John had not disconnected.
“I’ve been burned,” Carlos told him. “But I’m okay for the moment.”
“What are your chances of getting out of the compound?”
Carlos looked out the window. No one else was coming. “Fifty — fifty,” he said. And the fact that he was now armed meant absolutely nothing. Because once the shooting began, by anybody, he would be cornered.
“Your extraction point is X-ray, copy?”
“Roger, X-ray,” Carlos said.
“Good luck.”
Glancing out the window again to make sure that he was still in the clear, Carlos shut off the phones, pocketed them, and stepped outside into the warm, humid night. X-ray was Marina Hemingway, about fifteen kilometers west along the coast, where a speedboat and captain would be waiting for him. But even if he managed to get to the motor pool on the other side of the house without being spotted, managed to steal a car and drive away, his chances once he got to the boat were hardly better. The Cuban navy maintained a heavy patrol presence around the entire island, but especially on its north coast. And they were good at intercepting watercraft.
More cars were coming up the driveway, and the crowd at the front of the house had grown appreciably in the last few minutes. He’d never really known these people, even though this was his country. From the moment he’d come back to the island, he felt a disconnect between the Cubans here and the Cuban exiles in Miami and elsewhere. That rift was not only the result of fifty-plus years of separation, but mostly came about because of the vastly different lifestyles between here and the States. The language was the same, but the words had come to have different meanings.
Carlos hesitated for just a moment before he started the opposite way he had come, down a path that led behind the house and away from the growing crowd coming from Havana. By dawn, there would be hundreds of people here from all over the island. And he supposed that heads of state or their representatives from all over the world would be attending the funeral sometime next week, fawning over a dictator and mass murderer who’d once brought the entire western hemisphere to the brink of nuclear war.
Light spilled out from the windows in Fidel’s bedroom, and Carlos had to get off the path to stay in the darkness.
“Alto!” Halt! someone shouted from behind.
And it was over just like that, just as he knew the day would likely come. He veered to the right, directly away from the house, and sprinted deeper into the darkness, pulling the security officer’s 9 mm Glock 17 from his waistband.
“Halt!” someone else shouted from ahead.
And Carlos raised the pistol forward and fired five shots in quick succession, and pulled off five more to the rear.
A bullet slammed hard into the base of his spine, knocking him forward off his feet the instant before he heard the sound of the shot. He felt no pain, except that breathing seemed difficult and he was having trouble moving his gun hand.
Moments, or perhaps minutes, later — time seemed to be distorted — someone kicked the pistol away from his hand and he looked up as Captain Fuentes hunched down next to him.
“It seems we were right to keep an eye on you.”
“Bastardo,” Carlos managed to croak, amazed that he still felt no pain, but worried that he felt as if he were drowning. And the sinking sensation was getting worse.
“Whom do you work for?” Fuentes asked. “The CIA?”
Three years in place, essentially on a deathwatch, from which almost no hard intelligence had been gained, except for the time and date of El Comandante’s passing, and the unexpected appearance of a mystery woman — perhaps Fidel’s last visitor. John had the photographs, so maybe something interesting would come of it.
Captain Fuentes was shouting words that Carlos couldn’t quite make out, and his last thought was that he would have liked to meet John face-to-face, maybe over a cold cerveza.
THREE
The headquarters of the Dirección de Inteligencia is located in Plaza Havana — across from the Parque de la Fraternidad, in sight of the capitol building, amongst most of Cuba’s government buildings — and driving there a couple of hours before dawn, María still wasn’t quite sure what she was feeling.
Traffic had begun to pick up, most of it heading down to Miramar, leaving her to wonder if everyone in the country except her had been on a deathwatch this morning, dressed and ready to respond. She was sound asleep at her finca on the beach near the tiny fishing village of Cojimar — about ten kilometers east of La Habana Vieja, old town — after a difficult day, when the call came from Fuentes, and it had taken her a half hour to get her act together.
Raúl, who had officially succeeded his brother in 2008, would be the one to announce El Comandante’s death, and the proclamation of a state of national mourning. Out of the public’s eye, Cuba’s military and intelligence services would be placed on the highest condition of alert against the chance that some nation might try to take advantage of what could be perceived as a weakness in government. At least, that’s the stance she was sure Raúl and his generals were taking right now. It was another reason for her to go directly to her office, because things were going to get very busy in the government plaza.
The precautions were paranoia, but that was the state of affairs all of them would be faced with, especially her directorate. Another Bay of Pigs? She didn’t think so; there’d been no hints, no odd bits of intelligence from Miami or Washington to suggest such a possibility. But she needed to be ready for the rounds of meetings and staff conferences with every scrap of intel her directorate could produce.
Parking in her slot in the rear, she went inside, showing her ID to the man on duty, whose right eyebrow rose at the sight of her in a T-shirt and shorts. But she was a colonel and he was a sergeant, so he said nothing.
She took the elevator up to her suite of offices on the third floor. In addition to the night-duty officer and his four people manning the watch, which closely monitored the output of the entire sophisticated network of signals intelligence (SIGINT) facilities around the island, her chief of staff, Major Román Ortega-Cowan was also seated at his desk.
He was a career intelligence officer of medium height, with a thick barrel chest, a square-jawed face, and wide, smiling eyes under a high golden tinged forehead and coarse, richly black curly hair. His passion was opera, for which it was rumored he knew by heart the score and libretto for every major work performed in the last two hundred years. He was also a patron of the country’s four professional orchestras and one seriously depleted opera company, many of whose members had fled to take jobs, mostly in Spain.
But in María’s estimation, he was a conniving, two-faced hijo de puta whose smile concealed deeper, darker purposes — almost always for his own personal gain — and who needed to be constantly guarded against. Exactly why she had picked him for her chief of staff three years ago: She wanted a conniver who would get results no matter the obstacles. And he’d done a fine job for her, his training at the hands of the Russian intelligence apparatus in Moscow first-rate.
He looked up when she came to his open door, said something to whomever he was talking to on the phone, hung up, and got to his feet. “I was just about to call you,” he said.
“I’ve already heard. Who was that on the phone?”
“General Muñoz’s chief of staff. We’re at DEFCON Two, and I was ordered to start the call up.” General Ramiro Casas Muñoz was chief of the DI; Defense Condition Two was just one step below the actual military invasion of the island, and all military and intelligence personnel were being called for duty.
“That’s stupid. Fidel wasn’t murdered.”
“We can’t be certain.”
María had turned to go to her office, where she kept a set of military fatigues with her insignia of rank and the DI badge, when Ortega-Cowan stopped her.
“There was a shooting at the compound a couple of hours ago.”
She came back, her stomach suddenly hollow. “Wha
t are you talking about?” She’d been out there, of course, but she could not tell that to her chief of staff. She was sure that he didn’t know the relationship she had to Fidel.
“I don’t have the details, but Captain Fuentes sounded excited. He’s on his way right now — it’s one of the reasons I was just about to call you.”
Nor could she tell him that she’d ordered Fuentes to come here first thing this morning because of sloppy security out there. Neither man knew her entire story, though they were both cut of the same conspiratorial cloth, and both of them thought they knew everything. They wanted her job — that had always been obvious — and she had a feeling that now that Fidel was dead and Fuentes was freed from his compound security position, he might think he had the opening he was waiting for. And of course, Ortega-Cowan was a typical Cuban male, full of machismo, who thought from the beginning that María’s post should be filled by a man, not by a woman.
As long as the two of them never got together, she would be safe, and perhaps now was the time for her to get rid of one of them. There would be a lot of confusion in the coming days. Who could tell what might happen?
“I want to talk to Captain Fuentes when he gets here,” María said. “Not a word about the shooting to anyone.”
“Of course,” Ortega-Cowan said. “Shall I sit in with you?”
“I’ll handle him myself, probably nonsense. You know how he can get.”
Ortega-Cowan nodded. It was unspoken knowledge that Fuentes was a homosexual, but he’d been Fidel’s choice for chief of his personal security, and everything had been left at that; speculation was not encouraged. “Staff meeting at ten?”
“Oh-nine-hundred,” María said, and she walked back to her office to change, and to ponder not only her father’s last request, but also the business of a shooting out there. It must have happened just minutes after she’d left. Curious.
Something wasn’t right, and although she’d prefer to think that it was some trick that Fuentes had worked up, she wasn’t sure, because there was no motive she could think of. Fidel was dead; there was no one left for the captain to impress.
* * *
She changed into her crisp fatigue uniform, ordered up a pot of strong café con leche from the cafeteria, and was just going over the first overnights from the watch — and especially the collated data from the dozen and a half signals intelligence ground stations around the island — when Ortega-Cowan showed up at her door two hours later with Fuentes, who carried a canvas shoulder bag.
If they were in any sort of collusion, she couldn’t make it out from the expressions on their faces, except that Ortega-Cowan was curious and Fuentes was excited. And maybe smug?
“I’ll be in my office if you need anything, Colonel,” Ortega-Cowan said, and he turned and walked away.
María waved Fuentes to a seat across the desk from her. “You reported a shooting after I left,” she said before he was settled.
“Yes, Colonel. We caught a spy trying to escape. He managed to kill one of my officers, and when he fired on us, we shot him.”
María sat back. “A spy in El Comandante’s compound is nothing short of incredible. CIA?”
“Presumably,” Fuentes said, but he didn’t seem concerned, which was bothersome.
“Don’t play games with me, Captain,” María said harshly. “You have sixty seconds to explain to me why I shouldn’t have you arrested and tried for gross dereliction of duty bordering on treason.”
Still, Fuentes didn’t seem to be bothered. “We’ve had one of the house staff under investigation for the past year and a half. His name was Carlos Gutiérrez, and he was hired as a gardener about the same time El Comandante retired.”
“He’s dead?”
“Most unfortunately. But it’s not likely, had he survived, that he would have told us anything under interrogation.”
“We have the drugs.”
“We found a hollow tooth with cyanide.”
“I’ll want to see the report of your investigation, but what the hell was he doing out there? He could hardly have been gathering anything important, other than Fidel’s health. Unless he he’d been put in place as an assassin. Was that what happened this morning?”
“No. Dr. Céspedes is certain El Comandante’s death was from natural causes. He’s been failing for months now. In any event, the gardener had no direct access. They were never alone together.”
“How do you know that he was CIA?”
Fuentes took a satellite phone from his bag and laid it on the desk, and María immediately recognized it for what it was.
“Encrypted?” she asked.
“I think so, and the machine needs passwords. Our technical department might be able to figure it out. But it’s almost certain that he called his report in to Langley that El Comandante was dead and was given instructions for his escape.”
It didn’t add up for María. “It would have been stupid for him to try to run. He’d done nothing wrong, unless his call had been detected and he became aware of it.”
Fuentes took a flip cell phone out of his bag and placed it on the desk. “We’ve kept him under surveillance, as I’ve said. And we’ve been extra alert the past few days because of El Comandante’s condition. We searched his quarters, but we couldn’t be as thorough as we wanted, lest he become suspicious of us. And it was driving us crazy why he was there. What did he hope to learn?”
“And?”
“One of my officers spotted him taking photographs with this cell phone.”
“Of what?” María asked.
“You.”
María powered up the phone, careful to make sure her hands did not shake, and brought up the half dozen photographs of her and her car, one of which included the tag number. “Are you sure that he managed to send these to Langley?”
“We found a USB cord in his room, which would certainly suggest that he had the opportunity to do so.” Fuentes shrugged.
He was enjoying himself, and it infuriated María. But looking at the photographs again, she couldn’t see that any real damage had been done. “Were there any indications that he knew my rank?”
“None that I’m aware of.”
“Or why I was out there this morning?”
Fuentes hesitated. “No, but I’m wondering the same myself. Is it anything you can share with me, Colonel? You were the last one to see El Comandante alive. What were his last words?”
María waved the question off. “Minutiae,” she said. “He wanted to know what SIGINT we’d gotten from Miami in the last twenty-four hours.”
“That makes no sense.”
“The final ramblings of a very old man who’d been accustomed all his life to knowing everything.”
Fuentes was skeptical.
“He died in the middle of my report,” María said. “And that bit of information, Captain, will never leave this office. Am I clear?”
“Perfectly.”
She’d been taught by her Russian masters that the secret of keeping a subordinate in line was to keep him forever off balance. She’d become adept at it. “I originally wanted you here this morning to discuss your security procedures, but that has become a moot point. So now let us discuss your next assignment, which will depend on your skills.”
Fuentes was clearly distressed, but María held back a smile. She’d never liked the man, and maybe having him here at headquarters, close at hand, would force him into making a mistake that she could use to get rid of him.
“Talk to me, Captain,” she said. “Tell me what you want.”
FOUR
Emerging from the colonel’s office and stalking down the corridor, Fuentes knew damned well what the bitch was trying to do to him, had been trying all along, but it still wasn’t straight in his mind why she wanted him out. Uncle Fidel had trusted him, and yet he’d called a nobody director of operations to his deathbed, and the why of that alone was enough to drive a man crazy.
Passing Ortega-Cowan’s open door, their eye
s met, and Fuentes resisted the urge to step inside and have a little talk. Of all the people with any influence in the DI, María’s chief of staff was the only one he had common ground with. But not now; the fact that they could be allies was something best kept from the colonel until it was time for them to strike.
Outside, he got into his battered Gazik, which was one of the jeeps the Russians had left behind, but before he could drive away, Ortega-Cowan came out. The parking lot was at the rear of the building, while the colonel’s office was in front. They went to a bench in one of the gardens.
“You didn’t look too happy up there, Manuel,” Ortega-Cowan said. “Mind sharing with me what’s going on?”
“She wants to get rid of me,” Fuentes said bitterly. He needed to complain to someone.
“I meant about the shooting.”
And Fuentes told him everything, leaving out no detail, including the photographs of María and her car that had presumably been transmitted to Langley, and about her reaction.
Ortega-Cowan was impressed. “This just might be what we need to take her down.”
“What are you talking about? She means to use the fact that I let a spy so close to El Comandante to have me demoted, possibly even court-martialed.” And she’d be well within her rights and duties, the errant thought flashed in his head. But the kid’s eyes were enchanting, and Fuentes had seen him a couple of times tending the less prickly of the plants while wearing nothing but brief shorts and sandals. He’d been dazzled.
“Use your head. Until now, the identity of all our directorate chiefs has been kept a secret. Just like in the Mossad. But if the CIA has her photographs, especially in connection with Fidel’s compound, on the very morning of his death — within minutes of his death — and pictures of that goddamned fancy car of hers, they’ll sit up and take notice.”
“So what?”
“If she’s identified, she’s out,” Ortega-Cowan said. “And maybe I can help.”
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