And he was a spy. And his job was running another spy called BUCHAN. Or spies, since BUCHAN product seemed more diverse and exciting than anything one person could encompass.
And BUCHAN had the ear of the President and of the US General in charge of Southern Command. BUCHAN knew crooks and wheeler-dealers: just as Andy must have known them when he had his greyhound, whose name she had recently learned was Retribution. She attached significance to this: Andy had an agenda.
And BUCHAN was in touch with a secret democratic opposition that was waiting for the old fascists in Panama to show their true colours. He talked to militants in the students’ movement and fishermen and secret activists inside the unions. He plotted with them, waiting for the day. He referred to them – rather glamorously, she thought – as people from the other side of the bridge. BUCHAN was on terms with Ernie Delgado too, the grey eminence of the Canal. And with Rafi Domingo, who laundered money for the cartels. BUCHAN knew Legislative Assembly members, lots of them. He knew lawyers and bankers. There seemed to be no one worth knowing in Panama that BUCHAN didn’t know, and it was extraordinary to Fran, eerie in fact, that Andy in such a short time had succeeded in getting to the very heart of a Panama she never knew existed. But then he’d got to her heart pretty sharpish too.
And BUCHAN was sniffing a great plot, though nobody could quite work out what the plot consisted of: except that the French and possibly the Japanese and Chinese and the Tigers of South-East Asia were part of it or might be, and perhaps the drugs cartels of Central and South America. And the plot involved selling the Canal out of the back door, as Andy called it. But how? And how without the US knowing? After all, the Yankees had effectively been running the country for most of the century, and they had the most amazingly sophisticated listening and monitoring systems all over the isthmus and Central America.
Yet the Yankees mystifyingly knew nothing about it at all, which added hugely to the excitement. Or if they did, they weren’t telling us. Or they knew but weren’t telling one another, because these days when you talked about Washington foreign policy you had to ask which one, and which ambassador: the one at the US Embassy or the one up on Ancón Hill, because the US military still hadn’t got used to the idea that it couldn’t bang heads in Panama any more.
And London was extremely excited, and was digging up collateral from all sorts of odd places, sometimes from years ago, and making amazing deductions to do with whose ambitions for world power would dominate everybody else’s because, as BUCHAN put it, all the world’s vultures were gathering over poor little Panama and the game was guessing who was going to get the prize. And London kept pressing for more, more, all the time, which made Andy furious because overworking a network was like overworking a greyhound, he said: in the end you both pay for it, the dog and you. But that was all he told her. Otherwise he was secrecy itself, which she admired.
And all this in ten short weeks from a standing start, just like their love affair. Andy was a magician, touching things that had been around for years and making them thrilling and alive. Touching Fran that way too. But who was BUCHAN? If Andy was defined by BUCHAN, who defined BUCHAN?
Why did BUCHAN’s friends speak so frankly to him or her? Was BUCHAN a shrink, a doctor? Or a scheming bitch, worming secrets out of her lovers with lascivious skills? Who was it who telephoned Andy in fifteen second bursts, ringing off almost before he could say, ‘I’ll be there’? Was it BUCHAN himself, or an intermediary, a student, a fisherman, a cut-out, some special link-person in the network? Where did Andy go when, like a man commanded by a supernatural voice, he rose at dead of night, threw on his clothes, removed a wad of dollar bills from the wall-safe behind the bed and left her lying there without so much as a goodbye, to creep back again at dawn, chagrined or wildly elated, stinking of cigar smoke and women’s perfume? And then to take her, still without a word, endlessly, wonderfully, tirelessly, hours, years on end, his thick body skimming weightlessly over her and round her, one peak after another, something that till now had only happened to Fran in her schoolgirl imagination?