J. Winslow Masterson, a very tall, well-dressed, very black African American of forty-two, who was almost belligerently American and loathed most things French, stood leaning on the frame of his office window looking at the demonstration outside.
Masterson’s office was on the second floor of the embassy building, just down the hall from that of the ambassador. Masterson was deputy chief of mission— read number two, or executive officer, or deputy ambassador—and at the moment was the acting minister extraordinary and plenipotentiary of the President of the United States to the Republic of Argentina.
The ambassador, Juan Manuel Silvio, was “across the river”—in Montevideo, Uruguay—having taken a more or less working lunch with Michael A. McGrory, the minister extraordinary and plenipotentiary of the President of the United States to the Republic of Uruguay. The two ambassadors or their chiefs of mission got together regularly, every two weeks, either in Buenos Aires or Montevideo.
Silvio had taken the red-eye, the first flight from Jorge Newbery airport in downtown Buenos Aires, which departed on the twenty-six-minute flight to Montevideo at 7:05 A.M., and he would return on the 3:10 P.M. Busquebus. The high-speed catamaran ferry made the trip in just over three hours. The ambassador said that much time allowed him to deal uninterrupted in the comfortable first-class cabin with at least some of the bureaucratic papers that accumulated on his desk.
There were, Masterson guessed, maybe three hundred demonstrators today, banging pots and pans, held back by fences and maybe fifty cops of the Mounted Police, half of them actually on horseback.
The demonstrators waved—at least when they thought the TV cameras were rolling—banners protesting the International Money Fund, the United States’ role therein, American fiscal policy, and America generally. There were at least a half dozen banners displaying the likeness of Ernesto “Che” Guevara.
The Argentine adulation of Guevara both surprised and annoyed Masterson. He admitted a grudging admiration for Fidel Castro, who had taken a handful of men into the mountains of Cuba for training, then overthrown the Cuban government, and had been giving the finger to the world’s most powerful nation ever since.
But Guevara was another story. Guevara, an Argentine who was a doctor, had been Castro’s medic. But as far as Masterson knew that was all he had ever done to successfully further the cause of communism. As a revolutionary, he had been a spectacular failure. His attempt to communize Africa had been a disaster. All it had taken to see him flee the African continent with his tail between his legs was a hundred-odd-man covert detachmentof African American Special Forces soldiers. And when he’d moved to Bolivia, an even smaller covert group of Green Berets, this one mostly made up of Cuban-Americans, had been waiting for him, not so much to frustrate his revolutionary ambitions as to make him a laughingstock all over Latin America.
The Green Berets had almost succeeded. For example, they had almost gleefully reported that Guevara had taken a detachment of his grandly named Revolutionary Army on an overnight training exercise, promptly gotten lost in the boonies, drowned four of his men trying to cross a river, and taken two weeks to get back to his base, barely surviving on a diet of monkeys and other small but edible jungle animals. And when he got back to his base, Guevara found that it was under surveillance by the Bolivian Army. A farmer had reported the Revolutionary Army to the Bolivian government, in the belief they were drug smugglers.
The President of Bolivia, however, was not amused, nor receptive to the idea that the best way to deal with Dr. Guevara was to publicly humiliate him. He ordered a quick summary court-martial—the bearing of arms with the intent of overthrowing a government by force and violence being punishable by death under international law—followed by a quick execution, and Guevara became a legend instead of a joke.
“Lost in thought, Jack?” a familiar voice, that of Alexander B. Darby, asked behind him. Darby’s official title was embassy commercial attaché, but among the senior officersit wasn’t exactly a closely guarded secret that he actually was the CIA’s station chief.
Masterson turned and smiled at the small, plump man with a pencil-line mustache.
“My usual unkind thoughts about Che Guevara.”
“They’re still out there?”
Masterson nodded.
“It looked like rain. I hoped it would, and they would go away.”
“No such luck.”
“You about ready?”
“At your disposal, sir,” Masterson said, and started for the door.
Masterson was bumming a ride home with Darby, who lived near him in the suburb