretary of State, whom the Ambassador had telephoned at home at 7
A.M.
Although Dokubo had been cautiously vague about his reasons for requesting the extraordinary meeting with the President, his reputation for sound common sense and his country's enormous oil reserves had convinced the Secretary that the meeting should take place.

“You can't tell me any more than you've already told me, I take it?” the Secretary had said.

“No, I don't see how I really can, Mr. Secretary, and still keep my word.”

“Of course. I understand. Although their tour was unofficial we naturally are deeply disappointed that they canceled the balance of it. Did they give you any inkling as to why they decided to cancel?”

“Only that it was not a success. I believe I'm quoting exactly.”

“I've always found this new crop of Libyans to be quite 𔄶 strange,” the Secretary had said.

“Quite mad, really.”

“Yes. Well, I'll see what I can arrange.”

After the telephone conversation, Ambassador Dokubo summoned his principal aide, who came in and stood before the large carved desk on which rested the small Gucci box.

“I don't suppose you have any chewing gum.”

“No, sir, I don't.”

“Do you think you might hunt up a stick or two?”

“Any particular kind, sir?”

“Do you have any idea about what kind this might be?” Dokubo said, indicating that the aide should examine the box.

The aide picked it up and sniffed the chewing gum. “Dentyne, I'd say, sir. Or close to it.”

“See what you can do.”

In a few minutes the aide had returned with a package of Dentyne gum that he had obtained from a youth in the Embassy mail room.

“Chew up a couple of sticks,” the Ambassador said.

The aide peeled the wrapping off two sticks and popped them into his mouth. While he was chewing, the Ambassador carefully examined the Gucci box. He weighed it in the palm of one hand.

“I don't think it could be a bomb, do you?”

“There are such things as letter bombs,” the aide said.

“Well, we shall soon see,” the Ambassador said. He peeled away the chewing gum that had been stuck to the box's edges. Then he carefully untied the string. After that, he looked up at his aide and said, “You may leave the room, if you wish.”

The aide swallowed. “No, sir, that won't be necessary.”

The Ambassador nodded and carefully lifted off the top of the small box.

“Good God!” the aide said.

Ambassador Dokubo's 11:45
A.M.
meeting with President McKay had been sandwiched in between a photo opportunity with a band of 4-H prize winners from Valley City, North Dakota, and a meeting between the President and the Director of the FBI, whose west coast special agents had been alerted to start a search for Bingo McKay and Eleanor Rhodes after repeated calls to the Marriott Hotel in Anaheim had failed to locate them.

There was always the chance, of course, that Bingo, a resolute bachelor, could have bedded himself down with a companion or two in the farther reaches of Hollywood or Malibu or the Marina del Rey. But if he had, he normally would have arranged for Eleanor Rhodes to cover for him. But when neither she nor Bingo could be located by the resourceful operators on the White House switchboard, the President, in view of the Libyans' hasty departure, had once again silently goddamned his brother's stubborn refusal to accept Secret Service protection.

He grew even more concerned when the Secretary of State telephoned with the news of the Libyans' strange early-morning meeting with the Nigerian Ambassador. “Have we done anything to piss them off—anything at all?” the President had asked.

The Secretary was careful in his reply. “Nothing that I am aware of, Mr. President.”

“That leaves a whole lot of territory unexplored, doesn't it?”

“An immense amount, sir.”

“Well, check around and see what you can find out. And I suppose I'd better see Dokubo at—let's make it eleven forty-five. Maybe he'll have something I can pass on to the FBI.”

“I'll inform the Ambassador of the time.”

“And don't forget to check out what we've done to upset that Libyan bunch—you know, like serving them pork chops for lunch.”

“I'll see to it immediately, Mr. President.”

When Ambassador Dokubo was ushered into the Oval Office at precisely 11:45, the President was quick to note the Nigerian's grim expression. After they shook hands and exchanged routine pleasantries, the President said, “You've brought me bad news, haven't you?”

Dokubo nodded. “I don't believe it will be good.” He picked up his attaché case, put it on his lap, and opened it. He took out the buff envelope first and then the Gucci box and placed them on the President's desk.

“I took the precaution of having my security people examine both of these,” he said. “They assure me that they contain no explosives.”

The President examined the small box first and looked up. “Chewing gum.”

“They apologized for having no sealing wax.”

“They say what was in it?”

“A token—according to Ali Arifi.”

“He's the Minister of Defense, right?”

“Yes.”

“He say what kind of token?”

“No, Mr. President, he didn't.”

The President snipped the red string binding the box with a pair of scissors, then peeled away the chewing gum and lifted off the lid. He was a tall man with a tennis pro's rangy body and the careless good looks of a man who for some reason had always assumed that he was ugly and didn't particularly care. In a few years, possibly as many as ten, he would look far more distinguished than he did now, but perhaps not as capable. He had a high, wide forehead and deep-set greenish eyes, an unremarkable nose, a mouth that in repose appeared sardonic, but not when he smiled, and an almost perfect chin, which compensated for the batwing ears that had been handed down to McKay men for generations along with enough thick blondish-gray hair to cover them up.

After the President opened the box, his year-round tan seemed to fade and he said, “Sweet Jesus Christ almighty!” and looked up quickly at Ambassador Dokubo, whose eyes had been recording every nuance of the scene for his half-completed memoirs.

The severed ear rested in the Gucci box on a bed of surgical cotton. It was a large ear, quite drained of blood and no longer pink—indeed, almost white—and the Ambassador's eyes traveled from it to the left ear of the President and matched them up. It's his brother's, he finally decided. Those idiots have cut off the brother's ear.

The Ambassador made a slight clearing noise far down in his throat and said, “It would appear to be an ear, Mr. President. A human ear.”

The President's right hand seemed to move unbidden up to his own right ear, which he touched reassuringly. Not taking his eyes from the box, he picked up the buff envelope and ripped it open. He read its contents at a glance, read them again, more slowly, and then tossed the letter across the desk toward Ambassador Dokubo. The Ambassador wasn't at all sure whether he was intended to read the letter, but when the President spun around in his big chair and stared out the window at the White House south lawn, Dokubo almost snatched up the letter and hungrily read its crabbed writing, trying to burn every word into his memory.

There was no date, and the letter's salutation was a brusque “Mr. President.” The body of the letter read:

Your notorious CIA jackals have kidnapped Gustavo Berrio-Brito, the freedom fighter known to the oppressed millions of the world as Felix. We have taken as hostage your brother and his female companion. Unless you immediately release Gustavo Berrio-Brito, we will send your brother back to you piece by piece. Herewith is a token of our determination.

The letter was signed simply but rather grandly with the Libyan ruler's last name, “Mourabet.” Underneath in a far different, somewhat shaky Palmer method was written, “These suckers aren't kidding.” The postscript was signed “Bingo.”

Ambassador Dokubo put the letter carefully back down on the desk as the President slowly turned around in his chair, his expression grim, his face ashen.

“You read it?”

Ambassador Dokubo nodded. “I did, Mr. President.”

The President rose. So did the Ambassador. The President looked at the Nigerian thoughtfully for a few moments and then spoke, carefully choosing his words. “I'm not sure yet just what steps we will take, Mr. Ambassador. But it could be that we might call on you to serve in an intermediary role of some kind. Would you agree?”

Dokubo nodded gravely. “My country and I are at your service, Mr. President.”

“Thank you. And I'm also sure that I can rely on your complete discretion.”

“Complete, Mr. President.”

After leaving the Oval Office, Dokubo hurried to his waiting Mercedes. Before the chauffeured car had even reached the south gate, Dokubo, using his attaché case as a desk, was making frantic notes about the morning's meeting, which he had already decided to make the epiphanic chapter in his memoirs.

The President, meanwhile, had again turned away from his desk to stare out at the south lawn. When he turned back, his face was no longer ashen. Instead, it had resumed its normal tan except for the rosy flush that had crept up his neck to his ears. His mouth was stretched into a thin, furious line as he picked up the telephone.

When the secretary answered, his voice was a snarl. “Get me that fucking Coombs out at that fucking CIA.”

6

The deceptively slight man with the sleek gray head and the small prim mouth had heard all of the words before many times. Words of the barracks, the barnyard, the oil rig, the pool room, and the saloon. Short, harsh-sounding words mostly, with three consonants and a single vowel. He never used them himself and disapproved of their use by others, on the grounds that they betrayed a lack of imagination. Yet he was neither surprised nor dismayed that the words were coming now in a furious stream from the mouth of the President of the United States.

If anything, the words bored him, even though they were being used to describe his own incompetence and lack of character. So after a short span of listening, he tuned the words out and thought instead about his roses.

The slight man whose roses often won prizes was Thane Coombs, who nine months before, on his fifty-eighth birthday, had been named Director of Central Intelligence. Coombs was also nearly the last of the World War II OSS veterans who once had permeated the Central Intelligence Agency. That he had lasted long enough to be named Director was tribute more to his political skills, which were adroit, than to his intelligence, which, while not quite true brilliance, still left him far cleverer than most.

When after six minutes the President showed no signs of running down, Coombs let his mind drift to an idle examination of the fact that the man sitting behind the Woodrow Wilson desk had been only three years old when a twenty-two-year-old Lieutenant Thane Coombs had parachuted into France near Dijon as a member of a three-man Jedburgh team. But since this was only a notional comparison and really not very interesting, Coombs decided to interrupt the President in mid-word. The word he interrupted was “asshole.”

“It wasn't us, Mr. President.”

The President completed the word he had begun, but stopped in mid-sentence. He gaped, a mouth-wide-open gape of surprise and disbelief, until he realized what he was doing and clamped his mouth shut into a harsh line of total suspicion.

“Not you?” he said, making it somehow an accusation rather than a question.

“No, sir,” Coombs said, choosing his next words with precision. “The Agency had nothing whatsoever to do with the abduction or disappearance of the Venezuelan national Gustavo Berrio-Brito—sometimes known as Felix. Nothing whatsoever.”

“The Libyans think you kidnapped him.”

“I deeply regret that our still rather flamboyant reputation may have endangered your brother and—”

The President cut him off. “Who?”

“Who kidnapped Felix, you mean?”

That drew a sharp impatient nod from the President.

“I have no idea. None.”

“But it wasn't you?” McKay said, still almost hoping that Coombs was lying.

“No, sir. You see, Felix— We may as well call him that, don't you think?”

“Yeah. Sure.”

“Well, Felix is, or perhaps now I should say
was,
the leader of a five-man or five-person terrorist group which insists on calling itself Red Anvil Five.”

“Always some cute fucking name.”

“Yes, I tend to agree. The group consisted of Felix, of course; a Japanese man; a German; a Frenchwoman, and another Venezuelan who was also a woman and also Felix's sometime mistress. Her name was Maria Luisa de la Cova.”