Ghosts of Havana

by Todd Moss

  Brenda Adelman-Zamora wore her most serious business pantsuit and an even sterner expression. Her personal makeup artist had used extra eyeliner that morning, adding subtle black lines to suggest intense ferocity.

  The congresswoman stared into the camera for a moment, ensuring that all the networks had time to catch her opening statement. Satisfied the assembled media was ready, she inhaled deeply.

  “I have called this press conference on short notice to express my deep outrage at the actions of the Cuban government. Last night, the Cuban navy illegally detained four innocent American citizens. My office has learned that these four men were on a fishing trip. These men are husbands. These men are fathers. Their young daughters play on the same soccer team in the great state of Maryland, just a few miles from where we stand this morning. One of the detained Americans is the coach. A hardworking businessman and a girls’ soccer coach. These soccer dads were together on a fishing trip out of the Florida Keys, enjoying the bounty of my own beautiful state, when they were illegally captured by the communist regime.”

  Adelman-Zamora took another deep breath and hung her head in grief. “My thoughts and prayers are with the families of these innocent men. These fathers have been torn from their wives and children. These men and their families are suffering needlessly from the actions of a ruthless dictatorship.”

  She lifted her chin. “We have not yet had any official statement from Cuba, but they have shamelessly released a video clip to their state-controlled media of the men in detention. Contrary to what the Cuban propaganda machine is reporting, there is no evidence whatsoever that these Americans were engaged in anything other than recreation. There is no evidence whatsoever that these Americans strayed into Cuban waters. My office has now confirmed that their last communication sent to the U.S. Coast Guard came from a location well within international waters. It is thus clear that any claims by the scurrilous regime in Havana that these men penetrated Cuban waters are patently false. There is no excuse for this gross violation of international law.”

  Then she gripped the lectern with both hands and looked directly into the camera. “I am calling on the regime in Havana to immediately and unconditionally release these innocent men. Anything less is unacceptable.”

  She shook her head in disbelief, her hair remaining firmly in place. “This is further evidence of the immoral brutality of the Cuban regime. This act of barbarism is evidence that despite recent steps taken by the United States to extend the hand of friendship, the Cuban regime has nothing but disdain for basic human rights. It is evidence of their utter disregard for international norms. The United States must never waver in the face of tyranny.”

  She paused for a moment and pursed her lips.

  “I am calling on our own government to denounce in no uncertain terms this illegal action by Cuba. I am calling for the White House and the State Department to spare no effort to gain their release.”

  She narrowed her eyes and looked down at her notes. “Even as we seek the freedom of these innocent husbands and fathers, we must also remember that the United States can never reward such acts of aggression. We cannot engage in direct talks with a regime that behaves in this manner. We cannot appease tyranny. We can never negotiate with terrorists.”

  She looked directly into the camera. “I am therefore calling on the White House and State Department to immediately suspend any diplomatic negotiations until further notice. If necessary, we will reimpose sanctions on Cuba. If necessary, we will place them back on the list of state sponsors of terrorism. As the record shows, I strongly opposed the administration’s lifting of sanctions and the reestablishment of diplomatic relations. I take no pleasure in seeing my warnings come to pass. Our olive branches have only been interpreted by Havana as a sign of surrender. It can be no coincidence that just as the Cuban government believes we are weak, they undertake this latest escalation by kidnapping these innocent Americans. They are testing our resolve.

  “But make no mistake, America is stronger than ever before. We will show Havana that we are unwavering in our pursuit of liberty. That there can be no compromise with democracy. No compromise with freedom. We will show the dictator in Cuba that his aggression will result in serious consequences.”

  The chairwoman banged her fist on the podium. “There will be no direct talks with the Cuban government until these innocent men are released unconditionally and full democracy is restored. We will give the communists nothing in return for their safe release.”

  Adelman-Zamora softened her scowl. “I am calling on all Americans to let our own government know that they stand with the Soccer Dad Four. That they stand with their families. And that they stand with the Cuban people who seek nothing less than their own freedom.”

  An aide off camera handed her a white poster board. “The Free Cuba Congressional Caucus is calling on Americans to stand with us today by contacting your representatives, calling the State Department, and by expressing yourself on social media.” Adelman-Zamora flipped the sign and held it up to the camera: #freesoccerdad4.

  20.

  LONG KEY, FLORIDA

  THURSDAY, 11:19 A.M.

  Jessica Ryker drove the rented white convertible Ford Mustang over the bridge, departing Long Key. The waters of the Florida Keys reminded her of Jamaica, the lonely palm trees hanging precariously over the clear blue seas and sugar-white sand. It was a warm, cloudless day. She should have been enjoying this drive through paradise. Instead, she was pissed off.

  Jessica had been in the car for the past two and a half hours, driving south from Fort Lauderdale, then taking Route 1, a series of two-lane bridges connecting the archipelago of the Florida Keys. The bridges began just south of Homestead on the mainland and then ran for more than a hundred miles. Route 1 eventually reached a dead end at Key West, the southernmost point on the continental United States. Just ninety miles from Cuba. But Jessica wasn’t going all the way to Key West today.

  She had been yanked off the Fort Lauderdale beach that morning by the Deputy Director of the Central Intelligence Agency. She was ordered to drive to Marathon, about halfway along the Keys, to find out what she could about what had happened to a fishing boat seized by the Cubans. Her first thought had been Cuba?

  —

  A few minutes after she had hung up the phone with the Deputy Director, an elderly lady in a white housecoat and a long leopard-print sun visor had arrived at the beach.

  “Hello, Jessica my dear,” she had said warmly.

  “Aunt Lulu? Is that you?” Jessica replied to a face she had never seen before.

  “Yes, dear. How lovely to see you and the boys. Noah and Toby have gotten so big.”

  Jessica had coughed as her two sons had stared with quizzical looks at the strange old woman who had suddenly invaded their space. “Toby, Noah,” she said slowly, “this is your Auntie Lulu. You haven’t seen her for a very long time.”

  Both boys had stared up emotionlessly at the old woman.

  “She’s going to help you make a sand castle while mommy runs an errand. Auntie Lulu will then take you to lunch and I’ll meet you all back at the house later today. Okay?”

  Toby shrugged and returned to digging holes in the sand. Noah’s eyes watered.

  “Oh, baby, be brave. Auntie Lulu will take good care of you. And I’ll be back before you know it. She’ll take you for pizza.”

  “That’s right, dear,” Lulu had said with a broad smile.

  “Pizza,” Noah had said, choking back tears.

  —

  Bastard,” Jessica hissed to herself as she punched the accelerator to pass a gigantic Winnebago covered with destination stickers: SOUTH OF THE BORDER, THIS CAR CLIMBED MT. WASHINGTON, VIRGINIA IS FOR LOVERS.

  She should have known that the Deputy Director wouldn’t have given her his vacation house without some hidden agenda. She cursed herself for not knowing better. A rookie mista
ke. Of course he had sent her to Florida on purpose. For a purpose. For some kind of mission.

  Lulu hadn’t provided many details, but Jessica hadn’t wanted to argue in front of her children. She was leaving them with a total stranger and the last thing she wanted was to appear anxious. But Cuba?

  Cuba seemed like a relic of the Cold War. What could possibly be so important about a lost fishing boat that the Deputy Director would have sent her down to Florida and then ordered her to drive all the way to the Keys? To find some deckhand and see what he knows? She decided she’d go, do her job quickly, and get back to her children as soon as possible.

  The bridge was a single lane in either direction over the water. A green sign announced that Marathon was four miles away. Almost there, she thought just as her phone buzzed with a call from Judd.

  “Hi, sweets!” she answered.

  “How’s the beach?”

  “Great. We all miss you.”

  “Wow, it sounds windy,” Judd said.

  Jessica took her foot off the accelerator and regretted not pulling over to take the call. “Yeah, it’s breezy. It’s . . . Florida.”

  “How are my boys?”

  “They’re playing in the sand. They love it.”

  “Do they want to say hello to their dad?”

  “Um . . .” Jessica stalled as she decided how to play this. “They’re busy with their buckets. And they’re all wet and sandy.” Lie Number Two, she thought with a pang of guilt.

  “Okay, I guess,” Judd tried to hide his disappointment.

  “We’re going to visit with my Aunt Lulu later today. I want the boys to meet her,” she said.

  “You have an Aunt Lulu?”

  “Yes, I’m sure I told you about her. She’s not really an aunt, more of a distant cousin.” Lie Number Three. Jessica changed the subject. “So how’s work?”

  “Fine, I guess. It’s going fine.”

  “That doesn’t sound good.”

  “I pitched my idea about cash incentives to Landon Parker.”

  “Incentives? You didn’t talk about aligned incentives and Adam Smith, did you, sweets?”

  “Yeah. That was a mistake, Jess.”

  “So, what did Parker say?”

  “I mean, he liked my ideas, but they’re going in another direction.”

  “I’m sorry, honey,” she said. “You’ll get another shot.”

  “Sure.”

  “The good news is that you’re free, right?” Jessica brightened up. “Maybe you want to come down to join us? Maybe tomorrow?”

  “That’s what I was thinking, too. But Parker has pulled me onto a special assignment. Something different. Actually, that’s . . . what I’m calling about.”

  “What kind of special assignment?”

  “Have you seen the news? Have you seen the story about these soccer dads down in Florida on a fishing trip who were captured by the Cubans?”

  “Cuba? Really?” Jessica gripped the steering wheel tightly. “Judd, you’re working on Cuba?”

  “Sort of. I’m helping Parker out. I’m not supposed to talk about it. But I’m helping the State Department get the hostages released. I probably shouldn’t say any more on the phone.”

  “Judd, why didn’t you tell me you’re working on Cuba?”

  “I am. That’s why I called you. Why”—Judd paused—“Why does it matter?”

  “It matters”—she calmed herself—“because . . . maybe I can help you? Assist. That was one of our rules, remember?”

  “Right, I remember. Assist, avoid, admit.”

  Jessica knew it was already too late to avoid. They were now both working on Cuba. On the very same case. This was Jessica’s chance to admit. To avoid Lie Number Four.

  “So how can you help me?” Judd asked.

  “Um, I don’t know yet,” she said as she passed a shiny red replica lighthouse announcing WELCOME TO MARATHON. “But I am down here in Florida . . .”

  Her mind spun. Should she admit that she was also now working on the Cuba detainees? Or could she get away with it one more time? Maybe her Cuba assignment would be short-lived? Maybe it would be over this afternoon?

  “Oh, I don’t know, Judd.” Lie Number Four. “You’ll think of something. Maybe if you get stuck, there’s someone I can call?” Jessica offered.

  Yes, Jessica thought, I know exactly who to call.

  21.

  CIA HEADQUARTERS, LANGLEY, VIRGINIA

  THURSDAY, 11:37 A.M.

  The cubicle, in a drab room labeled AFRICA ISSUE on the third floor of the old CIA headquarters building, was unusually neat for an analyst work space. Most of the cramped desks were littered with papers, the half walls covered with worn maps, stolen street signs, pilfered campaign posters, and other detritus from undercover field visits.

  The analysts, the academic teams working for the Agency’s Directorate of Intelligence, always lived slightly in the shadow of the other side of the CIA house, the operatives working for the National Clandestine Service. Most of the newer analysts, some barely out of college, competed with bravado to acquire unique souvenirs—a sword bought off the streets of Khartoum, a battlefield talisman used by a Congolese rebel, a hand-painted barber’s sign snatched from the inner slums of Kumasi—to prove their mettle. It was a game, mainly for the rookies, dismissed by the older salty CIA professionals as the youthful follies of intelligence community tourism.

  This analyst’s cubicle, however, was different. It was spotless. The papers and maps perfectly stacked and aligned with the edge of the desk, any coffee stains immediately wiped clean. The occupant of this particular cubicle, a man named Sunday, was also immaculate. His Afro cut tight, his wide face carefully clean-shaven except for a perfectly trimmed short goatee. The only concession to his personal life, a small formal photo of his parents, first-generation immigrants from Nigeria.

  Sunday had no time for childish contests. Not that he wasn’t fiercely competitive. He had inherited from his father an intense drive to adapt to his surroundings and find unconventional ways to get ahead. His father had been a northern Nigerian working in the southeast, a Muslim working in a zone dominated by Christians. When the secessionist Biafran War exploded, Sunday’s father knew trouble was coming and fled by boat to neighboring Cameroon. He had then managed, by ways that Sunday was never told, to get to Chad, then Tunisia, Paris, London, and eventually he joined a distant cousin in southern California.

  When Sunday was born, he inherited his father’s instinct for adaptation and survival, hidden among his genes. Only later, as a young man, did he exhibit his dad’s patriotic passion for their family’s adopted nation.

  From his mother, Sunday received two birthrights: a tight emotional bond with Nigerian culture and an obsession with cleanliness. His mother cooked traditional Hausa foods—goat stew or okra-and-pumpkin soup were his favorites—at least once a week. She also graciously hosted an unending parade of Nigerian visitors in their suburban Los Angeles home, an occasion that often was accompanied by a feast of a whole roasted lamb.

  This combination of cunning, patriotism, and meticulousness, paired with links to a foreign culture, made Sunday an ideal recruit for the Central Intelligence Agency. It was only natural that he became a scholar of politics and the motivations of organized violence. In hindsight, it was almost inevitable that one day Sunday would fall under the wing of Professor BJ van Hollen. That eventually he would use his gifts to help the United States of America better understand what was happening in a faraway corner of the globe. That was what had brought him to this tidy cubicle.

  But unlike his Africa Issue colleagues, Sunday had little time for silly competitions over weapons or street signs. Like many Americans working undercover, Sunday really had two jobs. His day job was as a Directorate of Intelligence analyst, currently assigned to a special task force on piracy in Somalia. Yet S
unday was also working covertly for the supersecret Purple Cell, an autonomous operational unit within the National Clandestine Service run by Jessica Ryker. That, too, was thanks to BJ van Hollen.

  —

  Someone on an upper floor of the CIA was convinced that Iran was using criminal gangs in Somalia to fund violent extremist cells, and Sunday’s current assignment was to hunt for financial fingerprints. He scanned the screen on his classified computer, running an algorithm that was trying to discern a pattern in banking transactions between Tehran and the informal hawala banks in Somalia. It was looking like another all-nighter.

  “Hey, S-Man, who’s this?” a voice shouted from behind Sunday. He spun around to find an overweight colleague, holding a stuffed moose head with a wide-brimmed safari hat. Before Sunday could reply, Glen answered, “Moose-eveny . . . Get it?”

  Glen roared with laughter.

  Sunday smiled politely, “President Museveni from Uganda. Ay. I get it.”

  “Museveni, Moose-eveny!”

  “Did you steal the president’s hat?”

  “I bought it off a coffee farmer in Kampala. Moose-eveny! I love it! I’m going to hang him up by the front door. Hey, Sunday, you want half my muffin?”

  “No thanks,” said Sunday, turning back to his computer.

  Glen occupied a faraway cubicle, but he always seemed to be hanging around this side of the office with his snacks. This morning he was brandishing an extra-large dark-chocolate muffin. “Okay, more for me,” Glen said.

  He ripped off the muffin top and shoved it into his mouth. “So . . . you find anything yet?” Glen asked while still chewing.

  “Not yet,” Sunday replied, his back still turned to his colleague.

  “Nothing?” he mumbled through a mouthful of muffin. “I’ve got SIGINT on more than a dozen pirate gangs. And I’m mapping their scouting routes correlated with the tides in the Gulf of Aden. Cutting edge analytics. The task force team chief is gonna love it. And you’ve got nothing, S-Man?”