Pablo’s torso still sat in the pilot’s chair. His feet were still on the pedals and his hands still held the wheel, but where his head had been there was just a jagged stump spurting fountains of blood.
“Oh give me a goddamn fucking break,” Melchior said, even as the plane dipped and spun toward the left. He’d known the plan was going to be stupid, but he had no idea it was this stupid. “You’ve got to be fucking kidding me.”
The plane’s sharp turn put the open hatch almost directly above him, and he had to climb the floor like a ladder, cursing Robert Kennedy, Allen Dulles, Richard Bissell, Sidney Gottlieb, and everyone else who had anything to do with such a cockamamie scheme. Grunting, he chinned himself through the opening. The plane’s engines screamed as it dipped into a death spiral. If he timed his jump wrong, he was going to get sliced in half by a tail fin. But Pablo’d been instructed to come in under 2,500 feet, so it was now or never. He counted—three, two, one!—and threw himself clear. The left elevator ripped by so close that if he’d turned his cheek, he could’ve gotten a free shave. A second later, the plane disappeared into the clouds.
He pulled the cord as soon as he was level. There was that interminable quarter second when it always seemed like nothing was going to happen, and then he felt the familiar snap and tug as the chute opened and caught. He listened for the sound of a crash but the cloud-choked air wrapped around his head like a pillow, and all he heard was the sound of his own breath. The cigar’s smoke still sat on his tongue.
“Jesus fucking Christ,” he muttered as he spat the taste of gunpowder and blood into the cottony void. “Exploding fucking cigars.” In the category of need-to-know, he was pretty sure someone could’ve bothered to mention that.
The next minute or so was a surreal interval, as he floated through a layer of cloud so dense he could’ve been a fly suspended in amber. He found himself remembering certain rumors that had come to him—rumors that, until sixty seconds ago, he’d dismissed as Communist propaganda or, who knows, an exercise in disinformation on the Company’s part, an attempt to make the rest of the world think CIA had lost the thread in the wake of the Bay of Pigs. Now it was starting to look like the rest of the world was right.
Before he left the Congo, Joe Mobutu—this was before all that Sese Seko Nkuku nonsense—told him about a microphone in a radio station that would spew deadly gas when Castro delivered his weekly address. In Saigon, a jaded British journalist–cum–MI-5 freelancer named Fowler told him about a jar of poisoned cold cream one of Castro’s mistresses was supposed to put in his mouth while he was sleeping, and on the Laotian side of the Vietnamese border, a Hmong warlord told him about a seashell packed with C4 that Castro was supposed to find when he went scuba diving. In a whorehouse outside Clark AFB, a Filipino madam of questionable gender (but unquestionable assets) told him about a ballpoint pen that was really a syringe filled with poison, and the Marine who handed his girl off to Melchior told him about a wet suit infected with some kind of toxic fungus. Perhaps the most ridiculous story of all, though, had come from Caspar: a plan to put thallium salts in El Jefe’s boots, which would supposedly cause his hair to fall out (apparently the bright young things Bissell had brought in with him felt that Castro’s power, like Samson’s, was vested in his hair—more specifically, his beard—and a bald, bare-cheeked leader would lose his hypnotic hold over the people). Caspar’d told this story at a bar a few miles outside of the Atsugi Naval Air Facility on the east coast of Japan; Melchior had flown there for the sole purpose of having a drink with him before he went into deep cover, and he was inclined to put the story up to their third or nineteenth bottle of saki. But the wet stains splattered all over the back of his shirt suggested that Caspar’d been telling the truth. That all the stories were true. The Company hadn’t just lost the thread, it had lost its head. All due respect to Pablo, of course.
The fact that these rumors seemed to be true lent credence to other things he’d heard about during his time away. Namely that Technical Services, under the leadership of its clubfooted, folk-dancing Jewish genius, Sidney Gottlieb, had all but superseded the Directorate of Plans as CIA’s paramount division and was pushing an ever greater reliance on technology over manpower—everything from wiretaps to U-2 stratoflights to crazy drug experiments designed to create truth serums and knockout drops, with, apparently, exploding cigars and poison pens and who knew what other James Bond type of stuff thrown in for good measure.
Melchior couldn’t help but think that none of this would’ve happened if Frank Wisdom, the man whom Bissell and Gottlieb had made redundant, were still around. The man who, with the help of James Forrestal, the nation’s first secretary of Defense, built CIA out of the remnants of the wartime OSS and pretty much single-handedly founded the concept of covert ops. The man who led the fight against Communist expansion in France, Italy, and the Ukraine (two out of three seemed like a pretty good win-loss record in that department, especially given which two they’d won), in Korea, Persia, and Guatemala (ditto the two-out-of-three stat, and they’d only lost half of Korea anyway). The man who recruited Melchior and Caspar out of that orphanage in Dallas almost exactly twenty years ago, anointing them the first of his Wiz Kids. Twenty years later, they were the last of the Wise Men. The Wiz himself had been out since ’58. Not officially retired, no, but sidelined. There were rumors of a breakdown, time in a sanatorium, shock treatments. The last Melchior heard, he was stationed in London. For a man who’d spent his whole life fighting Communism in Eastern Europe, Central America, the Middle East, and beyond, cold, gray Westminster must’ve seemed like a fate worse than death.
Well, it wasn’t as cold and gray as Moscow. Caspar could’ve told you that.
Just then he broke through the clouds. Immediately he snapped into focus. He could see a few twinkling lights in the distance, judged the nearest to be at least three miles away. The area directly beneath him, however, was a dense black void. It could’ve been open water or a cane field or …
“Aw, shit.”
Melchior jerked his feet up as the jagged outlines of forest canopy suddenly came into view. Pablo’d dropped them directly over the goddamned Zapata Swamp. He tried to steer clear but ran out of airspace way too soon. His right ankle slammed against a branch and he whirled around in an explosion of pain. He did his best to shelter the volatile cargo in his backpack even as branches pounded his legs, ribs, arms, head. A sudden jerk and then a long tear as the chute tangled in the branches. Something smacked him right in the kisser, something else slammed into his gut, and his descent came to a sudden, stomach-churning stop.
He hung there for a moment until he could breathe, then opened his mouth, let a thin stream of blood and saliva fall to the ground. A faint splat reached his ears about two seconds later, meaning he was about twenty feet up. He flexed his throbbing right ankle. It didn’t seem to be broken, but even so. This wasn’t gonna be fun.
He was reaching for his knife to cut himself free when he heard a rustle, grabbed his light instead. A pair of green eyes glared up at him, but it took a couple of seconds to discern the outline of the full beast. Some crocodile-looking critter, jaws wide open like a toothy funnel, as though all it were doing was drinking the drizzle still falling from the sky. It was only seven or eight feet from nose to tail—an iguana compared to the behemoths he’d seen in the Congo—and it seemed to be alone, as well, but Melchior wasn’t in the mood to mess around. Although it occurred to him to light one of the cigars and drop it in the croc’s mouth, he pulled his sidearm out instead, sighted between the twinkling orbs of its eyes, squeezed the trigger. The croc collapsed like a punctured tire. Melchior waited thirty seconds to see if anything else came running, then used his knife to sever the strings of his chute one at a time, slipping and jerking his way downward. When he was about six feet off the ground, he unbuckled his harness and dropped right on the croc’s back. He took most of the weight on his left leg, but his right still screamed with pain. If he got out of this pissant country alive—never mind if this cockeyed plan came off—he vowed to put his throbbing foot all the way up Richard Bissell’s pasty white ass. He’d save the cigars for Sidney Gottlieb.