Fidel's Last Days

by Roland Merullo

  “You would go ahead with the plan, then.”

  Anzar nodded. They had reached the green. He pulled the sand wedge from his bag, looked at Volkes, and smiled. “With certain modifications.”

  Roberto splashed his ball out of the sand trap and up onto the green, but he was still thirty feet from the hole. As Volkes was taking the flag out of the cup to allow his friend to putt, his portable phone sounded. When he said hello he heard a familiar voice: “Volkes, Eddie. Will you please tell your madman friend Roberto to keep his damn phone on. I’m meeting with his niece in a few hours and we need to speak.”

  “He’s right here, Eddie, about to miss his putt for par. A golfer is obliged to turn off his phone when he’s on the course. You ought to know that.”

  CHAPTER NINE

  Walking beside Olochon down the damp, echoing corridor, Carlos was almost blinded by the pounding of the pulse behind his eyes. How soft he had become, he thought. And then, glancing at Olochon: how horrible it was not to soften as one aged. The Revolution had been built on a concern for the pain of others. In the beginning the revolutionaries had killed, of course—without that killing they would still be slaves—but always in the name of a glorious future. Now, however, it seemed to him more and more that they killed in the name of a mediocre present, a status quo that kept so many Cubans wanting food, while a few, like him and Olochon, lived well. They had become the men they had once cursed.

  Carlos was surprised to see that the dented metal door Olochon opened was unlocked. Inside the almost dark room there was a terrible smell he could not fully identify—urine and blood and something else. A scarred table and chair sat in the middle of the room. Off to one side, shackled to the wall by both wrists, his body sagging so that the metal cuffs cut into his skin, his mouth a ragged, red wound, was something that had once been a man. At the sound of their entry, the man lifted his horribly torn face, and Carlos took in a sharp breath.

  “You recognize him?” Olochon asked. “Our Ernesto?”

  Carlos shook his head. There was no need to lie here. The man was a complete stranger. Part of another conspiracy, perhaps. Or just someone unfortunate enough to have caught Olochon’s attention.

  “For a second there it seemed as though you recognized him.”

  Carlos shook his head again and fought to loosen his dry tongue. “He’s a sight,” he said. The man’s broken teeth and pieces of his gums lay in red puddles on the floor. His shirt and pants were marked with ribbons of blood, and Carlos’s first instinct—which he violently suppressed—was to begin medical treatment for the man’s wounds.

  “Yes,” Olochon said. “A conspirator.” The colonel had a 9mm pistol in his left hand. He went up to the man and put the barrel end of the pistol against the flesh that had once been his lips. “Just a word from him was all we wanted. A name. One more name.” The man was screaming and trying to move his face from side to side.

  Olochon took the pistol away. “Anything?” he shouted in the man’s ear.

  Ernesto was breathing as if he’d run up three flights a moment earlier. His wrinkled jeans were freshly stained at the crotch. He was trying to speak. He made a series of grunting sounds.

  “Again?” Olochon said, putting the pistol an inch away from the bloody mess of his mouth. “¡De nuevo!”

  “A-ah.”

  “A-ah? What is A-ah? Speak clearly and we’ll let you go. Speak!”

  “A-ah,” Ernesto said. “A-ah.”

  “A-ah! What is A-ah?”

  “Do you know an A-ah?” Olochon whirled around and suddenly demanded of Carlos.

  Carlos shook his head.

  “No?”

  “No, of course not.”

  Ernesto sagged against the cuffs and screamed, seemed to lose consciousness momentarily. Olochon was furious with him, livid. He put the pistol up to the man’s temple and shouted at him. “Who is Ester? Who is A-ah? Who is Margarita? We’ll arrest every Margarita in the country and bring them here. All night you repeat these names and then nothing. Nothing! Rat! Traitor!”

  Olochon worked himself up into a fury and began slapping Ernesto’s face, this side and that, with the barrel of the pistol. Carlos focused his eyes on a point well to the right of Ernesto’s head and tried to think of the future, the reason for this. He willed Ernesto to die, to hold his peace, to be free of his suffering. He said, to Olochon’s back, “Kill him, the rat.”

  “You kill him!” Olochon shouted. “I brought you here to kill him!”

  “Certainly,” Carlos tried to say. “Por supuesto.” But the words stuck against the sides of his mouth for a second before they sputtered out. Olochon stopped pistol-whipping the sagging shadow and turned and looked at Carlos, almost smiling now, the fit of anger flushed from him. He wiped the bloody pistol carefully on his white coat, held it, handle-first, toward Carlos, and said, “Take it.”

  Carlos took it, wincing at the thought of a stranger’s blood against bare skin. The instant the weapon was in his grip he felt an almost overwhelming urge to point it at Olochon’s face and pull the trigger. Olochon seemed to sense this; he was watching him through that awful twist of smile. “Against the temple,” he said, almost in a whisper, through his protruding teeth.

  Carlos’s hand was shaking horribly. He raised the gun. All he had to do was make a quarter turn and fire and the earth would be rid of Olochon forever. He could walk out of the building without anyone suspecting, then send a message to his friends here before D-7 could catch him. It would begin. He would begin it.

  “Shoot,” Olochon commanded. “He gave me all the names he has. We’ll figure out who or what A-ah is on our own. Shoot!”

  Carlos pulled the trigger and heard a sharp click. Olochon let out a hideous laugh that echoed against the damp stone walls like a flock of mad birds screeching in the jungle night. Carlos pulled the trigger a second time and Ernesto’s head exploded away from him in a burst of blood and brain.

  CHAPTER TEN

  She waited so long in the room at the Marriott that she fell asleep there on the bed with the door ajar. When the knock sounded she was instantly awake and sitting up, embarrassed. The clock radio by the side of the bed read 10:11 P.M., and a woman and two men were in her room—very large men with very large shoulders and short hair. Before seeing them, she’d assumed she’d be meeting with some fairly important intermediary—a “high government official” was all Oleg had said—an aide to some senator on the Foreign Relations Committee, an undersecretary of defense, another of the Orchid’s mysterious connections. But all three of them wore earpieces and a certain facial expression she was familiar with: a combination of hyper-alertness and physical confidence, as if there were enemies of the United States behind every door and they would all be taken care of in due time. She revised her expectations upward. A small ball of nervousness formed beneath her old woman’s dress.

  The trio watched her without emotion. Secret Service, she was sure. There were no handshakes, no words spoken except the name. “Mary Archibault?”

  She blinked, nodded. She had been dreaming about her uncle—that he was a very young man again, and she was old—and she tried to shake off the memory of that image. She looked down at her legs and hands and stood up. They gave her a moment to straighten the dress and hair and gather herself, before the woman—short, unsmiling, and armed—began to check her briskly and professionally.

  “There’s a pistol in my purse,” Carolina said.

  “Where’s the purse?”

  “On the bed.”

  The gun was taken, with a promise of its safe return. When the woman finished, the men motioned for Carolina to leave the room, one ahead of her, one behind. Eight paces down the corridor they took the doorway into the stairwell—one guard there with a microphone in his lapel and a firearm holstered beneath his coat—and then went through a door and into a plain concrete hallway where an open freight elevator waited. The woman stayed in the hallway. The doors of the elevator banged closed and Carolina rode up
with the men to either side of her, looking straight ahead. Top floor, down another short corridor, through another guarded door and into the main hallway. Ten paces there and they were slipping her into a small suite, and then Edmund Lincoln, self-made billionaire and vice president of the United States of America, was standing up from the sofa, walking across the room, stretching out his hand to her as if they’d met a hundred times.

  She was nervous at first, and then, strangely, not nervous at all. She thought she smelled gin on his breath. He asked her to sit, asked if there was anything in the way of food or drink they could bring her. She was ravenous, but she shook her head.

  “My apologies for keeping you waiting this long. Would you have something, at least? Fruit juice? A Coke?”

  “Juice would be fine, thank you. Cranberry if possible, on the rocks, twist of lime.”

  The vice president smiled and waved a hand at one of the men. Lincoln was smaller than he looked on television, with a soft, fleshy, pasty face and unnaturally pale blue eyes set wide apart. His hair was cinnamon brown—it looked dyed—and pushed straight back from his forehead in the style of her uncle. He was dressed in a plain blue suit and red necktie, polished loafers with tassels, a college ring on his right hand and a wedding ring on his left. He’d inherited eighteen thousand acres of prime Nebraska farmland from his grandparents, parlayed that (with the help of some undisclosed investors) into an agribusiness that dealt in everything from tractors to sweeteners to ethanol, and made a fortune more quickly than seemed mathematically possible. He then spent 15 million dollars of his own money to become governor of Nebraska, serving in the state house for six years—“Lincoln does Lincoln” was the joke. During his tenure as governor, Lincoln had earned a reputation for his pro-big-business decisions, his volatile mood swings, and his ruthlessness with inferiors.

  When he grew bored with the governorship, he’d moved onto the Senate—another 25 million—then, after serving in Washington only two terms, he’d been picked for the VP job. There had been a flurry of articles in the liberal press questioning his experience and qualifications, but those small brushfires had been quickly extinguished. Carolina knew his beliefs and some of the rumors; no one seemed to know the full extent of his influence. The only sign of his wealth, in this room at least, was a pair of gold and sapphire cuff links that flashed when he took off the suit coat. He set it neatly on the arm of the sofa, clasped his hands, and leaned toward her. He seemed slightly off balance there, Carolina thought, as if he might suddenly tip forward and end up on the carpet on his face. Meeting the vice president of the United States at a modest hotel like this: it seemed strange to her, somehow not right.

  One of the men delivered the glass of juice, and they began.

  “Is the disguise uncomfortable? Should we turn up the air-conditioning?”

  “I’m fine, thank you, sir.”

  “Your voice gives you away a bit.”

  “I took some mints with antithol before I checked in at the front desk. We figured it would be the only time I’d really need them. Antithol makes the voice hoarse. Criminals sometimes use it when they make ransom calls, or phone threats.”

  “I’m aware of that, thank you.”

  “Sorry, sir.”

  “I have twenty minutes. Give me as much of a sense of your plan as you possibly can.”

  She repeated what Oleg had told her. “Well, we have people in Cuba and here, men and women we’ve been cultivating for decades. All of them ready to go.”

  “CIA sources?”

  “Mostly not. We have different methods than the CIA. We pay more, for one thing. For another, we rely almost exclusively on personal introductions. There’s no cold recruiting involved. We have uncles talking to nephews, aunts to nieces, brother to brother. It means our people are more reliable, which means the likelihood of our plan succeeding is increased exponentially. Because of the closeness of the Cuban expatriate community this is easier than in some other projects.”

  “Go on.”

  “We have people in all the important ministries—defense, health—in the countryside, the churches, the police, the military, even someone in D-7. Not many altogether, and most of them have little sense of the larger picture, but they are in key positions. Smart, brave, and utterly loyal. These are people who have hated Fidel for almost fifty years in some cases. In other cases, they started out believing in him and became disillusioned.”

  “And Mr. Castro himself?”

  “Castro’s schedule and habits are well known to us, sir. He is not expected to be in his present position very much longer.”

  “Not, ah, dealt with by our hand, of course.”

  “Of course not, sir. His own people will deal with him, as well they should. We are just going to act as facilitators, with your assistance, if possible.”

  The vice president seemed to relax one half of one notch, but his eyes were eager. “What is it you want from us, exactly? Air support?”

  She winced. The words were a particular sore spot among the people who knew anything about the Bay of Pigs. “Almost nothing. Benign neglect, for the most part.” Deep inside herself, she threw a switch that moved her from the truth to the almost-truth. It was simple for her now; nothing showed on her face, nothing changed in her voice. “At a certain appointed time a small amount of a very toxic biological substance will be released in the most remote part of the Sierra Maestra, where it will do the least harm. A hundred people will be affected, at most. Probably five percent of that number will die, and another five percent will be permanently disabled.”

  “That’s troubling.”

  “We’ll do everything we can to minimize the collateral damage, and avoid risk to children. And what damage we do inflict will be inflicted upon those most loyal to Fidel. There will be a meeting scheduled there, a sort of retreat for his top propaganda operatives in that province, and these aren’t people we are particularly fond of. He may be there himself; we aren’t sure.”

  “Of course.”

  “I haven’t been authorized to tell you much more. After the escape of this biological agent, we will have someone leak the official report to the Latin American press, and then the North American press. Once the information comes out, we want you to confirm the accuracy of the report based on satellite surveillance and air-quality monitoring, and then say that you have learned of a terrorist cell there in the mountains. The cell was preparing to carry a biological weapon into the Port of Miami. All the work of this terrorist cell will have been done with Castro’s tacit permission, of course. The weapon accidentally detonated while they were moving it.

  “Fidel knows the game. He’ll fulminate and protest, blame everything on the yanqui imperialists. He’ll put the country on a state of high alert, round up anyone he feels might be a threat to the regime . . . which is what we want, actually, all those people in one place. At that point we will have to act very quickly to keep our people from being hurt. Shortly afterward, I cannot say how soon, exactly, Castro will be assassinated by one of our agents inside his regime, and then—”

  “And then Anzar’s people will move.”

  She almost fell off the couch. This seemed to be a gigantic slip on the part of the vice president, and she was sure then that he had been drinking. There was no way in the world he should have known anything about Roberto Anzar’s involvement in this make-believe plan; Anzar himself should only have learned of it that same afternoon. If the vice president did know, it would mean that he had been talking, very recently, with her uncle. Even so, there was no way he should have admitted that to her. But, as she had been trained, she went briskly on, pretending nothing had happened. “Anzar’s people complement our people nicely; we couldn’t really do it without them. They are already positioning themselves. We have small caches of sophisticated weaponry hidden in various places and it will be distributed to them. We’ll take over the prisons where the dissidents are held, take over the police headquarters in a few key towns. We’ll kill or arrest
key members of Castro’s secret police and DGI. We will deal with his brother.”

  The vice president held up his hand, palm out. On his face was an expression of disdain. “The Cubans are going to see this as a violent coup. They’ll blame us. It’s no good.”

  “As a violent coup that some of their own people initiated, and that some of their own good people will have thwarted. The coup will have come from within DGI, not from us—at least, that’s the way it will appear. Those responsible will be arrested, or killed . . . by Cubans. What we’d like from you, at that point, is simply to announce that the U.S. military is standing by in case the situation on the ground in Cuba begins to seem in any way threatening to U.S. interests, but that you have no plans to send troops unless there are signs of civil war. Aside from satellite and radar help, that is all we should require in the initial stages.”

  At first, the vice president had been listening more or less calmly, but by the time she reached this point in her little made-up speech, he was blowing out his cheeks angrily with each new detail. Carolina noticed a sheen of perspiration on his forehead. When she paused for breath he said, “You’re going to take over the entire country with what, a few hundred dissidents, some ‘sophisticated weaponry,’ and a wacky plan? Against what, the entire Cuban army? Which is the largest, most powerful, and most combat-hardened army in Latin America!” He was shouting. She wondered if the man at the window and the man at the door were embarrassed for him. She wondered what the president’s reelection chances would be if the American public found out his second-in-command had a drinking problem and such a short-fuse temper.

  “With all due respect, sir, the entire Cuban military is not loyal to Fidel Castro. Especially since the arrest of Colonel Alejandro Davos. That one event resulted in a hardening of anti-Castro sentiment within his own forces.”