“Get out! This is my office.”
Alejo Vargas settled into a chair. He turned to the camera crew. “Turn that thing off. The lights too. Then you may take a short break. We will call you when we want you to return.”
The extinguishment of the television lights made the room seem very dark.
Colonel Santana escorted the technicians from the room and closed the door behind them. He stood with his back against the door, his arms crossed.
“If you are pushing the button near your knee to summon the security staff, you are wasting your time,” Vargas said. “Members of my staff have replaced them.”
“Say what you want, then get out,” Castro said.
Vargas got out a cigarette, lit it, taking his time. “I am wondering about Maximo Sedano. The night before last he was here, you signed something for him, he left this morning on a plane to Madrid, with a continuation on to Zurich. What was that all about?”
Fidel said nothing. Mercedes noticed that he was perspiring again.
“I am in no rush,” Vargas said. “I have all the time in the world.”
Fidel ground his teeth. “He went to move funds. On a matter of interest to the Finance Ministry.”
“The question is, where will the funds end up when their electronic journey is over? Tell me that, please.”
“In the government’s accounts in the Bank of Cuba, in Havana.”
“I ask this question because the man who was here last night did not see you check the account numbers in any book or ledger. You have the account numbers memorized?”
“No.”
“So in reality you don’t know where Maximo Sedano will wire the money?”
“He is a trustworthy man. Loyal. I cannot be everywhere, see everything, and must trust people. I have trusted people all my life.”
“How much money are we talking about, Señor Presidente?”
“I don’t know.”
“Millions?”
“Yes.”
“Tens of millions?”
“Yes.”
“Dios mio, our Maximo must be a saint! I wouldn’t trust my own mother with that kind of money.”
“I wouldn’t trust your mother with a drunken sailor,” Mercedes said. “Not if he had two centavos in his pocket.” She handed some pills to Castro, who glanced down at them.
“Water, please,” he whispered. He put the pills on the desk in front of him.
Vargas continued: “If we ever see the face of Maximo Sedano again, Señor Presidente, you have me to thank. I am having one of my men meet the finance minister in Zurich. We will try to convince Maximo to do his duty to his country.”
Mercedes handed Fidel a glass of water. He picked up several of the pills, put them in his mouth, then wallowed some water. Then he put the last pill in his mouth and took another swig.
Vargas was a moral nihilist, Castro thought, a man who believed in nothing. There were certainly plenty of those. He had known what Vargas was for many years and had used him anyway because he was good at his job, which was a miserable one. We entrusted it to a swine so that we need not dirty our hands.
Another mistake.
“I need rest,” he said, and tried to rise.
“No,” Vargas said fiercely. He leaned on the desk with both hands, lowered his face near Fidel. “You still have a statement to make before the cameras.”
“Nothing for you.”
“You think you have nothing to lose, do you not? You think, Alejo could kill me, but what is that? He merely speeds up the inevitable.”
Fidel looked Vargas square in the eye. “I should have killed you years and years ago,” he said. He took his hands from the arms of his chair and wrapped them around his stomach.
“There is no regret as bitter as the murder you didn’t commit. How true that is! But you didn’t kill me because you needed me, Fidel, needed me to ferret out your enemies, find who was whispering against you and bring you their names. Help you shut their mouths, cut out the rot without killing the tree.
“Kill me? Without me how would you have kept your wretched subjects loyal? Who would have kept these miserable guajiros starving on this sandy rock in the sea’s middle from cutting the flesh from your bones? Who would have provided the muscle to keep you in office when the Russians abandoned you and nothing went right? When everything you touched backfired?
“Kill me? Ha! That would have been like killing yourself.
“Now I have come for mine. Not centavos, like in the past. I want what is mine for keeping you in power all these years, for keeping the peasants from slicing your throat when in truth that was precisely what you deserved. You are a miserable failure, Fidel, as a man and as a servant of Cuba. And you are going to die a revered old man—God, what a joke! Hailed as the Cuban Washington for the next ten centuries … .”
Vargas sneered.
“Now I have the power of life or death, Fidel. I think you will make your statement in front of the camera. You will name me, Alejo Vargas, your loyal, trusted minister of interior as your successor, you will plead with all loyal Cubans everywhere to recognize the wisdom of your choice.”
Sweat ran in rivulets from Fidel’s face, dripped from his beard. His voice came out a hoarse whisper. “Forty years’ service to my country, and you expect me to hand Cuba over to you? To rape for your profit? Not on your life.”
“Don’t be a fool. You have nothing to bargain with.”
“Kill me. See what you gain,” Fidel said, his voice barely audible.
“You’ll die soon enough, never fear. But before you do Colonel Santana will butcher Mercedes on this table while you watch.”
“Have you no honor?”
“Don’t talk to me of honor. You have told so many lies you can’t remember ever telling the truth. You have profaned the Church, denied God, sent loyal Cuban soldiers to die in Angola, demanded that generation after generation give their blood to fulfill your destiny as Cuba’s savior. You have impoverished a nation, reduced them to beggary to salve your ego. I spit on you and all that you would have us become.”
And he did.
Fidel brought a hand up to wipe away the spittle. “Fuck you!” he whispered.
“And you too, Líder Maximo!” Vargas shot back. “I do not pretend to be God’s other son, strutting in green fatigues and spouting platitudes while the people worship me. But enough of this. Before we get to the camera, tell me where the gold is.”
“The gold?”
“The gold, Fidel. The gold from the peso coins that the Ministry of Finance melted down into ingots, the gold ingots that you and Che and Edis López and José Otero carried away. How much gold was there? Forty or fifty tons? You certainly didn’t spend it on the people of Cuba. Where is it?”
A grimace twisted Castro’s lips. “You’ll never find it, that’s for certain. Edis and José died within weeks of Che. I am the only living person who knows where that gold is; I am taking the secret to my grave.”
“The gold isn’t yours.”
“Nor is it yours, you son of a pig.”
“We will let you watch us cut up Mercedes. We will make a tiny incision on her abdomen, pull out a loop of small intestine. I will ask you questions, and every time you refuse to answer Colonel Santana will pull out more intestine. You will tell us everything we want to know or we will see what her insides look like. Colonel?”
Santana grabbed Mercedes by the arms. With one hand he grabbed the front of her dress and ripped it from her body.
Fidel Castro’s jaw moved. Then he went limp, slumping in his chair.
“Fidel!” Mercedes screamed.
Vargas leaped for Castro, pried open his jaw and raked a piece of celluloid from his mouth with his finger.
“Poison,” he said disgustedly. He felt Castro’s wrist for a pulse.
“Stone cold dead.” He tossed down the wrist and turned toward Mercedes.
“You gave him the poison! He had the capsule in his mouth.”
Alejo
Vargas slapped her as hard as he could.
“And this is for insulting my mother, puta!” He slapped her again so hard she went to her knees, the side of her face numb. “If you do it again I will cut your tongue out,” he added, his voice almost a hiss.
Then Vargas took a deep breath and steadied himself. The sight of Fidel Castro’s corpse drained the rage from him and filled him with adrenaline, ready for the race to his destiny. He had waited all his life for this moment and now it was here.
“Listen to this,” the technician said, and handed the earphones to William Henry Chance. They were crammed into a tiny van with the logo of the Communications Ministry on the side. The van was parked on a side street near Chance’s hotel, but with an excellent view of the Interior Ministry.
Chance put on the headphones.
“We recorded this stuff early this morning,” the technician told Chance’s associate, Tommy Carmellini. “Getting to you without stirring up the Cubans was the trick. Wait until you hear this stuff.”
“What is it?” Carmellini asked.
“Vargas and his thug, Santana, in the minister’s office. They’re talking about a speech they want Castro to make in front of cameras. A political will, Vargas called it. They are writing it, debating the wording.”
“What do they want it to say?”
“They want Castro to name Vargas as his successor, his heir.”
“Will he do that?”
“They seem to think he will.”
“Have we heard anything back from Washington about that ship reference—the Colón? … Nuestra Señora de Colón ?”
“No. Something like that will take days to percolate through the bureaucracy.”
“I was hoping the reference to North Koreans and biological warheads would light a fire under Somebody.”
“It always takes a while before we smell the smoke of burning trousers.”
Carmellini watched Chance’s face as he listened to the tape. William Henry Chance, attorney and CIA agent, certainly didn’t look like a man who would be at home in the shadow world of spies and espionage. But then appearances were often deceiving.
Carmellini had been a burglar—more or less semi-retired—attending the Stanford University Law School when he was visited one day by a CIA recruiter, a woman who took him to lunch in the student union cafeteria and asked him about his plans for the future. He still remembered the conversation. He was going into business, he said. Maybe politics. He thought that someday he might run for public office.
“A prosecution for stealing the Peabody diamond from the Museum of Natural History in Washington would probably crimp your plans, wouldn’t it?” she said sweetly. He gaped. Sat there like a fool with his mouth hanging open, the brain completely stalled.
He had seen her credentials, which certainly looked official enough. Central Intelligence Agency. The Government with a capital G. But there had never been the slightest hint that anyone was on his trail. Not even a sniff.
“It would do that,” he managed.
After a bit, the question of how she knew formed in his mind, and he began trying to figure out how to ask it in a nonincriminating way.
“You’re wondering, I suppose,” she said matter-of-factly between sips of her coffee, “how we learned of your involvement.”
Unable to help himself, he nodded yes.
“Your pal talked. The Miami PD got him on another burglary, so he threw you to the wolves to get a lighter sentence.”
Well, there it was. His very best friend in the whole world and the only guy who knew everything had sold him out.
“You need some better friends,” she said. “Your friend is a pretty small-caliber guy. A real loser. He got eight years on the state charge. Moving stolen property across state lines is a federal crime of course, and Justice hasn’t decided if they will prosecute.”
It quickly became plain that at that moment in his life, the CIA was his best career choice.
After finishing law school, Carmellini spent a year in the covert operations section of the agency. Now he was an associate of William Henry Chance, who had been with the CIA ever since he left the army after the Vietnam War. The cover was impeccable—both men were really practicing attorneys and CIA operatives on the side.
Carmellini remembered the first time he met William Henry Chance. He was running a ten-kilometer race in Virginia one weekend when Chance came galloping up beside him, barely sweating, and suggested they have lunch afterward.
Chance mentioned a name, Carmellini’s boss at the agency. “He said you were a pretty good runner,” Chance said, then began lengthening his stride.
Tommy Carmellini managed to stay with Chance all the way to the tape but it was a hell of a workout. Chance didn’t work at running; he loped along, all lean meat, bone, and sinew, a natural long-distance runner. Carmellini, on the other hand, was built more like a running back or middle linebacker.
About half of Carmellini’s time was spent on agency matters, half on the firm’s business. He was a better covert warrior than he was a lawyer, so he had to work hard to keep up with the bright young associates who had not the slightest idea that Carmellini or Chance were also employed by the CIA.
Sitting in a telephone company van in the middle of. Havana listening to intercepted conversations, Tommy Carmellini wondered if he should have told the CIA to stick it. He would probably be getting out of prison about now, free and clear.
And broke, of course. His friend had fenced the diamond and spent all the money, never intending to give Carmellini his share.
On the table were a set of photos the technicians had taken of the University of Havana science building. They had had the place under surveillance for the last two days.
Carmellini looked at the photos critically, as if he were going to burgle the joint. There were guards at every entrance, some electronic alarms: getting in would take some doing.
After a while Chance handed the headphones to a technician. He sat looking at Carmellini with a frown on his face.
“I think Vargas plans to kill Fidel,” Chance said finally.
“When?”
“Soon. Very soon. Today or tomorrow, I would imagine.”
“And then?”
“Your guess is as good as mine.”
The men left alive aboard Angel del Mar were unable to get the engine restarted, so it drifted helplessly with the wind and swell. Ocho took his turn in the tiny, cramped engine compartment. Something down inside the engine was broken, perhaps the crankshaft. Rotating the propeller shaft by hand made a clunky noise; at a certain point in the shaft’s rotation it became extremely difficult to turn. Admitting finally that repairing the motor was hopeless, Ocho backed out of the small compartment. His place was taken by someone else who wanted to satisfy himself Personally that the engine was indeed beyond repair.
After a while they all gave up and shut the door.
Without the engine they had to work the bilge pump manually. Fifteen minutes of intense effort cleared the bilges of water. With daylight coming through the hatch one could just see the water seeping in between the planks where the sea had pounded the caulking loose. It took about fifteen minutes for the bilges to fill, then they had to be pumped again. A quarter hour of work, a quarter hour of rest.
“If we can just keep pumping,” the old fisherman said, “we stay afloat.”
“If the water doesn’t come in any faster,” Ocho added. He was young and strong, so he spent hours sitting here in the bilge working the pump, watching the water come in.
Twenty-six people remained alive. The captain’s body was still in the wheelhouse, where he had fallen. No one wanted to take responsibility for moving him.
After a morning working the bilge pump, Ocho Sedano stood braced against the wheelhouse and, shading his eyes, looked carefully in all directions. The view was the same as it was yesterday, swells that ran off to the horizon, and above it all a sky crowded with puffy little clouds.
At least the
sea had subsided somewhat. The wind no longer tore whitecaps off the waves. The breeze seemed steady, maybe eight or ten knots out of the southwest.
One suspected the boat was drifting northeast, riding the Gulf Stream. The nearest land in that direction was the Bahamas.
The United States was north, or perhaps northwest now. A whole continent was just over the horizon, with people, cities, restaurants, farms, mountains, rivers … if only they could get there.
Well, someone would see this boat drifting before too long. Someone in a plane or fishing boat, perhaps an American coast guard cutter or navy ship looking for drug smugglers. They would see the Angel del Mar drifting helplessly, give the people stranded on her water and food, then take them to Guantanamo Bay and make them walk through the gate back to Cuba. Or maybe they would be taken to hospitals in America.
Already some of these people needed hospitals. They had vomited too much, been without water for too long. They had become dehydrated, their electrolytes dangerously out of balance, and if left unattended would die. Just like the people swept over the side last night.
Of course, knowing all this, there was absolutely nothing Ocho Sedano could do. He too felt the ravages of thirst, felt the aching of the empty knot in his stomach. Fortunately he had not been seasick, had not retched his guts out until he had only the dry heaves like so many of these others lying helpless in the sun.
The wheelhouse cast a little shade, so he dragged several people in out of the sun. Maybe that would help a little.
The sea seemed to keep the boat broadside to it, so the shade didn’t move around too much, which was a blessing.
There wasn’t room in the shade for everyone.
“The sail,” said the fisherman. “There is an old piece of canvas around the boom. Let’s see if we can get it up.”
They worked with the canvas in the afternoon sun for over an hour, trying to rig it as a sail. It wasn’t really a sail, but an awning. Finally the fisherman said maybe it was best used to catch rain and protect people from the sun, so they rigged it across the boom and tied it there.
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