by Cuba (lit)
of the world.
Someone slapped the side of the stall, said something
unintelligible in Spanish. Probably wanted
him to hurry up, to get out and let the next man
in.
Svenson made a retching sound. And almost
lost his breakfast.
He tried retching audibly again, less forcefully.
The person standing beside the stall walked away, the
door to the rest room opened and closed.
Where was Santana?
Maybe he wasn't coining. Surely by now if he
were searching the terminal he would have looked into this
restroom.
Coukfit be?
Or perhaps Santana was standing outside, waiting for
him to come out, for the sheer joy of dashing his hopes when
he thought the coast was clear. Santana would do a thing
like that, Svenson told himself now.
He felt so dirty, so wretched. He wiped at
the sheen of sweat on his face, wiped his hands on his
trousers.
He watched the minute hand of his watch, watched it
slowly circle the dial, counted the seconds as it
moved along so effortlessly.
With every passing minute that Santana didn't come he
felt better. Yes. Perhaps he wasn't looking.
He must not be. If he were looking he would have been
hi this restroom, would have opened the door, would have
jerked him from the stall and arrested him and put the cuffs
on him and dragged him across the terminal and
thrown him into a police car.
But Santana didn't come.
After an hour of waiting, Olaf Svenson began
thinking about how he was going to get out of the country. He
needed another passport. If he used his own, the
security people might not let him through the immigration
checkpoint.
He pulled up his pants, washed his hands
thoroughly, and went out into the main hall of the terminal.
Keeping an eye out for Santana, he went to the
ticket desk for Mexicana Airlines and stood
where he could watch the agent When handed a passport,
the man glanced up, comparing the face to the photo. Just
a glance, but a glance would be enough. Using a stolen
passport with a photo that didn't match his face was
too much of a risk. Svenson knew he would have
to use his own, dangerous though it would be.
Screwing up his courage, Olaf Svenson got in
line.
"Ciudad Mejico, par favor."
He handed the passport to the agent, who glanced
into his face, then handed the passport back.
An hour later Svenson went through the immigration
line. The uniformed official didn't look up,
merely compared the passport to a typed list
that lay on his desk, then passed it back. He
did not stamp the document.
Olaf Svenson took a seat in the waiting area and
used a filthy handkerchief to wipe perspiration from his
forehead.
A reprieve. The powers that rule the universe had
granted him a reprieve.
He would have liked to have had the opportunity to study the
latest viral mutation, but the risk was just too great.
A lost opportunity, he concluded. Oh, too
bad, too bad.
When the plane from Madrid touched down at
Havana airport with Maximo Sedano aboard,
Colonel Santana and two plainclothes secret
police officers were there to meet him. They stood beside
Maximo while he waited for his luggage, then the
two junior men carried it to the car while Maximo
walked beside Santana.
Colonel Santana said nothing to the finance minister,
other than to say Alejo Vargas wanted to see
him, then he let the bastard stew. He had learned
years ago that silence was a very effective weapon,
one that cost nothing and caused grievous wounds in a
guilty soul. All men are guilty, Santana
believed, of secret sins if nothing
else, and if left to suffer in silence will usually
convince themselves that the authorities know everything. After
a long enough silence, often all that remains to do is
take down the confession and obtain a signature.
One of his troops drove while Santana rode
in the back of the car with his charge. Not a word was uttered
the whole trip.
Maximo seemed to be holding up fairly well,
Santana thought, not sweating too much, retaining most
of his color,
breathing under control. The colonel smiled
broadly, a smile that grew even wider- when he
saw from the corner of his eye that Maximo Sedano
had noticed it.
Ah, yes. Silence. And terror.
The car drove straight into the basement of the Ministry
of Interior, where Maximo Sedano was hustled to a
subterranean interrogation room.
"I demand to see Vargasea"...Maximo said hotly
when they shoved him into a chair and slammed the door
shut.
"You demand"..."...asked Santana softly, leaning forward
until his face was only inches from Maximo. "You
are in no position to demand. You may ask humbly,
request, you may even pray, but you don't
demand. You have no right to demand anything."
Santana seated himself behind the desk, across from
Maximo. He took out the interrogation form, filled
out the blanks on the top of the sheet, then laid it
on the scarred wood in front of him.
"Whereea"...Santana asked, "is the money?"
Maximo Sedano inhaled through his nose. He
smelled dampness, urine, something rotting, meat or
vegetable perhaps ... and something cold and slimy and
evil. It was here, all around him, in this roomthe very
stones reeked of it. Before Castro the secret
police belonged to Fulgencio Batista, and before him
Geraldo Machado, and so on, back for hundreds
of years. This was a secret room that never saw the
light, where justice did not exist, where force and
venality and self-interest ruled. Here shadow men
without conscience or scruple wrestled with the enemies
of the dictator. The room reeked of fear and
blood, torture and maiming, pain and death.
Maximo pushed the images aside. With a tenuous
composure, carefully, completely, honestly, he
explained about the accounts and the German and the people at the
bank. He related what they said to the best of his
memory. He told about the ice pick and the men's
room, everything,
CUBA
withholding only his intention of transferring the money
to his own accounts.
Santana had questions, of course, made him repeat
most of it two or three times. When the colonel
had it all written down, Maximo signed the
statement.
"Where are the transfer cards"..."...Santana asked.
"In Switzerland. I left them at the bank."
"Why?"
"If there has been some mistake, if the money was
stolen by someone at the bank, then the banks have
valid, legal transfer orders they must honor.
They must send the money to the Bank of Cuba."
"So where is the money?"
"It is not in those accounts, obviously. I think the
money has been stolen."
For the first time, Santana was openly skeptical.
"By whom?"
"By someone who had access to the account numbers.
El Presidente
insisted on keeping a record of them in his office.
I would look there first."
"Why not your office? Is it not possible
one of your aides learned the numbers, passed them
to someone
who7"
"All the numbers of the government's foreign accounts,
including the accounts controlled exclusively by
el Presidente,
are kept in a safe in my office under my
exclusive control. None of my staff has
accessonly me."
Again Santana smiled. "You realize, of course,
that you are convicting yourself with your own mouth?"
Maximo threw up his hands. "I tell you this,
Santana. I do not have the money. If I had
fifty-four million dollars I would not have taken
the plane back to Cuba. I would not be sitting in this
shithole talking to a shithead like you."
Santana ignored the insult and jotted a few more
lines on his report. Personally he believed
Maximoif the man had the money he would have run like
a rabbitbut to say so would give Maximo too much
leverage. And Maximo
said that he killed a man with an ice pick, which
certainly seemed out of character. Santana raised an
eyebrow as he thought about Rail. Maximo Sedano
killing Railwell, the world is full of
unexpected things.
He left Maximo Sedano sitting in the chair in
the niterrogation room while he went to find
Vargas. The minister was in his office listening to a
report of the laboratory burglary from one of the
senior colonels, who had just returned from the
university.
Santana knew nothing of the burglary, had not been
informed before he went to the airport. He stood
listening, asked no questions, waited for Alejo
Vargas.
An hour passed before Vargas was ready to talk about
Maximo. "He is downstairs in an interrogation
roomea"...Santana said. "Here is his statement."...He
passed it across. Vargas read it in silence.
"The money is not hi the accountsea"...Vargas said
finally.
"So he says."
"And you think he is telling the truth?"
"Sir, I don't think Maximo Sedano has
what it takes to steal that kind of money and come back
here to face you. He knew he would be met at the
airport. He was expecting it."
Vargas said nothing, merely blinked.
"Actually, his suggestion about the account
numbers at the president's residence is a good
one. If there was a leak, it was probably there.
Fidel probably left the book lying aroundhe had
no organizational sense."
"And?"
"I know of no one in Cuba with the computer expertise
to get into the Swiss banks electronically and steal
that money, but there are plenty of people in America who
could. A lot of them work for the American government."
"People were stealing money from banks long before computers were
inventedea"...Vargas objected. "Anybody could have
bribed a bank officer and stolen that money. The
Yanquis are the most likely suspects,
however."
Vargas well knew that everything that went wrong south
of Key West was not the fault of the United States
government, but he was too old a dog to think that the people
who ran the CIA were incompetent dullards too
busy to give Cuba a thought.
"The Americans say that shit happens."
"They often make it happenea"...Vargas agreed,
and stood up. "Let us talk to Maximo. Perhaps
we can save a soul from hell."
Going down the stairs Vargas said to Santana,
"Maximo has been plotting to get himself
elected president when Castro passes. Today would
be a good time to let him know that such a course is
futile."
"Yes, sir."
"Some pain, I think. Nothing permanent, nothing
lifethreatening. We will need his expertise in finance
later on."
"Yes, sir."
A petty officer came to find Jake
Grafton. The sailor led the admiral to the Air
Intelligence spaces, where he found Toad and the
AI'S gathered around a television monitor.
"A P-3 took this sequence a few hours
agoea"...Toad told the admiral, "in the
Bahamas. It's an anchored North Korean
freighter. The P-3 is going to fly directly
overhead here in a minute and get a shot looking
straight down. We'll freeze the video there."
The perspective changed as the plane came across
the top of the ship. The clear blue water seemed
to disappear, leaving the ship suspended above the yellow
sandy bottom. Just before the P-3 crossed above the
ship, Toad froze the picture.
He stepped forward, pointing to dark shapes resting
on the sand under the freighter. "I think
we've found the rest of the stolen warheadsea"...he said.
'The people on the
Coldn
dumped them here in the ocean for the North Koreans
to pick up later."
Jake stepped forward, studied the picture on the
televi-
sion screen. "Can this picture be computer
enhanced?""...They are working on that hi Norfolk right
now.""...How certain are they about the identification of the
ship?"
"Very sure. Undoubtedly North Korean."
When the National Security Council met to be
briefed about developments in Cuba, the
president's mood was even uglier than it had been
a few days before. He listened with a frozen frown as
the briefer described the biological warfare
research laboratory in the science building, at the
University of Havana. He covered his face with a
hand as the briefer explained that some of the warheads from
Nuestra Senora de Colon
appeared to be resting on a sandy ocean floor in the
Bahamas, with a North Korean freighter anchored
nearby.
"The good newsea"...the briefer said brightly,
"is that the freighter seems to be in Baharaan
territorial waters."
"Do you have a plan"..."...the president asked General
Totten.
"Yes, sir. At our request, the Bahamans have
formally requested that a United States ship board
and search the North Korean freighter, which has
violated their territorial waters. The nearest
U.s. ship will be there in three hours."
"And if the North Koreans raise the anchor and
sail away?"
"We'll stop the ship anyway, remove any
United States government property mat we
find."
"Another international incidentff"...the president
grumped. "The North Koreans will shou
t bloody
murder, then the Cubans will join the chorus."
The national security adviser jumped right in.
"Sir, the Cubans can't prove we had CBW
warheads in Gitmo."
"Can't prove? If Fidel Castro doesn't have
a stolen artillery shell on his desk right now
I'll kiss your ass at high noon on the
Capitol steps while CNN"
"Sir, we think"
"Let me finish!
Don't interrupt! I'm the guy the congressmen are
going to fry when they hear about this fiasco. Let me
finish."
Silence.
The president swallowed once, adjusted his tie.
"And nowea"...he said, trying to keep the acid out of his
voice, "we learn the Cubans have a biological
weapons lab in a building in the heart of
Havana, at the university there. Is that
correct?"'
"Yes,, sir."
"What I would like to know is this: Have the Cubans got
any way of using biological weapons on the
United States right now? Today? Have they got a
delivery system?"
"Sir, we don't know."
"Well, by God, in my nonmilitary opinion we
ought to find out just as fast as we can. Does anybody
in this room agree with that proposition?"
"Yes, sir."
"Another thing I want to know: Somebody explain
again how the goddamned Chemical Weapons Treaty
will make countries like Cuba decide not
to build biological and chemical weapons."
The silence that followed that question was broken by the
chairman of the joint chiefs, General Tater
Totten:
"The Chemical Weapons Convention Agreement
won't dissuade anyone who wants these weapons from
building them. All it will do is force us to rid ourselves
of the weapons that deter others from using these things.
Chemical and biological weapons are only
employed when a user believes his enemy cannot or will
not retaliate in kind. Your staff knew that and
wanted the treaty anyway so that you could brag about it
on the stump and win votes from soccer moms who
don't know shit from peanut butter."
The president eyed General Totten sourly, then
surveyed the rest of them. "At least somebody around
here has the guts to tell it like it isea"...he muttered.
The chairman continued: "Doing the right thing isn't the
same as getting the right result. We could use more
of the latter and less of the former, if you ask me."
"Don't push it, Generalea"...the president snarled.
The gray-haired general motored on as if the
president hadn't said a word. "To get back to your