The Aztec Heresy

by Paul Christopher

  Using his parents’ insurance money and his own trust fund, Max Kessler purchased the house in Georgetown and had lived there ever since, maintaining it as both home and office. He never married, had no hobbies, pastimes, or friends. He never met with clients or anyone else at the house on N Street and never cooked there, preferring to eat all his meals at any one of an endless supply of restaurants on M Street. Work was everything, knowledge was everything, information was everything. Power was everything.

  Max had inherited more than money and a facility with languages from his father. He had also inherited his father’s obsessive need to catalogue and order every facet of his life. His last inheritance was less ephemeral than the others: he had inherited his father’s files, Der Wunderkasten, as Kurt Kessler called them, the Magic Boxes.

  The boxes, five hundred of them, each held a thousand three-by-five index cards, each card having a neatly typed entry of up to one hundred and fifty coded words summarizing one of Reinhard Gehlen’s private files on agents and activities from Vladivostok to Moscow and from Leningrad to Odessa.

  Originally intended to be nothing more than a backup to the originals in case of accident or fire, the cards eventually became a ticket out of the horrors that came with the end of the war. Gehlen’s own file copies of his records filled three large trucks when the Gehlen Organization fled to Miesbach; Kurt Kessler, seeing the collapse of Hitler’s Germany even before Gehlen, had called in a favor or two with the Luftwaffe reconnaissance people and had his index cards photographed under an animation camera at what was left of one of the UFA film labs in Berlin. His half million index cards were spirited out of Germany in three large film cans that could easily be carried in a single suitcase.

  Using his father’s filmed files as the basis for his own system, and the extensive fallout shelter Jack Kennedy had secretly built in the basement of the house on N Street, Max Kessler added to his patrimony with coded files of his own. In the first ten years he doubled the size of his father’s files, and over the next ten years he quadrupled the number.

  Even with the advent of computers, nothing changed in the private world of Max Kessler. Each card was typed on a sturdy IBM Executive and the tape ribbons were individually destroyed in the living room fireplace as they were used. In 1990 he purchased a Kodak rotary microfilm camera and installed it in the basement, slowly but surely transferring his file cards to film, just like his father had.

  From that point on he kept only the last five years’ worth of cards on hand, archiving the rest. Nowhere in the house was there a copy of the code Max Kessler used to input his information onto the cards. The individual file drawers stacked in the basement were all locked and alarmed, as was the microfilm storage area of archived cards, which occupied a fireproof vault that was also connected to Max Kessler’s alarm system. The bomb shelter entrance was itself disguised as well as being locked and alarmed.

  As a further element of his efficient system he microfilmed each and every check given to him by his clients, invariably depositing the checks into a rotating and ever-changing series of banks in several states, then transferring the funds to a bank in Switzerland that he still considered to be the most discreet, despite their recent problems regarding Holocaust accounts. Max and his father had shared the same account at Baer & Cie, Geneva, since 1945, the year of Max Kessler’s birth, without any problems or indiscretions. His father had dealt directly with Joseph Baer and Max dealt with his son, Fritz.

  To Max Kessler trust was anathema. There was only a single attic window on the east and west sides of the house, and both the front and rear windows were covered in polarizing film. The laneway at the back was a dead end and the cameras at the rear of the house were all infrared. He swept his house every day for electronic bugs, had a total of six other digital surveillance cameras installed on the outside of his house, and had never even considered using a cell phone or a PDA. One of his professors at Georgetown University had once commented on the neat, tiny handwriting of his essays to a fellow professor as being the work of an antisocial anal-retentive Luddite. Most of his fellow students simply thought of him as a freak and kept out of his way.

  On this particular day Max Kessler was having lunch at Leopold’s, a small café-restaurant in the courtyard off Cady’s Alley, a narrow pedestrian walkway just off M Street. He was having his regular afternoon meal: Miesmuscheln—mussels in white wine and herbed potatoes—to be followed by Mohr im Hemdt—chocolate mousse with hazelnut ice cream—and finishing with a German coffee, coffee with Kirschwasser cherry brandy, sugar, and whipped cream, the only time he drank anything alcoholic.

  At five minutes to two Max Kessler finished his meal and paid for it, leaving an appropriate tip, then walked back down Cady’s Alley to M Street. At exactly 2:00 p.m. a black Lincoln Town Car slid down M Street, driving west, and pulled over to the curb directly in front of Kessler. He opened the rear door, entered the car, and sat back against the black leather seat.

  ‘‘Site Three,’’ said Max, and the car moved off. Site Three was a park bench on the Mall directly in front of the National Museum of Natural History and directly across from the red-brick Smithsonian Castle, and getting there involved some complicated maneuvering up and down Washington’s maze of one-way streets. The car dropped him off in front of the museum on the Madison Drive side, and Kessler walked across the street and turned onto the broad gravel path. As usual the grass on the Mall was spotty, brown with neglect and burnt by too much sun, dog urine, and excrement, not to mention the litter, which wasn’t surprising in a post-9/11 world, where trash containers were a potential target for hordes of brown-skinned terrorists and had all been removed years ago.

  He glanced up the Mall toward the Capitol. That, of course, was where the real terrorists could be found, in Congress and the Senate. The terrorism of Greed and Stupidity, Kessler called it. He smiled. No matter; he had files on each and every one of them and had made a great deal of money from them as clients, trading secrets of the one to the curiosity of the other.

  Kessler sat down on the designated bench, folded his small hands in his lap, and waited. Five minutes later his client-to-be sat down beside him. He was a large man, tall, broad-shouldered, and well dressed in a tailored suit that made him look like a lawyer or a banker. His skin was very tanned, his brownish hair streaked by a lot of sun, his eyes light blue and hard.

  ‘‘What do you know about Angel Guzman?’’ asked the hard-eyed man.

  ‘‘A great deal,’’ said Kessler, who’d done his research.

  ‘‘Tell me.’’

  ‘‘He’s a Mexican warlord. On his father’s side he is the illegitimate grandson of Dr. Arnulfo Arias, the three-time president of Panama. On his mother’s side he is the grandson of a puta, a whore from Mexico City. He is considered to be completely insane. He collects the mutilated sex organs of his enemies the way soldiers in Vietnam collected ears. He is the last of the great cocainistas, men like Pablo Escobar. He wants to use all his money and power to make the Yucatán a separate state, and after that he thinks he can spawn a new Mexican Revolution. The general consensus is that he wants to be king.’’ Max Kessler stopped.

  ‘‘Is that it?’’ said the man beside him. ‘‘I could have got that much off Wikipedia.’’

  ‘‘That is most certainly not all,’’ answered Kessler. ‘‘The file on Señor Guzman is a considerable one and very detailed. Sex habits, his curious concern for his bowels. His fear of escalators. His private radio codes. The names of the key people in his organization both in Mexico and in other places, the location of his headquarters in the jungles of Quintana Roo.’’

  ‘‘Jesus, you know all that?’’

  ‘‘And more.’’ Kessler nodded.

  ‘‘How do I get my hands on the information? ’’

  ‘‘By paying me a great deal of money.’’

  ‘‘How much?’’

  ‘‘Two hundred and fifty thousand dollars,’’ said Kessler blandly.

  ‘�
�A little steep, isn’t it?’’

  ‘‘You can afford it.’’

  ‘‘That’s irrelevant. It’s still a lot of money.’’

  ‘‘Then don’t pay it.’’

  ‘‘Your father was a Nazi, right?’’

  ‘‘Three hundred thousand dollars,’’ murmured Kessler.

  ‘‘All right. When can I get the file?’’

  ‘‘As soon as you give me the money,’’ said Kessler.

  ‘‘Half when I get the file, half when I’ve read it.’’

  ‘‘Don’t be silly,’’ said Kessler. ‘‘All of it when I put the file in your hands. Hard copy, microfiche, or microfilm. Scanned onto a memory stick, if you prefer, it’s all the same to me.’’ The scanner was Kessler’s only nod to twenty-first -century technology, but it had become necessary simply for the sake of transportability.

  ‘‘You’ve got to be joking!’’ the man exclaimed. ‘‘You expect me to pay you that kind of money, sight unseen?’’

  ‘‘I expect nothing,’’ said Kessler, standing. ‘‘And I never joke. Ask your father. Three hundred and fifty thousand dollars.’’

  ‘‘You said three hundred!’’

  ‘‘I don’t like your tone,’’ said Kessler. ‘‘Let me know what you decide.’’ He glanced at his watch. The car would be waiting outside the museum in a minute or two. He turned away from the bench and headed back down the path. A Rottweiler on a leash was squatting on the grass, having a gargantuan bowel movement; the creature’s owner, a pretty young woman in a flowered skirt and sweater, was looking on like a proud parent, a clear plastic bag wrapped inside-out around her hand. Kessler wondered if she’d noticed there wasn’t a trash bin for miles around.

  He reached the loading zone in front of the museum just as the Lincoln reappeared. He climbed into the rear of the car and gave the driver his instruction.

  ‘‘Home, please.’’

  The driver nodded and pulled smoothly away from the curb. Kessler sank back against the leather once again. He closed his eyes. A good lunch and an interesting meeting. It demonstrated one of his father’s favorite credos when it came to intelligence gathering: sometimes the questions asked were more useful than the answers. Why did Harrison Noble, the dilettante owner of Noble Ventures, a treasure-hunting company, and the son of the pharmaceutical billionaire James Jonas Noble, want detailed information on a Mexican thug and drug lord based in the wilds of the Yucatán jungle? And why now?

  5

  Capitán de Navio Arkady Tomas Cruz stood at the wheel of the stinking old fish boat and smoked a cigarette. Behind him the few lights of the village he used as a navigation marker were beginning to fade on the far side of the bay. He adjusted his course a little, feeling the helm sluggishly answer to the motion of the wheel.

  The boat was the Cuban version of a classic North Carolina Core Sounder with a low, graceful sheer sweeping up to a flared bow, while the after end was almost daintily curved, offering no sharp edges to snag the nets. There was a simple cabin forward that sheltered a minimal galley, a pair of berths, and a bad-weather steering station with a hatchlike windowed box for the helmsman to look around. The boat was thirty-five feet long and carried a rusted old Guantánamo province registration plate on the bow. The name Panda was roughly painted in black on the stern. It was most definitely not Arkady Tomas Cruz’s usual command.

  Arkady Tomas was a hybrid with the dark, tanned, almost Indio looks of his Cuban father and the high cheekbones and bright blue eyes of his Russian mother. His parents had met in Russia, his father a student at the First Leningrad Medical Institute, his mother a physicist at the Admiralty Shipyards, which dated back to the times of the czars. Arkady spent his early years in Leningrad, journeying back to Cuba once a year with his father but never quite feeling as though he belonged.

  He spoke Spanish well, but not quite like a native, and somehow the coldness of the country of his birth seemed to infuse itself into his personality, making him shy and distant. He graduated from the Nachimovsky Naval School in 1984 and in 1986 from the Higher Naval School for Submariners. He spent the early part of his career on both Juliet and Foxtrot submarines, and on the death of his mother in 1992 he returned to Cuba with his father. From 1993 until their decommissioning he was in overall command of the four Foxtrot submarines in the Cuban fleet.

  By 2000 that fleet was down to one active submarine doing occasional coastal patrols, and by 2004 the last sub was rated as inactive, although there were some rumors that it had sunk somewhere in the Windward Passage and had been lost with all hands. For Arkady during that time there had been a brief marriage of no account to a woman named Marina Gelfriel, who worked as a junior curator at the Hermitage, but since most of his time was spent in the northern bases like Vidyaevo, a hundred miles north of Murmansk beyond the Arctic Circle, the marriage was doomed to icy failure from the start. Thankfully there had been no children.

  Arkady Tomas looked toward the headland a mile or so away. Dense jungle, and even this far out in the water he could taste the stink of it in his nostrils, like hot steam pouring off some cooking broth. He smiled, feeling the sweat in his armpits and along his spine, still able to remember the white, frozen hell of the Kola Peninsula; the place he’d once thought of as his home. He ducked his head and lit another Popular. He held the cigarette between his teeth against the wind and turned the wheel another couple of points to round the headland and guide the boat into the next bay.

  Ahead of him now, half a mile away, was the rusting hulk of a ship, a sour jarring geometry against the wall of convoluted, color-splashed jungle that served as its backdrop. The wreck stood two hundred yards or so off the ragged empty shore, stern in, torn in half when she foundered. The bow section was ripped away, sunk into the deeper waters beyond the shoals where the wreck now lay.

  Arkady Tomas Cruz knew the ship’s history well. She was the SS Atlantic Champion, also known as the SS Angela Harrison in her later years, built by the Welding Shipyards in Kure, Japan, in 1954 for National Bulk Carriers and the largest tanker afloat at the time of her construction. She was originally 854 feet long and 125 feet wide, with a spindly four-story-high navigation bridge in the forward section and a lower deckhouse aft. Luckily, at the time of her demise in 1974, she had been under tow to the scrap yards in Spain and had spilled no cargo on the Golfo de Guacanayabo shore. Her owners, by then a Panamanian company, had made no attempt to salvage her, given the difficulties of dealing with the Cuban government. After having anything of value stripped from her by local entrepreneurs, she languished for a decade, slowly settling, becoming part of the landscape, invisible except to fresh eyes.

  The Panda grumbled slowly into the looming shadow of the massive tanker and Arkady Tomas breathed in the scent of iron and peeling paint that had baked in the hot, unrelieved sunlight throughout the daylight hours. He grinned; the interior of the hull would have been a furnace for most of the day, only now cooling to a reasonable temperature. The privileges of rank.

  He turned the wheel a few degrees, disappearing around the flank of the tanker on the windward side. The huge wall of rotting steel now stood between him and possible watching eyes on the shore. Twenty yards along he saw the gaping hole in the ship’s side, turned the wheel slightly once more, and guided the Panda inside the yawning cavern of the old ship’s hull.

  With almost idiotic irony the idea had come from a James Bond movie. Produced in 1977, three years after the grounding of the SS Angela Harrison off the beaches of Baracoa, the film’s plot revolved around a giant supertanker that swallowed submarines. The idea that a supertanker could open up its bow section and inhale a couple of nuclear subs was obviously science fiction. The idea that a wrecked tanker on an isolated coast could camouflage an active base for a Russian-Cuban Foxtrot-class submarine was not. In the mid ’80s, while there was still money in the Soviet coffers, the hull of the old tanker had been gutted and refitted as a staging base for covert submarine patrols. By the time of the fall of the Soviet
Union and the beginning of what Castro began calling the Difficult Times, there was barely any reason for a Cuban navy, let alone four expensive-to-operate examples of what was already an outmoded class of nonnuclear submarine; there was, however, a reason to keep one of them: Admiralty Shipyard’s Hull B-510, launched on October 20, 1983, and handed over to the Cuban Revolutionary Navy in February of the following year. The reason was as ironic and fundamentally ludicrous as the plot for the James Bond Movie The Spy Who Loved Me.

  Since 1972 the United States Navy, in conjunction with the CIA and the American Telephone and Telegraph Company, had been tapping the Soviet telephone cables in the Sea of Okhotsk and the Barents Sea using induction recording equipment that was serviced as regularly as a mailman’s route. For a decade the Americans had been listening in on secret military communications between Soviet naval bases and their superiors in Moscow. Eventually, late in 1982, the Soviets discovered the so-called tap-pods, which had numerous parts within them stamped ‘‘Made in the U.S.A." Even though the taps had been discovered, it was still regarded as one of the great intelligence coups of the Cold War. The Americans, in their inevitable arrogance, had never considered that the same thing might be done to them.

  The arrogance wasn’t entirely misplaced. Most secure military and intelligence communications outside the United States were carried on encrypted satellite signals, and had been since Telstar and the earliest telecommunications satellites of the sixties. There was only one place where this was not the case: Havana.

  The U.S. Special Interest Section of the Swiss embassy knew perfectly well that the huge Signals Intelligence Center at Lourdes, just beyond the airport, was capable of trapping and tracing any satellite calls made to the mainland, so the nine heavily encrypted high-speed data lines running out of the embassy used the original Cuban American Telephone and Telegraph cable that ran from Havana Harbor to Key West, coming to the surface in a concrete conduit between Fort Zachary Taylor Park and Whitehead Spit. The cable, installed in 1921, was still the only direct-dial link between the two countries. Turnabout was fair play and Cuban intelligence had been tapping the cable since 1986, using the Foxtrot B-510 to service the intercept.