The guard returned with three Styrofoam cups of coffee that smelled vaguely of kerosene.
“Serve yourselves,” he said, placing the tray on a table that was pushed up against the mirror. “I brought you sugar and Coffee Mate and half a dozen doughnuts.” He left, taking his bad breath with him.
“Not a bad guy,” Lonsdale mumbled as though trying to convince himself, his mouth full of sticky dough.
“Yeah. Well, rank hath its privileges.” Quesada remarked, taking a gulp of his coffee. He had a very slight Spanish accent.
“You from Cuba?” Lonsdale wanted to know.
“Originally, yes. I came here when I was thirteen.”
“So you speak Spanish.”
“Of course. Do either of the two of you?”
“I wish I did.” Morton bit into his doughnut.
“And you?” Quesada fixed Lonsdale with a baleful look.
Lonsdale decided to lie. “I speak English and a little French, that's all.”
Quesada sighed. “That's a pity. Spanish sure would help.”
“Let's just see how things play out, shall we?” Morton's voice was hard, cold, and dispassionate.
Quesada shrugged, pointed to the chairs facing the mirror and switched off the lights. The mirror turned into a transparent pane of glass, on the other side of which in a windowless, but brightly lit cell an unkempt, unshaven man lay sleeping in slacks and a long-sleeved shirt on an army-type cot. His shoes were on the floor beside the cot, his jacket under his head doubled as a pillow.
“He says his name is Fernandez and that he is a captain in Fidel's army. He had a million dollars in cash on him when he arrived.” Quesada spoke matter-of-factly.
“Counterfeit?” asked Morton.
Quesada shook his head. “He also says that for the last little while he has been coordinating the movement through Cuban waters of Colombian ships carrying drugs. He gave me some interesting information, but stopped talking, because first he wants assurances from the CIA that it will protect him.”
“From whom?” Morton was curious.
“The Medellin cartel and the Cuban secret police.”
“Did he say who his boss was?” Lonsdale was suddenly very much awake.
“He says he reports directly to a Cuban Army brigadier general called Patricio Casas Rojo, who commands all Cuban troops in Africa. This general is also supposed to be the quartermaster general of the Cuban Army.”
“Who fixes things with the Cuban Coast Guard?”
“I suppose the general.”
“And with the air force?”
“Also the general, I guess.”
Lonsdale wouldn't let go. “And with the coastal defense people?”
Quesada threw up his hands. “I suppose the general does that, too.”
“That's bullshit and you know it, Quesada.” Lonsdale feigned indignation. “Only someone high up in the Cuban Ministry of the Interior would have pull strong enough to coordinate all this. I'm sure this must have occurred to you while talking to Fernandez, so do us all a favor and start over again, but this time give details and be specific and accurate.”
It took a miffed Quesada an hour to oblige.
“Do you believe all this?” Morton asked Lonsdale after the man had finished.
“I believe that Fernandez believes it.”
“But why?”
“Because he's either scared shitless or crazy.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Look, Jim.” Lonsdale was pacing back and forth, his eyes on the sleeping Cuban. “This guy is a foot soldier who's supposed to follow orders no questions asked. But he now feels he's being left to hang out to dry. None of his orders are in writing. No one, except this General Casas knows about what he's doing, so if something goes wrong or some money goes missing the guy who would get the blame, who'd be made to take the fall, would be him.”
“But there's no money missing, just the opposite: there's too much money.” Morton couldn't help looking puzzled.
“What do you mean by too much money?”
“You heard Quesada. He said Fernandez told him there was an extra million bucks in the sub-account that should not have been there.”
“Which he took,” added Quesada.
“Which he was made, no, ordered, to take.”
Trust Morton to start splitting hairs, Lonsdale said to himself
“This, in turn,” Lonsdale picked up where he had left off, “could mean the Colombians, or a friend of theirs, were sending a bribe to parties unknown and that Fernandez may be the unwitting messenger to deliver it. Fernandez is right to be scared shitless. One way or another someone not particularly friendly will be calling on him soon to collect the money.” Lonsdale shrugged.
“But why should that worry Fernandez? He could have given up the money, got paid for his troubles, and then gone back to Cuba. He'd have been safe there. He's in the army and his boss knew what he was up to.” It was obvious Quesada was not buying any of Lonsdale's analysis.
Lonsdale gave Quesada a jaundiced look. “If you were in the recipient's shoes would you want a potentially dangerous witness against you to be wandering around alive?” He headed for the door. “There are two possible explanations for Fernandez acting the way he is, but before I lay them on you I want to think them through once more.”
“Where are you going?” asked the bewildered Quesada.
“First to freshen up, then to have a chat with our friend here.” He nodded toward the prisoner.
A glance at his face in the bathroom mirror surprised Lonsdale. He didn't look as bad as he felt. He smiled when he saw an athletic-looking man with short sandy hair, a generous nose, and an expressive mouth looking back at him. Obviously, his regimen of jogging five miles at least three times a week had paid off. He looked vital and slim and much younger than his fifty-five years.
He took off his bifocals, washed his hands, and splashed his face with cold water. The lines around his speckled, hazel eyes, however, suggested a deep-seated weariness no amount of sleep could cure.
After his wife's tragic death Lonsdale had taken up residence in Georgetown, a fashionable district of Washington, and gradually changed from a fast-living, fun-loving socialite to a reclusive, quiet loner. He was not lonely, just alone, and he enjoyed being so. His job required ferocious focus and this meant that, essentially, he needed solitude.
Not that he was without social contact. On the contrary. He played squash and breakfasted with his acquaintances at least twice a week, and the women he bedded (of whom there were quite a few) invariably fell in love with him. He could be a real charmer when he wanted to be, and his aura of mysterious suffering fascinated them.
But he belonged to no club or church or organization, attended very few social functions, and kept his thoughts and feelings to himself. The only person Lonsdale allowed an occasional glimpse into his private self was Jim Morton, his immediate superior, whom he considered to be not only a colleague, but also a friend.
Though Lonsdale had pretended to Quesada that he could not speak Spanish, he was very much at ease in the language. Nonetheless, he conducted the interview with Fernandez in English.
“And you say you were afraid to return to your posting because there was too much money in the account? I don't find that credible.” He'd been baiting Fernandez for some time, but the Cuban would not be shaken.
“I told you already, and I will tell you again,” he said. The man had a deliberate way about him, and his speech reflected it. “I am exposed, I am unprotected. If General Casas wants to destroy me, he can. Nobody else can back up my story. If he says I am a liar, I am a liar, and I am dead.” His slightly accented English was just about flawless.
“But why would he want you dead?”
Fernandez shrugged. “I don't know. I have been trying to figure this out ever since I found the new account and all the money. Everything was going really well. There were no problems; the operations were being conducted with military pre
cision—”
“They were military operations, remember?”
“Yes, and we were operating like clockwork. The money was good too.”
“Where did the money go after being transferred to Panama?”
“Nowhere. It stayed there in a special account, ready for use by Department Z.”
“Department Z?”
“Yes, the Ministry of the Interior set it up to circumvent the U.S. blockade.”
“How?”
“Originally certain officials in the Ministry of the Interior were given some dollars, which they were allowed to smuggle out to Panama. They used the money to buy medicine and essential spare parts that they smuggled back to Cuba. That's how it all started.”
“And then?”
“Then they ran out of money and someone, I think Comrade De la Fuente, suggested the drug idea to them.”
“Tell me again who Comrade De la Fuente is”
“Mr. Bob or whatever your name is,” Fernandez was getting exasperated. “I've already told you about him three times.”
Lonsdale gave the man a bleak smile. “Then tell me about him for the fourth time,” he said, his voice icy cold, “and leave out none of the details.”
Fernandez sighed and started again. “General Casas told me that the idea of Department Z was Fidel's. He put comrade De la Fuente in charge of creating it and he got General Casas to help.”
“Why?”
“Comrade De la Fuente is a deputy minister in the Ministry of the Interior. In this new situation he needed the cooperation of the armed forces. The Ministry has no authority over the army.”
“Go on.”
“General Casas also told me that De la Fuente then went to Raul, Fidel's brother, who is also our secretary of defense. Raul appointed General Casas to act as coordinator between the Ministry and the army to make Department Z work.” The Cuban took a sip from the glass of water on the table, and then continued. “We started to operate in the mid-eighties, buying sensitive materials wherever we could find them.”
“Where?”
“Everywhere, but especially in Canada, Holland, and Germany.” Fernandez stopped talking. He was an old hand at the interrogation game. By making Lonsdale prompt him he would tire Lonsdale and give himself a rest. But Lonsdale, recognizing a professional, would not play. He got up and left.
“Found out anything new?” Morton was anxious to hear.
“In a way, I guess I did, Jim. Fernandez confirmed what I was beginning to suspect: there can be only two explanations for Fernandez's behavior.”
“Namely?”
“General Casas is either a very decent human being, ashamed that Fidel Castro's morals have degenerated to the point where he is willing to deal in drugs, or Casas is a front for the Cuban security people in a sting against the CIA.”
“Explain.”
“Assume that Casas is straight. He wants to tell us about the drug thing, but he's closely watched. He can't order Fernandez to defect and come to us. Doing so would irrevocably damage Casas's position if things went wrong. So he scares Fernandez into doing so by compromising him through messing around with his bank account and practically ordering him to take the extra money and run.”
“Got it.”
“Now let's assume that Casas is not straight and that he is trying to sucker us into denouncing Fidel for being a drug dealer. He'd make Fernandez do the exact same thing as if he were an honest injun, except that, in such a scenario, Fernandez would be in the know.”
Morton nodded. “I understand this too, but where would the sting part come in?”
“After our having denounced Fidel, the Cubans would provide irrefutable proof to a five-star international panel of neutral observers that they weren't in bed with the Medellin cartel and that what we took for being drug-transport ships were in reality vessels carrying some innocuous material such as medicine or foodstuffs.”
“And Uncle Sam would have egg all over his face.”
The long silence that followed was broken by Quesada. “What do we do with Fernandez now?”
Lonsdale bit into a stale ham sandwich and washed it down with tepid coffee. It was past one o'clock in the afternoon, and everybody was edgy. “Leave him alone in there for a while, but turn off the lights and the air conditioning. Let him stew.”
“What about his civil rights?” Quesada was concerned.
“He has no civil rights. He came in on a forged passport— remember?”
“He's a Cuban refugee. He's seeking political asylum. He's protected by special laws.” Quesada had been the one with whom Reyes Puma had negotiated Fernandez's surrender and it would be Quesada whom the lawyer would crucify if Fernandez were maltreated.
“So we had a power failure.” Lonsdale wanted Fernandez to sweat.
“Ease up fella.” Morton spoke quietly but with authority. “You know very well Quesada is for the high jump if Fernandez turns out to be valuable and word got out that we roughed him up. Besides, what else can he tell us just now anyway?”
Morton's logic was unassailable, but Lonsdale was not ready to give in. “I need a week to check on his story, and by then I'd like our boy to be really insecure. Babying him won't help me.”
“Let's leave that problem to our people downtown,” Morton said with finality.
CHAPTER FOUR
Saturday
Havana, Cuba
The little garden was just as Patricio remembered it: cool, cozy, and suffused with the heavy scent of white lilies. The hard-bodied, graying, and distinguished-looking quartermaster general of the Cuban Army and commander of all Cuban forces in Africa, Patricio Casas Rojo, had been given the house and garden on Calle 28 in Vedado by a grateful Fidel Castro at whose side Casas had fought in the Sierra Maestra for three tough years.
Now well into middle age, Patricio could still vividly remember the day when, as a wiry boy of sixteen, he had first met his leader. “So you're the holy terror everyone's been talking about,” Fidel had said to him. “The fearless fghter, ambushing Batista's men left and right.”
He had stood his ground, waiting for Fidel to stop joshing, embarrassed and much too aware of the people around him in the sunlit clearing, laughing with him ... or was it at him? He hadn't been able to tell, but it hadn't mattered. In those days of trial by fire, his dedication to Fidel and to the Revolution had been absolute. And he did have a special kind of talent, an instinct that always told him where to position himself in battle for maximum effect, for the greatest firepower, for the most startling surprise. Within six months of having joined the Rebel Army he had been named platoon leader and allowed to initiate operations against the enemy without supervision from headquarters. He was a born soldier, and Fidel had been quick to recognize the youngster's special skills.
Casas had been nineteen the year Batista had fied Cuba, but there had remained much to be done and Casas had volunteered to stay on in the army for a while. Though Cuba was at peace, the ever-present threat of invasion by the United States required that her fighting forces have talented, competent, and devoted leaders. In the end, Casas, who qualified on all counts, was persuaded to make soldiering his career. He married a girl he had met in the Sierra, settled down in Havana, and became the father of two beautiful little girls.
A captain at the time of the Bay of Pigs, he had driven to the battle zone in a taxi, ahead of everybody, and had immediately taken charge of the eastern front. The nation and its leader had been grateful.
When he was sent to Russia for further training and to become a good Communist, his wife, who didn't like his being away so often, left him after a few years. She took the kids with her, but he'd kept the house and moved his widowed mother in to look after it.
His mother greeted him as he walked into the house: “Go wash your hands, Patricio.” She still treated him as if he were a child. “You want to set a good example for your daughters.” Casas laughed and hugged the gnarled old woman lovingly. His daughters were in their mid–teens and unl
ikely to be impressed by their father's clean hands.
He considered the multiple meanings of clean hands as he removed his watch and began to scrub in the downstairs bathroom, carefully avoiding the scar on his wrist. It was still tender, although the accident with the phosphorous grenade had happened more than a year before.
Clean hands indeed, the hands of a murderer, a drug dealer, a cheat.
The Revolution had been pure and noble—all for the people. Casas had seen that. The son of a foreman on a tobacco farm in Pinar del Rio, luck had been with him during Batista's reign. There had always been food on the table and a roof over their heads because his father had learned to read and write and do arithmetic.
Casas had started work at thirteen, backbreaking work in the tobacco fields and lofts. He had been a good-humored boy with a friendly, open smile, always ready to help. The smile and the good humor had stood him in good stead in the Sierra, and later on as well. Soldiers sought to serve under him because he was approachable, brave, and fair.
Batista had been a murdering liar and cheat and a corrupt puppet of the U.S. national crime syndicate run by Myer Lansky. In the forties and ffties there was misery in Cuba; prostitution and drug dealing were rampant, government officials were corrupt, and there was no medical help for the poor. Twenty-five percent of the population couldn't read or write since schooling was available only in the towns and cities; los campesinos, the farmers, in the villages and on the farms were condemned to live in ignorance, neglect, and abject poverty.
Along came Fidel Castro and the nation united behind him. He and his followers believed that it was not power that corrupted, but misery. Fidel had tremendous popular support, and in the end, the rule of the army and police thugs, the gorillas, came to an end.
Deeply insulted by the Eisenhower administration's dismissive attitude toward him, and egged on by Che Guevara, who was constantly haranguing him about the United States's intention to try to reimpose its will on the people of Cuba, Fidel turned to Russia for help. The Americans responded by blockading the island and the country's economic situation deteriorated because help from the Soviet Union was insufficient to counteract the effects of the blockade.
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