“One more thing,” Johnson said, turning to Lowell and Lunsford. “I don’t want to have to pin another medal on either of you. Or send one to your next of kin. Clear?”
“Yes, sir.”
He shook their hands, then marched out of the small office.
X
[ ONE ]
Room 1322
The Fountainbleau Hotel
Miami Beach, Florida
1605 9 January 1965
J. Richard Leonard of the Gresham Investment Corporation, a somewhat portly forty-five-year-old, came out of the shower with a towel around his middle.
He sat down on the double bed and reached for the telephone.
There was a knock at the door.
“Room service.”
Leonard went to the door, admitted a bellman carrying a champagne cooler holding four bottles of Bass Ale, signed the tab, and handed it to the bellman.
“That was quick, thank you,” he said.
He had ordered the ale before going into the shower, thinking it would take at least half an hour for it to be delivered.
“Anything else I can get for you, sir?” the bellman asked suggestively.
A lone forty-five-year-old businessman in a nice suite often wanted more in Miami Beach than sand and sun.
“No, thank you,” Leonard said. “I like to catch my females on the hoof.”
"Well, if you change your mind, ask for Richard,” the bellman said, and left.
Leonard found a bottle opener in the bathroom, opened a bottle of the ale, and went back to the bed and picked up the telephone again. He gave the operator a number in northern Virginia.
“Twenty,” a female voice answered.
“Dick Leonard, sweetheart, is the boss available?”
“I’ll see.”
Howard W. O’Connor came on the line a moment later.
“What’s up, Dick?”
“I spoke with Captain Portet this afternoon,” Leonard said. “Which was more difficult than I thought it would be. There’s a place down here called Ocean Reef—”
“I know it. When Nixon was Vice President, he used to go there with his buddy Bebe Rebozo. Very nice.”
“Also hard to get into,” Leonard said. “Anyway, Portet’s got a house there. I think he’s renting it to give his family a vacation.”
“Well, that blows your ‘he’s probably broke’ theory, doesn’t it?”
“Yeah, I guess it does. Anyway, after heavily bribing the security guard to let me in, I went to his house this morning, just as he was leaving. So I followed him. He went to the airport in Miami and was nosing around, asking about used airplanes. I struck up a conversation with him in a coffee shop, and made a preliminary pitch, told him Gresham was thinking of buying into a small airline, or starting one up, and that I’d gotten his name because of what he’s been doing in the Congo.”
“And he was interested?”
“A little,” Leonard said. “I didn’t get the enthusiasm I sort of expected. He told me to make him a proposition, and he’d think it over.”
“Well, make him one, and let me know what happens. We have to get this thing moving, Dick.”
“I’m going to hang around here a couple of days more, snoop around a little more. I don’t want to seem too eager.”
“Just don’t sit on the dime, Dick,” Howard W. O’Connor said, and hung up.
[ TWO ]
“Bonne Visage” (aka House A)
24 Golf Club Lane
The Ocean Reef Club
Key Largo, Florida
1820 10 January 1965
Captain Jean-Philippe Portet had just gone to the poolside wet bar and made himself a drink when the door chimes went off.
“There’s the door,” he called, in case Madam Portet hadn’t heard it.
“Get it,” Hanni called back from their bedroom. “I’m not dressed.”
“Give whoever it is a thrill.”
“Mein Gott!”
Captain Portet walked through the house to the front door and opened it.
Lieutenant Colonel Craig W. Lowell was standing there, in uniform. His enormous ancient Packard was in the drive.
God, he’s got more medals than Patton.
“Excuse me for just showing up like this, JP,” Lowell said, smiling. “I am about my master’s work, and there is no rest for the weary.”
“Oddly enough, I was just thinking about you,” Portet said. “We need to talk.”
“That’s my line,” Lowell said. “Look JP, I put this uniform on in Buenos Aires. I need a shower badly. What I’d like to do is buy you dinner, if that would be possible. But before that, could you come with me to my place while I change clothes? What I have to say won’t take long, but it’s the sort of thing I’d rather Hanni and the girl didn’t hear.”
Why the hell not? What I have to say won’t take long, either.
He pushed the TALK and MASTER SUITE buttons on the intercom panel mounted to the exterior wall by the door.