Black Horizon (Jack Swyteck Novel)

by Grippando, James

  “Hi,” she said softly.

  “Hi.”

  Her gaze was still cast toward the floor. She looked exhausted. “Thanks for coming,” she said.

  “No problem. Can I get you anything? Water? Soda?”

  “No.”

  The fluorescent light hummed overhead. Through the door, the usual noises of the ER were audible but muffled. The examination room was otherwise silent.

  “They numbed my lip,” she said. “Do I talk funny?”

  It seemed like such a kid thing to say. She’s so young. And yet she’d seen so much.

  “Don’t worry about it,” he said.

  She raised her eyes for an instant, then looked away. “Do you want to know what happened?”

  “Only if you want to tell me.”

  Her hand began to shake. Jack sensed she was about to cry. He reached toward her, but she withdrew.

  “He called me a whore,” she said, her voice shaking. “When he cut me, he said, ‘Taste the blood of a Cuban whore.’ ”

  “I’m sorry,” said Jack. He hesitated to ask what happened next, but he was mindful of the counselor’s advice not to shut her down if she felt the need to talk.

  “I don’t remember much after that,” she said. “He injected me with something.”

  It was sounding like Jack’s kidnapping, but again he just let her keep talking.

  “When I woke up, it was daylight. I was in the passenger seat of my car. I have no idea how I got there. I wasn’t even sure where I was at first.”

  “How’d you get to the ER?”

  “I couldn’t find the car keys, so I walked. The car was parked in the Winn-Dixie lot, which is, quizás, two blocks from the hospital. I got here about an hour ago, I’d say.”

  “The hospital is one of the first places I checked when we knew you were missing. You must have walked into the ER right after I called.”

  “Sorry. They asked if I had any family they should notify, and I said no. I should have asked them to call you.”

  “It’s okay. You saw the doctor, the counselor. That’s more important. Let me ask you this, though. Do you have any idea why he left you where he did? Anything special about that place?”

  “No. The cops told me I was lucky. They don’t think the guy was stealing my car and just taking me for a ride. He took me with something very specific in his mind, but for some reason, he chickened out. Maybe he saw the police roadblocks for the oil spill and decided it was too risky, so he pulled into the parking lot and left me. Thank God he didn’t . . .”

  She didn’t need to finish the thought for Jack. “Thank God,” he said.

  Bianca pointed toward a plastic bag on the counter. “Look in there.”

  Jack opened the bag. It held her wallet, her shoes, and other personal effects. And some papers. It took Jack only a moment to recognize them as the letters Josefina had given him.

  “He gave those to me,” said Bianca.

  Jack felt chills. Of course he had suspected a direct link between his kidnapping and Bianca’s disappearance. But he wasn’t sure it had been the very same attacker—until now.

  “Have you shown these to the police?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because he said I should give them to you. Only you.”

  “Okay. Then you absolutely did the right thing, Bianca. But we need to let the FBI know about it. If this guy is trying to get back to Cuba, we may have a shot at catching him.”

  “Whatever you say.”

  Jack reached for his phone. “Thanks to my wife, I have a direct contact at the FBI now. Agent Linton, and he’s completely dedicated to your case. I’m going to call him right now. There’s nothing to worry about. I’ll handle it.”

  Bianca seemed to have heard him, but she was staring blankly at the wall, her response distant. “He also told me to give you a message.”

  Jack stopped, not yet dialing. “A message?”

  “He said the price is ten million. Whatever that means.”

  Jack knew exactly what it meant: ten million dollars was the price to be paid by the U.S. government for the names of the Scarborough 8 saboteurs.

  “Did he say anything else?”

  “That I should drop my case.”

  Jack didn’t immediately follow the logic, but he could sort it out later. First thing was to get the FBI swarming on all available routes back to Cuba. He dialed Agent Linton and gave him the news. Linton had news for him, too.

  “Interesting thing about the blood on the mirror,” said Linton.

  “What?”

  “Sometimes the perpetrator’s blood can be mixed in with the victim’s. You just never know. So I ran a sample through CODIS and some other data banks. You know what CODIS is, right?”

  The Combined DNA Index System (CODIS) is an FBI-funded computer system that stores DNA in searchable profiles for identification purposes. It was how Jack got Theo released from death row. “Yeah, I’m familiar with it.”

  “Anyway, I got nothing out of CODIS. But I got a hit in the weirdest place.”

  “Where?”

  “The World Anti-Doping Agency. They hold about eighty thousand samples from Olympic hopefuls all over the world. We came up with a hundred-percent match to a female athlete. A boxer in Cuba. Her name is Josefina Fuentes. Ever heard of her?”

  Jack went cold. For a moment, he couldn’t even speak.

  “Jack, you know her?”

  Jack’s mind was awhirl. Rafael’s letters. The cut to Bianca’s lip. Josefina’s blood on the bathroom mirror—no doubt collected by Bianca’s attacker in some unspeakable manner and brought over from Cuba in a vial.

  Taste the blood of a Cuban whore.

  “Yes,” Jack said in disbelief. “I do know her.”

  Chapter 34

  Jack needed space. Literally.

  The oil mess, the attack on Bianca, his father a ticking time bomb of stress—it was a ball of confusion, but one thing was clear: Jack wasn’t leaving Key West anytime soon. A colleague in Miami linked him up with a Key West lawyer who had extra office space. Jack and Theo walked to Whitehead Street to check it out.

  “We should go back to Cuba,” said Theo.

  “Bad idea,” said Jack.

  They were down the street from the courthouse, a few blocks from the cleanup on the southern shore. The Green Parrot bar was bustling with a lunch crowd, and Theo continued to plead his case as they walked through the sidewalk seating area.

  “If Josefina isn’t dead, she’s obviously been hurt by this sick son of a bitch. I want to find out what happened.”

  “We need to stay right here with Bianca.”

  “But we dragged Josefina into this, Jack.”

  “The oil consortium dragged her into it. They put Rafael’s letters in evidence.”

  “Then I’ll go to Cuba, and you can stay here and fight the consortium. You are going to keep fighting, right? Don’t let that bastard push you around and make Bianca drop her case.”

  They stopped at the curb, then continued through the crosswalk. “I actually don’t think he meant drop the case.”

  “The message said ‘Drop it.’ ”

  “But if you think this through, he’s not saying that he’s on the oil consortium’s side and that he’s helping them win the lawsuit. Truth is, he probably couldn’t give a shit about the lawsuit one way or the other. The only thing he wants is for the U.S. government to pay him for naming the men who brought down the Scarborough 8. So the last thing he wants is for me to make sabotage the centerpiece of Bianca’s case, trying to expose in a high-profile trial the very information that he thinks will put money in his pocket. He needs to keep the sabotage dialogue between himself and the U.S. government.”

  “Ten million dollars sounds pretty ridiculous to me.”

  “He’s already demonstrated that he’s a credible source. I’m not saying he’ll get ten million, but if he knows who’s behind an environmental disaster that outdoes Deepwater Horizo
n, he could be negotiating for real money.”

  “Not if he killed Josefina.”

  They stopped at a white picket fence, where a weathered wooden sign on the gate read LAW OFFICE OF ALEJANDRO CORTINAS.

  “Let’s talk about this later,” said Jack. “I can’t keep practicing law out of a hotel room. Let me nail down some kind of arrangement with Cortinas, and we’ll go from there.”

  Whitehead Street near the courthouse was to the Key West bar what Wall Street was to white-shoe law firms. The Cortinas firm was in an old wood-frame house, two stories, and built in the Victorian style. Its traditional front porch and balconies spared none of the gingerbread details that defined the very best of the island’s nineteenth-century architecture. Cortinas had been there since 1970, but the building had seen continuous use as a law office since 1828, when the first federal court opened in the territory and a newly established newspaper called the Register announced the arrival of a vessel from middle Florida with “an assorted cargo, and seven lawyers.” For the next fifty years, frequent wrecks on the coral reefs drew talented maritime lawyers from around the country who laid the foundation for a rich and distinguished legal tradition in Key West. Depending on the source, Alejandro Cortinas might or might not be called “distinguished.” Nobody disputed that he was rich.

  Cortinas greeted them on the porch and showed them inside. They chatted and got acquainted during a ten-minute tour that took them upstairs to Cortinas’ office, then down a back staircase to the much smaller office that was available to Jack.

  “You can also use the main conference room,” said Cortinas.

  It was down the hall, behind double-paneled doors, and Cortinas led them there. An even older lawyer was seated at the long mahogany table, and Jack couldn’t help thinking that they both looked like antiques. Cortinas made the introduction.

  “Jack, I want you to meet Victor Garcia-Peña, founding member of the Key West Cuban-American Lawyers Association.”

  “Con mucho gusto,” said Jack as they shook hands. “You probably wouldn’t guess this about a guy named Swyteck, but my mother was born in Cuba.”

  “So I’ve been told.”

  “Victor has something he’d like to discuss with you,” said Cortinas. “Can we all sit for a few minutes?”

  “Sure,” said Jack.

  Victor sat at the head of the table. Cortinas was on one side, to his left. Jack and Theo sat opposite Cortinas, to Victor’s right. Victor pulled a handful of cigars from his pocket and offered them around the table. Cortinas and Theo took one.

  “You don’t smoke cigars?” asked Victor.

  “I really don’t,” said Jack.

  “What the hell kind of Cuban are you?” he said, laughing.

  “That’s what his abuela wants to know,” said Theo. More laughter.

  Over the years, Jack had learned to let such jokes go, to avoid the mood-killer explanation that he’d been raised a gringo after his Cuban mother died in childbirth.

  The cigars were lit, and before long, Jack might as well have been smoking one.

  “On a more serious note,” said Victor, “I want to talk to you about your Cuban oil case.”

  The “Cuban oil case” wasn’t the way Jack referred to Bianca’s wrongful death action, but he knew what Victor meant. “Sure. There are things I can talk to you about, and, naturally, things I can’t.”

  “Understood,” said Victor. He drew heavily on his cigar, the smoke pouring from his lips as he spoke. “Let me just say that I find the list of defendants named in your lawsuit to be incomplete. Have you thought about suing the Cuban government?”

  From another lawyer, the question might have taken Jack by surprise. But not from Victor. His uncle had been killed in the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion, which stood as the worst blunder of the Kennedy administration. Not a single Democrat had earned Victor’s support since.

  “The consortium operated under a production-sharing agreement with the state-owned oil company,” said Jack, “Cubapetróleo. So, yeah, I did think about naming Cupet. But what’s the point? Cuba never responds to any lawsuits filed in U.S. courts, and actually collecting a judgment against a Cuban sovereign entity is pie in the sky.”

  Victor smiled thinly. “You have much to learn.”

  Cortinas jumped into the conversation. “Victor was involved in the Brothers to the Rescue wrongful death lawsuits in the 1990s.”

  “This was back when your father was governor,” said Victor. “You were probably still in law school.”

  “I was in jail,” said Theo.

  Jack kicked him in the ankle. “I remember Brothers to the Rescue,” said Jack. “They flew private planes out of Miami to look for rafters who might be crossing the Florida Straits.”

  “Exactly,” said Victor, his expression turning very serious. “Until the twenty-fourth of February 1996. That’s when a Cuban Air Force MiG shot down two little Cessna 337s flown by the Brothers. One was flying nine nautical miles outside Cuban territorial airspace, and the other was ten miles out. Four men from Miami were killed. Two were very young men in their twenties. Two others married with kids. A lot of people told me don’t waste your time suing the Republic of Cuba. Well, guess what? Not suing would have been a 187 million-dollar mistake.”

  Theo coughed on his cigar. “That’s a lot of moneda nacional.”

  “We were able to recover about half the judgment,” said Victor.

  “I don’t see how you got anywhere near that much,” said Jack. “My understanding is that most judgments against Cuba go uncollected.”

  “Most,” said Victor. “But in the early sixties, the U.S. government froze Cuban assets worth hundreds of millions of dollars. We were able to tap into that fund.”

  “I can see that in the case of a Cuban MiG shooting Cessnas out of the sky,” said Jack. “But an oil rig disaster is something else entirely.”

  “Not as I see it,” said Victor. “Under the Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996, you have to prove four things. First, the foreign state is a ‘state sponsor of terrorism’ as designated by the U.S. State Department. Cuba is so designated.”

  Theo did a double take. “Cuba is a designated state sponsor of terrorism?”

  “Four countries are on the list,” said Victor. “Iran, Syria, Sudan, and Cuba.”

  “I had no idea,” said Theo. “Did you know that, Jack?”

  “Honestly, I did not.”

  Victor exchanged a quick glance with Cortinas, then shook his head. “I hate to sound like a broken record, but what the hell kind of Cuban are you, Jack?”

  Theo reached for the ashtray, flicking his ashes. “I think we’ve already established that, counselor.”

  Jack kicked him again.

  Victor continued. “The second thing you’d have to prove is that Rafael’s injury took place outside the territorial boundaries of the Cuban state. I think we win on this, since the rig was beyond twelve miles of the Cuban shore. Third, the plaintiff has to be a U.S. national, which Bianca is. We might have some arguments over the fact that Rafael was a Cuban national, but I still think we win in a wrongful death action brought by Bianca.”

  “What’s the fourth element?” asked Jack.

  “This is where things get interesting,” said Victor. “Basically, we have to prove that the Cuban government murdered Rafael.”

  “Murdered him?”

  “‘Unjustified killing’ is the statutory language. Manslaughter would probably cut it. But not mere negligence.”

  Jack shifted in his chair, as if a straighter spine might help make his point. “I don’t mean to sound glib, but I’ll be lucky to prove that the oil companies were negligent. I can’t prove the Cuban government murdered Rafael. There’s no evidence of that. I don’t even have colorable theory.”

  “I do,” said Victor. “Have you read carefully the statement the Cuban government issued when it sent warships to seal off the spill site and refused any assistance from the United States?”
r />   “I’ve seen the English translation.”

  “You don’t read Spanish?”

  “Well, you know . . . menus and such are easy. A speech would be tough.”

  Theo leaned back in his chair, out of Jack’s peripheral vision. “Not really Cuban,” he whispered to the other men.

  Jack didn’t even bother kicking him this time.

  Victor continued. “The warning issued to the United States was filled with accusations that the relief operation is really a hostile invasion driven by right-wing elements in Miami, that the Revolutionary Government cannot tolerate a flagrant violation of its frontiers or provocative acts against its people, and that the Cuban military will take all necessary action to prevent intruders from committing acts of terrorism and piracy.”

  “I think we all hope they back off from that,” said Jack.

  “Here’s my point,” said Victor. “The language in this latest warning is taken almost verbatim from the statement issued by the Ministry of Justice after the Brothers to the Rescue planes were shot down in ’96.”

  Jack considered Victor’s point. “So from the Cuban government’s standpoint, the U.S. relief efforts are every bit the threat to national sovereignty that the Brothers to the Rescue flights were. Is that what you’re saying?”

  Victor struck a match and gave his cigar a booster light. “I’m saying much more than that. To me, this proves that the entire Scarborough 8 disaster was a well-choreographed plan by the Cuban government.”

  “The Cuban government is playing politics with the cleanup efforts,” said Jack. “Is that your point?”

  “No. Let me be clear. This is the biggest threat Cuba has presented to the United States since the Cuban Missile Crisis. That does not happen by accident. My point is that the Cuban government caused the explosion on the rig.”

  Jack paused, considering his response. “I mean no disrespect, and, without question, there has been political maneuvering on both sides since the explosion. But the idea that Cuba sent the Scarborough 8 into the Florida Straits intending to blow it up? You lost me there.”

  “You underestimate the Revolutionary Government.”

  “Oil is Cuba’s ticket to economic independence. I’ve been reading up on this. The average Cuban makes twenty bucks a month. Every dollar matters in Cuba, and the government is planning to spend nine billion of them to become a serious player in the petroleum market. They wouldn’t blow up the only shovel that can bring up the oil. Scarborough 8 was the only ultradeep-water rig in the world that was built to comply with the U.S. trade embargo.”