Carlos Fuentes - Hydra Head

“You haven’t answered my question about what happened in the Palace.”

“Just this. The Director General decided to speed things up. He’s an old fox; his intelligence is equaled only by his boldness, and one feeds the other. He’s the most dangerous of them all. He realized there was a serious possibility of a more or less disguised surrender of Mexican oil to the United States and Israel. This would be fatal to the Arabs. The Director General decided to risk everything on one throw of the dice. Once he learned about you, you became the ideal candidate for his plan. He suspected that you were working for an unidentified intelligence agency. Furthermore, you were a converted Jew. He decided to kill two birds with one stone. Or rather, three. Because what he was planning was the assassination of the President.”

I placed my hand in my pocket and caressed the hidden.44, cold and black, as innocent as a bird in its nest.

In his agitation, Felix ignored the movement. “What was his plan?”

“He stationed his people in the Salón del Perdón. As the President approached you, a marksman was to shoot him. In the general confusion, Rossetti would place the pistol in your hand. Like this.”

I whipped out the.44 and placed it in Felix’s surprised hand; he took it automatically.

“A simple reaction. You would have accepted the gun the way you did just now. You might have dropped it immediately, but in any case you’d have been incriminated.”

Felix offered me the gun. I waved it away. “Keep it. You may want to use it later.”

Again, I saw flare in my friend’s eyes the fear of being blindly manipulated. I countered that threat by frowning, as if planning what I was going to say — though I knew that perfectly well. “The plan was daring,” I added hastily, “but had it succeeded, the whole country would have been saying what the Director General wanted them to say: Israel had ordered the assassination of the President of Mexico. He calculated that the inevitable reaction would be Mexico’s alignment with the Arab world. In any case, the political crisis would insure that the government would be crippled, and in those muddied waters the Director General counted on being a better fisherman than his rival Bernstein.”

“But the plan failed; it failed for the simple reason that I fainted. Why?”

“Because I made sure you would faint.”

“You?”

I glanced at the pistol in Felix’s hand. This wasn’t yet the moment I feared. He wouldn’t use it, because his astonishment was still greater than his anger.

“Felix, the pharmaceutical house I inherited from my father is thriving. The manager of the Hilton told me the exact hour you’d ordered breakfast for. I was in the hotel.”

“You?” He laughed, not scornfully, because amazement still ruled his other emotions. “You who never leave your house…?”

“I’d been in the hotel since the previous evening. I myself placed the precise dosage of propanolol in your coffee. Would you like to know the exact formula? Isopropyla-mine-1 (naphthyloxy-(1′)-3 propanol-(2)). Yes. It’s an anti-adrenaline compound. Ingested with food in a quantity of no fewer than fifty milligrams — the amount I placed in your coffee — it works along with the digestion. I knew the hour of the ceremony. The drug would take effect as you were digesting your breakfast, at the moment you were about to speak with the President.”

“That’s impossible, it would require split-second timing.”

“The mechanism exists: the drug is activated two hours following ingestion as the flow of adrenaline encounters the blocking drug. They served your breakfast at 8 a.m. The ceremony took place at ten. You may have confused the signs of hypotension — sweat and general nervousness — with the emotion of the moment. What we know is that as the three factors come together — digestive juices, the drug, and adrenaline — the effect is instantaneous: the blood rushes from the brain to the stomach, and the subject faints. That’s what happened to you. And that’s how Plan A was spoiled.”

“So he activated Plan B.”

“Exactly. The real assassin didn’t have time to fire.”

“Who was he?”

“It doesn’t matter. One of many killers on the Arab payroll. The Director General’s instructions were absolute: all or nothing. All it took was a slight accident, an unforeseen event, to thwart Plan A. You were that accident. While the Director General was explaining to the President what had happened, his people put you safely out of the way in the clinic on Tonalá. Rossetti was in charge of that; you worked in the same branch of government as he. You’d just fainted, he would take you home.”

“But if Plan A hadn’t failed, I wouldn’t have been taken to the clinic but to the Military Camp, and from there to the cemetery.”

“No, the Director General was perfectly honest with you. All he wanted was your name, to fire up official hostility against Israel. He wanted you alive so you, the new you, could escape from the clinic and lead him to me.”

“But I still don’t understand. Ayub warned me at the Hilton not to attend the ceremony. When I woke up in the clinic, the Director General was berating me for having showed up at the awards ceremony. He said all he’d wanted was my name and that my presence had spoiled his plans; he accused me of meddling and told me that if I hadn’t been there, as Ayub had warned me, everything would have worked out the way he wanted.”

“They know you too well. They knew you’d do exactly the opposite of what you were told, because you’re proud and you’re stubborn. The fact was that your presence was indispensable for their plan.”

“So why did they keep saying that in the clinic, after it was all over?”

“If you believed them, you’d be diverted from the truth The Director General doesn’t want people going around saying he tried to kill the President. Not even as a theory.”

“Is it more than a theory? Is there any proof?”

I nodded nonchalantly. “Mauricio Rossetti is free. He’s been extradited. In this case, Mexican justice was expedited. He says Angelica’s death was an accident. Trevor’s charges didn’t stick. Rossetti has been reinstated in his position as the Director General’s private secretary. He owes everything to his chief and he knows why: he’s the only one who knew about Plan A. The Director General procured his freedom in exchange for his silence, and he’s not worried about blackmail. Rossetti would lose something more than freedom if he talked: his life.”

“But don’t forget, Ayub told me not to go. You say by his chief’s orders. But Ayub despises the Director General; he’d have been pleased to have Plan A fail. It would have been his revenge against a man who imprisoned his family in Lebanon and then ordered them killed.”

“The Director General ran that risk. But his boldness, I repeat, is always balanced by intelligence. If Ayub hadn’t convinced you, the Director General wouldn’t have given a damn for Ayub’s life, or his family’s.”

“He didn’t give a damn.”

“Try to convince a man condemned to die tomorrow that it would be better to die today. That happens only in the folk ballad ‘La Valentina.’”

“I suppose I should be grateful. That sinister old bastard has been pretty decent with me, comparatively speaking.”

“That’s true. If Plan A hadn’t failed, he would have given you what he promised in the clinic: passports, tickets, and money for you and Ruth.”

The pistol was pointed at my heart, but I knew that Felix’s anger wasn’t directed toward me any longer.

“Goddammit, then who was shot in the Military Camp and buried the next day in my name?”