The Technical Service elves, as they were known in-house, lived in a world of their own: a sealed-off warren of top-floor rooms in one of the Company’s “temporary” World War II buildings on the Reflecting Pool. The single entrance off the stairwell to their shop, protected by a hermetically sealed door with a skull and crossbones stenciled on it, was manned day and night by armed security guards. The elves themselves, stooped men with a tendency toward thick eyeglasses and thinning hair, favored white lab coats, the pockets of which were usually filled with disposable syringes. Some of the rooms were climate-controlled, with the temperatures hovering in the greenhouse range because of the spoors germinating on moist cotton in petri dishes. Cardboard labels were propped up everywhere: bacteria, fungi, algae, neurotoxins were growing like weeds. The man who directed the division, Dr. Aaron Sydney, a cantankerous five foot two biochemist with tufts of wiry hair on his cheekbones, had worked for a giant pharmaceutical firm before joining the Company. His most recent triumph had been the development of the infected handkerchief that the CIA mailed to General Abdul Karim al-Kassem, the Iraq military strongman who had fallen afoul of the wonks who masterminded American foreign policy. “Oh, my, no, we certainly don’t expect it to kill the poor man,” Dr. Sydney was supposed to have told Dulles when he brought him the finished product. “With any luck, it will only make him ill for the rest of his life.”
“I didn’t catch your name when Mr. Bissell called to arrange the appointment,” Dr. Sydney told the Sorcerer when he turned up in his office.
“Torriti, Harvey.”
“What can we do for you, Mr. Harvey?”
The Sorcerer looked around the room with a certain amount of discomfort. The walls were lined with shelves filled with sealed jars containing white mice and the occasional small monkey preserved in formaldehyde. Each jar was carefully labeled in red ink: clostridium botulinum, toxoplasma gundii, typhus, small pox, bubonic plague, Lupus. Torriti repeated the question to jump-start the answer. “What can you do for me? You can give me an Alka-Seltzer.”
“Oh, dear, do you have an upset stomach?”
“I want to arrange for someone else to have an upset stomach.”
“Ahhhhh. I see. Male or female?”
“Does it make a difference?”
“Indeed it does. Matter of dosage.”
“Male, then.”
Dr. Sydney uncapped a fountain pen and jotted something on a yellow legal pad. “Would it be asking too much to give me an idea of his age, height, weight and the general state of his health?”
“He’s in his early thirties, tall, on the solid side, and in excellent health as far as I know.”
“Excellent…health,” Dr. Sydney repeated as he wrote. He ogled the Sorcerer through his reading glasses. “Just how upset do you want his stomach to become?”
Torriti was beginning to get a kick out of the conversation. “I want his stomach to stop functioning.”
Dr. Sydney didn’t miss a beat. “Suddenly or slowly?”
“The suddener, the better.”
Dr. Sydney’s brows knitted up. “Is that a word, suddener?”
“It is now.”
“Suddener. Hmmmm. Which would suggest that you don’t want to give anyone time to pump his stomach.”
“Something along those lines, yeah.”
“Will the product need to be disguised in order to get past an inspection at a border?”
“That’d be a smart idea. Yes. The answer is yes.”
“Obviously, you won’t want a powder—police at borders of certain countries tend to get all hot under the collar when they see powders. A pill, perhaps?”
“An Alka-Seltzer would be about right.”
“Oh, dear, Mr. Harvey, I can see you are a novice at this. Alka-Seltzer is far too big. I’m afraid you’ll want something smaller. The smaller it is, the easier it will be for the perpetrator to slip it into a liquid without anyone noticing. You do want the perpetrator to get away with the crime, I take it.”
“I suppose so.”
“You only suppose?”
“To tell the truth, I haven’t given it much thought.” The Sorcerer scratched at his nose. “Okay. I’ve thought about it. I want the perpetrator to get away with the crime.”
“How many specimens will you require, Mr. Harvey?”
Torriti considered this. “One.”
Dr. Sydney seemed surprised. “One?”
“Is something not right with one?”
“We generally supply more than one in case something goes wrong during the delivery process, Mr. Harvey. To give you a for-instance, the product might be dropped into the wrong glass. Or it might be delivered to the right glass which, for one reason or another, is not consumed. If the perpetrator possessed a backup supply, he—or, why not? she—could get a second shot.” Dr. Sydney aimed a very nasty smile in the Sorcerer’s general direction. “If at first you don’t succeed—“
“Skydiving is not for you.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“That was a joke. Listen, right, I hadn’t thought about a backup supply. As long as you’re going to all this trouble you might as well give me a bunch of pills.”
“How does three sound to you?”
“Three sounds fine to me.”
Dr. Sydney scratched the number three on the pad. “May I ask if you are working on a tight schedule, Mr. Harvey.”
“Let’s say I’m hurrying without rushing.”
“Dear me, that’s nicely put; oh, nicely put, indeed. The hustle without the bustle. The haste without the waste.” Dr. Sydney rose to his feet and looked up at the Sorcerer. “Would that everyone in the Pickle Factory functioned the way you do, Mr. Harvey. Mr. Bissell generally wants things done by yesterday. If you could manage to drop by again in, say, four days, chances are I will have what you need.”
Leo Kritzky was in the process of tacking the photographs to the wall when Dick Bissell and his Cuba task force people trooped into the war room on the ground floor of Quarters Eye. “How does it shape up?” Bissell demanded. He hooked a pair of dark-rimmed spectacles over his ears and, leaning forward on the balls of his feet, examined the black-and-white blow-ups. Taken from a height of 70,000 feet during the previous day’s U-2 mission over the southern coast of Cuba, they showed what appeared to be a long stretch of beach, part of which was filled with tiny one-room bungalows set in neat rows.
“If anything,” Leo said, “it looks even better than Trinidad.”
Waving everyone to wooden seats pulled up in a semicircle facing the wall, Bissell nodded. “Walk us through this, will you, Leo?”
“Dick, gentlemen, what you’re looking at is the Bahia de Cochinos—in English, the Bay of Pigs. It’s a stretch of beach roughly thirteen miles long and averaging four miles in depth. On one side is the bay and, beyond that, the Caribbean. On the other are the Zapata swamps, which for all practical purposes are impassable—they’re crawling with marabu bushes with long thorns that’ll flay the skin off you, poisonous guao plants, the occasional deadly snake, not to mention the cochinos cimarrónes, the wild pigs that have been known to attack humans and give their name to the bay.”
“Sounds like a description of Capitol Hill,” someone quipped.
“There are three ways across the Zapata, three causeways”—Leo traced them with a pointer—“built up from land fill and rising above the swamp.”
“Do we have an idea what Castro has down there in the way of troops?” Bissell asked.
Leo pointed out what looked like four long low structures next to an unpaved road behind the town of Girón, which consisted of a few dozen wooden buildings set back from a wide main street. “There are roughly a hundred militiamen from the 338th Militia Battalion stationed in these barracks. Notice the antennas on the third building—it must be the radio shack. Here is a blow-up of their motor pool—we can read the license plates so we know these are militia trucks. Seven, all told. No armor, no artillery in sight.”
E
. Winstrom Ebbitt, who recently had been brought in as Bissell’s deputy chief of planning in charge of logistics, leaned forward. People who knew Ebby well understood that he had grave doubts about JMARC but tended, like everyone else, to nibble around the edges of the operation to avoid a head-on confrontation with Bissell and his gung-ho top-floor planning staff. “That looks like more barracks—down there, Leo, more to the left, north of the road that runs parallel to the beach.”
“No, that’s civilian housing, according to our photo interpreters,” Leo said. “The construction workers who are building the Playa Girón bungalow resort down at the beach”—Leo pointed out the neat rows of one-room structures—“live up there. Again, you can read the license plates on the Jeeps and trucks and the two earth movers parked in the field behind the housing—it’s all civilian. Judging from the sign on the roof of the shack near the pier—it says ‘Blanco’s’—this must be the local watering hole. The two piers here appear to be in good condition—one is made of concrete, the other of wood pilings and planks. Between them there is what amounts to a small harbor, which appears to be deep enough to accommodate landing craft. There is some evidence of seaweed but no serious obstacles. I’m getting our people to work up tide charts—“
Bissell interrupted. “It’s the airport that attracts me.”
“The strip, it goes without saying, is a godsend,” Leo said. His pointer traced the runway angling off to the left beyond Girón. “That’s a Piper parked next to the control tower. Working from that we were able to calculate the length of the runway. It’s long enough to handle B-26s, which means that the air strikes could plausibly look Cuban from D-day onward. Once we secure the beachhead and get fuel ashore, planes could actually fly from the runway.”
“Have we had a reaction from the Joint Chiefs?” someone asked.
“We ran it by them late yesterday,” Leo reported. “They said it looked okay to them.”
“They weren’t bursting with enthusiasm,” Ebby remarked.
“This isn’t a Joint Chiefs operation,” Bissell said, “so they’re keeping their distance—they’re not going to come straight out for or against anything. That way, if JMARC falls on its face they can say, ‘we told you so.’”
“I like the causeways,” one of Bissell’s military planners, a marine colonel sheepdipped to the Company for the Cuban project, commented. “If the brigade can seize and hold the points where they reach the beach area, Castro’s columns will be trapped on the causeways and sitting ducks for the B-26s.”
Ebby shook his head. “There’s a downside to your Bay of Pigs,” he told Leo. “We’ll be losing the guerrilla option if things turn sour.”
“How’s that?” someone asked.
Ebby walked over to the giant map of Cuba on the next wall. “Trinidad is at the foot of the Escambray Mountains. From your Bay of Pigs, the mountains are”—he stepped off the distance with his fingers and measured it against the scale—“roughly eighty miles away across impassable swamps. If the B-26s can’t break Castro’s grip on the causeways, the brigade won’t have the guerrilla option available. They’ll be trapped on the beaches.”
“There’s an upside to your downside,” Bissell said. “Havana will be nearer when the brigade breaks out of the beachhead.”
“There’s no fallback if the brigade air strikes don’t destroy Castro’s armor,” Ebby insisted.
Bissell bridled. “The brigade won’t need a fallback.”
“Things can go wrong…”
“Look,” Bissell said, “we’ll have a carrier off the coast. If the B-26s can’t hack it, we’ll fly strikes from the carrier. One way or another Castro’s forces will be cut to ribbons.”
“Kennedy specifically told Director Dulles he’d never authorize overt American intervention,” Leo noted in a flat voice.
“If push comes to shove,” said Bissell, “he’ll have to, won’t he?” He stood up. “I like it, Leo. Except for a handful of militiamen and some construction workers, it’s uninhabited, which will make it less noisy than Trinidad, which is what Kennedy wants. Let’s all head back to the drawing boards and work up an operation order predicated on early April landings at the Bay of Pigs. As for the business about going guerrilla, I see no reason to raise the matter again when we brief the President, one way or the other.”
Squatting in front of the office safe to hide the combination lock with his body, Dr. Sydney twirled the dials and pulled open the heavy door. He took a metal box from the safe and placed it on the desk. Producing a key from the pocket of his lab coat, he inserted it into the Yale lock on the lid and opened the box. Fitted into a bed of Styrofoam was a small half-filled bottle of what appeared to be ordinary Bayer aspirin. Dr. Sydney removed the bottle and set it on the desk. “Looks like garden-variety aspirin, doesn’t it, Mr. Harvey?” he said proudly. “In point of fact, all but three of the tablets are ordinary aspirin.”
“How will the perpetrator know which three are extra-ordinary?” Torriti asked.
“Child’s play,” said Dr. Sydney. He unscrewed the cap, spilled the pills onto the blotter and separated them with a spatula. “Go ahead. See if you can spot them,” he challenged.
The Sorcerer fitted on his reading glasses and poked through the pills with the tips of his fingers. After a while he shook his head. “Damn things all look alike to me.”
“That would be the reaction of a custom’s inspector or policeman,” Dr. Sydney agreed. He bent over the blotter. “If you study my precious pills attentively, Mr. Harvey, you will discover that on three of them the word Bayer is misspelled Bayar.” The head of the Technical Service Division set three pills apart from the others. Torriti picked one up and inspected it. Sure enough, the lettering across the pill spelled out Bayar.
“The pill you are holding, along with its two companions, contains a botulism toxin that I personally tested on three monkeys—all were clinically dead within minutes. I obtained the poison from the Army Chemical Corps stockpile at Fort Detrick in Maryland. I don’t mind telling you that I had the run of their biological warfare laboratory. They offered me the bacterium Francisella tularensis that causes tularemia, which you know as rabbit fever. They offered me brucellae, which causes undulant fever. Oh, I did have a choice, I promise you. I could have had tuberculosis or anthrax or smallpox, I could have had encephalitis lethargica, better known as sleeping sickness. But I preferred to stick with the tried-and-true botulism toxin, which cause paralysis of the respiratory muscles and suffocation. There are several things you should take note of. These particular aspirins should not be used in boiling liquids—I am thinking of soup or coffee or tea. They can be used in water, beer, wine—“
“How about milkshakes?”
“Yes, yes, milkshakes would be ideal. But I must caution you that the potency will not last forever.”
“How long have I got?”
“I would highly recommend that my little treasures be employed inside of three months. Anything longer and the pills risk becoming unstable—they might disintegrate in your fingers before you could use them, they might lose enough potency to produce only severe stomach cramps.”
“You did a terrific job,” the Sorcerer said. He carefully popped the pill with the word Bayar back into the bottle. “Anything else I need to know, doctor?”
“Let me see…Oh, dear, yes, Mr. Harvey, there is one more thing—you will want to wash your hands very thoroughly before going out to lunch.”
Rising with excruciating slowness, the large freight elevator worked its way up to the third floor of the warehouse on Chicago’s Printer’s Row, south of the Loop. Through the steel grating over his head, the Sorcerer could make out the giant spool reeling in the cable. The disfigured man operating the elevator worked the control knob and brought it, in a series of small jerks, flush with the floor. Two of Giancana’s boys, wearing gray coveralls with “Southside Gym” emblazoned on their chests, pulled open the double grilled doors as if they were parting a curtain and Torriti ambled off
the elevator into the most enormous room he’d ever been in. Except for several hundred cartons of alcohol marked “Duty Free Only” stacked against one wall, the space was empty. A football field away, or so it seemed to Torriti, he could see Mooney Giancana sitting behind the only piece of furniture in view, a very large table that once might have served for cutting fabric. Behind Giancana, gossamer threads of light pierced the grimy window-panes. Several men wearing sports jackets with shoulder padding—or was that their natural build?—lounged against iron stanchions, their eyes glued to the television set on one end of the table.
At the elevator, one of the men in coveralls held out a shoebox and nodded toward the Sorcerer’s chest and ankle. Torriti removed his hand guns and deposited them in the box. “You jokers going to give me a baggage check?” he asked, an irritable smirk squirming onto his face.
One of the Southside gymnasts took the question seriously. “You’re duh only one here—we ain’t gonna mix nothin’ up.”
From across the room Giancana called, “Come on duh fuck over. Kennedy’s gettin’ sworn in on duh TV.”
The Sorcerer moseyed across the room. Giancana, smoking a thick Havana as he watched the television screen through dark glasses, pointed to a chair without looking at it or his visitor. One of Giancana’s heavies splashed Champagne into a plastic cup and handed it to Torriti.
“You celebrating something, Mooney?” the Sorcerer inquired.
“Fuckin’ right—I’m celebratin’ Kennedy movin’ into duh fuckin’ White House.” Giancana laughed. The heavies laughed along with him.
On the television, Kennedy, bareheaded and dressed in formal tails, could be seen standing at the podium and delivering, in the clipped nasal voice that Torriti instantly recognized, his inaugural address. “Let the word go forth, from this time and place, to friend and foe alike…”
“Who would have thought Joe’s kid would become President?” one of the heavies said.