“So you’d already given Emerson the pills when you found out the maid was coming,” I say.
“That’s right. I figured it was not a problem. She would be working downstairs in the dining room and the kitchen. When Emerson got sleepy I would help him to bed, then get my bag with the passport, money from his wallet, some coins from the study, enough just for an airline ticket, and go out through the garage. The maid would never know I’d left. And if I was lucky, Emerson would not wake up until morning. That’s what I thought. But he refused to go to sleep.” She gives Harry a kind of plaintive expression. “I know now it was probably not the right thing to do. It must look very bad, but at the time it was all I could think of.”
Given the low dose, the cops would never have given the sleep meds a second thought. It’s a common enough prescription. The natural assumption would be that Pike had taken the stronger dose himself, especially if he’d built up a tolerance to the medication over time. But all the assumptions went out the window when they found Katia’s fingerprints on the prescription bottle.
Alone, by itself, and given the sum of other conflicting evidence in the state’s case, this might not be cataclysmic.
What worries me is the wild card, the prosecutor Larry Templeton and the artful ways he might try to use this. We may get a peek at the Dwarf’s crystal ball tomorrow when Harry and I meet with him on another issue.
It’s a courtesy call. Why Templeton has asked for this meeting we’re not sure. It happens all the time. A clerk puts something in the wrong box in the evidence lockup, and it takes them a few days to find it. It seems the evidence clerks have misplaced the six photos taken by Katia’s mother in Colombia, the photographic prints made by Emerson Pike, reclaimed by Katia the night he was murdered and seized from her by the police the day she was arrested.
NINETEEN
We have to assume that as long as the man in question is alive, the item is viable,” said Llewellyn.
Herb Llewellyn was in his early forties. He had a shock of tousled salt-and-pepper hair over horn-rimmed glasses. His dress shirts, the sleeves of which were always rolled above his thin, bony elbows, seemed to bear a perennial spot of ink, either fresh or faded, from a pen that leaked in his breast pocket. This morning he was meeting with Thorpe in Thorpe’s corner office at FBI headquarters.
“Explain to me how that works,” said Thorpe. “I’m still not convinced on the issue of shelf life. Everything I’ve ever read says ten, maybe twelve years tops, after that it may be dirty but that’s it, and even that’s minimal.”
Thorpe wanted to be sure he knew what he was dealing with before he went up the chain and got his head handed to him by someone who didn’t like the message he was delivering, especially if there was any chance he was wrong. The acting director had now fallen on his own sword. Thorpe wasn’t even sure if he knew what higher authority looked like anymore.
“In this case, you can forget everything you’ve read,” said Llewellyn. “And I don’t say that lightly. It’s a special case.”
“In what way?”
“The Soviet Seventy-ninth Brigade, according to the accounts in the Russian documents, possessed a highly skilled field-level maintenance unit. The FKRs were designed to be completely field maintained.
“More to the point, each transport van contained multiple replacements for every critical part. We’re talking about a gun type here, simplicity itself, exceedingly reliable and easy to maintain. The entire device could fit into a fair-size steamer trunk. The gun barrel would be no more than perhaps three feet long and between three and four inches in diameter, with a smooth bore. According to the information in the documents, the man we’re looking for was one of the brigade’s top armorers. He was trained and experienced in maintenance on the system in question. He would know how to store it, how to keep it alive, and if necessary, how to bring it back to life.”
“That’s possible? He could do that?”
“With an ample supply of replacement parts, yes.”
“What about the Russians? Can they help us at all?” said Thorpe.
“State Department has been in contact with them. Relations, as you know, are not good. On the international front, to deflect heat, in the event that something happens, they’re taking the position that it’s an old-empire problem, a holdover from the Soviets for which they are not responsible. Unofficially, they’re trying to obtain design details, drawings if they can find them. But it’s an old system. It’s been obsolete for decades, not even remotely close to anything in their current arsenal. Their thermonuclear stockpile, fifty megatons or more, enough to take out twenty square miles, would be implosion-type bombs, a core of plutonium surrounded by conventional explosives and triggered by highly complex detonation systems. What we’re hearing is that a lot of the documentation on the older-type weapons, the stuff we’re dealing with here, was trashed after the collapse of the Soviets. So finding information may be next to impossible.”
“So correct me if I’m wrong. You’re telling me our cause for concern turns on two contingencies: that the man is still alive and that he has the necessary spare parts to keep the weapon alive.”
“Correct.”
“We may know more about the man in a day or so. For now, let’s talk about the parts,” said Thorpe.
Thorpe and Llewellyn were about as different as two people could be. Llewellyn was an intellectual from MIT, a scientist who headed up an office of nerds all packing scientific calculators that could perform three hundred functions and carry out equations to a dozen decimal points. For this reason it seemed strange that the two men always gravitated toward each other whenever there was a crisis, as if each compensated for some deficiency in the other.
“Let’s assume for the moment that he doesn’t have the parts. Could he fabricate them?”
“It’s possible, but it becomes much more problematic. The tolerances required for fabricated parts would be critical. He would require access to tools and dies that would be difficult to obtain. Even with the proper equipment, it’s questionable. Without skilled help I would say his chances of success drop dramatically. The man’s an armorer, not a machinist.”
“Good,” said Thorpe. “Now how do we know he has the spare parts?”
“The KGB reports,” said Llewellyn. “We know that the Russian, Nitikin, arrived on Castro’s doorstep at Punto Uno the afternoon of October twenty-eighth.”
“Excuse me. What’s Punto Uno?” said Thorpe.
“It was central command, military headquarters for the Cuban government during the missile crisis. Castro always hung out there whenever there was a national calamity.”
“So Castro was involved personally?”
“We don’t know, but we have to assume so. According to the KGB reports that were compiled from Soviet military accounts, Castro was present at Punto Uno when the Russian arrived. Apparently the Russian was invited inside the compound. He was there for a little over an hour. What happened inside, who he met, who he may have talked to, the Soviets couldn’t be certain.”
“Castro would have wanted to cover his ass,” said Thorpe. “He wouldn’t want to get crosswise with the Soviets.”
“Nor they with him,” said Llewellyn.
“So we have no idea whether the Cubans might be involved now?”
“No,” said Llewellyn.
“Go on, let’s get back to the parts.”
“The Russian was seen again later that night, October twenty-eighth, this time at the port at Mariel. Both times, at Punto Uno in the after noon and at Mariel that night, he was driving a large Soviet transport van. According to the Soviet military and the later KGB reports when he arrived at Mariel, he was under the protection of a good-size contingent of Cuban troops. They estimated more than two hundred armed soldiers and at least two armored vehicles. It’s clear he wouldn’t have gotten off the island without the Cubans.”