Killing Che Page 2

  There was one other person in the waiting room with him: Miguel Castañeda, an eager young man who paced and smoked. Castañeda was decked in the garish uniform of a tenente in the Bolivian National Police—riding boots, jodhpurs, and peaked cap—the field-gray ensemble more than vaguely Nazi-looking.

  “Not long now,” Castañeda said. He exhaled, and smoke crawled into the yellow light slanting down from the transom.

  Hoyle ignored him, as he had managed to do for most of the long, jangling ride from Potosí. His eyes went to the map.

  Hoyle traced out the route they had traveled, from La Paz, south to Oruro on roads gouged through the Cordillera Central, on to Potosí, then Tarija, and into the southernmost part of that province: a V-shaped appendage jutting into Argentina. On the map, this, too, was void, though Hoyle knew the place to be a rugged huddle of mountains bound to the west by the headwaters of the Bermejo River and to the east by the Tarya.

  It was there, at an intersection of trails above ten thousand feet, that Hoyle had found the bodies. Two men, or what was left of their corpses, the bodies three years in the elements and scavenged by condors. The skeletons were photographed in situ, and the bones were shoveled into a pair of military duffel bags to be trucked back to La Paz. Their papers and effects had identified them without question, but word had come by cable that forensic efforts should be undertaken to make certain. That errand brought Paul Hoyle and Lieutenant Castañeda into the small office off the Avenida Camacho and into the waiting room of Señor José Lempira de Murcia y Hernan, a onetime dental student whose livelihood was identifying skulls brought to him by the secret police.

  As Hoyle stared at the map, his expression was unreadable, a perfect cipher. But he was, at this moment, disappointed, angry, and tired. The combination of these feelings imparted in him a gnawing sort of melancholy.

  The trip from Tarija had been deadly long, made interminable by rain, Castañeda, and a broken drive shaft. The journey had also been astounding for the depth and wretchedness of poverty that it revealed. Bolivia had sometimes been called the Nepal of Latin America; the comparison was valid only as far as both countries were precipitous, isolated, and tragically beautiful. The nation through which Hoyle had traveled was the poorest in the Western Hemisphere, the most desperately backward place in the Americas, save Haiti. In the countryside, cholos, those of Indian descent, lived in almost Paleolithic squalor. There were places so far-flung and neglected that the camposinos had only the vaguest idea that there existed a thing called government, or that it was seated in a magic place called La Paz. Hoyle had seen poverty before, he was well traveled, but he had lately become used to the smiling, tropical kind of want. Privation under the palms. He was unprepared for the cold and damp, the long gazes of the Indian women, the appalling deformities of their children, or an existence where a bundle of reeds was considered tolerable shelter from driving snow.

  Inasmuch as any task could be completed on time in Bolivia, Hoyle had located the bodies with remarkable alacrity. But it had still taken eight weeks, a month longer than he had been paid, and there was the gnawing question of what would happen now. Hoyle worried about his standing with his employers, a thing that was extremely tenuous. He thought of his disappointment at his present assignment, the half promises that had been made to him and broken, the plans he had made and built up on artificial foundations. He was lucky, he knew, to have a job at all.

  Paul Hoyle had been a CIA paramilitary officer for eight years, serving in Latin America, Europe, and, most recently, in Southeast Asia. And it was in Laos ten months ago that Hoyle and the agency had parted company. There had been the death of an English journalist—some would not hesitate to use the word “murder”—but Hoyle saw the death as an operational necessity. His superiors did not fully share his views on the matter. Following a reprimand and suspension, Hoyle had resigned. The resignation he soon came to regret; it was a gesture he had made in a fit of pride, and in the months that followed, he had come to think less of this most costly of sentiments.

  There followed a lotus time back in the United States, where he was unemployed and his marriage unraveled. His divorce, which had finally concluded at Thanksgiving, was still a raw thing in his heart. He owed money on a house he did not live in and another that he rarely if ever saw. He owed no money to his ex-wife, but he had taken personal loans from a friend who was a mortgage broker. Hoyle had borrowed in order to pay the divorce settlement, an amount roughly three times his annual salary, a lump sum his ex-wife preferred to alimony and any sort of continuing association with him.

  This bit of extortion strangled a lifestyle that was already frugal, if not spartan. Although it nearly broke him, this arrangement, too, had been urged upon him by the CIA, chiefly because Hoyle’s ex-wife knew what he did for a living.

  The money, it was hoped, would shut her up.

  Friends in the agency followed his decline, and he was offered a job—the task of recovering the two bodies in Tarija. Hoyle worked now in a diminished capacity, that of contractor, the word having malignant, shabby connotations within the intelligence community. The nomenclature was used for assassins, poisoners, and prostitutes: dispensable people with objectionable skills. The term also applied to ad hoc employees like Hoyle, onetime intelligence officers, cashiered, retired, or marginalized. Fallen angels.

  The recovery operation was a make-work assignment, one granted to him out of pity, he knew, but without other prospects, he could do little but accept. Bolivia was not just a backwater. It was a dumping ground—a place of pencil pushers who had no careers, no prospects, and no friends in Washington. Hoyle knew this well, for he had served in La Paz as a junior officer and done his level best to get out. The land of Bolívar was thousands of miles from action, adventure, or any sort of real work. For the Company, Bolivia was a penalty tour, but Hoyle had no choice when the offer was put to him.

  To locate the bodies Hoyle had spent his entire advance, overstayed four weeks, and now could only hope that the agency would pay his invoice. This was no certainty. If Langley said no, there would be damn little he could do about it.

  There was a scraping at the door, and Señor Lempira shuffled into the waiting room. Bug-eyed, frumpy, he was dressed in a yellowing laboratory coat and carried two hatboxes. Each box contained a human skull.

  “Absolutamente,” Señor Lempira said. “Both are identified.” He placed the hatboxes on the table, and Castañeda opened one and lifted out a skull by the eye sockets.

  Bored with the skulls and bored with Castañeda, Hoyle stood. “You’re certain?”

  “Bridgework, fillings, and crowns. Also the roots.” Thrusting out his lip, Señor Lempira took the skull away from Castañeda and placed it back in its box. “You can change the dental work, but not the anatomy. These are the people you were looking for.”

  Lempira handed Hoyle a manila envelope filled with dental X-rays as Castañeda counted out three hundred-dollar bills. Lempira took the money, Castañeda the hatboxes.

  “This has ended well for us, Mr. Hoyle.” The lieutenant grinned.

  “It’s been a pleasure working with you, Tenente.” Hoyle’s lie was smoothly delivered. It was a talent that came easily to him.

  THAT EVENING IN the safe house at the Plaza España, Hoyle gathered the dossiers and maps, opened a bottle of bourbon, and prepared to draft his message to Langley. The story of the skulls, of Jorge Ricardo Masetti and Héctor Atilio, was one of romance, fanaticism, and catastrophe.

  Masetti had been a journalist, an Argentine, and the first to interview Che Guevara and Fidel Castro during the Cuban revolution. Eventually befriending Guevara, Masetti was converted to the cause and underwent extensive military training in Cuba. He assembled a force of Argentine leftists, and together with Cuban intelligence officers and members of Guevara’s personal bodyguard, his group was infiltrated into Bolivia.

  The guerrillas purchased a remote farm in the departamento of Tarija, across the Bermejo River from Argentina. T
heir goal was the establishment of a guerrilla foco, a revolutionary nucleus, in Argentina. Their plans were grandiose, their methods amateur, and their fate inevitable.

  Masetti led his twenty-man force across the border into Argentina and established a series of camps in the mountains of Salta Province. Calling himself Comandante Segundo, Masetti vaingloriously announced their presence in a press communiqué, calling his band the People’s Guerrilla Army. A steady stream of visitors and resupply trips to their base soon garnered the attention of the Argentinean gendarmería. In a matter of weeks their major supply camp was taken and six guerrillas captured. One by one, his men died of starvation, fell from cliffs, perished in firefights, or were captured. Only Comandante Segundo and Héctor Atilio were to escape the pursuing Argentine forces.

  Hoyle’s job had been to ascertain if the survivors had returned to Bolivia or had perished. Arriving in Tarija, he studied the terrain on both sides of the frontier, imagining the route Masetti would choose. Pursued by a superior force, Hoyle knew Masetti would be compelled to move along ridgelines, avoiding places of ambush, water supplies, villages, and roads, and to travel mostly at night. Masetti’s only hope was to get his diminished command back across the frontier into Bolivia. Following a final clash below the headwaters of the Bermejo, Masetti left his casualties to fend for themselves, turned east, and made a final lunge for the border. Masetti and Atilio crossed into Bolivia but went no farther. Hoyle found their bodies on a south-facing slope, little more than rags and bones, tangled together under a cliff face jutting back toward Argentina. Their career as guerrillas had lasted barely thirty-six weeks.

  Hoyle placed the dossiers of Atilio and Masetti in the kitchen sink and put a match to them. He watched as the flames crept across the faces, stirred the ashes, and then sat down to write: Forensic identification positive of Masetti, Jorge, and Atilio, Héctor.

  Hoyle crossed out the names and above them wrote their CIA cryptoglyphs: SL/MALICE and SL/UPSTART. SL demarked their national affiliation, Argentine; this was followed by their operational handles, code names used in routine traffic. Hoyle continued to write, the pencil scratching over paper:

  Bodies recovered inside Bolivian territory at grid reference XS 23812254. Condition of remains suggests time of death March–May 1963. SL/MALICE succumbed unk causes. SL/UPSTART of self-inflicted gunshot to head. Confirmed with Argentine and Bolivian liaison services that remaining members PGA captured/killed within Argentina. Recovery accounts for last two members of Cuban-sponsored revolutionary group inserted Argentina. Regret efforts took longer than expected.

  He reread the message, encoded it by hand, replacing each word with a five-digit number from his codebook, then sent the message on the high-frequency radio concealed in the false bottom of his suitcase. After the message was acknowledged, Hoyle recoiled the antenna and listened for an hour to the Voice of America on the shortwave.

  There were several stories of interest. Four hundred members of the faculty of Yale University had signed a petition calling for the end of the bombing of North Vietnam, and Cassius Clay had appealed to the Louisville draft board to request a deferment from military service. There was a piece on the Red Guards in China, and a last news item from Latin America. The announcer blithely noted that twenty-four hours ago, guerrillas had attacked a Bolivian army unit on the Camiri Highway in Santa Cruz. Details were evolving, but a number of soldiers and one officer had been reported killed in the ambush. Further details were promised by the Bolivian minister of information as they became available.

  Hoyle was dumbstruck. His report had been sent and could not be pulled back from the ether. Could Señor Lempira have been mistaken? Had Masetti and Atilio survived, moved north into Bolivia, and struck the convoy?

  The ambush had taken place two hundred miles north of where he’d found the bodies. Had some members of the PGA survived? At thirty minutes past the hour, a song was played between news items, “Indescribably Blue” by Elvis Presley. This song was in Hoyle’s communication plan, a signal indicating an immediate, nonscheduled message from Langley. Sent over VOA, this sort of signal was second in priority only to an emergency indicator, and that precedence was used only for an immediate threat to life. Imagining the worst, Hoyle tuned the shortwave to 12.3 MHz, where, precisely at 55 minutes 30 seconds past the hour, a female voice read a stream of five-digit numbers. Adding his contractor number, 1130, Hoyle transposed the sums against the master code key, each five-digit number representing a word or phrase rather than a list of characters.

  As the message assembled itself, Hoyle sank into a funk. It summoned him to a meeting tomorrow, noon, at a café on the Calle Santa Cruz in La Paz. Thoughts of being paid evaporated, and Hoyle began to wonder how he would come by a ticket home. He drank what was left of the bourbon, decided, rightly, that he needed no supper, and at seventeen minutes past midnight he switched off the light and slept like the damned.

  3

  ABOVE THE PLAZA San Francisco, the sky was sapphire at its zenith, an ethereal blue, too pure to be comprehended. In the shadow of high Catholic architecture, Hoyle sipped his coffee and looked into the street. The sidewalks were crowded, and beyond them traffic passed in a steady growl on the Calle Santa Cruz: trucks, cars, and minipolos in an argument of grinding gears and piercing horns. Trundling between men and women in Western dress were cholas in voluminous pollera skirts, their long black braids tucked into bowler hats. A woman in a miniskirt passed carrying a green parasol, her heels clicking on the cobbles. With disconsolate lust, Hoyle watched until she passed from sight.

  A man approached the table and spoke in French. “Excusez-moi, ma montre s’est arrêtée. Avez-vous le temps?”

  The man’s hair was brown tending to sandy, and he wore round wire-rimmed spectacles and a tweed jacket.

  “I’m sorry, my watch is in the shop.” Hoyle answered in English, completing the bona fides communicated from Langley—embarrassing formalities straight out of a dime novel.

  Hoyle took in his contact, greatly surprised at how young he looked. Hoyle waited a moment to ask, “Aimez-vous parler ici?”

  “No. We have a car.” The man gestured across the street. Behind the wheel of a 1965 Impala sat a man with the dark good looks of a Guaraní Indian.

  “Let’s go.”

  Perplexity giving way to irritation, Hoyle tossed a few coins on the table and followed the man down the sidewalk.

  “I didn’t catch your name.”

  “Smith,” the man said as they crossed the cobbles. “First name’s Neil. The Directorate of Operations sent me. I’m going to be taking over the in-country effort.”

  As they reached the car, the driver popped from behind the wheel and opened the passenger-side door.

  “Charlie, boss. I’m the driver,” the dark-complected man said. His name was Ovejuyo, a handle unpronounceable by gringos, and for as long as he had worked with the American embassy, everyone had called him Charlie. Dressed in a white shirt, gray jacket, and fedora hat, Charlie looked like a typical Boliviano, a man so inconspicuously dressed as to be invisible.

  Smith piled into the passenger seat, and Hoyle fell into the back behind Charlie. Charlie honked and entered traffic, and Smith turned in his seat. “What was your assignment?”

  Hoyle’s eyes flicked to Charlie.

  “He’s in,” Smith said.

  “I was sent down-country to locate Masetti and Atilio.”

  “Did Langley indicate there would be any follow-on work?”

  “No.” Hoyle continued: “Did you read my traffic?”

  “I’ve read everything.”

  “Who hit the convoy in Santa Cruz?” Hoyle asked.

  “The latest country brief and intel summaries will be in tomorrow’s diplomatic pouch. You can read them yourself,” Smith said. After a moment he asked, “How’s your Spanish?”

  “Bastante bueno.”

  “What were they paying you, Mr. Hoyle?” Again the young man’s tone was disaffected, patronizing.


  “A thousand dollars a week,” Hoyle answered.

  “I have more work. Six months, maybe a year. In-country. I’ll have you continue at the same rate. If you’re interested.”

  “You’re aware I’m a contractor.”

  “Yeah. The Company’s going to want some distance on some of this.”

  “Distance” meant deniability. Hoyle assumed Smith had been told about his resignation. Finally, he asked, “What’s the job?”

  “Paramilitary. Fieldwork.”

  Hoyle noticed that the collar of Smith’s shirt was a size too big. It gave him an even more juvenile appearance. Hoyle thought of all the money he had left, seventy-five dollars U.S., and the words burned in his throat. “I’m interested.”

  The Impala passed through the cemetery district, down Avenida República, and sharply left onto the Boulevard Jose Maria Asin. There they came upon the first military checkpoint. A dozen Bolivian soldiers sat atop a Sherman tank, blandly watching traffic pass.

  The Impala merged into the morning rush; the traffic ran together, slowed, and stopped like too many animals jammed into a pen. As the car turned, something slammed against the windshield. Hoyle suppressed a flinch, thinking as he did so that whatever had struck the glass had not made the noise of a hand grenade. Appearing suddenly on the windshield was a wet rag stuck above the wiper blades. Outside the car, a young beggar started to wipe the glass. The child was dirty, skinny, and maybe ten or twelve years old.