Especially the latter.
I was going to have Trace and Doc ask their minder for a tour of some medical clinics so we could scout some likely targets when a pain in the side of one of our fellow guests at our hotel saved me the trouble. The landlady made an immediate appointment with a clinic a mile away. Now that you have trouble doing in America, and I was duly impressed. So was Red, who was in the kitchen getting some tea when the guest came in with his complaint. She volunteered her services as a nurse and shoulder to lean on, and accompanied the man to the doctor.
The clinic was a small building at the edge of a residential area, with a visiting area about the size of a couch. It was clean, smelling more like flowers than medicine, and staffed by two overworked but amazingly friendly nurses and one doctor who looked older than Fidel and mumbled to himself in the hall. Red went into the examining room with the patient but couldn’t locate the drug cabinet. But that was a minor concern: there were no alarms and only simple locks on the building’s doors and windows.
“It’ll take me ten minutes,” said Red.
I winced, but it was too late. Mr. Murphy had already heard.
Let me update the status of the rest of our crew:
Junior had taken the disc to the States to get a decrypted copy and then deliver the original to the CIA. Shotgun was en route to Mexico, where he would stand by in case we needed him. Danny had returned to Jamaica, mixing piña coladas and lining up resources for any new contingencies that came up. With the PBM still out of action—repairs were proceeding with the help of our Christians in Action brethren—he’d arranged for an Agusta 109 helicopter based in Havana to be leased to a very wealthy European tourist for sightseeing on the island.
The Augusta was tempting, but we could only use it as a last-ditch backup. The pilot would almost certainly be a former military man, and the few helos on Cuba were all owned by a government company and generally under close control. Those were not insurmountable problems—Trace could fly the aircraft if a gun in the ribs didn’t convince the pilot—but it meant our first flight would definitely be our last. And more importantly, we wouldn’t be able to count on the chopper arriving with enough fuel to get us back to the States.
Hitting the clinic looked like such an easy job that I decided to let Red and Mongoose handle it alone that evening while I went over and checked the security around Fidel’s hospital. If I liked what I saw, we’d go in later that night, just as soon as Red and Mongoose got the drugs.
That meant I had to conduct my research in character. So I spent the day practicing my Fidelisms while watching the recent video of el Jefe, courtesy of a download Junior arranged through the sat phone and a borrowed PC. Then with Red’s help I made myself up, dying my hair and beard, adding some liver spots, playing with makeup to add the weight of nearly fifty years of communism to my face.
“Don’t let the landlady see you,” said Red when we were done. “She’ll have a heart attack.”
The finishing touch was pretend-army fatigues just like Fidel himself favored, purchased by Mongoose at a tourist-only department store. I looked more like Fidel than Fidel himself.
Renting a car wasn’t practical, so I borrowed one from a few blocks away. It was an old fellow—a ’58 Chevy to be exact—in showroom shape with a church’s worth of Santeria statues and icons scattered throughout the interior. It was like driving a Catholic church to the local sock hop, except that the radio seemed only capable of playing salsa.
Fidel’s hospital was located in a ritzy area northeast of the city. A bit smaller than most hospitals in the States, it was a brick building eight stories high with a meticulous lawn and a discreet sign that made it clear only the crème of society got sick here.
There were guards just inside the gate, along with an armored car behind them blocking the road to the building. Two more armored cars were parked opposite at the driveway, though I only spotted one soldier near it, and he seemed to be dozing. The entire property was walled off, and there were video cameras at the top.
Perched over the sea, the hospital had its own beach area. Barbed wire ran along the back wall, and I had to assume that there were video cameras there as well.
Obviously the best option was to go in the front door.
Red and Mongoose left the guesthouse about the same time I did, walking and then trotting to a wooded lot a few blocks away. There they changed into their working clothes—basic black—and continued to the clinic.
A jimmy of the window to the rear examining room proved unnecessary—it had been left unlocked. Red went in; Mongoose stepped over to the bushes and played lookout.
Red went immediately to the doctor’s office and began poking around. She spent a lot of time unlocking drawers and filing cabinets, but couldn’t find so much as an aspirin. She got excited when she found the closet in the hall locked, but the lock turned out to be protecting a vacuum cleaner. She couldn’t even find a hypo needle.
With no place else left to look, she went to the receptionist’s cubicle and sat down, trying to psych out where the drugs would be kept. An American doctor’s office would be awash in samples and all sorts of medications. She knew not to expect that here, but still was convinced there would be some medicine somewhere.
While she was thinking inside, Mongoose was watching a set of headlights approaching down the road. He thought at first it was me: the roads had been empty until that point, and I’d said that I’d loop back to pick them up when I was done if I hadn’t heard from them. But the car went directly into the lot without stopping.
“Somebody’s coming in,” he warned Red. “I think it’s the doctor. Shit. There’s a woman with him. Shit. Shit.”
There were about five more shits. By the last, Red had hidden herself in the closet with the vacuum cleaner.
The lights flipped on. The doctor walked to the back, apparently to get something out of his office. He whistled as he went, clearly in a good mood. Whatever he wanted wasn’t hard to find, and he quickly returned to the front.
There he stopped whistling. Other sounds of pleasure ensued.
“What’s going on?” asked Mongoose over the radio.
“He’s examining a patient,” answered Red. “It’ll be a while.”
Not as long as the doctor’s friend wished, apparently, and she soon started protesting.
“Another car coming,” warned Mongoose as a second car pulled into the parking lot.
A man and two women, all mildly high, got out.
“This ought to be interesting,” Mongoose told Red as they walked up the path.
That turned out to be an understatement. The newcomers were apparently expected, and within a few minutes the doctor’s friend had absolutely nothing to complain about.
Who says Mr. Murphy doesn’t have a sense of humor?
( II )
There were no drugs in the clinic at all, a fact that Red wasn’t in a position to determine until close to two in the morning. By then I was back in the hotel, makeup off, sipping a little Bombay Sapphire in anticipation of their return. Even without the orgy and with a sedative, I would have waited until the next night to get into Fidel’s room; my plan required a little preparation and I didn’t want to rush it.
Though doping Fidel might not be absolutely necessary, dulling the old bastard’s senses was desirable. So I decided to take a shot at procuring some drugs myself the next morning when my trick knee began acting up.
A very trick knee, as it only acts up on command.
It did this while I happened to be right across from a small suburban hospital.
I believe the nurse at the desk said something along the lines of, “Get the old coot a cane,” and tried to shoo us out. But Red insisted that her gray-haired uncle (my hair was still dyed to look like Fidel’s) needed care, and eventually we were shown seats and told the doctor would be with me shortly.
Same thing you hear in America, where it translates loosely into “don’t hold your breath.”
I
t meant roughly the same thing in Cuba. After a few minutes, the old coot got up to visit the facilities. Being an old coot, he walked right by the men’s room, past a few examining rooms, and into a pharmacy.
Or rather the back room of a pharmacy, which was a hell of a lot more convenient. The narcotics were kept in a screened-in cabinet at the back of the room maybe six feet from the door—close enough so that you could hear someone walking down the hall, but far enough away that you could duck back in time before they saw you.
It was a busy hospital. I ducked back twice before I was able to pick the lock, and three times more before I was able to locate the right shelf.
Because of shortages and bourgeoisie drug company policies like actually demanding money for their wares, the pharmacy was not as well stocked as an American hospital would be. There were a lot of off-brands and substitutions. I never did find the Demerol. But at least part of the reason was the fact that I found something a hell of a lot better, at least for my purposes: C11H17N2NaO2S, also known as thiopentone sodium, aka Trapanal, aka sodium thiopental, aka sodium pentathol.
That’s right, truth serum.
Famous for its ability to elicit information from targets in Cold War-era movies, sodium pentathol is actually just a very fast-working sedative. Whether it has any real ability to get the truth from people is a matter of debate—though it was used to extract information from a confessed serial killer in Nithari not too long ago. I pocketed a bottle, closed the cabinet, and backed out to the hallway, mumbling to myself as I continued my wanderings back in the direction of the waiting area.
“The doctor’s ready for you,” said Red as I came in.
“Good, let’s go.”
“You actually want to see him?”
“I’m hoping I can steal a syringe,” I told her, passing the serum off.
I didn’t get a syringe, but Red did, pilfering it from a tray outside the examining room. Just as importantly, she found two sets of doctors’ scrubs. She couldn’t fit them both into the large pocketbook she’d brought, and had to make two trips to get them out, by which time I’d received not only a cane and a bandage for my knee, but a fistful of Robaxacet: codeine-flavored aspirin substitute.
I prefer Dr. Bombay’s finest myself. But in my line of work, stockpiling painkillers is never a bad idea.
Trace and Doc were booked on a flight to leave Havana for Canada at four o’clock that afternoon. I decided that it would be a better idea if they could delay their departure until midnight or later, just in case I needed Trace to grab the helicopter. Danny found a 2:00 A.M. red-eye back to Toronto, perfect for our purposes. Then Doc went back to the well with Maggy MacKenzie, telling her that he wanted to treat her to a nice dinner as a good-bye gesture.
MacKenzie was wary, but even Cuban thought police don’t get to eat out in fancy restaurants all that often, and eventually she agreed that they should have one last meal on Doc’s television station.
Playing the imp, Trace asked if they wanted her to get sick again.
“No,” said MacKenzie, looking a little pale. “No.”
What is the vehicle that never gets turned away from a hospital?
If you guessed ambulance, you’ve never had an emergency in New York City or some other place where Medicaid reimbursement rates make treating the sick a losing proposition. The vehicle you’re looking for is a hearse.
The beauty of using a hearse to get past a security post is that even the most anal inspector feels uneasy taking a look at the furniture. None of us like to look too closely at our future.
Our hearse was parked at the back of a very fancy funeral home in the Miramar section of the city, at a funeral parlor I’d noted during our garbage run a few days before. Red and I paid them a visit at noon—a few minutes after the two proprietors went to dinner.
Red made a show of going up to the door and knocking, just in case we were wrong about the place being empty. I went around back, popped the hood on the ancient Cadillac, and had it started inside of thirty seconds, probably quicker than if I’d had the key.
I picked up Red a block away. We headed over to a building on the outskirts of town where we’d stashed our clothes and gear before boarding the bus to get there. Mongoose was waiting.
There was a coffin in the back. Red went around to the tailgate to take it out; bodies are generally removed from hospitals in a gurney and body bag.
“Holy Mary, Mother of God!” said Red, pulling open the lid on the coffin. “There’s a corpse in the box, Dick.”
She wasn’t kidding. An elder Cuban dressed in a fine suit complete with a slightly wrinkled rose lay in the coffin, waiting to meet his maker.
He looked too comfortable to disturb, so we put the lid back on and gently set the coffin down against the back wall. For all I know, he’s still there.
A half hour later, we pulled up to the gate in front of the hospital. The guards gave us a perfunctory search, then waved us through.28
We backed the hearse into a spot near the loading zone at the rear of the hospital, then got out and very deliberately took out the body bag and our gear. My makeup kit was inside one of the doctor bags; if anyone asked, we’d say it was to make the corpse look lifelike.
The video camera covering the back swiveled twice while we were taking the cases out; whoever was working the security desk had a thing for morticians, or at least short cute ones like Red.
Inside, though, it was a different story. The security guard at the door nodded but said nothing as we walked in. My black suit was a bit tight across the shoulders, and a size and a half too small in the thighs; it made me look extraordinarily stiff—appropriate under the circumstances. Red wore a similar suit, though hers was loose where mine was tight. Her hair was tucked up beneath her cap, and her chest had been restrained so that she looked more boy than girl—a precaution since we weren’t sure how common women funeral attendants were on the island.
The entrance fed into a hall that ran to our left and right; elevators were located about midway down each side. The set on our left featured a pair of soldiers in full combat regalia, along with an officious-looking young man with thick rimmed glasses and a clipboard.
We turned to our left, passed the elevator there, and ducked into the stairwell. I leaned against the door, resisting the urge to hum the stripper song as Red quickly pulled her funeral suit off to reveal her nurse’s uniform.
“Top floor, let’s go,” I told her as she slipped on her sneakers and put her dress shoes in one of the suitcases. We double-timed up the steps to the sixth floor. Trace’s routine of wind sprints paid off; we reached the top landing without losing our breath. Red adjusted her makeup, glanced at me, then slipped out into the hall.
Our first order of business was to locate Fidel and scout the defenses. We’d guessed that Fidel was staying on the top floor, since it had the best view of the ocean and would be easier to guard, but we’d guessed wrong. Only one of the rooms was occupied. A pale old woman lay in the middle of her bed, covers off, talking nonstop at the ceiling as Red passed by her door.
The only other person on the floor was a bored nurse reading a magazine at a station at the far end of the hall. She gave Red an odd look as she walked down it.
“Wrong floor,” muttered Red after going all the way to the end of the hall and turning back around. “I’m such a bird brain.”
“Why are you taking the stairs?” asked the nurse as Red started to open the door.
“Exercise.”
Red pushed through, shaking her head. A moment later, the door opened behind her.
“You know you’re not supposed to take the stairs,” hissed the nurse. “If the soldiers see you, you will be fired like Debra.”
Fortunately, I’d been waiting at the next landing and was just out of her view. I ducked back beneath the stairs, listening as Red turned and went back.
“God, I forgot,” said Red, going back. “I’m trying to lose weight. So I walk everywhere.”
�
��You? Lose weight? You’ll be a scarecrow,” said the other nurse. “You need some meat to grow boobs. That’s how you get the men. And where is your tag?”
Red patted her hip, as if expecting to find the ID tag there.
“It must have fallen off downstairs,” she said.
“Now you’re really going to be in trouble.”
“I can’t be fired,” blurted Red. “What would Papa do?”
“It must be on the stairs somewhere,” said the older nurse. “Go look. Be quick and quiet—if you hear someone coming, hide.”
Solid advice, under any circumstances.
“Remember—stay away from the fourth floor,” added the nurse.
“Of course. I’m not a fool,” answered Red, closing the door. She winked at me. “He’s on the fourth floor.”
I told Red to stay put while I went back down to the first floor and took the elevator up to scout around. There were three other people in the elevator when I got in, all going to the third floor.
I pressed five, then waited. As soon as the others got out, I pressed four, only to find it didn’t work.
An elevator key fixed that. More difficult were the two soldiers standing directly in front of the doors when they opened.
“Who are you?” said the one on the left roughly. The other just glared. Both had AK47s in their fists—the cuddly paratrooper model with its folding stock and cute banana clip. “How did you get onto this floor?”
“Here for the body,” I said.
“Out, out, you’re on the wrong floor.”
I glanced around, pretending to be lost. Another pair of guards stood at the nurses’ station in the center of the ward. The second elevator was located just beyond them. This was set up as a checkpoint, with a small table and a functionary who was apparently reviewing potential visitors to see if they were on Fidel’s must-see list. A small group of these lucky duckies stood in a line behind the table, apparently queued up to enter Fidel’s room, which appeared to be the second from the end on the right.
RW15 - Seize the Day Page 24