The Deceiver (49 page)

Farther into the town were the town hall, the small Anglican church, the police station, and the principal hotel, the Quarter Deck. Apart from these and an unsightly corrugated-iron warehouse at one end of the port, the buildings were mainly of wood. Along the shore, just out of town, stood the Governor’s residence, Government House, all white and walled in white, with two old Napoleonic cannon by the front gate and the flagpole in the middle of the carefully cultured green-grass lawn. During the day the British Union Jack fluttered from the mast, and even as Julio Gomez made his way through the small town to the boarding house where he lodged, the flag was being ceremoniously hauled down by a police constable in the presence of the Governor’s adjutant.

Gomez could have stayed at the Quarter Deck, but he preferred the homey atmosphere of Mrs. Macdonald’s boarding house. She was a widow, with a cap of snow-white frizzy hair, as amply proportioned as he was himself, and she made a conch chowder that was to die for.

He turned into the street where she lived, ignoring the garish election posters clipped to most of the walls and fences, and saw that in the dusk she was sweeping down the front steps of her neat, detached residence—a ritual she carried out several times a day. She greeted him and his fish with her usual beaming smile.

“Why, Mistah Gomez, that is one very fine fish.”

“For our supper, Mrs. Macdonald, and enough, I think, for all of us.”

Gomez paid off the boy, who scampered away with his newfound wealth, and went up to his room. Mrs. Macdonald retired to her kitchen to prepare the dorado for the grill. Gomez washed, shaved, and changed into cream slacks and a bright short-sleeved beach shirt. He decided he could use a very large, very cold beer and walked back through the town to the bar of the Quarter Deck.

It was only seven o’clock, but night had come and the town was quite dark, save where it was lit by the glimmer from the windows. Emerging from the back streets, Gomez entered Parliament Square with its neat, enclosed patch of palm trees at the center and three of its sides garnished respectively by the Anglican church, the police station, and the Quarter Deck Hotel.

He passed the police station, where electric lights, powered by the municipal generator that hummed away down on the docks, still burned. From this small, coral-block building Chief Inspector Brian Jones and an impeccably turned-out force of two sergeants and eight constables represented law and order in the community with the lowest crime rate in the Western Hemisphere. Coming from Miami, Gomez could not but wonder at a society that seemed to have no drugs, no gangs, no muggings, no prostitution, no rapes, one bank (no robberies therefrom), and only half a dozen reportable thefts a year. He sighed, passed in front of the darkened church, and entered the portico of the Quarter Deck.

The bar lay to the left. He took a corner stool at the far end and ordered his large, cold beer. It would be an hour before his fish was ready—time for a second beer to keep company with the first. The bar was already half full, for it was the town’s favorite watering hole with tourists and expatriates. Sam, the cheerful white-jacketed barman, administered his nightly array of rum punches, beers, juices, Cokes, daiquiris, and soda-mixers to help down the fiery shots of Mount Gay rum.

At five to eight, Julio Gomez reached into his pocket for a handful of dollars with which to settle his bill. When he looked up, he stopped, fixed rigid, and stared at the man who had entered the bar and was ordering a drink at the far end. After two seconds, he eased back on his stool so that the bulk of the drinker sitting next to him blocked him from view. He could hardly believe his eyes, but he knew he was not wrong. You do not spend four days and four nights of your life sitting across a table from a man, staring into his eyes, and seeing hatred and contempt corning back at you—and later forget that face, even eight years on. You do not spend four days and nights trying to get a single word out of a man and get absolutely nothing, not even a name, so that you have to give him a nickname just to have something to put on the file—and later forget that face.

Gomez gestured to Sam to refill his glass, paid for all three beers, and retired to a corner seat in the shadows. If the man was here, he was here for a reason. If he had checked into a hotel, he would have a name. Gomez wanted that name. He sat in the corner, waited, and watched. At nine the man, who had drunk alone, always Mount Gay rums, rose and left. Emerging from his corner, Gomez went after him.

In Parliament Square, the man climbed into an open Japanese-made jeep, started the ignition, and drove away. Gomez looked desperately around. He had no transportation of his own. Parked near the hotel entrance was a small motor scooter, its key still in the ignition. Wobbling precariously, Gomez set off after the jeep.

The jeep left the town and drove steadily out along the coast road—the only road—which went right round the entire island. Properties situated in the hilly interior were all reached by individual service roads, dusty tracks, that ran down to the one coastal highway. The jeep passed the island’s other residential community, the native village known as Shantytown, then went on past the grass strip airport.

It kept going until it reached the other side of the island. Here the road flanked the expanse of Teach Bay—named after Edward Teach, Blackboard the Pirate, who had once anchored and victualed here. The jeep pulled off the coast road and up a short track to a pair of wrought-iron gates that protected a large walled estate. If the driver had seen the single wobbling headlamp that had been behind him all the way from the Quarter Deck Hotel, he gave no sign of it. But seen it he surely had.

At the gates a man stepped out of the shadows to open them for the jeep driver, but the driver slowed and stopped. He reached above his head to the rollbar and detached a powerful hand-held spotlamp. As Gomez rode past the entrance to the track, the beam of the spotlamp swept over him, came back, and held him in its glare until he passed out of sight down the road.

Gomez returned the scooter to its place outside the hotel thirty minutes later and walked home. He was deep in thought and deeply worried. He had seen whom he had seen, and he knew he had not been wrong. He now also knew where the man was living. But he himself had been seen. He could only pray that after eight years, in the darkness of a Caribbean night, sputtering past for a few seconds on a motor scooter, he had not been recognized.

Mrs. Macdonald was perturbed at his failure to arrive for supper until almost two hours late, and said so. She served the dorado anyway and watched her guest eat it with no pleasure. He was lost in thought and only made one remark.

“Nonsense, man,” she chided. “We don’t even have them things in these islands.”

Julio Gomez spent the night lying awake and considering his choices. How long the man would remain in the islands, he did not know. But his presence here was something the British ought to hear about, he thought, especially his actual location. Surely that was significant. He could go to the Governor, but what could that official do? The man probably had no cause to be arrested. He was not on U.S. territory now. Nor did Gomez believe that Chief Inspector Jones, with his toy town force, would have any more weight than the Governor. This would need an order from London, following an extradition request from Uncle Sam personally. He could telephone in the morning—then he discarded that thought. The island’s communication, for public use, was an old-style open phone line running to Nassau, the Bahamas, and thence to Miami. He had no choice; he would have to return to Florida in the morning.

That same evening, a Delta Airlines flight from Washington touched down at Miami Airport. Among its passengers was a tired British civil servant whose passport said he was Mr. Frank Dillon. He had other papers—which he had no need to show on arrival from an internal American flight—that specified he was on the staff of the British Foreign Office and asked all whom it might concern to foe as helpful to him as possible.

Neither his passport, which he had no need to show, nor his papers revealed that his real name was Sam McCready. This was known only to the group of senior staff members of the CIA at Langley, Virginia, in whose company he had spent an intensive week attending a seminar on the role of the intelligence community of the Free World in the forthcoming decade of the nineties. It had meant listening to a raft of professors and other assorted academics, none of whom favored using one simple word where ten complicated ones would do.

McCready hailed a cab outside the airport terminal and asked to be taken to the Sonesta Beach Hotel on Key Biscayne. Here he checked in and treated himself to a lobster supper before retiring for a deep and untroubled sleep. He faced, or so he thought, the prospect of seven days of toasting himself by the pool, working his way through several light-hearted spy novels, and occasionally raising his gaze from a chilled daiquiri to watch a Florida girl sway by. Century House was a long way away, and the business of Disinformation, Deception, and Psychological Operations could remain in the capable hands of his newly appointed deputy, Denis Gaunt. It was time, he thought as he fell asleep, for the Deceiver to get a suntan.

On Friday morning, Julio Gomez checked out of Mrs. Macdonald’s boarding house without asking for a rebate for his unused two days and with profuse apologies. He hefted his suitcase and walked to Parliament Square, where he took one of the town’s two taxis and asked to be driven to the airstrip.

His ticket was for the Sunday-morning scheduled flight by BWIA to Nassau, with a connection to Miami. Although it was actually a shorter distance direct to Miami, there were no scheduled nights on the direct run, only via Nassau. There was no travel agent in town—bookings were always made right at the airstrip—so he could only hope that there was a Friday-morning BWIA flight. He did not notice that he was being watched as he took the taxi out of the square.

At the airstrip he was disappointed. The airport building, a single long shed containing a customs area and little else, was not closed, but it was almost deserted. A single passport officer sat in the morning sun reading a week-old
Miami Herald
that someone, probably Gomez himself, had left behind.

“Not today, man,” he replied cheerfully. “Never on a Friday.”

Gomez surveyed the grass field. Outside the single metal hangar stood a Piper Navajo Chief. A man in ducks and shirt was checking it over.

Gomez moved across. “You flying today?” he asked.

“Yep,” said the pilot, a fellow American.

“Available for charter?”

“No way,” said the pilot. “This is a private plane. Belongs to my employer.”

“Where you heading? Nassau?” asked Gomez.

“Nope. Key West.”

Gomez’s heart rose. From Key West, he could take one of the frequent scheduled flights up to Miami.

“Any chance I can have a talk with your employer?”

“Mr. Klinger. He’ll be here in about an hour.”

“I’ll wait,” said Gomez.

He found a shady spot near the hangar wall and settled down. Someone in the bushes withdrew, took a motorcycle from the undergrowth, and motored away down the coast road.

Sir Marston Moberley checked his watch, rose from his breakfast table in the walled garden behind Government House, and sauntered toward the steps that led up to his verandah and his office. That tiresome delegation was due anytime.

Britain retains very few of her former colonies in the Caribbean. The colonial days are long gone. No longer called colonies—an unacceptable word—they are today classed as Dependent Territories. One is Montserrat. Another is the Cayman Islands, known for its numerous and very discreet offshore banking activities. In a referendum, the people of the three Cayman Islands, when offered independence by London, voted overwhelmingly to stay British. Since then they have prospered like the green bay tree, in contrast to some of their neighbors.

Another obscure group is the British Virgin Islands, now a haven for yachtsmen and anglers. Yet another is the small island of Anguilla, whose inhabitants conducted the only known revolution in colonial history in order to stay British rather than be forcibly amalgamated with two neighboring islands, of whose prime minister they had the most lively and well-founded suspicions.

Even more obscure are the Turks and Caicos, where life proceeds on its somnolent way beneath the palm trees and the Union Jack, untroubled by drug peddlers, coups d’état, and election thuggery. In all cases, London rules with a fairly light hand, its principal role in the case of the last three territories being to pick up the annual budget deficit. In exchange, the local populations appear content to have the Union Jack run up and down the flagpole twice a day and the insignia of Queen Elizabeth on their currency notes and policemen’s helmets.

In the winter of 1989, the last group was the Barclays, a collection of eight small islands situated at the western edge of the Great Bahama Bank, west of the Bahamas’ Andros Island, northeast of Cuba, and due south of the Florida Keys.

Why the Barclays were not amalgamated into the Bahamas when that archipelago secured its independence, few can recall. A wag in the Foreign Office suggested later they might simply have been overlooked, and he could have been right. The tiny group had no more than twenty thousand inhabitants, and only two of the eight islands were inhabited at all. The chief island and home of the Government rejoiced in the name of Sunshine, and the fishing was superb.

They were not rich islands. Industry was nil, and income not much more. Most of that came from the wages of the young people who left to become waiters, chambermaids, and bellhops in the smart hotels elsewhere and who became favorites with visiting European and American tourists for their sunny good nature and beaming smiles.

Other income came from a smattering of tourism, the occasional game fisherman who would make the pilgrimage via Nassau, aircraft-landing rights, the sale of their very obscure stamps, and the sale of lobster and conch to passing yachtsmen. This modest income permitted the importation by weekly steamer of some basic commodities not available from the sea.