He told Parmenter he would stay in close touch with Guy Banister. Banister's detective agency was the Grand Central Station of the Cuban adventure. Every type renegade passed through. Guy would help them locate a substitute for this kid who'd disappeared. Someone rated expert with a rifle and scope. A shooter who could blast a finger off a dangling man.

When Parmenter was gone, T-Jay sat in the bleachers watching the Vietnamese bounce each other around. The hot new station was Saigon. It was the talk around the base. They were putting Cuba in a box, which was okay with him. Let them forget. Let them find a new excitement. It would make the moment in Miami all the more powerful.

Some hours later Mackey was in his trailer in the woods outside Williamsburg. Light beams floated through the trees and then he heard the ghetto clank of Raymo's '57 Bel Air. He opened the trailer door and watched them get out, two men showing the stiff weighted movements of long-distance drivers.

Mackey said, "Just in time for dinner except there isn't any."

The words sounded abrupt and clean in the empty night.

"Maybe just a swallow. Un buchito," Raymo said. "We ate on the road."

The other man, Frank Vasquez, was occupied getting blankets and clothes out of the re'ar seat and then he backed out and stood erect and half turned, his hands occupied, and gave the door a rough shove with his hip and followed with a sweet kick, knocking it shut. Raymo, approaching the trailer, gave a little head-shake at the other man's treatment of the once-gorgeous car.

"Plenty of coffee," Mackey said. "Good to see you. How are things?"

"Good to see you. Long time. How are things?"

"Hello, T-Jay."

"Hello, Frank. I thought you were getting your teeth fixed."

"He never does it," Raymo said.

They embraced, pounding each other on the back, abrazos, absent-minded collisions.

"How are things?"

"Long time."

"Too long, my friend."

Standing by the trailer door exchanging nods, looks, half-sentences, everything so clearly shaped, their words sounding well made in the fine light air.

Mackey made room for their things in the trailer. Then they sat drinking coffee. Raymo was at the fold-out table, a thickset man with a wide mustache. He wore a black cowboy hat, black T-shirt, fatigue pants, combat boots. His lounging outfit. Mackey definitely wanted Raymo in on this. Raymo could not light a match, walk his dog, scratch his head without infusing the act with the single-minded energy of his rage. It was a consciousness they shared un-spokenly, Bahia de Cochinos, the Bay of Pigs, the Battle of Giron- whatever you wanted to call it. Even his stockiness, all that dense flesh, seemed a form of energy and purpose. A flamingo was etched on his T-shirt. He was the one man T-Jay trusted completely.

"We spent part of April with the harvest."

"Picking oranges in central Florida," Frank said.

"We fill ten-box tubs. How many pounds you think that is?"

"He fell off the ladder," Frank said.

"I'm telling you, man, it's hard labor."

"Then what, we go to Live Oak- near the Georgia border."

"We stack these huge bales of tobacco," Raymo said. "Like in huge sheets they're called. They work our ass, T-Jay."

Mackey knew they were working every job they could, night work, spare time, odd job, to save enough money to start a business, maybe a service station or small construction firm.

"Then my wife calls us from Miami," Frank said. "We drive up here right away."

Drive through Georgia and the Carolinas to hear what news T-Jay has for them. It could only be a Cuban operation. Nothing else would make him get in touch with them and nothing else would bring them here.

Vasquez sat on the bunk bed. He had a thin sad face and would have seemed at ease in a cobbler's smock in some dark narrow shop on a fringe street of Little Havana. There were two rows of teeth in his lower jaw, or maybe one row haphazardly aligned, with zigzag patterns, teeth set at angles to each other. It made him look like a saint of the poor. A brother and a cousin lost at Red Beach, another brother allowed to die in a hunger strike at La Cabana prison. Frank had been a schoolteacher in Cuba. Now, between jobs, he and Raymo drove to a training camp in the Everglades with the one weapon they owned between them, a so-called Cuban Winchester, put together from elements of three other rifles with handmade parts added on. They drilled with one of the groups out there, living in open huts made of eucalyptus logs and assorted vines. Raymo fired the rifle, swung from ropes, pissed in the tall grass. Frank did some target work but otherwise just hung around, the longtime silent buddy, dressed the way he always dressed, in oversized trousers and a sleeveless sepia shirt worn outside his pants.

Both men had been with Castro, originally, in the mountains.

"The wife and children, Frank? They're well?"

"Doing okay."

"Three kids, right? What about Raymo? The right woman doesn't show up?"

These were the only men Mackey could talk to like this, in extended ceremonial hellos, little arcs of family news and other details of being. It was the necessary foreground. He knew it was expected and he'd come to look forward to it. They had to say something to each other. There was only one subject among them and it did not adapt to easy chat.

All right. Mackey gave them some background on the operation. Extremely dedicated men were behind it. The idea was to galvanize the nation into full awareness of the danger of a communist Cuba. Direction General de Inteligencia would be exposed as a criminal organization willing to take extreme action against important figures who opposed Castro.

He told them a shooting was in the works, designed to implicate the DGI. He wanted Frank and Ray mo to be part of it and he supplied some operational details. High-powered rifles, elevated perches, a trail of planted evidence, someone to take the fall. There would be five hundred dollars a month for each of them, commencing now, and a nice payday when the job was done. The men behind the plan, he said, were respected Agency veterans, deep believers in a free Havana.

He did not mention Everett and Parmenter by name. He did not tell them who their target was or where the shooting would take place. He would let details drop, here and there, in time, as need dictated. The other thing he did not say was that they were supposed to miss.

The Parmenters lived in a stunted frame house at the edge of a brick sidewalk in Georgetown. The sidewalk bulged and rippled and the once-quaint house was slightly shabby now, a mousy relic no one noticed.

It was Beryl who'd wanted to live here. The corporate suburbs were not for them, she said. Guarded shoptalk over drinks and dinner with colleagues and their anxious wives. She wanted to live in town. Fanlights, wrought iron, leaded glass. The security of a small and darkish place with old familiar things lying about, with books, rugs, dust, a wine cellar for Larry, a tininess, an unnoticeability (if such a word exists). There was something about a long and low and open-space house with a lawn and a carport that made her feel spiritually afraid.,

Larry paced the small rooms now, drink in hand, wearing an enormous striped robe. Beryl was at her writing desk clipping news items to send to friends. This was a passion she'd discovered recently like someone in middle life who finds she was born to show pedigreed dogs. Nothing that happened before has any meaning compared to this. A week's worth of newspapers sat on the desk. She sent clippings to everyone. There was suddenly so much to clip.

"Look at this, now. Am I angry or amused?"

She turned around to find her husband.

"Look at this, Larry. A folk singer named Bob Dylan is told by CBS he can't sing one of his songs on The Ed Sullivan Show. Too controversial."