‘‘What exactly are we looking at?’’ Briney Hanson asked, lighting up another of his perfumed clove cigarettes. Beside him Run-Run McSeveney wrinkled his nose at the smell, but even he knew better than to say anything.
‘‘A lump, o’ course,’’ said the half-Chinese Scotsman.
‘‘But a lump of what?’’ asked Guido. ‘‘It has the appearance of something very bad that sometimes floats to the surface of the canals in Amsterdam.’’
‘‘I’m still not sure why you’d retrieve a thing like that in the first place,’’ said Billy as they all stared at the object. ‘‘Not particularly attractive to my untrained eye.’’ He shook his head. ‘‘I’m inclined to agree with Guido.’’
The object was a little more than a foot long, roughly tubular, and nine or ten inches in diameter. It had a dark, tarry surface and was slightly pinched at both ends. In a word, it was ugly.
‘‘Dàn juān,’’ said Run-Run.
‘‘Don Juan?’’ Billy said. ‘‘What’s he got to do with it?’’
‘‘Dàn juān,’’ repeated the diminutive engineer. ‘‘Egg roll, ya sassenach gogan. I thought ya said ya went to Oxford Univairsity?’’
‘‘All right,’’ said Billy, looking across at Finn on the other side of the table. ‘‘It’s a fossilized bit of Chinese takeaway from five hundred years ago. It still doesn’t explain why you hauled it back up on the Hispaniola.’’
‘‘It’s because it’s so . . . useless,’’ explained Finn. ‘‘You’re right. It looks like . . .’’
‘‘It looks like a giant black taird,’’ said Run-Run drily.
‘‘Exactly,’’ answered Finn with a smile. ‘‘So what’s it doing in the captain’s cabin? Why would he have such an ugly, unpleasant-looking thing in his possession?’’
‘‘What the dog did in the nighttime,’’ Billy said and nodded.
‘‘Ay?’’ said Run-Run.
‘‘Sherlock Holmes,’’ explained Billy.
‘‘Ay?’’ Run-Run repeated.
‘‘Another time,’’ said Billy. ‘‘It’s an Oxford thing.’’
Finn turned away from the table and checked the array of instruments laid out behind her. She slipped on a pair of latex surgical gloves from a dispenser, picked up a Stryker cast-cutting saw, and turned back to the table. She held down the long black object, and applied the blade of the little circular saw to the upper edge. She switched on the saw and trailed it down the length of the object applying almost no pressure.
‘‘Phew!’’ Run-Run said, wrinkling his nose as a horrible stench filled the room.
‘‘Burning rubber,’’ muttered Briney Hanson.
‘‘Gutta-percha,’’ explained Finn, ‘‘or in this case, more probably chicle or gutta-balatá.’’
‘‘Chicle, as in Chiclets?’’ Eli Santoro asked.
Finn nodded. ‘‘It was used to make chewing gum originally. Gutta-percha’s a kind of rubber. They used it to insulate transatlantic cables. They still use it in dentistry. Gutta-balatá is a Central American version, almost identical.’’
‘‘Waterproofing,’’ said Billy, suddenly understanding.
‘‘That’s it,’’ said Finn. It took another five minutes with the saw to peel off the thick, slightly tarry layer of the gutta-balatá to reveal what lay beneath: a plain brown ceramic bottle with a wide neck covered in a second layer of sealing wax.
‘‘A bottle?’’ Hanson asked.
‘‘Probably for wine or rum,’’ answered Finn.
‘‘Quite a vintage, I should think,’’ said Guido.
‘‘I think the wine’s all gone by now,’’ said Billy.
Finn found a scalpel on the instrument table and spent another few minutes peeling and chipping away the wax seal. There was a lead-foil stopper beneath that, which she removed in turn. Finally the bottle was opened.
‘‘Anything inside?’’ Billy asked.
Without answering Finn found a pair of rubber-tipped tongs and carefully inserted them into the broad opening at the top of the bottle. She pulled out a roll of odd-looking parchment, dry and perfect after half a millennia beneath the turquoise water of the Caribbean. Excited now, her fingers shaking slightly, she picked up a pair of tweezers and carefully unrolled the first inch of the roll. A row of brightly painted figures appeared: Aztec warriors. Finn straightened and flipped back her long red hair. She was grinning from ear to ear.
‘‘Gentlemen,’’ she said, ‘‘I give you the Codex of Cortéz.’’
13
After returning to the submarine base in the ruined hull of the SS Angela Harrison, Arkady Cruz’s next stop was the offices of Brigadier General Eduardo Delgado Rodriguez, head of the Dirección de Inteligencia, or DI, formerly known as Dirección General de Inteligencia, or DGI.
With the location of the offices on the corner of Linea and Avenue A in the Vedado section of Havana so well known it could be Googled by anyone with a computer, and under constant surveillance by various elements of the American intelligence community, including the satellites of the NSA, the CIA, the DIA, the DEA, the FBI, and Homeland Security, Cruz and his information were shuffled off to the North American directorate of DI, which had long since been moved out of Cuba altogether and was now headquartered in the embassy in Ottawa, Canada, a convenient three-hour plane ride to New York and easily accessible with direct flights from Havana by way of Toronto on Air Canada or Cubana Airlines.
The original embassy had been on Chapel Street in a quiet residential neighborhood of the city. The Embassy had been the target of so many American anti-Castro terrorist attacks from 1960 onward that it had been forced to move, finally becoming a purpose-built fortresslike structure in the suburban area known as Ottawa South.
After arriving in Toronto, Cruz rented a car using the identification of a Ukrainian businessman named Ignacy Gulka. From Pearson Airport he drove into the city, dropped the rental in the long-term lot at the Toronto Island Airport on the waterfront, and took a Porter Airline Bombardier Q400 turboprop for the one-hour jump to the nation’s capital.
From Ottawa Airport he rented another car, this time as Xavier Martinez, a Bolivian coffee salesman, and drove to the center of the city. There he took a room at the Lord Elgin, a large old tourist hotel opposite the hexagonal bulk of the National Arts Centre.
Cruz then walked down Elgin Street to the florist on the corner of Somerset Street and purchased a red carnation for his lapel. Ten minutes later a black late-model Range Rover with smoked-glass windows pulled up at the light and Cruz stepped up into the passenger seat. A Yoruba black was behind the wheel wearing a dark suit and tie. He checked the flower in Cruz’s lapel and then concentrated on his driving.
Fifteen minutes later they arrived at the embassy, a large, modern, two-and-a-half-story concrete slab with narrow, smoked-glass windows just like the ones on the Range Rover. They drove directly down the ramp into the underground parking lot. Cruz spent a few minutes establishing his real identity at the security desk in the basement, then rode alone up the elevator to the top floor of the embassy. He walked down an anonymous, quietly carpeted hallway and stepped into the office of Brigadier General Rubén Martinez Puente.
Puente was a heavyset gray-haired man in his early sixties who could trace his involvement with Castro back to his teenage years during the first days of revolutionary power in Havana. He was now the head of Foreign Air Intelligence.
‘‘Ah,’’ said Puente from behind his large desk. ‘‘El Singular.’’
Cruz smiled. He’d heard the nickname before. The Only One. A comment on his abilities, perhaps, but more likely a wry and clearly antirevolutionary comment on the state of Cuba’s navy and the size of its submarine fleet.
‘‘Générale,’’ said Cruz. There were no uniforms, but even so Cruz stood roughly at attention.
‘‘Sit,’’ said the general, gesturing toward a comfortable-looking armchair set at an angle to the desk. The office was cozy if a little rundown. A couch against one
wall, out of style and upholstered in a worn-looking corduroy. A rug, Persian, but the kind of Persian the English had made in their cotton mills in the twenties, not from Iran or Afghanistan a century or more ago. The dark glass window looked out in perpetual artificial dusk over the backyards of neighborhood tract houses. The lights in the ceiling were buzzing fluorescents. The Supreme Leader’s revolution was still alive but it was definitely ailing, just like El Supremo himself.
Cruz sat. The general spoke again.
‘‘So, tell me about this thing you found in the jungle.’’
Cruz did so, describing exactly what he’d seen and the circumstances. It took fifteen minutes. He wondered if he’d traveled all this way just to make a quarter-of-an-hour report that no one wanted to believe.
‘‘You’re sure of the serial numbers?’’
‘‘Yes, sir. I wrote them down.’’
The general nodded. ‘‘They’ve been confirmed. They were manufactured in 1960 at the Pantex plant in Amarillo, Texas.’’
Cruz waited. The general stared at him for a moment, then picked up a red package of Populars from his desk and lit one with a very old-looking green Ronson. He didn’t offer a cigarette to Cruz.
‘‘We’re concerned,’’ said Puente.
‘‘Yes, sir.’’ Cruz had no idea who ‘‘we’’ referred to, nor did he think it politically wise to ask. In this day and age in Cuba the average man had no idea who belonged to what faction, or the degree of possible criminality that might be involved. From the moment he’d laid eyes on the bombs in the jungle, his primary objective had been to off-load the responsibility onto someone else’s shoulders.
‘‘The devices were lost on Nochebuena, Christmas Eve 1962.’’
‘‘The missile crisis.’’
‘‘At the time the Americans had a total of one hundred and seventy-eight Strategic Air Command flights in the air on any given day, each armed with at least one thermonuclear device. It was almost inevitable that there would be some kind of problem, either tactically or logistically. Given the times it is not surprising that the Americans did not make their so-called Broken Arrow incident public.’’ The general drew heavily on the cigarette and then snorted smoke forcibly from his nostrils. ‘‘Presumably they thought the aircraft was lost on the outer leg of its flight, either in the Yucatán Channel or the gulf.’’
‘‘Was there any search?’’
‘‘There were already a number of warships in the area, so yes, presumably. They couldn’t very well tell the Mexican authorities that they’d lost a load of hydrogen bombs, could they?’’
Cruz could tell that the man was thinking out loud now. ‘‘No, sir.’’
‘‘The Americans are a very lazy lot. Out of sight, out of mind, I think the saying goes. Having the bombs fall on land was too much of a difficulty, so in their own minds it could not have happened, yes?’’
‘‘Yes, sir.’’
‘‘But it did happen.’’
‘‘Yes, sir.’’
‘‘Which you have now brought to our attention. ’’ It almost sounded like an accusation.
‘‘Yes, sir.’’
‘‘So what are we going to do about it?’’
In the earlier, black-and-white days of the revolution, they would simply have ‘‘disappeared’’ Cruz and the problem along with it, but practical considerations now made that difficult. And then there was Guzman, the wild card.
‘‘I don’t know, sir,’’ answered Cruz. ‘‘What are we going to do about it?’’
‘‘This Guzman, the drug dealer, he assumes he can actually sell these things to us?’’
‘‘He thinks so.’’
‘‘Dios,’’ said Puente, shaking his head. He stubbed out his cigarette in a glass ashtray on his desk. ‘‘Is he mad?’’
‘‘Yes, sir,’’ said Cruz. ‘‘Almost certainly. He thinks giving the weapons to us will make Cuba his ally. He wants to become dictator of Mexico. An Adolf Hitler of sorts.’’
‘‘Or a Stalin?’’ Puente grinned.
‘‘I don’t think he cares either way, sir.’’
‘‘Do you know how a hydrogen bomb works, Capitaine?’’
‘‘Vaguely, sir.’’
‘‘It is like using a hand grenade to set off a fertilizer bomb. A nuclear explosion at one end sets off a plutonium bomb at the other. Fission creating fusion. A filthy thing. The weapons on the Strategic Air Command B-47’s flying patterns around Cuba were all fused and operable. Do you know what this means?’’
‘‘That they’re dangerous.’’
‘‘Exactly. To try and transport two such devices through the jungle and on board your submarine would be an act of suicide.’’
‘‘So?’’
‘‘So we do not want them. Also we do not want them in the hands of Señor Guzman.’’
‘‘He prefers the title Generalissimo.’’
‘‘I’m sure he does. At any rate, he cannot be allowed to have them and we do not want them. The question is, what do we do with them?’’
‘‘Tell the Americans where they are?’’
‘‘It had occurred to me, but it would be too complicated. The resolution would be out of our control.’’
‘‘There is some other possibility?’’
‘‘I think so.’’
‘‘Yes?’’
‘‘Yes. Our Chinese friends.’’
Since the demise of the Soviet Union, China had stepped in as Cuba’s main military ally, especially in the field of intelligence gathering, notably at the Bejucal telecommunications center tapping into American military radio and satellite traffic. They had also heavily invested in developing Cuba’s offshore oil potential.
‘‘What can they do for us?’’ Cruz asked, wondering what his role in all this was.
‘‘They can send us a nuclear team and some of their Special Forces personnel. There are some of them already in Cienfuegos. The nuclear team will detonate the bombs on-site.’’
‘‘I beg your pardon?’’
‘‘The initiating package in the bombs is a form of high explosive. With the tritium core removed the explosive can be detonated safely. An unfused bomb was accidentally set off outside of Albuquerque, New Mexico. It made a crater twelve feet across and killed a cow.’’
‘‘The generalissimo isn’t going to like you neutralizing his prized possessions,’’ commented Cruz.
Puente smiled. A gold molar flashed. The rest of his teeth were tobacco stained from too many Populars.
‘‘The stupid mamalon can go singarte un caballo, for all I care. What do you think the Special Forces people are for?’’
‘‘He has his own people. A squad of body-guards. ’’
‘‘Buy them off.’’
‘‘Their leader is Guzman’s cousin.’’
‘‘Buy him off as well.’’
‘‘And if he won’t be bought?’’
‘‘Anyone can be bought, Capitaine Cruz. Simply pay him more. If he doesn’t take the money, give him his own head.’’
‘‘What is my part in all of this?’’
‘‘Take the nuclear team and the Special Forces group to Guzman’s camp. Put your generalissimo at his ease.’’
‘‘How do I explain the Chinese gentlemen?’’
‘‘Tell Guzman they are prospective buyers. Make him believe it.’’
‘‘If this works out as you have described, we will have a hole in our transportation network, Générale. It makes a great deal of money for the regime.’’
Puente leaned back in his chair and put the tips of his square, well-manicured fingers on the edge of the desk. He smiled again. The tooth gleamed.
‘‘If there is one thing to know about drug lords, Capitaine, it is that there is a never-ending supply of them.’’
Max Kessler sat at his favorite table next to the pastry case at Leopold’s Café enjoying his favorite breakfast of Belgishe Zuckerwaffeln with extra whipped cream on the side and his second Verlangert
er, an Austrian version of a caffe latte. A little later he’d finish off his meal with an Esterhazy pastry and perhaps even a third coffee. He looked out through the bank of glass doors that led to the brick-paved courtyard and considered the problem at hand.
In point of fact it was less a problem than a situation, and perhaps, if everything he’d discovered was accurate, an opportunity for great gain, both financially and in terms of pure intelligence-gathering power. Kessler, who rarely talked to anyone at all unless it had to do with business, would never have described his profession in negative terms. In the unlikely event of being asked to do so, he would have portrayed himself as a fisherman casting a wide net and bringing in a varied catch from which he might create a single feast for his clients. In clinical and objective terms, however, it might have been better to depict himself as a gluttonous spider in the center of an enormous web, sinking his fangs into his victims’ bodies, liquefying their internal organs and digesting the result.
In his case the web was a worldwide network of informants feeding him tidbits of apparently unrelated information, which he digested and then regurgitated in a single, meaningful purge, vague links solidified into a coherent mass. It was this ability to create a single picture from a jigsaw puzzle of tiny parts that was Max Kessler’s true talent, as it had been his father’s before him. He had no ulterior motive to cloud his judgment, so the pictures when they coalesced were perfectly clear and without bias. His only goal was the picture itself and the process of putting it together.
The Aztec Heresy Page 10