Covert intelligence agents and security men in the various embassies along the tree-lined street knew instinctively that it was a bomb blast that had intruded on the chilly morning calm. It was hardly an automobile's backfire. Windows nearby were shattered. Bric-a-brac fell from shelves and tables in elegant houses innocently flung in the blast's periphery. A pervasive, unfamiliar odor flumed invisibly upward through the usual pall of pollutants hanging in the heavy Washington air. Someone who not only surmised what had occurred but actually saw the twisted wreckage of the gray Pinto, apparently floating in a cloud of smoky after-blast, called the police. Spectators hovering behind heavy draperies contemplated with fascination the block-long wreckage. A hubcap had been blown, like a discus, into a tree trunk. A tire lay on the doorstep before the heavy wrought-iron door at the entrance of the Greek Embassy. A trail of upholstery stuffing, white, like heavy snow, lay on the asphalt.
Experienced eyes, familiar with the impersonal ruthlessness of explosives, picked knowingly among the debris of the violence seeking limbs. A foot, the shoe still carefully laced and reflecting on its shine the glint of the shrouded February sun, lay on a patch of grass, fifty feet from the car's mangled remains. A ringed hand rested eerily on a piece of deformed chrome ornament. Blood stains materialized adjacent to the wreckage, adding a grisly highlight to what might have been a surrealistic performance of an avant-garde art show.
Officer Bryant of the Executive Protective Force, a tall man with a craggy face, felt the backwash of bile in his throat as he tamped down an involuntary retch. It was the worst, most horrifying scene he had ever witnessed. The first detail he was conscious of was that of a man's mangled torso in the front seat jammed against the remains of the dashboard, though it was the sight of the head that had made him want to vomit. It was cleanly severed at the neck and lying like an errant basketball on what might have once been the back seat. The eyes were open, the silvery-gray surrounding the black pupils oddly clear and glistening. A thin mustache, neatly edged, lay perfectly centered above a fatty upper lip. The mouth was set in a broad sardonic smile, showing even white teeth.
"I'll be a sonofabitch," Officer Bryant heard himself say after he had assured himself that he had conquered his urge to vomit. He stared at the face in the severed head, fascinated, compelled to absorb the horror of it. He had no idea what to do.
Sirens screeched as both marked and unmarked official cars swarmed into the area. Wooden horses suddenly emerged, restricting access to the crime scene. Police officers began to reroute traffic. A white ambulance from the Georgetown University Hospital was quickly passed through the cordon. Two pale, white-coated doctors stepped out, surveyed the scene, hesitated, went back into the ambulance and reappeared wearing surgical gloves.
A group of uniformed police officers with golden braided caps talked quietly with men in civilian suits as they clustered around the main area of the wreckage. One of the suit clad men waved the doctors forward. Two uniformed attendants followed them carrying a stretcher and a package of transparent bags.
"Looks like a single corpse, male, Caucasian," one of the men in civilian clothes said. He was from the FBI, a take-charge type from his bearing, obviously the senior of the group. "Be careful," he whispered to the doctors. "There may be prints."
"They should leave their shit at home," another man said. His complexion was sallow, his hair completely white. He was Alfred Dobbs, CIA. Flashbulbs popped as two FBI photographers recorded every detail. An acetylene torch appeared suddenly in the hands of a policeman. He wore safety glasses. The flame of the torch bit into the mangled metal and cut a long rectangular gash in the wreckage, large enough to remove the remains.
When he had finished, the doctors knelt, poking their arms into the opening, and gently removed the torso. Part of it seemed to disintegrate in their hands as they deftly edged it into a large plastic bag. Securing it with a length of tape, they placed it on the waiting stretcher. Sliding half his body through the opening, one of the other doctors saw the head.
"Oh, my God," Dobbs whispered, lifting it by the hair. He put it in another plastic bag and handed it to the other doctor, who placed it on the stretcher with the pieces of the torso. One of the attendants was searching the area for other signs of human remains, a plastic bag in his hand, like a garbage picker gathering rubbish after a county fair. He picked up the severed hand, found the foot, as well as pieces of indistinguishable flesh, and put them quickly in the bag. He was a young man, a former medic in Vietnam. He was used to this, he told himself. He had seen worse. He sensed that people were watching him from behind the tall windows of the big houses and he liked the attention.
The doctors, too, continued to find bits and pieces of flesh and bone in what was once the interior of the car. They moved methodically. They knew that the FBI would want the pathologists to get everything that could be found and they wanted their efficiency to be commended.
A beeping sound grated their ears, and the FBI take-charge man drew a compact walkie talkie from his pocket and quickly extended the antenna.
"Grady here," the FBI man said.
"What is it, Jack?" He recognized the voice of the Director.
"Male, Caucasian, sir. Looks foreign. Probably Latino or Italian. About thirty feet from the Chilean Embassy on Massachusetts Avenue. Looks like a homemade bomb, blast ripped through the interior of a 1974 Ford Pinto. The medics are picking up the pieces."
"A real mess, eh?"
"Better believe it."
"No identity?"
"The prints will be over shortly."
One of the doctors handed him what seemed to be the remains of a District of Columbia license. He held it up at a distance to assure the focus of his farsighted eyes.
"I've got a license make," Grady said into the walkie talkie. He gave the Director the number, heard the sound garble as the director repeated it to another person. Static crackled as Grady waited. He knew the information banks were being sent into action, the electronic probes activated. Waiting, he watched with some annoyance as the CIA man approached, the competitive animosity surfacing as he recognized the gray-haired man. It was Dobbs. Pretty high up, he thought with contempt, knowing how swiftly they would move in when they smelled foreign involvement.
"Eduardo Allesandro Palmero." The Director's voice intruded over the static. His pronunciation was amusingly inaccurate. "The car was registered in his name."
"I've got a spook here, sir," Grady said. His contempt was undisguised.
The Director sighed. "Who?" he asked.
"Dobbs, he wants to know." There was a brief pause. Grady knew what was in the Director's mind. Hoover would have told him to get lost.
"Tell him," the Director said.
"Eduardo Allesandro Palmero," he said, proud of his pronunciation.
Dobbs heard the name. It was the confirmation he had dreaded. His stomach lurched. How could he have not foreseen what had happened?
"Is the name familiar?" Grady asked, his contempt now hidden, professionally alert. The answer from Dobbs was spare, crisp.
"A Chilean. He was in the Allende government. We gave him asylum." There was more to tell, but this was all they would get. Grady sensed the ambiguity. They would dole out only what was officially necessary. He conveyed the information.
"Shit," the Director said. The foreign aspect meant CIA interference, bureaucratic competition, and aggravation. "Keep me up on it."
"Yes, sir," Grady responded, hearing the sign-off click. He put the walkie talkie back in his pocket.
"That's it," one of the doctors said, tapping Grady on the shoulder. Grady motioned to two of his men who jumped in behind the attendants. The ambulance backed out of the street and moved swiftly down Massachusetts Avenue, sirens turned on, the message of urgency, frightening to the many ears that could hear the shrill agony of its sound.
The street was crowded with police, FBI and other officials and experts. Many were searching meticulously through the wreckage, retrieving any object that might be potentially useful. They combed the length of the street, peering, hawk-like. Some worked on their hands and knees placing material in plastic bags with tweezers. Photographers continued to snap pictures. Technicians tenaciously brushed all available surfaces for prints. Samples were taken of everything-blood, dust, the upholstery stuffing.
Men with small pads, ballpoint pens scribbling, meandered up and down the street. Some went in to interview people in the big homes and embassies nearby. They talked to servants, staff, ambassadors, their wives, children. Reporters, forced to remain behind the wooden horses, yelled questions to the men working in the street. Flashbulbs popped. Television and motion picture cameras whirred.
Everyone worked swiftly. Grady was satisfied with the cooperation of the D.C. Police, the Executive Protective Agency, his own men and the specialists with their sophisticated equipment who gathered every scrap of evidence that might tell them who had torn Eduardo Allesandro Palmero to shreds on this chilly morning in February. Amid the bedlam, he occasionally cast an annoyed glance at Dobbs. "Damned spooks," he muttered, knowing that they would, as always, withhold pieces of the puzzle.
Dobbs, Grady sensed, was already deep in speculation. Dobbs was the Langley wizard on terrorist groups, the resident expert on the sub-underworld of competing gangs who waged continuing war between factions and ideologies. This battleground respected neither national boundaries nor human life. It was an ugly, brutal, maddening war of unparalleled intensity, with many casualties, far from the prying eyes of the media. There were rarely any wounded. Combatants were wasted. Only the innocent were occasionally maimed when, by some odd misfiring, they were not killed. This was Dobbs' arena, and hundreds of analysts, technicians, agents in every country of the world under his supervision were covering people of every persuasion, all on the payroll-hired guns, mercenaries supplying bits and pieces of intelligence-so that Dobbs could examine this war and synthesize it for the President and his advisors. He was the information filter and he knew his own power, the power of rhetoric.
Sometimes, with luck, he could track a hit in advance. The Palmero thing, he knew, was an aberration. Who could believe it? His mind was already manufacturing rationalizations, the cover up. On the surface, it could appear to be a logical Junta hit. Was anything awry, out of focus? What was the Junta getting out of it? he asked himself. Every hit had a purpose. Nothing was without design. Perhaps, though, at the moment, it might have been useful to let the obvious prevail.
Watching the scene now winding down as the men efficiently disposed of their assignments, Dobbs grew restless to be back at his desk in Langley to read the Palmero files, to reach into the information banks, to comb through the forest of information gleaned from the monitoring of the Chilean counterinsurgents, an arm of DINA, their vaunted intelligence apparatus. For South Americans they were a marvel of organization, a long and ruthless arm that could pick out and set up anti-Junta agents with superb dispatch. They had destroyed their enemies in Europe, Africa, the Middle East with great skill. A quick hit. Then fadeout. He wished their own "Capos" were half as efficient. Capos, he called them, borrowed from the Mafiosi. They would now see him only as a bungler.
Grady moved closer. The man was in his fifties, but still retained that clean FBI Irish look. You could spot it coming at you almost before you saw the face, as if they threw out some special scent.
"Well," Grady said, "how do you read it?"
"Could be a Junta hit," Dobbs said. He wanted to seem sincere. Grady nodded, as if he understood. "It seems political." Was he suspicious? Dobbs wondered. Bits of information collected themselves in his mind.
Palmero had been a strategist in the Allende inner circle. He had been Allende's Minister of Interior, but that was merely to give him a handle. In actuality, he was the propaganda man, the ideological brain, and the Junta had imprisoned him. The CIA had gotten him out, ostensibly as part of a barter for United States aid. In fact, he was set up to be one of their pigeons, a lure, carefully marked bait.
"It has all the earmarks," Dobbs said, feeling the need to reinforce Grady's naive suppositions.
"Do you think it will be the beginning?"
Dobbs understood. The United States was off limits. Even the most ardent fanatics shied away from performing their bloody business on American soil. Setups were difficult. Officials were less corruptible. Surveillance was sophisticated.
"I hope not," Dobbs replied. In this case, it was still neutral, he knew.
"What kind of bomb was it?" Dobbs asked. He knew the answer to that as well.
"Plastic stuff. We found the timer. It looks like it was placed in the back seat, set to go when he hit this area. Where was he heading, you think?" Grady was fishing now.
"Who knows?" Dobbs shrugged, on his guard. The symbolism was clever, the blast so close to the embassy. A lucky stroke? Or well planned? Either way, it was a useful device.
"You think we'll get them?" Grady asked.
"Nobody ever does."
"We'll get them," Grady said with an air of conviction.
"Good luck."
Their naiveté was incredible, Dobbs thought. The FBI was clueless, he told himself. Too macho. Too worried about their own image. Too simplistic. This business happened in the shadows. It was his war. The FBI was out of its league and he was grateful for that.
The crowd in the street began to thin out. The wooden horses were removed and a crane and truck appeared. The crane quickly lifted the wreckage of the Pinto into the truck while the remaining litter was removed and bagged. Then it, too, was put into the truck, covered and driven out of the area. Reporters pressed around Grady as he moved toward his own car, but he said nothing and drove away.
Dobbs moved slowly out of range of their probing voices. He liked to think of himself as invisible, an observer, when he was in the field-a rare occurrence. Cloaked in the mist of anonymity, he surveyed the scene.
The large embassies on either side of the street had borne witness impassively. Dobbs could see eyes still watching in the shadows beyond the large windows. The street emptied. The last traces of the twisted Pinto had disappeared. Even the bloodstains on the asphalt had been cleaned, and the janitors of the various large homes and embassies had already swept the shattered glass. Glaziers were on their way to replace the shattered windows.
Soon cars were moving normally and people had ventured back into the street, observing the spot where it had happened, then moving on to accustomed chores. The men of the Executive Police wearing their blue-trimmed uniforms resumed their posts. A debrief of the morning events would chase boredom for a few hours, then it was back to the stultifying emptiness of their official duties.
Dobbs walked to his car. So far, he had observed nothing amiss. But it was still too early to be sure. What was there in Eduardo… he began to think of him as an acquaintance… to inspire such… he hesitated… grandeur? He needed to refresh his mind, consult the files and review the bigger picture. It was not the conclusion he was concerned about. That had already been determined. What had this man done? Why had it eluded him until it was too late?
