by Todd Moss
“Sunshine! Compadre guapo!” he shouted again, a huge smile plastered across his face.
It wasn’t a swimming area, Jessica realized with alarm. It was a shark pen. What kind of lunatic keeps a shark for a pet?
Her phone vibrated with a reply from Sunday to both her questions:
Ruben Sandoval.
25.
ARLINGTON, VIRGINIA
THURSDAY, 2:07 P.M.
Ruben Sandoval was bored. Dead bored. He’d been at the George P. Shultz National Foreign Affairs Training Center all week. Stuck in dull seminar rooms, under fluorescent lights, and now on his fifth straight hour sitting in an uncomfortable plastic chair.
His stomach rumbled with hunger. He’d paid fourteen dollars cash for a squished ham-and-cheese sandwich wrapped in plastic and crammed into a small cardboard box along with a bag of salty potato chips and a bruised apple. He had picked up the lunch, examined each item with mounting disgust, and then had thrown the whole thing in the trash. Even the coffee was unbearable. He licked his lips at the thought of a proper thick, black café cubano, with a twist of lemon, sipping it while relaxing on a chaise longue in the Florida sun.
The woman sitting next to him coughed loudly, a wet, mucousy bellow that jolted Ruben back to the seminar. At the front of the room, a plump man in an ill-fitting suit with a bad comb-over was tediously explaining how to handle classified documents.
“Standard procedures for determining the level of classification are based on Executive Order 13526 . . .”
This wasn’t how it was meant to be. An ambassadorship was supposed to be glamorous. This was to be the pinnacle of his professional life, coming from nothing to be the official representative of the President of the United States of America. His mind drifted again, marveling at what he had done to get here.
—
Ruben had been just six years old when he had arrived in America alone. His family had tried to flee, hustled onto a plane in the middle of the night, carrying only what they could stash in their pockets. But they were stopped, yanked right out of their seats on the plane by armed men. Ruben remembered his mother screaming, his baby brother wailing, as they dragged away his father. It was the last time he would see his papi.
Ruben’s father had been one of six children raised in a poor village in eastern Cuba. He had moved to the capital at sixteen and worked his way up through Havana’s casinos. His papi started by sweeping floors on the overnight shift, then became a bartender, a blackjack dealer, a pit boss. When American investors opened the grand Hotel Habana Riviera, the same year that Ruben was born, his father was named head of casino security. Links to powerful gringos had been the reason his family had seats on a plane to Miami after the communist guerrillas closed in on the capital.
But those connections were also why they dragged his father away, leaving a single mother with young Ruben and his infant brother, Ernesto.
“There are three levels of document classification. ‘Confidential’ is the lowest level, where release of such information to the public would cause damage . . .”
Without his papi, Ruben’s mother was heartbroken and alone. Their family home was then seized by the government and turned into a headquarters for the local chapter of the communist Rebel Youth Association. So Ruben’s mother, through an inconspicuous friend at the Catholic church, made the most difficult choice for a parent: She sent her eldest son away to safety. Ruben, along with fourteen thousand other unaccompanied Cuban minors, was flown to America in a secret effort dubbed Operation Peter Pan. It was the last time Ruben would see his mother or his baby brother Ernesto.
Unlike the fictional Peter Pan, Ruben was forced to grow up immediately. He was sent to an orphanage in Buffalo, New York, and then on to a boarding school in Oklahoma. Once he turned sixteen, he quit school, like his father, and made his way to the big city. Ruben hitchhiked to Miami, where he took odd jobs running errands up and down Calle Ocho for the old men of Little Havana. At eighteen he worked as a hotel cabana boy, bringing clean towels and cold tropical drinks to middle-class tourists on Miami Beach.
As he ran along the pool deck in the sun, young Ruben remembered something valuable he had learned from his father: There was big money to be made in selling effortless leisure. The tourists in Havana’s casinos didn’t know that the bright lights and shiny hotels were a façade for a crumbling system. And they didn’t care. They paid handsomely to escape their regular lives, to have fun, and to look fabulous. Pretending to have it all was good enough.
Miami in the 1980s was so similar to Havana of the 1950s.
The notion of effortless leisure was the inspiration for Ruben’s first Sunshine Yoga Studio & Juice Bar, opened in Coral Gables. The upscale neighborhood, known as “The City Beautiful” and home to the University of Miami, was the training ground for South Florida’s attractive elite. Within a few years, Ruben had Sunshine Yoga Studio & Juice Bar branches in Fort Lauderdale, Boca Raton, and Palm Beach. After a decade, he had a studio in every wealthy zip code in the state of Florida. Then he cashed out.
“SBU is a special designation which stands for ‘sensitive but unclassified.’ This is used for personnel records and other information that is not technically . . .”
Getting rich wasn’t enough for Ruben. He had learned that, too, from his father and the pain of his exile. Sure, he had grown to appreciate fine wine and Italian sports cars. He owned luxurious vacation homes in the Bahamas, the Florida Keys, and in Puerto Banús on the Spanish Costa del Sol. But Ruben also knew that to protect his fortune and his family, he needed to be politically connected. To get what he really wanted, he would use his wealth to buy power.
Ruben learned quickly that hosting fund-raisers for American politicians was easy. For a catered cocktail party and fifty grand in cash, passed through a network of straw donors, you could buy a congressman every other November. It was almost too easy.
“The distinction between Secret and Top Secret information is based on a determination of whether revelation of that information might cause extreme damage . . .”
Ruben was always thinking of a grander plan. If he could own a congressman for a pittance, then what about a President? Campaign donations paid his way into the inner circle of the White House. He had stayed with his wife in the Lincoln Bedroom and then with a girlfriend at Blair House, the President’s official guesthouse just off Lafayette Park normally reserved for visiting heads of state.
Why not bigger? What about an ambassadorship? It didn’t matter which one, really. Just a title and an entrée into the upper echelons of the American political game. Which he could leverage to expand his network and plot his ultimate goal.
“Top Secret information that is designed to be sensitive compartmented information is handled only in specially designated areas . . .”
Sitting in the dreary seminar room, that final dream, the inner motivation that drove everything Ruben Sandoval did, seemed so very far away.
Ruben wasn’t even supposed to be here. Officially, he wasn’t here. The President had not yet formally announced his nomination to be the next U.S. Ambassador to Egypt. And then he’d need a Senate confirmation hearing and a full Senate vote before he could go to Cairo. He could be weeks, if not months, away.
But Egypt was important. The State Department was especially anxious to have that post filled quickly, so someone in the Secretary of State’s office had arranged for Ruben Sandoval, the presumptive nominee, to spend an inconspicuous—and, technically, unofficial—week at the Schultz Center to get an early start on ambassadorial training and to begin Arabic-language lessons. He had also been fast-tracked for his security clearance. Filling out all those pages of disclosure forms had been painful. This all seemed so unnecessary, a distraction from what he was hoping to achieve. Rather than sitting in this pointless seminar, he should be ensuring that his plan was in motion. He needed to get out of this room.
“For To
p Secret information we use a Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility, which we usually call a SCIF, pronounced ‘skiff.’ Inside a SCIF, communications are protected from external listening devices and swept regularly . . .”
Ruben snapped out of his daydreaming and interrupted the speaker. “Excuse me. You’re saying that discussions and phone calls in a SCIF are entirely private? They can’t be bugged or decoded?”
“Yes, sir. That’s where any information that has been classified as TS/SCI can be handled and discussed.”
“And phone calls from a SCIF are undetectable?”
“Yes, sir. All communication in and out of a SCIF is encrypted and untraceable. It’s fully secure.”
“Where are these SCIFs?” Ruben asked.
“Everywhere. In the State Department. Inside our embassies. Anywhere that a cleared USG official needs to handle Top Secret information.”
“Is there a SCIF here?”
“Yes, sir. We have a SCIF on campus. Would you like to see it?”
26.
CIA HEADQUARTERS, LANGLEY, VIRGINIA
THURSDAY, 2:15 P.M.
Sunday had never heard of Ruben Sandoval, but there was plenty of information on him.
The immigration and naturalization database listed Ruben Sandoval as arriving in the United States from Cuba in 1962 at the age of six. He had arrived unaccompanied and in the custody of the Catholic Church of western New York. In the church records shared with the government, his father was recorded as Fulgencio Sandoval, age thirty-eight, and his mother as Yanitse Sandoval, age twenty-nine, along with one sibling, Ernesto, three years old. But Ruben is the only one in the family who appeared to have ever entered the country.
From tax records at the Internal Revenue Service, Sunday learned that Ruben Sandoval had moved around to different addresses in South Florida for years with little income. He had started a string of failed ventures until the Sunshine Yoga Studio & Juice Bar, Inc., made a small profit. The real money flowed once the business expanded. Then, three years ago, he sold out. Sandoval’s income shifted from the yoga and juice business to a portfolio of investments, an erratic mix of real estate in Nevada and Arizona, a chain of check-cashing outlets in Texas, and a hotel complex in Naples, Florida. Sandoval’s most recent financial statements showed that he had abruptly disposed of a significant minority shareholding in a defense contractor Kinetic Xelaron Systems in Tampa and paid tax on $78 million in capital gains.
Sunday sat back. What he could do with $78 million! He would buy his parents a big house, maybe in the Hollywood Hills or out in the desert near Palm Springs. Ay, would the cousins come from Nigeria in droves! Everyone expecting their share of the payout. And the goats! And lambs! He’d probably have to buy a ranch to keep all the livestock for feasts! Ay! Sunday laughed to himself at the thought and returned to his research.
For such a successful and wealthy self-made businessman, the newspapers didn’t have much on Ruben Sandoval. Sunday found a grainy Miami Herald photo of him at a charity gala for marine wildlife protection. In the picture, Sandoval wore a white tuxedo and a much younger woman on each arm. The caption described him only as “a local businessman and two party guests.” The Tampa Bay Times business section reported on the Kinetic Xelaron sale, but had no further details or any mention of Sandoval. The Washington Post’s political gossip column mentioned Sandoval only once, noting that he was a rising political fund-raiser and reporting a rumor that his name was on a short list of potential ambassadorships.
“Fund-raiser?” Sunday muttered to himself. He opened a new window on his computer and logged on to the Federal Election Commission database, which showed that Sandoval was indeed active. He had given the maximum allowable contribution of $2,700 to virtually every prominent politician in Florida and Nevada, and to the President’s reelection campaign. Nothing unusual here, he thought. Rich guy spreading around some cash to make friends. But $2,700 doesn’t buy anyone an ambassadorship. There must be more to Sandoval’s story. More details . . . somewhere.
27.
U.S. STATE DEPARTMENT HEADQUARTERS, WASHINGTON, D.C.
THURSDAY, 2:33 P.M.
The freshly washed pearl-white Lexus LX SUV roared up Constitution Avenue and squealed around the corner toward the dead end of 22nd Street Northwest. The driver whipped tightly around a line of waiting taxicabs and veered up onto the curb, coming to a screeching halt at the steel gate perimeter.
A Diplomatic Security officer stepped on a silent alarm and immediately raised the anti–car bomb barriers. Inside the State Department’s Harry S. Truman Federal Building, all the security gates automatically locked and the reception desk computers froze. The earpieces of dozens of armed guards erupted with emergency instructions to seal all the doors and execute an immediate lockdown. Shelter-in-place orders flashed on every computer screen in the building.
The officer at the front gate unsnapped his sidearm and aimed it at the Lexus. The taxi drivers ducked into their cars as pedestrians shrieked and ran for cover.
“Driver!” the guard shouted. “Exit your vehicle with your hands up!”
He crouched and took a few steps toward the SUV. The engine cut and the door of the Lexus swung open heavily.
“Hands! Hands! Hands!” the officer shouted.
Out of the Lexus stepped a tall blond woman, middle-aged and handsome, wearing a peach-colored designer business suit.
“Driver! Hands now!”
Behind the officer, more guards in heavy Kevlar, matte black helmets, and automatic weapons emerged from the main doors. The woman threw off her sunglasses and squinted in the sun, revealing long black streaks of eyeliner running down her cheeks. She took a step toward the officer.
“Freeze! Hands! Now!”
The other guards fanned out in a perimeter around the woman.
“Down on the ground! Now! Now! Now!”
The woman showed her palms. “Don’t be ridiculous,” she said, wiping her cheek with her sleeve.
—
At that very moment, up on the seventh floor of the State Department’s headquarters, a security officer burst into the office of the Secretary of State’s chief of staff and slammed the door.
“What the hell’s going on?” Landon Parker howled, holding a phone in each hand.
“Sir, we’ve got a security breach at the front gate. I’m here to lockdown your office.”
“I’ll call you back,” Parker said, and set down both handsets. “Where’s the Secretary?”
“She’s not in the building, sir. She’s over at the West Wing. She’s secure.”
“Is all this really necessary? What kind of breach?” Parker huffed.
“Unknown at this time. I’m checking now,” he said, touching a finger to his earpiece.
Parker walked over to the window, pulling on the blinds.
“Sir, stand away from the window!”
Parker peered out and witnessed a dozen armed guards surrounding a pretty woman with golden hair in an orange suit. He glared as the woman reluctantly raised her hands and took several tentative steps toward the guards, igniting a round of shouting and the appearance of more officers from every direction.
“What the fuck?” Parker said to himself.
“I’m checking now, sir,” the guard repeated.
Parker watched the guards swarm over the woman, force her to the ground, and handcuff her. He could see a second security team secure a pearl-white SUV parked nearby while other officers cleared the area of bystanders.
“Looks like they have it under control,” Parker said. “Doesn’t look like anything serious.”
“Let’s wait for the all clear, sir.”
“I’m going back to work,” Parker said, turning away from the window and eyeing one of his telephones. “Tell me, once you know what happened.”
“I’m in touch with the commanding o
fficer at the front gate right now, sir.”
As Parker started to press redial, something about the woman—her shape, the color of her hair perhaps—suddenly seemed . . . familiar.
Parker set down the phone and returned to the window. The officers were forcing the woman up to her feet. He narrowed his eyes and tried to make out her face. “Officer, I want a full report. Who is . . . that suspect?”
“Sir?”
“I just watched DS detain a woman at the front gate. I want to know who she is.”
“Mr. Parker”—the officer paused and touched his earpiece—“DS is reporting that she’s here to see someone on the seventh floor. She’s insisting she’s here to see . . . you.”
—
Eight minutes later, Landon Parker was in a windowless room in the basement of the State Department, consoling a crying Mrs. Penelope Barrymore.
“Pippa, why didn’t you just call me?”
“I did!” she wailed. Parker handed her a tissue. “They told me someone would get back to me, but of course no one did.”
“I’m sorry, Pippa, I didn’t know.”
“You should have called me, Landon!”
“Yes, you’re right. I should have, Pippa. I’ve been busy.”
“That’s why I had to just come over. Those horrible men pushed me on the ground!”
“Security is a little nervous about trucks rushing the State Department gate. You know how dangerous that was? It was stupid, Pippa. You could have been killed.”
“I’m not here about me, Landon. I’m here about Brinkley. I can’t believe what’s happened. I need your help!”
“Yes, I know,” Parker said.
“So you can help him? You can get him free from those terrible Cubans?”