O ’Connor directed the taxi driver past the railway sidings to the end of Buchheisterstrasse. He retrieved the backpacks containing the precious figurines from the trunk of the taxi, paid the driver, scanned the length of Buchheisterstrasse, and then the dockside itself. Satisfied, he nodded to Aleta. ‘Let’s go.’
Dark clouds scudded across the midnight sky, and behind them a three-quarter moon was intermittently reflected off the inky waters of the Elbe, 120 kilometres upstream from the river mouth on the North Atlantic. Together, they walked unhurriedly along the concrete dock, past warehouses and containers and the massive forklifts used to manoeuvre them to the loading cranes. The rusted shape of the MV Galapagos, a 15 000-tonne container ship, loomed at the far end of the dock, smoke wisping from her blackened funnel as the engineers worked up the required head of steam for departure.
‘Are customs and immigration going to be waiting for us?’ Aleta asked nervously.
‘With a bit of luck, they won’t be too bothered with a small cargo vessel, particularly at this time of night. Although the captain will probably ask to see your passport, and depending on how busy he is with the final loading arrangements, he might see us in his cabin. Just be your charming self – but not too charming; we don’t want to excite the crew on the first night,’ O’Connor added with a mischievous grin.
‘If we were anywhere else I’d kick you in the shins!’ Aleta said, smiling to herself. The prospect of sailing across the Atlantic with this dashing Irishman was as exciting as it was nerve-racking, but her smile quickly faded as she caught sight of two men in uniform descending the ship’s gangplank.
‘Keep walking. Just act normally,’ O’Connor said softly, weighing up his options as the two men approached.
‘Who the fuck does she think she is?’ Howard Wiley fumed at his chief of staff, shaking with rage at the ‘please explain’ he’d received from the CIA’s director. Rodriguez’ questions at the HAARP briefing had raised eyebrows in more than one corridor of power.
‘I don’t think she understands the potential of the HAARP experiments,’ Larry Davis agreed, sweating more than usual as he absorbed the full force of Wiley’s tirade.
‘Rodriguez wouldn’t know if a goddamned San Francisco trolley car was up her ass until the people got off… and in her case you’d have to ring the fucking bell. I want her head on a plate the minute she steps back into this building. She’s fired!’
‘And if she goes to the media?’
‘We’ll have her behind bars. She’s signed up to the Intelligence Authorization Act like every other motherfucker around here, and if she so much as thinks about opening that big mouth of hers, I’ll have her in the slammer faster than she can blink.’
‘With respect, Deputy Director – and I’m not defending Rodriguez here – the Authorization Act didn’t protect Valerie Plame, and if Rodriguez sues -’
‘Let her! She won’t win, and we’ll clean out the bitch’s bank balance in the process.’
‘She wouldn’t win, sir,’ Davis persisted, ‘but the peaceniks would be all over us like a rash. So far, they haven’t been able to stir up much media interest in HAARP, but this would give them air time, and the director will be more pissed than he is already.’
‘So what are you suggesting?’
‘The chief of station in Guatemala City’s just resigned. Why don’t you send Rodriguez down there in his place?’
‘As chief of station? Are you out of your mind, Davis?’
‘Think about it, sir. Guatemala’s an armpit and we were short-staffed down there even before this codex thing came on the radar, let alone now the chief of station’s resigned. Rodriguez will be working like a dog from the day she arrives. You can claim it’s a promotion into the field; it gets you off the hook with the equal opportunity wankers and gets her out of our hair. And if it all turns to custard, you can remove her, and she’ll probably resign.’
‘It’s a pity we don’t have anyone at the North Pole,’ Wiley grumbled. ‘She could freeze her tits off up there. All right, make it happen,’ he said finally. ‘In the meantime, what’s the word on Tutankhamen and that other bitch?’
‘We’re still checking. We’ve traced them to Hamburg, but they may have left by train.’
‘I want them found – and fast!’
‘ Guten Abend.’ O’Connor flashed a smile at the two officers approaching along the dock.
‘ Abend,’ one of them replied.
‘Who were they?’ Aleta asked, breathing a little easier after the two men had passed.
O’Connor shrugged. ‘Don’t know, but Merchant Marine, not customs or police. Watch your step,’ he said as they reached the gangplank.
‘You’re cutting it fine,’ the ship’s steward observed haughtily as they reached the deck. ‘We sail in twenty minutes.’
‘Sorry about that,’ O’Connor apologised.
‘The captain’s on the bridge,’ the steward sniffed. ‘I’ll show you to your cabin and then he’ll want to see your passports. Follow me,’ and he minced his way down the port companionway.
‘Opening bat for the other side,’ O’Connor whispered.
‘Stop it!’ Aleta whispered back, suppressing a fit of the giggles.
Aleta and O’Connor stood at the rail of the port wing of the bridge. Aleta watched the two tugs herding their charge away from the dock towards the middle of the Elbe. Powerful lights lit the for’ard decks of the MV Galapagos as the crew worked to get the heavy mooring hawsers aboard. O’Connor scanned the docks up to Buchheisterstrasse, searching for any signs of anyone on their trail.
‘The captain didn’t seem too interested in the paperwork,’ Aleta observed as the MV Galapagos moved slowly out into midstream.
‘One of the reasons I timed our arrival to just before sailing: he’s got a lot of things on his plate right now, and he won’t relax until he’s clear of the English Channel and out into the Atlantic.’
‘Slow ahead,’ the captain ordered. Below decks, a single gleaming steel shaft, driven by the massive Hitachi-Man marine diesel engine began to turn.
Howard Wiley looked into the biometric security scanner outside the door of the Operation Maya ops room. In an instant the powerful system computed the algorithms and analysed the pattern on Wiley’s iris. No two irises were the same; even identical twins had different irises. The security Wiley had installed on Operation Maya was far tighter than fingerprint recognition. The light glowed green and he stepped into the room, just as a message alert from the Berlin station pinged on Larry Davis’s computer screen: Information just to hand indicates Tutankhamen and Nefertiti departed Hamburg by sea. MV Galapagos, a 15 000-tonne container ship, left Buchheisterstrasse docks nine hours ago, bound for Havana and then Puerto Quetzal on Pacific coast of Guatemala.
‘Fuck! Can we get someone on board?’
Davis shook his head. ‘She’ll be clear of the mouth of the Elbe and into the English Channel by now.’
‘Tell Rodriguez that when she gets to Guatemala City, her first task is to organise for one of the crew to fall ill in Havana and arrange a swap. Tutankhamen and Nefertiti can simply disappear over the side, and the sharks will do the rest.’
‘The ship’s steward is not such a bad guy once you get to know him. He even keeps a half-decent cellar,’ O’Connor said, extracting the cork from a bottle of Alsace riesling. They had been at sea over a week, and O’Connor had made it his business to speak to every member of the crew. He now felt reasonably confident they’d got out of Hamburg without a tag… for the moment. Initially the MV Galapagos had made good progress. They were now well out into the mid-North Atlantic, to the west of the Azores group, but rising seas had forced the captain to slow to ten knots. Dinner over, O’Connor and Aleta had repaired to their cabin just below the bridge, with its view over the for’ard decks through the big square portholes.
‘Cheers.’ O’Connor raised his glass. Aleta raised hers, and gripped the table as the Galapagos rolled to starboard and buried herself into a massive wave. White water exploded over the bow and foamed over the for’ard containers before streaming back through the scuppers.
‘They lose about 10 000 containers a year in seas like this,’ O’Connor observed idly, savouring the delicate citrus flavours of the riesling. ‘One washed up on a beach in Somalia last year full of thousands of bags of potato chips – made the kids’ day.’
Aleta smiled and turned to stare at the dark mountainous seas ahead. The wind moaned in the rigging of the ship’s cranes and tore at the foaming crests beyond. She looked back at O’Connor. ‘You know, if someone had told me that one day I’d be sitting in a cabin with an Irishman, guarding two priceless figurines and sipping riesling – which is very nice by the way – while on the run from a bunch of hitmen, I would have thought they’d lost their marbles.’
‘This is life and we’re living it, but unfortunately your life’s not going to be the same for a while, at least not until we find the codex.’ O’Connor paused, weighing up how much hurt his next question might cause. ‘What happened in San Marcos? If that’s not too painful a question.’ O’Connor was still puzzled as to why some of the most powerful men in Washington wanted Aleta dead.
Aleta sighed. ‘No, it’s not too painful, although I still want those responsible brought to justice.’ She gripped the table again as the Galapagos ploughed into the base of another massive wave. The whole ship shuddered, her bow disappearing from view in another explosion of white foam. ‘I was only eight at the time. My father was a lay preacher in the little Catholic church at San Marcos.’
‘Yet he started out life as Jewish?’
Aleta nodded. ‘Papa was Jewish through and through, but as I mentioned to you at Mauthausen, Archbishop Angelo Roncalli, who later became Pope John XXIII, helped my father escape the Nazis. Roncalli used to sit up until three in the morning forging Catholic baptism certificates for Jewish children.’ Aleta’s eyes were moist. ‘Papa said that Roncalli was everything a priest should be. My aunt Rebekkah drowned during their escape, but Papa never forgot Roncalli’s kindness. My grandparents were both Jewish, and they had great faith, but I think Papa practised his own faith as a Catholic out of respect for Roncalli. Papa was occasionally asked to preach at the bigger Catholic church in San Pedros, fifteen minutes by boat from San Marcos.’ Aleta took O’Connor back to 1982 and the north-west shores of the beautiful lake.
Ariel Weizman gripped the rails of the pulpit of the cavernous white-washed church that stood over San Pedro and the lake. His dark curly hair had long turned grey and his face was gently lined with the wisdom and heartache of the years. Some of the villagers shifted nervously in the big wooden pews, their dark eyes fearful and alert.
‘As we celebrate mass here in San Pedro today, we remember in our prayers Archbishop Oscar Romero,’ Ariel began. ‘It’s two years to the day since Archbishop Romero was brutally gunned down while celebrating the Holy Mass, just across the border in El Salvador. Archbishop Romero’s “crime” was to demand an end to the torture, rape and murder of his people. The leader of San Salvador’s death squads, Major Roberto D’Aubuisson, has never been brought to justice. “Blowtorch Bob” was a nickname D’Aubuisson earned from his favourite form of torture, and he was also known for throwing babies into the air and shooting them for target practice. Yet D’Aubuisson is an honoured guest whenever he visits Washington.’ Ariel glanced at his family sitting in the front pew. The twin boys were restless, but little Aleta was looking at him, her big brown eyes as inquisitive as ever, her dark shiny hair tied back in a ponytail. Misha, Ariel’s wife of fifteen years, scolded the twins softly, a tender smile on her face.
‘In Central and South America, the United States is supporting brutal regimes that are systematically murdering the local populations. The Sixth Commandment is very clear,’ he continued, ‘and in Exodus, and in Deuteronomy, God has spoken, yet in Chile, the United States has supported the overthrow of the democratically elected Salvador Allende, and replaced him with Augusto Pinochet, a murderous thug. With the support of the CIA, Pinochet’s men are torturing and murdering tens of thousands of Chileans opposed to his brutal regime. The United States of America is fond of preaching democracy, but only if it gets the results it wants.’ Ariel paused. The campesinos, the simple folk of San Pedro who eked out a subsistence living amongst the coffee plantations and maize farms, were nervous; but Ariel knew that unless someone spoke out on their behalf, the killing would continue.
On the other side of the town square Howard Wiley was standing next to a dilapidated store – Cristo viene! Christ is coming! painted in red on the wooden walls. Wiley scanned the courtyard of the San Pedro church. Appointed as the CIA’s chief of station at the US Embassy in Guatemala City two years previously, at thirty-one he was one of the Agency’s youngest field commanders. Wiley turned to Major Ramales, the Guatemalan Army officer commanding the death squads assigned to put down the growing insurrection around Lake Atitlan.
‘Everything is ready, Comandante?’
Ramales fingered his trimmed black moustache. ‘ Si. You only have to give the word.’
Wiley adjusted his earpiece. Ariel Weizman’s homily was coming through loud and clear.
‘Here in Guatemala, President Reagan is supporting General Montt, another ruthless thug trained by the Americans at their School of the Americas at Fort Benning in Georgia. This is not the first time the United States has put a government of its choosing in power in Guatemala,’ Ariel reminded his congregation. ‘Many of you will recall that the Eisenhower administration and the CIA toppled the democratically elected President Arbenz and replaced him with another of their puppets, Colonel Armas. I appeal today to General Montt: send your soldiers back to their barracks, where they will no longer be able to rape and murder our women and children -’
Ariel’s sermon was interrupted by soldiers in camouflage uniforms shouldering open the heavy doors of the church, crashing them back against the white-washed stone masonry. More soldiers stormed into the church and immediately opened up with machine guns and automatic rifles in a deafening burst of fire. Bullets ricocheted off the stone walls and shattered the ornate glass windows. The old stone church was rent by the screams of the congregation, many dying where they sat. Ariel clutched his chest, the bloodstain on his shirt spreading as he slumped forward onto the pulpit railing. Aleta screamed as her mother’s lifeless form toppled into the aisle. Blood spurted below Misha’s neck from a ruptured aorta. The twins, who had been standing on the pew seat, were cut down together as the soldiers repeatedly raked the villagers with bursts of fire. Tears running down her cheeks, Aleta crawled between the pews and out through a side door of the church.
Some time later, numb with shock and horror, Aleta peered through the bushes in the church garden as the soldiers threw the last of the bodies onto the big trucks drawn up outside the church. A young boy moaned and stirred amongst the corpses and a soldier jumped up onto the truck. In a series of brutal swipes with a razor-sharp machete, he hacked off the boy’s head. In the distance, on the foothills of Volcan San Pedro, more soldiers were unloading their grisly cargo, throwing the bodies of the villagers into a deep pit dug the previous day.
Aleta could not have known that while most of the campesinos were dead, some, including one of her brothers, were still alive. Explosions rocked the volcanic hillside. Whenever there was movement in the pit, a soldier would yell ‘Granada!’ and hurl a hand grenade at the bodies. Tears continued to stream down Aleta’s cheeks as she watched the truck drive away, leaving just the officers in the town square, laughing and joking with a short white man wearing a fawn safari suit. He had a pale, freckly face and spiky red hair. Eventually the white man and an officer got into a staff car and drove down towards the little dock at the bottom of the hill.
The container vessel shouldered her way through another massive wave, the crest curling angrily over her bow. ‘I am terribly, terribly sorry,’ O’Connor said simply. ‘The CIA has made some unconscionable mistakes over the years, and the campaigns in the Americas were amongst the worst. But thank you for telling me. It couldn’t have been easy.’
‘Time is a great healer, Curtis… but you never forget.’
‘Would you know the man with the red hair if you saw him again?’
‘Oh, yes. Even though it was years ago, that’s one face that’s indelibly seared on my memory. Why do you ask?’
‘Howard Wiley, the man who’s trying to kill us, is now in charge of all the CIA’s spy rings and overseas operations. In 1982 he was chief of station in Guatemala City – and his most striking physical attribute, apart from his lack of height, is his spiky red hair.’
Aleta’s eyes widened. ‘Short?’
‘Around five-foot four. Quite vertically challenged, is our DDO. I think this explains why he wants you out of the way.’
‘And it explains something else. Papa was asked to preach that day because Father Hernandez was supposedly going to be away in Guatemala City. But how could Wiley know I was there?’
‘The CIA have a file on anyone, anyone they think might pose a threat, either to their operations overseas, or to America itself. When you wrote that article in The Mayan Archaeologist linking the School of the Americas to the training of death squads in Central America, it would have rung alarm bells for Wiley. He can’t be certain you were at the church on that day, but he knows you were born in San Marcos and that Ariel was your father. People like Wiley don’t leave anything to luck. If he suspects there is the slightest chance you can link him to the killings, he won’t hesitate.’
‘So he’ll get me in the end… ’ Aleta shuddered.
‘Not while I’m around.’
Trust this man with your life. Aleta sipped her riesling, pondering the shaman’s words. ‘What I don’t understand is if Wiley is now running the CIA’s spy ring, why have you stayed so long?’
O’Connor didn’t reply immediately. It had been a long time since he’d been alone with an intelligent, beautiful woman, and even longer since anyone had been able to penetrate his outer shell. ‘I’ve always been grateful for getting a new start in America,’ he said finally. ‘When I joined the CIA, I just wanted to do my bit for my adopted country, a country I was proud of – or used to be, until the last administration came along.’
Aleta listened, trying to fathom O’Connor. To her, he was still an enigma. He was confident but unassuming. Hard as nails, yet possessed of a roguish sense of humour and a soft Irish brogue. She felt her attraction for this man growing. ‘I don’t even know where you were born, other than, I presume, Ireland,’ she said, her voice gentler now. ‘You now know a little more about me, but I still know very little about you.’
O’Connor refilled the wine glasses. ‘I’ve never tried to disguise my accent. I was born in a place called Ballingarry. It’s a small village in County Tipperary, near the border of Kilkenny in the south. My father used to work in the coalmines, but he died when I was ten.’
‘I’m sorry. I know how hard that must have been.’
‘Thank you, but don’t be. I was the last of five kids by a wide margin – my father referred to me as “the accident”. I used to hide before the drunken bastard came home because if he found me, he’d beat me up.’
‘Did things get better after he died?’ she asked, shocked.
‘Not much. We moved to a tenement house in Sheriff Street in Dublin, near the docks on the Liffey, which was a pretty tough neighbourhood. My mother worked as a cleaner at night, and got her kicks screwing her way through the day. Eventually one of her men friends paid for me to go to a Catholic boarding school in Dublin run by the Christian Brothers.’
Aleta noticed his face cloud as he took her back to the slums of inner-city Dublin in the late 1970s.
‘So, O’Connor. I’m told you’re in need of a bit of discipline. What have you got to say to that, eh?’ The head brother of Saint Joseph’s, Brother Michael, was obese, his round, pudgy face the same colour as the salmon walls of his sparsely furnished office. His sandy-coloured hair was thinning at the temples; his eyes an icy grey.
Curtis winced as Brother Michael lashed him across the face with a heavy leather strap.
‘I asked you a question, you little Dublin shite! Answer, boy!’ Brother Michael said more slowly and menacingly, ‘or bejaysus I’ll beat you within an inch of your life.’
‘I’m here because my mother’s boyfriend paid for me to come here,’ Curtis responded defiantly. He fought back the tears as the strap again sliced into his cheek.
‘You sodding little gobshite!’ Brother Michael lashed Curtis again and shoved him headfirst into the wall. A silver crucifix of Jesus rattled against the plaster above Curtis’s head. ‘Get out of my sight!’ Brother Michael propelled Curtis out of his office into the corridor, where he crashed into one of the bigger boys.
‘What da fook? I’m gonna bleedin’ nut the fookin’ head of you, ya bleedin’ bollocks ya!’
‘Tell your mother to get married,’ Curtis responded, ducking deftly out of the way of the bigger boy’s swinging right arm.
Later that night, as the newest boy in the dormitory, Curtis had his first experience with Brother Brendan, the house master.
‘Lights out, you scum!’ The tall, sinister Brother Brendan walked silently down the middle aisle that separated the rows of bunks. He stopped at the bottom of Curtis’s bed. Curtis pretended to be asleep, watching through barely open eyelids. Brother Brendan silently approached the head of the bed, breathing heavily, beads of sweat appearing on his pallid face. He slid his hand under the sheets and onto Curtis’s thigh. In an instant Curtis clamped the brother’s skinny wrist with his left hand and wrenched Brother Brendan’s thumb back sharply with his right.
‘Aaggghhhh!’ Brother Brendan’s high-pitched yell reverberated off the darkened dormitory walls.
‘Touch me again, you fucking pervert, and I’ll break your fucking arm!’
Brother Brendan fled without a word.
Curtis waited nearly an hour. When he was sure everyone was asleep, he quietly retrieved his clothes from the locker beside his bed, dressed and crept out of the dormitory.
Staying in the shadows of the three-metre-high brick wall that surrounded Saint Joseph’s, Curtis made his way to a large oak tree where he paused and checked the dimly lit buildings behind him. Satisfied that none of the brothers were about, he flung the battered leather satchel containing the few things he owned over the wall and scaled the tree. Curtis glanced up and down but the laneway was deserted. He quietly grasped the top of the wall, slid down until he hung at full stretch and dropped to the ground. The traffic on nearby Thomas Road was light, but Curtis eventually hitched a ride to the docks area on a truck carrying a load of Guinness.
It was after midnight when he reached the tenement house in Sheriff Street, but the light was still on in his mother’s bedroom. Curtis pushed open the old wooden front door and climbed the stairs; but he stopped at the top of the landing. The door to his mother’s room was ajar and she was naked on the bed. A man Curtis had never seen before was astride her.
‘Give it to me! Give me that fat cock!’
Curtis crept into his old room and closed the door, numb to a world over which he had no control.
‘At least I had some very good years with my family,’ Aleta said softly. The Galapagos rolled and shuddered yet again, spume flying from the crests of the huge waves as the gale howled over the foam-covered containers. ‘What happened? Did you go back to school?’
‘I left the next morning. My aunt Shaylee lived on the other side of the city and she and her husband took me in, something for which I’ll always be grateful. Without them, I’d probably be driving a crane down at the docks.’
‘University?’
O’Connor nodded. ‘I won a scholarship to Trinity College and did my doctorate at the School of Biochemistry and Immunology. Worked for “big pharma” for a while in the States, but didn’t like their ethics, so I joined the CIA… and here we are,’ he said with a grin. ‘Prost.’
‘Prost.’ Aleta raised her glass to the man she was beginning to understand, although she knew she’d only scratched the surface. They clinked glasses, and O’Connor got up from the table and stood at the window, watching another wave explode onto the decks, tumbling over the containers before exhausting itself in the scuppers. The Galapagos shook herself free, crested the wave and charged towards the next.
Aleta joined him at the big square porthole. For a long while they stood close, watching the storm, finishing their wine.
O’Connor put his arm around Aleta’s slim waist, half expecting her to take his hand away, but she nestled into him, resting her head and her now short blonde hair on his shoulder. Her perfume was a sensual mix of jasmine and caesalpinia; foxglove and vanilla; citron and cedar. It might be aptly named, he thought wryly, having spied the elegant red bottle earlier in the day: Trouble by Boucheron. A flash of forked lightning hit the sea barely two nautical miles from the ship; 120 000 amps travelling at 60 000 metres every second turned the strike point on the ocean into a boiling inferno. The deck and containers were bathed in a powerful and eerie blue light, and O’Connor momentarily reflected on the power of the transmitter at Gakona. The thunder crackled above them and shook the Galapagos ’ superstructure. He turned towards Aleta. Their lips met, softly at first, and then more urgently. They held each other tightly, moving with the roll of the ship. O’Connor ran his hand slowly down the small of Aleta’s back and she responded, moulding herself against him.