by Jose Latour
PART TWO
Five
Elliot Steil was dashing along a concourse, dragging his roll-on behind him, when from a side door Brent Hart waved for him to come in. Frowning, Steil approached him and crossed the threshold into a maintenance corridor with pipes painted in different colors exposed along the ceiling. Cleaning materials and aluminum portable stairs had been left by a wall.
“Hart, for God’s sake, I just landed. I want to go home, unpack, see the woman. We’ll meet after lunch. Is three o’clock okay with you?”
“You were approached?”
“I was.”
“We need to talk now. Don’t get cagey on me, Steil. This is a serious matter. Give me an hour.”
“An hour?”
“Plus maybe two or three more tomorrow.”
“Hey, I gotta work tomorrow, you know?”
“Steil, don’t make things more difficult than they are, please. Is the term debriefing familiar to you?”
“I’ve read a few spy novels.”
“Then you know I have to see you before anyone else does. C’mon. Just an hour. I promise.”
Hart guided Steil through the maintenance corridor, up one flight of stairs, then out to a public hallway that led to the office in which they had met a week earlier. The instant Hart closed the door, Steil asked him if he could use the phone to call Fidelia.
“Sure. Tell her you’ll be late ’cause your baggage is missing.”
He tapped her cell phone number.
“Hello?”
“Hi, honey.”
“Elliot, where are you?”
“At the airport. Where are you?”
“At the airport, waiting for you.”
Elliot mouthed “She’s here” to Hart. The agent shrugged his shoulders.
“Listen. I figured you’d come. It’s why I called. I may be delayed. My baggage is missing. Why don’t you go home and wait for me?”
“No, I’ll wait here.”
“Okay, I hope this doesn’t take too long. Then I have to get through customs. You know how it is, coming from a country that belongs to the Axis of Evil,” he said, slyly smiling and winking at Hart, whose involuntary frown of annoyance showed that he found the sarcasm not in the least amusing, and that he was fluent in Spanish.
“No problem, I’ll wait. I’ve missed you.”
“I’ve missed you too. Take care.”
“Where are you calling from?”
“Pay phone.”
“In the baggage claim area?”
For several years now, Steil had been considering whether falling in love and having to deal with smart women is a blessing or a curse. He had not been able to make up his mind. “Yes, there’s one, for staff. A Cuban who works here let me use it, as a favor.”
“Okay. Love you.”
“Love you, too. Bye-bye.”
Steil gave Hart a forty-six-minute overview of the two meetings held in Room 2124 of the Habana Libre. In an adjoining room, wearing headphones and watching five of a twenty-screen bank of monitors, Paul McLellan, who in fact worked for the Office of the National Counterintelligence Executive, not the Treasury, and Nathan Smith, the bureau’s chief of counterintelligence at the South Florida field office, hung on Steil’s every word. The Cuban provided physical descriptions of Capdevila and Berta, dictated the Havana phone number he had been given, and said he suspected a swindle. The FBI man did not interrupt once. The copious notes he took prevented Steil from realizing that they were being videotaped, but as the story progressed, Hart’s countenance changed from moderate curiosity to visible interest to well-guarded excitement. He seemed mildly surprised when Elliot mentioned Berta’s comment regarding phone calls between Miami and Havana.
“… then Capdevila said it had been a pleasure, Berta gave me a nod, and they left” was how Elliot finished his report.
Hart retracted his ballpoint with a click, put it in his shirt pocket, breathed deeply, arranged himself in his seat, and grinned fleetingly. “You’ve done a great job, Steil. Thanks. The bureau really appreciates your collaboration.”
Elliot wondered if the man was getting even for his Axis-of-Evil leg-pulling. “Collaboration, Hart?”
“Involvement is better. I stand corrected. Berta’s last name doesn’t come to mind yet?”
“No. It’ll come.”
“I wasn’t aware that IMLATINEX is the parent company of this Panamanian trading company …” Hart flipped the pages of his notebook as Steil shook his head, “Trans-Caribbean Trading, that’s been selling things to …” again the FBI man took a peek at his notes, “XEMIC.”
“To my knowledge, IMLATINEX is not the parent of Trans-Caribbean. They just buy from us. I don’t know who their clients are.”
“We’ll look into it. Okay. Now we have to agree on what you’ll tell Mrs. Scheindlin and consider how she may react to the news. Maybe Scheindlin bought medicines for Cuba, maybe he …”
“No, Hart. Take my word for it. Had he done that, I would’ve known it. These people made that up to give credibility to their cock-and-bull, and a humanitarian touch, too.”
“But Scheindlin frequently traveled alone. He could have met them abroad, done things for them you wouldn’t have known about.”
“He did travel alone, but can you see him transporting a hundred Gs in cash? A businessman who knows the law? Give me a break.”
“He could’ve rented safe-deposit boxes abroad. Or deposited the cash in a bank. Who knows? But let’s not speculate, we’ll see. Will you call the widow tomorrow?”
“Of course. She’s my boss. Besides, she asked me to buy her rum, cigars, and CDs.”
“And you did?”
“Sure.”
“Fine. Then try to give it to her on Tuesday. Preferably in the evening. We need to meet tomorrow to agree on what you’ll say to her.”
“What’s to agree? I just have to deliver a message.”
“That’s right. But we’ve got to have a good handle on any of the questions she may pose to you, consider alternatives, like what to do if she asks you to call these two and tell them that the uncle died, or that he’s alive and kicking. This real or imaginary cash is McLellan’s concern; he may want to hear everything straight from you. So, would it be possible for you to meet us tomorrow, say at 8:00 P.M.?”
“Do I have an alternative?”
Hart lay back against the seat and seriously eyed Elliot. “No, Steil, you don’t. But let me tell you something. I admit that your … involvement in this was … how should I put it …”
Elliot wondered why the man was choosing his words so carefully. Hart was thinking that, if the videotape became an exhibit in court, he didn’t want the jury to learn that his informer had been coerced into cooperating.
“… at our insistence” was the best Hart could come up with.
“Your insistence?”
“Call it as you wish. Nevertheless, your cooperation is vital to a federal investigation, and we’ll have to meet frequently to discuss things. We can do it in a friendly way or in a hostile way. Good rapport is preferable. So, don’t cop an attitude on me, okay? You don’t like doing this; I can understand that. I don’t like—well, never mind. I would be very grateful if tomorrow at twenty hundred hours you would go to this house …”
Hart paused for a few moments to pull the ballpoint out, scribble an address on his spiral notepad, rip the page off, and give it to Elliot. After glancing at it, the Cuban folded it, then slipped it into a patch pocket of his sports jacket. Hart returned the ballpoint to his shirt pocket.
“Now, Steil, let’s talk confidentiality.”
“How exciting.”
Taxed by the sarcasm, Hart lifted his gaze to the ceiling and took a deep breath.
“You have a reputation for being discreet and reserved; it’s a trait we appreciate,” he began as he locked eyes with Elliot. “But we are not asking you to be reserved or discreet. We are asking you to seal your lips, period. You are now in possession of informa
tion not to be shared with anyone, not your lady friend, not Tony Soto, anyone. What you just did, folding that note and putting it in your pocket, is a mistake. Suppose your lady friend finds it and gets curious. Who lives there? she may ask herself. Suppose she suspects there’s another woman in your life and tries to …”
“You’ve made your point, Hart. Leave her out of this.”
“That’s exactly what I want, to leave her out of this,” the agent snorted. “And leave Jenny Scheindlin, Sam Plotzher, and all the other people you know out of this, too. If you hadn’t forgotten Berta’s last name, I would’ve asked you to commit that address to memory and destroy the note. But seeing that your memory is bound to fail you, I’m asking you to put that paper someplace where no one can read it, until tomorrow evening, and later, once you leave the house, to destroy it.”
“Okay,” Elliot said begrudgingly, putting the paper in his wallet.
“Concerning this case, you make reports to me, to agent McLellan, or to any other federal agent that McLellan or myself bring to a meeting. You share your suspicions, doubts, and worries with me, with agent McLellan, or with any other federal agent present. We think you can keep a secret. So, why am I telling you this? I’m telling you this because, as far as we can ascertain, you’ve never before been involved in undercover work, you are not prepared for it, so we have to teach you a few basic rules and you have to pay attention and follow instructions. You must clearly understand that an indiscretion or a mistake on your part could jeopardize a very important case on which the bureau has been working for some time. Have I made myself clear?”
“Very much so, Agent Hart,” Steil said testily.
“We’ve told police officer Soto he’s not to ask you questions regarding what you’re doing for us. He promised he wouldn’t. Neither are you authorized to reveal your personal views on this to Mrs. Scheindlin. Only if she asks what you think, you tell her. She asks if you think it’s a swindle, you say yes. She doesn’t ask, keep your opinion to yourself. She’s free to act however she judges best. She asks you to refer what you were told in Cuba to her daughter, Sam Plotzher, and her lawyer, we have no objection. She pays for a full-page ad in the Miami Herald announcing that XEMIC is trying to extort money from her, we won’t interfere. She asks you to keep your mouth shut, don’t tell a word to anyone, you are only too happy to oblige. Understood?”
“Understood.”
“Okay, we’ll talk further about this tomorrow evening. Maybe you think I’m bullshitting you, but I honestly appreciate your help.”
“Yeah. May I leave now?”
“You may. Agriculture inspectors will ask you whether you’re bringing in agricultural produce. Did you?”
“No.”
“You bring cigars?”
“A box of Cohibas.”
“Tell the inspector. He’ll let you through. Then you take the nothing-to-declare line. C’mon, I’ll show you how to get there.”
…
The Cuban minister of the interior in 2002, the first individual to be awarded the Hero of the Republic of Cuba medal and the second promoted to lieutenant general in the Cuban army, was unquestionably a courageous man who had lived a hectic life. He was eighteen by the time he joined the rebels in the mountains of eastern Cuba in 1957. In the sixties he fought anticommunist guerrillas (“bandits” in partyspeak) in the highlands of the central part of the island. In the seventies and eighties, following to a tee the Chief’s strategy, he had led Cuban soldiers to victory in battles waged on African soil. The number of men he had seen die grisly deaths was anybody’s guess; his nice dreams would have been considered odd by many people, let alone his nightmares in which rivers of blood flowed, a slew of the men he had executed chased him, and poisonous African serpents bit his arms and legs.
This sad man inured to the cesspool of war had been appointed minister of the interior in June 1989 for five reasons. First, his predecessor was to be taken into custody under corruption charges. Second, the Chief had realized that new and irreversible geopolitical realities would make interfering in the internal affairs of other countries extremely risky; stationing troops abroad would be suicidal. Third, at no time had the comrade questioned or disobeyed a decision made by the Chief or by his brother. Fourth, he publicly prided himself on revering both men. Last, he was a member of the Politburo and vice president of the State Council.
Having awoken at noon on Sunday, April 21, 2002, once the assistant on duty reported that nothing compelling demanded his presence at the ministry, following a hearty brunch, and knowing that the Commander was sleeping, the minister of the interior sat down to relax and have a few. He knew the routine: The Chief would be getting up around five or six, eat a light supper, and head for the Palace, where he’d spend the night working. Therefore, the minister intended to take a shower around sixteen hundred hours, sip a cup of strong coffee, and be ready to report to the Chief’s office with a clear head should his presence be required. He just had a mild buzz on when, at 2:12 P.M., General Lastra called and asked for an urgent meeting. Having been told that Victoria Valiente, one of the darlings of the Commander, had something to report, the minister agreed to be in his office at 3:00 P.M. He ordered a servant to brew him a strong demitasse of coffee. If there was bad news, he wanted to be the first to know.
He didn’t pursue his duties with such zeal because he was overly committed to the cause of the poor and hungry of the world. After so many years of exerting authority and power, enjoying privileges, and rubbing shoulders with the high and mighty, to him the cause of the dispossessed had come to be sloganeering intoned to the ignorant masses. The reason for his wanting to be the first to learn bad news was that the comrade minister had appointed himself second protector of the Chief’s health. The Chief’s brother was immovable in his position of first protector.
In April 1996 the minister of the interior had sent for the man in charge of Patient One’s medical team and asked him what he could do to keep the Commander in perfect health. The doctor explained that, at seventy, that was impossible. Sooner or later cancer develops, or a stroke or heart attack takes place, or Alzheimer’s sets in. Most old people, however, are retired or semiretired, thus being partially insulated from the stress and unpleasant realities of daily life, the MD added rather didactically. But a seventy-year-old man at the helm of a nation endures a hundred times more stress than most people. When such an individual, to make matters worse, insists on being informed about all things that happen, important or unimportant, good or bad, of a political, economic, social, or military nature, his chances of suffering a myocardial or cerebral infarction increase exponentially.
Thereby, the doctor recommended limiting as much as possible the amount of bad news reaching Patient Number One. He further advised that, when giving awful news was inevitable, it would be prudent to make sure this was done after he had taken one of the three hypotensive pills he took daily, and to have the mobile medical unit on duty ready (two intensive care specialists, four nurses, two ambulances, four drivers, and six paramedics) in case something happened. The patient had to follow a strict diet as well. And it would be formidable if the Chief could be persuaded to speak less. The doctor feared that one of these days, something malignant would develop in the Chief’s larynx or vocal cords. Human organs were not meant to be overworked so savagely for so many years. The minister did not argue with the head of the team. It was easy to write prescriptions and make recommendations; convincing the patient that he had to behave was not.
Almost six years had gone by and things were inescapably worse. The Chief misplaced documents, accused aides of tampering with his things, lost track of what he was saying. His lifelong custom of blaming others for his mistakes had taken on massive proportions. His famous memory was slipping. In June 2001 he had had a ten-minute blackout while making a speech in a town close to Havana. Cuban TV was broadcasting the rally, CNN got the tape, and the whole world saw him collapse. His hypertension was serious; a stroke much dread
ed by his confederates. So, the minister had decided that concerning Interior’s fields of activity: intelligence, counterintelligence, police, the penal system, and emigration, he would decide, in consultation with the Commander’s brother, which bad news inevitably had to reach the Chief and which they would keep under wraps.
This serves to explain why, as Col. Victoria Valiente finished relating her suspicions, the minister of the interior felt relieved. He uncoiled himself from the seat and began pacing his office, hands behind his back, eyes on the floor. Victoria and her boss kept a respectful silence. General Lastra had persuaded her to change into her olive green uniform: short-sleeved jacket lacking name tag, trousers, and black pump shoes. At each point of the jacket’s open collar, three white stars. Lastra opined that the full dress uniform, the gold star, and the ribbons were overkill.
Maybe he had been good-looking in his twenties, Victoria judged as she watched the minister go back and forth. Not a spunk, though. He was five-feet-six or seven at most, with regular features, but lacked the sort of fascinating personality that makes women excuse physical mediocrity. Now he was just a flabby, balding old man thick around the middle and with age spots on his forearms and hands. Didn’t look like a hard-on at all, certainly didn’t act like one. She tried to picture him in his undies: skinny white legs, the waistline of his boxer shorts below his potbelly.
Yet he wielded enormous power. In a country where the media deifies only the occupants of slots One and Two, and Two is the head of the armed forces, many believed that whoever calls the shots in the arcane areas of national security, police, and prisons is indisputably Number Three, who is slated to be the next Number Two. Such a promising future turned him into a George Clooney for many young and beautiful female officers who Victoria had seen making eyes at him during anniversaries, festivities, and political rallies.
As Victoria considered all this, the minister was pondering if what he had just learned was bad news. Victoria had seen what she thought was a bank statement blink on the screen of her laptop; she had found a few thousand dollars hidden in a closet that she felt certain her husband could not account for; the guy (what was his name? Calvo? No, Pardo) criticized the Chief with increasing and worrying frequency, or so she said.