The Powers That Be r5-1

by Cliff Ryder

  that might bring.

  There was a bigger problem that affected his decision—

  his family. Damason had fallen in love when he was a corporal, and married a wonderful woman who had borne him two lovely children. The path he was considering would put them in terrible danger and could very well mean their deaths. It was just another aspect of what he wrestled with every day, trying to reconcile what he could do for his country with the realities of the situation.

  There had already been some attempts to initiate change—of that he was sure. While in Spain, he had been approached by a university student who had put him in touch with a small division of the State Department of the U.S. government, requesting information about Cuba’s government and its military. At the time, he had rebuffed the man and even let the people at the university know what had happened. But he hadn’t told any of his fellow officers, nor had he let his superiors know about the incident upon his return home.

  When he had come to his realization, he managed to contact that same student, who put him in touch with an American contact. He had fed information to that contact for over a year. He would drop the most recent data he had, and would receive confirmation that it had been received, but nothing was any different. Damason had come to the realization that something more needed to be done.

  Then, one sultry night Damason had been walking home in civilian clothes, thinking, as always, about what he could do, when he came upon what appeared to be a simple street mugging. Stepping in to break it up, he met an American businessman named Samuel Carstairs, who had thanked him profusely and had insisted on buying him a drink. Initially wary—although he couldn’t see the Cuban government using an American to entrap its own citizens—he had agreed and took the balding, sweating man to a local watering hole, where Damason was a regular, and more importantly, they wouldn’t be bothered.

  Carstairs leaned back and fanned himself with his hat.

  “I’ll have a rum and cola, por favor. ”

  Damason ordered the same, and sipped his drink, nodding when Carstairs handed over crisp U.S. dollars instead of pesos to the bartender, who made them disappear in a second. “You know what we call this back home nowadays?” Damason shook his head. “A mentirita. ”

  He chuckled, and Damason tried not to show his hackles rising too much. The term meant “a little lie” and was used by both Cubans and Americans as a derogatory reference to the island’s politics.

  Is he a spy? Is the government trying to entrap me?

  Damason wondered. He decided to play along for the time being. “Where are you from?” he asked politely.

  “My company does business all over the world, but I work at its headquarters in Miami. I handle foreign accounts, which is why I’m here. And what do you do?”

  The rum had loosened his tongue, and Damason figured he had nothing to lose. “I’m a major in the Cuban army.”

  The American leaned forward and fixed his new friend with an appraising stare. “Are you going to arrest me for buying you a drink?”

  The straightforward question was so ludicrous that Damason roared with laughter and ordered another round.

  The ice broken, their friendship had progressed along with the evening, until they both stumbled back to Carstairs’s hotel, located in the resort area, hours later. They had talked of many things—baseball, U.S.-Cuban relations, the embargo, politics. Damason had known that he had probably told this man too much—his despair at Cuba’s current situation, and the knowledge that nothing was likely to change until the government did. A part of his mind screamed at him during the conversation that he was committing treason, that what he was saying would land him in prison, but he didn’t care. The opportunity to talk to someone, anyone about what had been gnawing at his soul for months was simply too good to pass up, even if it meant he might suffer as a result.

  At the end of the evening, Carstairs shook his hand and pressed a small cell phone into it. Suddenly he did not seem as intoxicated as he had been earlier. “There is someone that I want you to meet. He will send you a message on this phone, and you can reply to it at your convenience. I think you and he would have much to talk about.”

  Damason’s paranoia was too muted by the alcohol to grasp the import of the other man’s words. The next morning, with his head aching and his tongue fuzzy, he stumbled across the small cell phone and tucked it into his pocket before his wife and daughters returned home from their trip to see her parents. All day he carried it, its insignificant few ounces of plastic and electronics weighing him down like lead in his pocket. His thoughts were consumed both by guilt at what he had done and the danger he might have put his family in. He wondered if this was a new kind of trap, if using the phone would bring the secret police to his door.

  But at last, when he was alone and sure he wasn’t going to be bothered, he made his decision; if he didn’t take this chance now, he would never be able to do anything to help free his country. He flipped open the cell phone to read the text message on the screen: “Do you wish to help your country change its direction?”

  There were two options: yes and no. Damason didn’t hesitate. He pressed the button for yes. A number appeared on the screen, and gave him instructions when to call.

  Damason made sure his office door was locked, then dialed that number, waiting with bated breath for the connection to be made. After several clicks, he heard a voice: “Is this the person who wants to change his country’s direction?”

  Damason swallowed, then committed himself. “Sí.”

  Before he knew it he was involved in the greatest operation that was going to occur to his country—the retaking of Cuba from the Communists, and placing it squarely in the hands of the people. And once he had proved he was who he claimed to be, Damason was assigned an integral part in this new revolution.

  Unfortunately, that also required sacrifices from people like Francisco Garcia Romero. Damason had received a message that Romero was in prison, and had to be eliminated before he could go to trial, or more importantly, before he revealed any details, no matter how minor, about the upcoming operation. Damason had reviewed the case, and didn’t believe there was any reason for alarm, but the voice on the other end of the phone had assured him that Romero had information that could cripple, or even expose their plan. He had to be removed. “Besides, after eight months in prison, most likely you will be doing him a favor,” the voice had said.

  After seeing the state Romero had been reduced to, Damason had been inclined to agree. He was even more upset at the indignities and torments that were inflicted on people who just wanted to speak their minds. Those, along with the death of good soldiers like Cantara, were conse-quences that had to be accepted if Damason truly wanted to help his country. And he wanted that more than almost anything else in the world.

  Damason shook himself out of his reverie. Just like that first day, he made sure his door was locked. He lifted his desk onto its side. The right desk leg was loose, and he pulled it out, revealing a hollow just big enough for the phone. He had made the hiding place himself, a bit at a time over several weeks, carrying out the wood shavings in his pockets bit by bit every day. The internal batteries had died long ago, so he relied on a jury-rigged battery pack that could be plugged into the phone’s power jack. It only lasted for about ten minutes, but would do the job.

  He plugged the batteries in, flipped the phone open and smiled. There was a message. Damason dialed the number given and waited for the connection, savoring the fact that the countdown was about to begin, heralding a new dawn of freedom for a nation that had been suffering for over forty years.

  Kate stood staring at a large screen in a virtual surveillance suite, surrounded by men and women all in front of computer screens, each monitoring or researching possible illegal activity around the world.

  Along with its other perks, Room 59 had been granted carte blanche back-door access to many computer systems, civilian and military, around the world. Any they didn’t have i
mmediate access to, a pool of brilliant, determined hackers could break into at a moment’s notice. Although they didn’t know the true identities of the others, as Room 59 kept them isolated just like everyone else, the young programming turks had formed a loose cadre and had a running bet to see who could hack an approved site in the shortest time. The current record holder was a girl—at least Kate thought of her as a girl—whose online handle was Born2Slyde. She had cracked a multinational online security company’s mainframe in under five minutes. She was now leading an operation, providing electronic backup and intel to an operative tracking a large former Russian army weapons ring.

  Kate leaned over the girl’s virtual shoulder. She was viewing three monitors while watching some kind of incomprehensible anime program that featured a schoolgirl in a short dress running around feudal Japan with a guy dressed in red robes and carrying a huge sword who had either white or black hair, depending on whether he was a human, half-dog demon or something else completely. B2S had tried to explain it to her once, but Kate’s head had spun after hearing two minutes of the vast, complicated plot.

  As her system sensed Kate’s presence, B2S acknowledged her with a small nod of her head, her multiple earrings tinkling softly, but her mascara-ringed eyes not leaving the main screen, which showed a meeting in progress on a remote army base in Siberia. B2S was piggybacking on a French telecommunications satellite to record the movement of vehicles and people and also monitoring the surrounding area to make sure no one was planning an ambush. All the bases were covered, Kate saw with satisfaction.

  A soft chime in her ear signaled that the Paradise operation room was ready. Kate popped up an instant messaging screen in front of B2S. “You got it covered here?” Kate typed.

  “GTG,” Kate read—hacker slang for “good to go. ”

  “Okay, contact me if anything happens, or afterward,”

  Kate signed off.

  The girl nodded, intent on the crime unfolding before her.

  Kate smiled and headed for the Paradise op room, thinking that the U.S. intelligence agencies’ loss was her gain. It was doubtful that B2S would even make it in the front door of any of the alphabet-soup agencies, but she was one of the best hackers anywhere in the world. The fact that she lived in Saudi Arabia would have bothered some people, but Kate had insisted on the best of the best, no matter where they lived, and once she gave them the recruiting spiel, almost everyone wanted in. They could never talk about what they did and were monitored constantly from a secondary location, just in case of attempted subversion, but so far there had never been a leak on-line about any covert activity.

  In fact, the hackers often brought Kate intel on possible security violations before any of the directors even knew there might be a problem. They were also paid extremely well for their work through several dummy companies set up for just such a purpose.

  The muted activity around her faded out of sight, replaced by a room with a row of three terminals, all occupied by avatars of the three hackers readying their programs.

  Once activated, they would work in shifts so that at least one was always on duty.

  Judy was also in the room, and greeted Kate with a nod.

  “Who’s heading this one?” Kate asked.

  “We’ve got KeyWiz as team lead, with El Supremo and NiteMaster as seconds.”

  Kate shook her head. “Boys will be boys. Speaking of, where’s ours?”

  Judy contacted KeyWiz, who was running his op out of a bedroom in Alameda, California. “Key, please show us the operatives.”

  He raised a finger and a moment later a map of Miami appeared, with two tiny green blips representing Jonas and Marcus, traveling south on Forty-second Avenue toward Coral Gables. They pulled into a side street a few blocks from the Miracle Mile.

  “Operatives are entering a custom tailor’s clothing store.”

  All the operatives who agreed to work for Room 59 were implanted with a small passive microchip that wouldn’t show up on any body scans or airport security equipment, but would enable Room 59 to track them wherever they went. The chips had saved the lives of several operatives in the past and were mandatory for anyone in the field or their handlers—Kate, Judy and Denny included.

  “Jonas must be getting outfitted.” Kate shrugged. “I suppose you have to look the part.”

  “I just hope he upgrades his wardrobe enough for the yacht he’s going to be playing arms dealer on.” Judy brought up a picture, and Kate’s eyebrows shot up in disbelief. “This is what one of the Bogota cartel was running around in a few months ago,” Judy explained.

  “I think my entire town house can fit on the bow, with room left over for something small, like, oh, Yankee Stadium,” Kate said.

  Judy stared at the picture. “It’s times like this when I find myself reconsidering the decision to leave the field.”

  “Maybe so, but then again, we won’t be facing Cuban exiles forming their own army to try and take back their homeland, either, and I can have a great piña colada at any one of a dozen places in New York City.” Kate paused. “That is, if I ever took a night off.”

  Another chime rang, and a moment later Denny appeared in the room, knotting a black tie around his neck. “Kate, Judy, good to see you both. I’ve got the information requested on one of the leaders of this exile group for you to pass on to Jonas.”

  Before replying, Kate isolated their conversation from the hackers. “Wonderful. Got a minute to give us the highlights?”

  “Sure, the Ingersoll Rand party doesn’t start until five.”

  Denny finished knotting his tie and straightened it, staring off into space as if he was looking into a mirror. “Our most likely suspect is a man named Rafael Castilo.” He brought up a photo of a stocky man with thick dark hair and wearing a tailored, tropical-weight silk suit, shaking hands with another suited gentleman. “The man on the right is Castilo.

  He’s shaking hands with the mayor of Miami as they celebrated the twenty-fifth anniversary of the founding of his very first business, a delivery service he started when he was seventeen. It’s the largest intracity delivery service today, holding a near monopoly on the trade.”

  “A self-made man.” Kate studied the picture. Mr.

  Castilo was the poster boy of American prosperity.

  “What’s his background?”

  “He came to Florida in 1967 at age fourteen, a victim of the purges during the 1960s. His parents were both killed in Cuba. He landed in Miami right after the U.S. passed the Cuban American Adjustment Act, intended to give exiles and refugees a leg up in making a life for themselves. Castilo is certainly one of the success stories—entrepreneur at seventeen, branched out into real estate at age twenty and engineered his first hostile takeover, of Miami Imports/Exports, at twenty-four. That business has grown twenty times larger in size in the past three decades. He has a master’s degree in business administration from the War-rington College of Business Administration. Even though the Ivy League courted him, he said he wanted to learn where he had grown up. Estimated net worth, approximately 1.2 billion.”

  Judy pursed her lips. “Surely he has a few tens of millions available to give to Cuba’s poor, right?”

  Denny chuckled. “He might have tried that, if Congress hadn’t made it illegal for U.S. businesses to deal with Cuban businesses. He does send money through his overseas branches, but that’s a drop in the bucket. Apparently he’s decided to raise the stakes a bit. Representatives from all of the major PMCs have recently taken meetings with his people. In fact, the folks at one of them passed this info on to us. Castilo’s rep was always very careful not to say anything incriminating, but he was just looking for a PMC that could field a force as large as two battalions, with equipment for an overseas mission in a tropical climate for up to six months, citing foreign expansion into potentially dangerous markets. Since there’s no way any American group will take this on, most likely we’ll be looking at foreign PMCs, probably operating on the shady side, since t
hey will basically be invading a sovereign country, for all intents and purposes.”

  “Great, the first attempted takeover by a private army since William Eaton captured Derna in Tripoli in 1805, only this time it’s about to happen in our own backyard.” Kate shrugged as both Denny and Judy stared at her with their mouths open.

  “What—I like military history. So, Jonas drops Marcus off to find our contact, and he goes after Castilo. One question—if Jonas is an arms dealer, why wouldn’t he deal with the PMC

  directly?”

  Denny nodded. “That’s a good one. Jonas and I discussed that, and we both believe that Castilo’s flamboyant nature and overwhelming desire to help his countrymen will make him take unusual risks, even for a prominent businessman, such as setting up a meeting between his PMC and a seller.

  The trick will be to appeal to his revolutionary side, as it were.”

  “Well, Jonas and Castilo are close in. I’m sure he’ll come up with some points in common that they both share—the oppression of communism, for example,” Judy said as she clasped her hands on front of her. “How are you getting those two face-to-face, by the way?”

  “One of Castilo’s hobbies is greyhound racing. We’ve set up Mr. Heinemann to casually run into him at the Palm Beach Kennel Club. Of course, that’s once he drops Marcus off in Paradise.”

  “I wonder what Marcus will think of his homeland today.” Kate turned back to the three hackers and opened a voice link to them. “Everything ready here?”

  KeyWiz responded immediately. “We’ve got scheduled satellites orbiting over Cuba and the surrounding waters, providing coverage for the next seventy-two hours, and we’re on top of your man in Miami, as well.”

  “All right, it’s show time.” Kate crossed her arms, resisting the urge to nibble on her nails, a nervous habit she acquired whenever one of her operatives entered the field.

  “Let’s do it.”

  Marcus couldn’t stop staring. “It’s unbelievable.”

  “And I thought I was the tourist here.” Jonas nudged him.