V ice President Walter Montgomery was due to host some senior CIA officers at an evening function on the lawns of his official home, a stately white nineteenth-century mansion overlooking Massachusetts Avenue. He’d asked DDO Wiley to come early for a meeting in the first-floor library.
The vice presidential library was finished in white timber with light-beige wallpaper and matching lounge chairs. It had a certain New England charm about it, in the midst of which both men seemed distinctly out of place.
‘I trust that asshole O’Connor’s enjoying the delights of Gakona,’ the Vice President said, indicating Wiley should take a seat.
‘It’s about as close to Siberia as I could send him, Mr Vice President. He’ll stay there until I work out something more permanent.’
‘Good. Now, have you seen the latest claims by that Weizman bitch?’ Vice President Montgomery flung a copy of the latest edition of The Mayan Archaeologist onto the elegant white coffee table. The cover was dominated by a striking photograph of Dr Aleta Weizman, standing beside the Pyramid of the Lost World in the jungles of Tikal, Guatemala. The headline read: Weizman Claims CIA Involvement in Guatemalan Genocide Allegations made against the School of the Americas
Wiley knew the reality behind that headline lay deep in the Guatemalan jungle, and his reasons for ensuring that the truth didn’t surface were far more pressing than those of the Vice President. Should he brief Montgomery on the diaries the CIA’s man in San Pedro, the ex-Nazi commandant of Mauthausen, had kept? Diaries that were now missing -
‘I need hardly remind you, Howard, that we go to the polls shortly,’ Montgomery thundered on, ‘and right now we’re up to our bootstraps in hog shit in Iraq and Afghanistan. The last thing the President or I need is the media spotlight back on Intelligence or secret prisons and water-boarding. Or the fucking Guatemalans, for that matter. Or the Mexicans, Venezuelans or anyone else from that garbage dump down south. Nixon got it right about Central America. Nobody gives a fuck about the place.’
‘I agree, Mr Vice President. It’s a shit box.’
‘I don’t care how you do it, but put some heat on this Weizman woman. Find out who controls archaeologists’ licences and send them a donation from a grateful nation with the proviso she gets blacklisted. Anyone who thinks that someone other than Columbus discovered America doesn’t deserve to have a licence. And put her under surveillance. If she even looks like exposing our operations in Guatemala, Paraguay or anywhere else, get rid of her. Meantime, keep the CIA out of the fucking media.’
‘Leave it to me, Mr Vice President. By the time I’ve finished with Weizman, and O’Connor for that matter, the AP numbers will look even better.’ Wiley and Montgomery had both been greatly encouraged by an Associated Press poll that had claimed twelve per cent of Americans had either never heard of the CIA or couldn’t rate it.
As the DDO left the vice presidential residence later in the evening, a move was already taking shape on Wiley’s sinister chessboard. It was a move that would require the recall of O’Connor from Gakona, but it would eliminate Weizman permanently.