1

The Preparation

The Saint Francis Inn

Saint George Street

Saint Augustine, Florida

Saturday, 30 June 1888

My nerves were dangerously raw that morning.

It had taken a lot of effort to get to that moment. Lives were in jeopardy, national policies were in the balance, time and treasure had been expended, my reputation was at stake. Such is the way of my profession, immersed in the grayer shade of a deniable but very real war between nations, fought by men in civilian attire, employing tactics usually thought criminal by the more prominent social circles of the Christian world. The fact that I was within my own country, made it all even more peculiar, almost unreal.

A noonday rain shower hadn’t defeated the June heat. It was not heavy enough to cool off the place; its anemic effort just left puddles and a steaming atmosphere. The sort that rapidly saps one’s patience. I sat there in sweat-soaked clothes, watching and waiting, expecting the worst. Thus, I was less than tolerant of the naïve—stupid, really—question posed to me by the junior member of my detachment while I was intently occupied in trying to spot any counter-intelligence surveillance, or an assassination attempt, by Spanish government agents.

“What d’ya suppose they’ll do, if they find out about him, sir?” asked Ensign Jefferson, while leaning out the window to the balcony where I sat, ostensibly relaxing with a book. His young face showed genuine concern for a man he’d never met and knew nothing about.

“The same damned thing we’d do, if he was one of ours—only without the prerequisite formalities,” I snapped back as Jefferson recoiled in surprise. Seeing his reaction, I vowed to not lose composure again. It was happening too frequently lately.

Jefferson’s question took me back two years. I didn’t have to suppose what would happen. From my own gruesome memories, I knew precisely what the Spanish would do if they found out about what their man was doing with us. I’d been a prisoner in the very dungeon in Havana, the dreaded Audiencia, where the Spanish interrogated their enemies. I’d met the dead-eyed men who did those interrogations, enjoying their prisoners’ agony. After their work was done, they cleaned off and neatly stowed the instruments of their trade on the table beside the victim’s chair—a surgical display immediately visible to the next client who entered the room. The lamp-lit scene in that dungeon, complete with condensation-dripping walls carved from coral rock, was permanently seared in my mind.

No, Jefferson didn’t need to know the mechanics of our informant’s fate if things went badly. Though, if the ensign had actually known the man and his proclivities, I dare say he wouldn’t have cared.

“Ah, there he is,” I said, calmer now. “Get into position, Mr. Jefferson.”

The ensign mumbled “Aye, aye, sir,” and ducked back inside, glad to be away from me. I heard the hallway door close and his heavy frame clumping down the stairs.

From my vantage point on the balcony, I could see the subject of Jefferson’s inquiry coming farther into view. A hundred yards away, an older man—old enough to be my father—approached my position, right on time. If you didn’t know him, and what he was about to do, you’d think him some grandfather making his way through the quaint old town. Clad in a faded black suit from the fashions of Europe forty years earlier, gray hair comically disarrayed by the breeze, he desperately clutched a large brown valise while trudging south on the uneven stone footpath beside Saint George Street. Even at that range, I could sense his anxiety by the cautious gait, his downward gaze.

The disturbed manner indicated he was going about some disagreeable duty, which he most certainly was. A passerby might think it an unpleasant chore for his elderly wife, but they would be wrong. There was no wife. Never had been. I knew what that duty was, for it was my idea. Six months of considerable effort on the part of half a dozen men in three countries had been expended to get that old man to this rendezvous.

So he could betray his king and empire.

Just past the Presbyterian Church, the man stopped to admire a vine of purple flowers cascading over a crumbling whitewashed wall of oyster shells, lime, and sand. I knew he wasn’t the type to appreciate flowers. No, he was taking an opportunity to look around for anyone following him. Slowly he swiveled his head, trying to seem nonchalant. He wasn’t very good at it and hesitated for a moment, staring at the wall. Leaves floated down around him like green snow from a gust of wind through the oak trees canopying the street. He ran his fingers over the exposed shells along the top of the wall. It was a relic from the original Spanish days—the wooden house behind the wall had decomposed a century earlier.

The old man seemed pensive for a moment, and I wondered if he’d had ancestors living in the town back in those terrible days. Or was his mind weighted down with the enormity of the task at hand? Would he place national honor over personal humiliation and worse, and back out at the last minute? The hand stayed on the wall another few seconds, as if somehow communing with it.

There were remnants of a lot of ancient walled courtyards in the area. Some were two or three hundred years old, each one built not for aesthetics but for last-ditch defense. In those days, you did not want to lose the battle. Especially if you were still alive. Prisoners didn’t live long after their capture. Most didn’t want to.

Actually, that concept wasn’t such an antiquated idea, I thought, watching the man glimpse nervously around one more time before resuming his journey. There’d be no niceties observed if he was caught by Colonel Marrón’s counter-intelligence operatives. No procedural protection. No opportunity for defense or mitigation. No compassion for his predicament. He’d be dead within hours, after they extracted all he knew about his foreign contact—me. Ah, yes, and that particular bit of information would greatly incense the Spanish imperial authorities in Havana. They already had substantial reason to hate me, but far less than I had against them.

Behind the old man, another figure came into sight, sauntering around the corner of a private entryway onto Saint George Street. Tall and lanky, with salt-and-pepper hair twisted into a sailor’s short tail, he wore a light blue cotton shirt and dark trousers. This second man walked with the confident rolling pace of one who’d spent decades standing on swaying decks. He was a son of Eire named Sean Rork, officially a senior boatswain in the United States Navy, and more particularly, my assistant and dearest friend. A newspaper—that day’s St. Augustine Press—was carried loosely in his right hand.

Well, to be more accurate, the right was his only hand. He’d lost the other to a sniper one August night in ’83, at the Forbidden Purple City, inside the Citadel at Hue, capital of the Empire of Viet Nam. The shooter was trying to kill me, but instead he hit Rork with that lump of lead. It’s something he occasionally reminds me of when in need of some libation and lacking sufficient funds. Since that wound, Rork’s had a stump just below his left elbow, courtesy of a French naval surgeon. But our friends in the French Navy didn’t stop there. Oh, no, they went on to create a veritable masterpiece of malevolent art.

A carpenter’s mate fashioned a false hand made of flesh-painted India rubber, carved into an opened fist, the fingers able to grip a bottle, a cutlass, or an oar. It even has fingernails and wrinkles painted on it, and one has to be close, indeed, to discern its true counterfeit nature.

A French gunner’s mate did the rest. Underneath that apparently benign façade of a rubber left hand is a wicked-looking sailor’s marline spike, mounted securely on the base of the underlying appliance. The rubber hand fits over it quite nicely, but can be removed in an instant to reveal the device beneath. Beside its nautical uses as a tool, the spike is quite handy in our line of work—quiet, lethal, concealable. Its unveiled appearance is an excellent attention-getter and motivator in dialogues. And, of course, Rork being Rork, the whole contraption is a source of great pride to him. In fact, the mere thought of his spike, and its various uses, makes my friend smile, a sign of that rather dark Gaelic soul lurking within.

The appearance of the newspaper in his right hand was a good sign to me. It meant there was no counter-surveillance by the Spanish government. That we were in Saint Augustine, the oldest city in America, was no guarantee of protection against foreign operatives. The Spanish had intelligence agents all over Key West, Tampa, Jacksonville, New Orleans, and New York. They were, and continue to be, even now in 1896, fully engaged in a dirty little war against rebel Cuban insurgents, most of whom are funded by people in this country. If the Spanish knew, or even had an inkling, of what the old man was delivering to me inside that valise, they most certainly would be following him. If they knew I was involved, my fate would duplicate the old man’s.

My second-story balcony jutted out from the south and west walls of the century-old Saint Francis Inn. The inn stands at the southern terminus of Saint George Street, a narrow lane running down from the town’s central plaza. It ends at the cross street of Saint Francis. My perch was on the northeast corner of that intersection. The balcony was a perfect platform for observing activity on both streets.

The old man crossed Saint George Street obliquely, his course shaped for the front door of the inn. Leathered creases were visible now on his worried face, as his step quickened. Shielding his eyes from the afternoon sun, he glanced up at me, then quickly looked away when a loud double pop exploded behind him.

Dropping the novel I appeared to be reading—Admiral David Dixon Porter’s The Adventures of Harry Marline—I reached inside my coat for the Merwin-Hulbert forty-four-caliber revolver I had at the ready. Following the old man’s frightened stare up the street, I saw a wagon straining under a load of turpentine barrels. The driver was snapping a whip into a pair of mules. Its crack made a sound exactly like the report of a small-caliber revolver.

Rork was already partially behind the trunk of an oak, his back to me, facing the wagon. That good right hand of his had dropped the newspaper and was inside the right trouser pocket, no doubt gripping his navy-issued Colt. He turned and nodded toward me before retrieving the newspaper and resuming his walk. I allowed myself to breathe again, stowed my pistol, and picked up the book.

Admiral Porter came to mind. He had approved this mission, but I doubted whether his superior, the secretary of the navy—or his superior—knew of it. Porter was quite good at that sort of thing. Devious might be a more apt descriptor of his machinations. In unguarded moments, he called it “executive protection, from their tendencies toward idiocy.”

Porter was a legend in those days. Some said he was arrogant, especially when faced with dissenting views, but no one denied his power. And not a soul on Capitol Hill, or over in the Presidential Mansion, crossed him. The irascible seventy-five-year-old had been the senior admiral commanding the United States Navy for almost two decades. Porter had seen a lot of secretaries of the navy and presidents come and go, and he knew where all the political bones were buried.

In the last few years he’d even had the leisure to apply himself to his long-submerged passion, writing books about the navy. Porter had already penned eight books—naval histories and novels—and was pretty good at it, though I thought some of his reminiscences on the late Southern rebellion were a bit self-serving. His sales were assured, of course. Every naval officer on active duty prominently displayed copies of Porter’s books, for the obvious reasons. I myself found them valuable for doorstops, chart weights, and as an accoutrement for surveillance. But, just like the others, I admit to having his Naval History of the Civil War on my desk at the Office of Naval Intelligence.

My mind returned to the situation at hand. I watched the informant enter the Saint Francis Inn’s garden courtyard. Seconds later, Rork followed him in from the street. Ensign Jefferson and Lieutenant Singer were in their positions at separate tables in the courtyard, scanning for any strangers. Their duty was to prevent interference, by force if need be. After a final check of the streets, I vacated the balcony, went into my room, and made a last-minute survey of our preparations. All was ready.

The two chairs and a coffee table were arranged just inside the west window. In the southwest corner, behind my chair, stood a table, atop which were two potted geraniums. Between them was a new Kodak box camera—precisely six feet, six inches away from the chair across from mine. Maximum effective range for this scenario. The camera’s lens was aimed exactly at the far chair, which would be the informant’s. At that moment of the day, a shaft of sunlight focused on the chair as if one of Mr. Edison’s electric searchlights had been trained upon it.

Draped over a table in the background of the Spaniard’s chair was a vividly new American flag, surrounded by red, white, and blue flowers. It was displayed artfully as a patriotic commemoration of the upcoming one hundred and twelfth anniversary of our nation’s declaration of independence, to be celebrated in five days. It was also nicely within the view of the camera. I wanted there to be no doubt as to the location of the transaction.

A new-fangled photographic device, the Kodak is an amazing implement, a true wonder of our age. The thing can record one hundred pictures on a length of papered film rolled up inside the boxlike apparatus. It requires no tripod and hood, no wet plates dripping in chemicals, and no complicated development process.

One simply depresses a button to capture the scene. When you desire to make another photograph, you merely turn a tiny crank to advance a new section of film to the aperture. When you reach the end of the roll, you send the box off to the company in the mail. In a few days they send you the photographs and the box with a new roll of film. No longer is photography the realm of the few. In fact, the designer, an energetic young man named George Eastman, touts it as a camera for the general citizenry and sells his invention for twenty-five dollars each.

I’d met Eastman when he came to Washington a month earlier, in May, to present one of the first of his Kodaks to President Cleveland. Commodore John Grimes Walker, chief of the Bureau of Navigation, and thus of the operations at the Office of Naval Intelligence, was with me at the time. After hearing Eastman’s explanation of how the camera worked, the commodore turned to me and quietly said, “Get one of those for us. ONI could use it.”

I did, and now was using it clandestinely for the first time, in a role I’m sure its creator never imagined. To make sure it would work properly, a week earlier I had photographed Rork sitting in that same chair, illuminated solely by the sunlight at the exact moment of its maximum intensity. It had come out a bit darker than optimum, but was recognizable enough for our purposes.

Most importantly, we’d heard just the tiniest click from the trigger button, which had been modified by Eastman before we’d left Washington to make it smoother. He didn’t know the camera was being used for cloak-and-dagger purposes by the intelligence service—Rork told him it was for his elderly grandmother in Boston who lacked the strength to depress the standard button. A shameless lie. Rork’s grandmother died in Ireland thirty years ago.

Everything in the room appeared ready, but my insides were churned up like a bilge in a storm. This scenario was the culmination of dangerous work in Havana, Nassau, and now, Saint Augustine. In five minutes, it would finally be done. The contents of the valise would be in my hands. By the next morning, they would be in a sealed navy envelope guarded by Jefferson and Singer aboard a train heading for the Office of Naval Intelligence in Washington.

In two days, Commodore Walker and Admiral Porter would be reading the material. I would be on a well-deserved annual leave at my island in southern Florida. I should have been contented by the situation, but I wasn’t.

So far, everything was going much too well.