Funny, if things had worked differently, she’d have heard that said hundreds of times over the last 28 years, whenever a friend of theirs called.
Instead, 28 years ago she had left him at the Ithaca bus station, or rather, he had left her, late as he had been to get back to teach a class.
“Are you sure you’re O.K.?” he had asked her in the bus station. “You look like you don’t feel so well.”
“I’m fine, how are you doing?” she asked.
He shook his head. “I’m sick about this, Amanda. I’m just sick. This morning I thought I was going to throw up. I wolfed about five antacid tablets.”
“But you didn’t get sick,” she laughed. “You’re just projecting your own feelings on to me.”
Paul nodded glumly and looked back over his shoulder toward the clock on the far wall.
“You think they’re following me?” Amanda teased. “You think I’m that big a radical they’d have an agent tail me around, make sure I go to Leipzig?”
Paul flushed and looked down. “No,” he said, his face reddening as he stared at the floor. “No, I don’t think that, it’s just…”
Amanda nodded and touched his shoulder.
“I know,” she whispered. “I know. These are sucky times. The whole world has turned upside down and it’s like you and I have fallen off. Some crackpots blow things up and everyone is afraid, so damn afraid.”
Paul looked up and Amanda panicked that she had said too much. But then he nodded, and she relaxed. She took his arm and guided him across the room.
“How many antacids did you have this morning?” she teased.
“Five,” he said. “I’m really sick about this, Amanda, about you going just because the bastards are making you.”
She patted his arm.
“You’ll be fine. Hey, I’m not sick over it. Even if I didn’t have to, I might have chosen to study abroad. It gives one a new perspective.”
They walked to the candy counter, arm in arm, and bought two Snickers, their favorites. Paul peeled back the wrapping while Amanda dropped hers in her purse.
“For the trip,” she said.
“You sure you’ll make the connection in Boston O.K.?”
She nodded. “Plenty of time. I’ll be in Munich in the morning.”
She looked at her watch. She knew she had to at some point.
“Oh my goodness, Paul, you’ve got to get back to campus. You have an eleven o’clock. I’ll be fine.”
She let his obvious relief pass without comment.
They hugged tightly, and kissed deeply, but she knew. They said all the right things, but she still knew. At her urging, he turned and walked to his car. She stood in the concourse for a full minute before making her way to the ladies room. She entered the first available stall, collapsed on the tile floor, and vomited into the bowl. She wished she too had antacids.
Chapter 22
Lewis Ginter lay staring at the wobbling ceiling fan in his third floor room in Mexico City’s Hotel d’Estes. It wasn’t helping. He was soaked in sweat.
He had been in Mexico City for a week, and the late September temperature had not dropped below 90 degrees. His hotel room, on the south side of the building under tarpaper eaves, did little for his comfort.
Lewis had never liked Mexico, and the Hotel d’Estes was, even by 1963 standards, a dump. He wondered if the temperature was usual for the city in late September. He would have asked someone—a casual inquiry of a desk clerk perhaps—but he remained wary of unnecessary contact with “63ers” as he had come to think of them. Knowledge of the climatic conditions of a Mexican city was of no benefit to him. He just knew it was hot.
Ginter had driven down from Laredo knowing he had to be in Mexico City at the end of September. He recalled that it was on a weekend that his efforts would be needed, but was unsure of the specific dates.
As he did several times a day, Ginter mentally checked his body. He began by checking his skin, his muscle reflexes and his joints, and ended with a memory test by asking himself questions about his past. In the seven weeks since the four of them had traversed, Lewis Ginter had discovered no physical ill effects.
Yet mentally, he felt different. Was it the wormhole? He reflected back on the run-up to his departure from Cambridge, and chastised himself for lack of preparation. This mission had gone terribly wrong. Last summer—was it last summer or a future summer?—he should have studied more. Maybe he was too old and his military training had faded. Maybe he had relied too much on Hutch’s expertise. The image of them scrambling around the lab with Pamela, Hutch hurriedly gathering up scattered papers, and tumbling into the Accelechron, Plan A already a shambles, sickened him. How could he have allowed the development of such a complex mission without an alternate plan?
But that didn’t matter now. He was in 1963, separated from Hutch and deVere, trying to formulate Plan B on the fly. It was impossible to convince the President not to pull out of Southeast Asia. Check that. It was impossible in 1963 for a black man to do it.
But he was not without options. He couldn’t change Southeast Asian military history, but he could change what would happen in South America, to stop Ché Guevara. Heck, the guerrilla would have been stopped long before his run north if not for that American turncoat.
Lewis knew the Soviet version. “Hero O.H. Lee used his American Marine training to encircle the reactionary forces with liberation fighters.”
But Ginter also knew the truth. Oswald, or Lee, as he called himself when he defected to Cuba, had screwed up, taken the wrong road, and arrived after Guevara’s force had already been attacked, but in perfect time to counter-attack. The trap had failed, and Guevara, who should have been killed, escaped. Without the charismatic Ché Guevara, Cuban agitation in South America might have petered out. And without the Communist threat in South America, the U.S. could have focused on stopping them elsewhere. And without Lee Harvey Oswald, Ché Guevara would have been killed in that Bolivian jungle.
So now, he had to stop Oswald however he could. He should have shot him in the head in broad daylight in New Orleans, and Rhodes be damned. But then he had seen the pathetic, gaunt loser, passing out leaflets. Plan B had hatched. “The perfect patsy,” Ginter had said to himself.
And so Ginter had spent the last sweat-soaked week in the Hotel d’Estes, staring at his ceiling fan. He only left the room, his fist full of coins, to call every other cheap hotel to see if Señor Oswald had checked in.
“Non, Señor,” was the constant reply.
Until this morning. Friday, September 27, 1963. Hotel del Comercio. Another third-rater just four blocks from the bus station.
“Si, Señor,” the desk clerk had answered.
“Oh, good,” Ginter had said, nonchalantly. “Oh, no need to leave a message. I will meet him later.”
He hoped that the del Comercio’s desk clerk would not mention the call to the American guest. Oswald didn’t speak Spanish, at least not yet, so the odds were good.
Ginter rose from the bed and checked his new Timex. Eleven twenty-three a.m. He dressed quickly and, as always, quietly. Despite the humidity, he slipped a sport coat over his starched white shirt. It clung a little in the damp, but was cut full enough to hide the .45.
The walk to the Cuban Embassy took only a few minutes and Ginter arrived shortly after noon. He passed the embassy on the opposite side of the street without glancing over. At the corner he turned and strolled past a row of apartment houses.
He surveyed the Cuban Embassy every day. The stone facade building, located in a generally residential neighborhood, was difficult to keep under surveillance. There were no good places to read a newspaper while standing, and no public park in which to innocently loiter. All surveillance had to be moving, and eventually someone might notice anyone who kept circling the neighborhood.