Four Months in Cuba

by Luana Ehrlich

  When we turned off the main highway and entered the access road leading up to the Meliã, I said, “When Mateo picks me up here in a few hours, I’ll get him to show me where the other museums in the city are located. Of course, when he’s driving me around, I’ll also be asking him a few questions about Ben’s visit to Club Nocturno.”

  “Call me when he brings you back to the hotel, and I’ll let you know if the surveillance crew has arrived. Coach said to expect them at the safe house around seven.”

  “Will do. I’ll probably want to meet with them tonight.”

  “In that case, I’ll stop by the market and pick up some food.”

  “Careful. You’re beginning to sound like a domestic diva.”

  She smiled. “This doesn’t mean I’m buying you any lemons.”

  * * * *

  As soon as I walked in the hotel lobby with my carryall, I noticed two men hanging around the gift shop. Since they looked out of place at the five-star hotel, I figured they had to be members of the Departmento de Seguridad del Estado (DSE), Cuba’s version of the secret police.

  DSE officers were responsible for keeping an eye on Cuba’s dissidents, ferreting out illegal business enterprises, and, of course, unmasking American spies.

  Although the DSE was the Cuban equivalent of the FSB in Russia, it wasn’t nearly as efficient as its Russian counterpart. However, since I always made it a point to avoid the secret police—no matter how inefficient they were—I didn’t make eye contact with them as I crossed the lobby.

  Before leaving the safe house, I’d retrieved my weapons package from underneath the flooring in the pantry. After checking out the handgun, I’d left the knife and extra magazines behind. Now, I was wearing a Glock 30S in a leather holster underneath my light blue Guayabera shirt.

  What Mitchell had told Juliana about me was true.

  I wasn’t into guns like some of the other Agency guys were.

  All I really cared about was a gun’s accuracy and reliability. Having used the Glock 30S several times before—specifically, one night in Tehran when several VEVAK operatives had come after me—I felt certain those requirements would be met.

  The beautiful young lady at the reception desk gave me a big smile. “Welcome to the Meliã. How may I help you?”

  I slid my passport across the counter. “My secretary booked a suite for me here a few hours ago.”

  She glanced inside my passport and then consulted her computer. “Sí, Señor Bandera. You’re in Room 1029.”

  After processing my credit card, she handed me an ivory-colored envelope with my room key inside and motioned for a bellboy to take my bag. “Enjoy your stay with us.”

  “I’m sure I will.”

  She handed me back my passport. “If I can be of any further assistance, please don’t hesitate to ask.”

  I glanced down at the name badge on her uniform. “Thank you, Sofia. I just might take you up on that offer.”

  As I followed the bellboy over to the elevator, I flipped through my passport to see how sincere Sofia’s offer of assistance had been.

  The fifty-peso bill I’d tucked between the pages of my passport had disappeared, so it appeared Sofia might prove to be a very helpful ally during my stay at the Meliã.

  * * * *

  Once the bellboy had left me alone in my suite, I turned on the television set, rumpled up the covers on the king-sized bed, and messed up some towels in the bathroom.

  I also did a quick sweep of the room to see if I could locate any electronic devices. As far as I could tell, there weren’t any hidden cameras, but I did find a listening device in the base of a lamp. There could have been other bugs as well, but I decided it didn’t really matter, since I didn’t plan on spending much time in the room anyway.

  Approximately fifteen minutes after my arrival, I left the room and walked across the hall to the stairwell, where I headed down to the fifth floor.

  When I got to the landing on the fifth floor, I paused outside the door and listened for any sounds of activity in the hallway. Hearing none, I opened the door and quickly crossed the corridor to Room 529, where I rapped twice on the door.

  Keith Gabriel opened it immediately, and I slipped inside.

  Although Room 529 had the same furnishings as Room 1029, Gabriel’s room looked nothing like the one I’d just left.

  Candy wrappers and two empty Coke bottles were on the nightstand. A cardboard pizza box was on the floor beside the dresser and spread across the bed were several pages of Santiago’s daily newspaper, the Sierra Maestra, along with some CDs.

  “No maid service today?” I asked.

  “She was here a couple of hours ago. Why?”

  I leaned over and picked up an empty Styrofoam cup from the floor, tossing it into a nearby trash can. “Oh, no reason.”

  He plopped down on the bed and shook his head. “Well, Mr. Neat Freak, you haven’t changed a bit, have you?”

  I smiled and sat down in an armchair across the room from him. “I could say the same about you.”

  Gabriel and I were at opposite ends of the spectrum when it came to housekeeping. However, when it came to running an operation, our philosophies were much the same—pay attention to the details, listen to your instincts, and take nothing at face value.

  Although there were times when I found Keith Gabriel very irritating—like when he became obsessive about a subject—he was an excellent operative.

  “You’re looking good, Titus,” he said, “and, personally, I think that gray hair around your temples makes you look very distinguished. Is it part of your cover story?”

  Since I knew there was a possibility all the rooms at the hotel were bugged, I was surprised to hear Gabriel address me by my real name.

  He must have sensed my discomfort because he immediately pointed over to the nightstand and added, “Don’t worry. I brought a black box along on this trip.”

  He pushed aside a candy wrapper and picked up what appeared to be an alarm clock. In reality, it was a sound distortion device or Acoustical Protection System (APS), which rendered all voices in the room as static and thwarted any listening devices in the area.

  I said, “If I were you, Keith, I’d stay away from any insults about my personal appearance.”

  He ran his fingers through his long black hair and laughed. “Would you believe I had an inch of this chopped off before I left Langley?”

  There was no denying Gabriel was a handsome man, and I was pretty sure at least half the women who showed up at his concerts did so because of his looks and not because of his musical ability, even though he was a good musician.

  With his looks, he could have been a model for any of the covers on those paperback romance novels I’d seen in the racks at the airport gift shops, the ones that depicted swashbuckling pirates or adventuresome frontiersmen—most of them shirtless, with long wavy hair flowing down their shoulders.

  “As muggy as it is here in Santiago, trimming those locks of yours was probably a good idea,” I said. “I can’t imagine how uncomfortable that hair must be in this heat.”

  “I’m used to it,” he said, picking up a CD and tossing it over to me, “and since long hair is Soft Euphoria’s trademark now, I can’t exactly cut it off.”

  Gabriel’s SOF unit was made up of a sax player, a guitar player, a piano player, and a female vocalist. At Langley, they were known as Select Operations Force Unit #5. Elsewhere, they were known as the musical group Soft Euphoria, a name that didn’t do justice to such a highly trained group of men and women.

  I glanced down at the album cover on the CD. All five members of Soft Euphoria—three men and two women—were dressed in white suits, and every one of them had long black hair exactly like Keith’s.

  “Personally, Keith, I think this album cover looks a little freaky.”

  “That’s because you don’t have a single artistic bone in your body. Just look at the way you’re dressed.”

  “I’m an archivist at the Haitian Na
tional Museum. I’m supposed to look bland.”

  “The last time I saw you in Libya you were an arms dealer. Even then you looked bland.”

  “As much as I love trading insults with you, Keith, I’m on a limited time schedule here. Before I have to leave, I’d like to hear what your SOF unit turned up on Ben Mitchell’s disappearance.”

  “What’s with the time schedule? You just got here.”

  “I’m supposed to meet a possible source at the hotel in a couple of hours. He runs a taxi privado service, and a few hours ago, he told me he was Ben’s driver the night he was abducted from Club Nocturno. I believe that’s how Ben got to the club that night.”

  Gabriel shook his head. “You’ve only been in town a few hours, and you’ve already discovered the missing piece of the puzzle?”

  “So you think my source is telling me the truth?”

  Gabriel shrugged. “Who knows? Truth is such an elusive concept. Defining it is beyond the scope of most human beings.”

  Keith Gabriel was a thinker. If he hadn’t joined the Agency, he might have become a philosophy professor at some Ivy League university.

  At times, his thought processes were hard to follow.

  At other times, his insights made things a whole lot clearer.

  Sometimes, though, he was just wrong.

  * * * *

  I didn’t believe truth was an elusive concept, and I didn’t agree with him about the difficulty of defining truth, but I decided now wasn’t the time to engage him in a philosophical discussion about the subject.

  Instead, I told him how Juliana and I had met Mateo Aguilar, and what he’d told us about dropping Mitchell off at Club Nocturno.

  When I finished, he said, “I figured Ben must have used a taxi privado to get from the safe house over to the La Torre district where Club Nocturno is located. Government-subsidized taxis don’t operate past one o’clock in the morning, and the Grid still had Ben at the safe house at two o’clock.”

  The Schematic Tracking Grid was the system the Agency used to monitor and locate the movements of its operatives in the field during an operation. Although the Grid primarily used the GPS devices in Agency sat phones, it also relied on reconnaissance satellites and surveillance drones to pinpoint a person’s location.

  I said, “Tell me about the timeline you put together on Ben’s movements that night.”

  “It’s pretty straightforward. At 2:28, he shows up at Club Nocturno and asks if the club has Wi-Fi access. After that, he leaves the club and doesn’t return until 3:46. I’m pretty sure he must have walked down the block to that warehouse, Almacén Santiago, because the Grid has him there at 3:02.”

  “Any idea how he got inside the warehouse? From the photographs I’ve seen of the place, it wouldn’t have been easy for him to get past the guards at the gate.”

  “Actually, at three o’clock in the morning, it might not have been all that difficult to slip inside. During the day, the cartel uses the warehouse for their legitimate enterprises, but during the wee hours of the morning, their illegal operations take over. At that time, Ben could have talked his way past the guards or just walked in there after creating some kind of diversion.”

  “That sounds about right. When Ben’s motivated, he doesn’t mind taking risks.”

  “Evidently, once he got inside the warehouse, he located the shipping containers pretty quickly, because he’s back at the club forty-five minutes later. That’s when he sends the Ops Center the photograph of the containers. Five minutes after that, his signal drops off the Grid.”

  Gabriel got up from the bed and walked over to a window overlooking Santiago Bay. On the windowsill was a large basket of fruit, and after picking out a couple of mangoes, he took a big bite out of one of them.

  “As soon as we arrived in Santiago,” he said, wiping mango juice from his chin, “I paid Club Nocturno a visit and talked with the manager. I told him Soft Euphoria was in Santiago to scout out locations for a music video and to do a photo shoot. I gave him a line about how much I loved taking in the local color, and then I offered to drop by the club sometime and play a couple of sets for his patrons.”

  Gabriel walked over and handed me the other mango.

  “No, thanks,” I said, handing it back to him.

  “I’m telling you, Titus, you wouldn’t believe the health benefits of eating mangoes.”

  Gabriel, who prided himself on being a health nut, proceeded to give me a short lecture on the subject of mangoes. When he got to number five on his list of reasons why I should be eating the fruit, I interrupted him.

  “I’m allergic to mangoes, Keith.”

  “In that case,” he said, dropping my mango back in the fruit basket, “I really hope you’re supplementing your diet with some other healthy alternatives.”

  I pointed over to the candy wrappers and empty Coke bottles. “You mean like candy and soft drinks?”

  He wagged his finger at me. “You’re assuming a person who eats healthy food all the time can’t, at the same time, eat unhealthy food.”

  “Yeah, Keith, that would pretty much be my assumption.”

  He shook his head. “That just proves you don’t understand the incongruity of life. What may appear normal to you may not appear normal to somebody else. Life is full of contradictions.”

  “You’re right about that.”

  “So you admit you don’t understand the incongruity of life?”

  “No, I admit my perception of what’s normal is completely different from your perception of what’s normal.”

  “Well then, you do understand the incongruity of life.”

  * * * *

  I tried steering the conversation back to Club Nocturno by asking Gabriel what he’d learned about the club from hanging out there a couple of nights.

  “It wasn’t just me. All the band members were there making their own inquiries. In fact, it was Doreen who discovered Ben had asked a waitress about the club’s Wi-Fi connection.”

  “Why would Ben care about Wi-Fi? As long as he had his sat phone with him, he didn’t need a Wi-Fi connection.”

  Gabriel looked surprised. “You mean you don’t know why he was asking about the Wi-Fi? The DDO said you’d taken Ben under your wing, so I thought maybe you’d taught him some new tradecraft technique.”

  I shook my head. “I don’t have a clue about the Wi-Fi, and I may have given Ben a few suggestions, but I wouldn’t say I’ve taken him under my wing.”

  He nodded. “I didn’t think that sounded like you.”

  He was right, of course.

  I’d been a selfish guy pretty much all of my life. I’d also been trying to change that in the last few months, but it was turning out to be a slow process.

  I asked, “How was Doreen able to question the waitress without making her suspicious?”

  He tapped his index finger on his temple. “The mind is a beautiful thing, Titus. I try to use it as much as possible.”

  “Does that mean you came up with a plausible story?”

  “Right you are. I told my team when they were out making inquiries about Ben, they should say we were looking for a photographer to take some still photos of Soft Euphoria at the historical sites around the plaza, and we’d heard the photographer, Luis Torres, was in town taking pictures of the same sites. When Doreen showed the waitress Ben’s picture, that’s the story she gave her.”

  “Did the waitress remember anything else about Ben?”

  “She said she saw Ben—of course, she called him Luis—later that night sitting out on the patio with two other men. When Doreen asked her if she knew—”

  “Was that after Ben had paid a visit to the warehouse?”

  “That’s right. When Doreen asked her if she knew the men, she said she didn’t know their names, but she knew both of them worked for Rafael Lorenzo. The moment I heard that name, I knew Ben hadn’t been kidnapped by Hezbollah and his disappearance didn’t have anything to do with those two hundred missing gas canisters
. I figured the cartel had grabbed him because he was snooping around the warehouse.”

  “So you started doing surveillance on Lorenzo?”

  “Oh, you bet. We watched his movements for three days. But then, when Senator Mitchell got the email from Los Zetas confirming the cartel had kidnapped Ben, we were told to stand down.”

  “Were you surprised?”

  “You mean when the DDO told us to stand down?”

  I nodded.

  “Disappointed might be a better word. I had hoped this would be a quick retrieval. But when I stepped back and analyzed the situation, I realized the disappointment I felt was in direct proportion to my expectations. Because I’d already formulated a plan, I had high expectations of its success. Thus, my level of disappointment was also extremely high because those expectations weren’t met. I also felt a twinge of frustration, and when I analyzed it, I—”

  “What kind of plan?”

  Gabriel quickly tossed the rest of his mango in the trash can and sat down on the edge of the bed. Picking up a section of newspaper, he pointed to an article and said, “Rafael Lorenzo is hosting an event for the provincial governor in a few weeks. It’s supposed to be held at Lorenzo’s house in El Bonete, and my idea was to have Soft Euphoria take part in the entertainment.”

  I walked over and picked up the newspaper.

  After scanning the article, I said, “Look, Keith, I know I may regret asking you this, but how would you feel . . .” I shook my head. “No, scratch that; the less I hear about your feelings the better.”

  I started over. “What would you think about asking permission from the DDO to be on the Peaceful Retrieval team? I believe the two of us, plus Juliana, could come up with a way to get inside Lorenzo’s compound and rescue Ben without causing an international incident.”

  Gabriel stared down at the floor for few moments.

  When he looked up, he said, “I don’t know, Titus. I’m used to running things myself. I like being my own man.”