by Ridge King
Aricela had given him some unwelcome news about one of their operatives, Julio Aponte, the lawyer / accountant they used to create fake identities, false passports, identity cards, etc.
She’d dropped him a half block from the front of his store. He didn’t want anyone seeing her drop him off. He walked the short distance to his store and went through the front door.
There was a retail shop in the front and a small factory in the back where the furniture line was made. It was all very mom and pop.
A couple of sales clerks greeted him.
“Have a nice trip, Señor Gonzalez?” asked one.
“Si.”
Other people nodded.
He made a beeline for the office toward the rear where he found the office manager, Frangina Soto, working behind her desk. She smiled when he came into the small office and sat at his desk.
“Señor?” she said. “Everything is good?”
“Everything is very good, Frannie.”
They went through the usual motions a largely absentee owner would go through when visiting one of his businesses. After a quick cup of coffee and some catching-up, they went together through the wide sliding door that led to the manufacturing shop that took up the larger back end of the warehouse style building the company used. He made a show of talking to the workers.
Frangina Soto was the only one at Gonzalez Patio Furniture who knew Pozo’s true identity. She was married and had a family in Hialeah and had been recruited many years ago into the Dirección de Inteligencia. She had some distant relatives in Cuba, but for all intents and purposes was just as “Cuban-American” as any number of other “exiles,” as they styled themselves, thought Pozo.
They returned to the office where Pozo collected some car keys, keys to his house, some cash, the cellphone he used. On second thought, he went to the safe near the back of the office and, quickly remembering the combination, opened it. He pulled out a .38, checked the ammo, and stuffed it into his pocket.
“I’ll be back around five,” he said to Frannie. “I have dinner with the Oyebanjos on some business. Ought to be here four or five days.”
Frannie nodded.
He left through the warehouse loading dock. He walked the two blocks down the alley to a cottage where he stayed. Here he got into the Chevy Malibu that he drove when he was in Miami. Nothing too flashy. He made a call.
“Aponte? Good, you’re there. Stay there. I’ll be over in ten minutes.”
He drove about ten blocks away where he found a little storefront office (rents were cheap in Hialeah) with a badly painted stenciled sign in the window: Aponte Servicios Financieros.
He went into the front office and nodded to the clerk sitting there. A male customer in his late 20s sat patiently—nervously, thought Pozo—in a chair against the wall.
“Gonzalez for Aponte.”
But he heard a rustle in the office behind and Julio Aponte came rushing out, eagerly shaking his hand. Aponte had a potbelly and Pozo noticed the shirt button above his beltline was unbuttoned. Unsightly stray black hairs protruded from this little opening. Aponte wore glasses that did not fit and he combed his hair from the right side to cover what had over the years become an increasingly bald head.
“Jorge, Jorge! So good to see you again!”
Pozo turned to the customer as he shook Aponte’s hand.
“One of the best in Hialeah, my friend.”
The customer just nodded agreeably, smiling, revealing a mouth full of teeth that needed work.
“You can’t go wrong with Julio Aponte!” Pozo rested his hands on his knees as he leaned down to get a closer to the customer. “And where are you from, my friend?”
The customer looked like a scared rabbit, glancing over his shoulder at Aponte.
“Havana,” he said tentatively.
Pozo said a few words to the customer in Spanish and then nodded.
“Can you spare a few minutes, Julio?”
“Of course, for you, of course, always.”
Aponte led him into his inner office and closed the door.
“No need to close the door, my friend,” said Pozo. “We’re going for a coffee.”
“But I have an appointment in ten minutes.”
“With that guy out there?”
“Yes.”
“Cancel it.”
“And I have another one in twenty minutes.”
“Cancel it, too,” Pozo ordered and went back out into reception.
Aponte told his secretary to call the client and reschedule the upcoming appointment, apologized to the customer with the bad teeth, and followed Pozo out of the office and around the corner where they picked up a couple of Cuban coffees at a stand-up window. They went to sit on a bench under a shade tree nearby.
“You disappoint me, Julio.”
“How so?” Aponte pretended to be shocked.
“You are, how shall I put it, straying from your mission.”
“But—”
The quizzical look on Aponte’s face led Pozo to sigh and go on.
“I know about your little side business, Julio.”
“But—”
“You’ve been knocking down $10,000 to $15,000 from guys like the one we just left in your office for fake Cuban birth certificates.” Aponte’s head fell to his chest. “I know these things, Julio. We have so much to do—tens of millions to make together—and you are wasting your time on this kind of shit that will get you caught.”
“I admit it, Fernando,” Aponte said, calling Pozo by his real name, “I was trying to make a little on the side.”
“If they catch you making a little on the side, I lose you. You go to prison and I lose you. What is the date? It’s eight days before Christmas, Julio, eight days! The prime time for us to file our phony tax returns begins January first. The first seven to eight weeks of the year are the time we make the most money. And you’ve been too busy to attend the planning sessions with the Oyebanjos. You are going to cost the Cuban government tens of millions of dollars, Julio. Is that what you want?” He leaned in, lowering his voice, almost to a growl. “I will not let this happen, Julio. I will not let you betray your country. I will kill you with my bare hands if that’s what it takes.”
Pozo straightened himself and smiled broadly, stretching out an arm that he draped over Aponte’s slumping shoulder.
“I’m sorry, Fernando,” said Aponte, his eyes welling with tears.
Pozo patted his shoulder.
“Now, now. I want you to focus on what we have to do, Julio. What we were sent here to do.”
“I will. I promise.
“If I hear of such transgressions again, you know I will deal with you severely.”
“Yes.”
“If you need more money, you let me know. Money, we have. If you don’t tell me the truth, I will know you are greedy.” He reached into his pocket and pulled out the .38 “You know me well enough, Julio, to know that I will not hesitate to use this if you fuck with me. If I smell the greed on you. Like I do the foul smell of those cheap cigars you smoke.”
“No, I am not greedy.”
“We shall see, my friend, we shall see. I am doubling your salary. When you need money, you reach out to me, not these losers on the street.” Pozo put the gun back into his pocket. He stood up and stretched. “Such a fine day. I love Miami in December. More coffee, Julio?”
“No, no more coffee.” Pozo noticed a slight tremor in Aponte’s right hand, but it wasn’t from the coffee.
They returned to the office.
Pozo got into his Malibu and headed back to the cottage. He wanted to lie down for a while. He’d been up before dawn to make the rendezvous with Big Fish IV, and he was angry about the Coast Guard interdiction. He could blame no one else for this incident. It was completely his fault. He’d insisted on the go-fast boat as opposed to the usual slower fishing boat he used. It’s just that the fishing boat took twice as long to cover the distance as the smaller, faster one.
&nbs
p; Aponte had hooked into an increasingly lucrative business in Miami for people with his skills in providing fake papers: putting together fake Cuban birth certificates.
As more and more illegal immigrants made their way into Miami from Latin American countries, a lot of them sought fake Cuban birth certificates because if they could show one, the American authorities would grant them green cards. So, the guy from Costa Rico they’d left behind in Aponte’s office, if he could get his hands on a Cuban birth certificate, could suddenly become a legal immigrant rather than an illegal one. The going rate was between $10,000 and $15,000 for one of these invaluable documents. Very tempting for someone like Aponte.
Pozo had big plans for Aponte. He had been grooming the low level operative to move him up into the big leagues where there was serious money to be made.
The Americans lost $5 billion to $7 billion every year to tax ID fraud. Pozo’s agents were responsible for only $1.5 billion of that. The rest of the money was stolen by a hodgepodge of other organized crime syndicates and small-time independent operators: people like ex-drug dealers who discovered tax fraud was easier than selling drugs, with the added benefit that almost no one got caught. Pozo was determined to double his take over the next couple of years—long before the IRS could put in measures to counteract the theft (if they ever got beyond the stage of talking about it).
Nine of the top ten cities in America where this fraud took place were in Florida, and Pozo was happy that he had teams in the top five. They were riding high.
It was crucial to file the fake returns in January before the real taxpayers filed their own returns, by which time it was too late. The IRS already would have sent out the fake refunds to the fraudsters. (An average taxpayer who might really be owed a $1,000 refund could be used by Pozo’s people to get a phony refund of $6,000 to $12,000—the IRS never checked before sending out the money to determine if filed returns were real or not. You could plug in any reasonable amount for a refund and they’d never check.)
It was so easy—last year Pozo’s team had used the same address to get over 2,000 refunds. Another address was used to get over 5,000 refunds, either in the form of checks or prepaid debit cards. Every year they set up a hundred new addresses they used to get the booty.
Those Americans who waited till the deadline of April 15 to file their returns were the dumbest. He loved this type of taxpayer because his people had already got most of the money they were going to get by the end of February. People who filed late gave Pozo’s people more time to abandon the fake addresses they’d been using.
It would be so easy for the Americans to stop the fraud: make any able-bodied taxpayer appear in person to pick up his check. They could use the post office system for this purpose. Instantly saving billions. But no. Too inconvenient. The Americans? Go out of their way? They were rich. But they were stupid.
Pozo thought back again to Aponte. In a personal way, Pozo couldn’t really blame him for trying to feather his nest. Pozo himself was 65 now. They’d let him stay on till he was 70 at the Dirección de Inteligencia, at which time he’d be retired out of the system and sent back to his small village eighty miles south of Havana to end his days as a loyal Communist partisan. This gave him a full five years to feather his own nest so that he could make the jump to America permanently. The Castro regime would undergo great changes now that Raúl and Fidel were gone. Pozo didn’t want to be around to navigate his way through the inevitable power struggles—not to mention assassinations and grudge killings—that would ensue. No, he wanted his own golden parachute ready when the time came.
Pozo shook his head when he thought of the hapless Aponte. Had it been any of the other ten or fifteen accountants like Aponte he had on his team, he’d have driven the guy deep into the Everglades and put a bullet through his head.
But Aponte was different from the others. He was special to Pozo. Very special. Pozo had big plans for the chubby balding man with the bad comb-over.
Though he didn’t know it, Julio Aponte would be instrumental in Pozo’s plan over the next couple of years to make the Great Escape. But before that time came, he had to amass a great amount of money under the noses of his very loyal team members without them suspecting a thing.
Chapter 9
CAMP DAVID
“They told me no aides allowed in the room,” said Sam when he got off the phone with the White House.
“I should’ve stayed in Miami?” said Jack.
“No, you come with me by chopper to Camp David, but you don’t go into the meeting.”
“Who’s going to be there?”
“They’re not saying,” said Sam as he paced around the sitting room in his suite at the Willard, his hands deep in his pockets. “Let’s go.”
They went down and got into a limo that took them to the White House where they were escorted to a Sikorsky SH-3 Sea King chopper that, had the President been with them, would have been designated Marine One. But they were told the President had gone to Camp David ahead of them.
Once they climbed aboard, they were surprised to see Lord Ellsworth sitting there flanked by two White House aides.
“Well, surprise, surprise,” said Sam, yelling above the roar of the rotors as they powered up. “How are you, Harold?”
“Very good. I’m really looking forward to visiting Sofia down in Miami next week.”
“Yes, she’s looking forward to it. You’ll be flying down with Jack, yes?”
“Yes, along with Bedelia and Patricia, if they’re still planning to go.”
“They are,” Jack said. “As well as Matt Hawkins and his wife.”
“A very important vote for you to sway, Sam,” said the British ambassador.
“I’ve met with him twice, and Jack’s become a friend of his,” said Sam.
“But Matt won’t budge,” said Jack. “At least not yet.”
“I’m looking forward to seeing my nephew again,” said Ellsworth.
“Gargrave is anxious to show you a good time,” said Jack, knowing that Gargrave was bored to tears every time his uncle visited Miami.
It was a strange twist of fate that Jack would meet Gargrave when he was detached from the SEALs and sent as liaison to the Special Boat Service at nearly the same time Ellsworth was becoming friends with Sam and the Vaughans back in Washington.
As the chopper lifted off the White House lawn, everyone stopped talking and settled in for the short ride.
Ellsworth wondered that Jack might find it curious that the British ambassador was going to Camp David to sit in on an American political strategy session. But there was nothing to be done about it. If asked, he’d have to say everything discussed was confidential.
Once at Camp David, military escorts took Sam and Ellsworth to the meeting with the President.
“Does Jack know anything about Keystone?” Ellsworth asked.
“No. I’ve told no one,” said Sam.
“Good,” said Ellsworth. “The fewer people know, the better.”
“Couldn’t agree more,” said Sam, feeling ashamed that these dark forces were at work to get him elected to the highest office in the land. He found the whole nasty business completely unsavory. When Norwalk first revealed Keystone’s existence to him, he’d thought about getting out of the race, but it was too late already: the election was over and he was caught in the middle of a deadlock. There was only one way out—to follow the process, for good or ill, through to its perhaps unseemly conclusion.
Jack was taken to a lodge where he had some coffee and caught up on email using his iPhone.
Sam and Ellsworth went into Laurel Lodge, a rustic cabin where they joined Norwalk, sitting with Ambassador Kornilevski, Speaker Lamar Perryman and Phil Slanetti. Sam looked up and noticed the President’s seal carved in wood over the fireplace. Once everyone was given coffee and the stewards left the room, Norwalk began.
“As you all know, I will be leaving office very soon. There is much that needs settling and I want to settle what I can
while still in office.”
St. Clair didn’t look fidgety, but he was. He was still considerably uneasy about the Russian advance into China and the impending House battle. For these reasons, the gathered dignitaries somewhat intimidated him. His snowy hair gave him a fatherly image of solidarity and iron surety, but he was far from the symbol of quiet confidence that he appeared to be. He admired Norwalk’s ease in dealing with a crisis and assumed, rather childishly, that he’d come to know such ease when he became President. He followed most of Norwalk’s suggestions and policies not necessarily because he agreed with them anymore, but because any decision emanating from a calm man was preferable to one coming from a nervous man.
“I have spoken at great length,” continued Norwalk, “with Sam and told him—in greater detail than he’s previously been aware—of the recent efforts you gentlemen have been involved in to benefit his position in the House. He and I have also discussed the foreign situation with great candor and he has made some basic decisions which I wanted you all to hear.” Norwalk glanced over to St. Clair. “I’ll give it to you, Sam,” he said, leaning back in his chair and puffing on his pipe.
St. Clair sat up and rested his elbows on his knees and pressed his hands together, looking at the hook rug on the floor, which reminded him of a similar one he had in his bedroom as a young boy. Then he sat back and looked at the Russian ambassador, who sat quietly across the room looking back at him, sitting next to Lord Ellsworth.
“After discussing the Chinese situation with the President, I’ve decided it would be in the best interests of the United States, if I am elected, to support a bilateral policy with Russia to completely destroy the Chinese potential to divert any of the waters from the rivers where they’re threatening to.” He paused, aware of the gravity and importance of what he was saying. Kornilevski did not show a relieved smile, but merely nodded soberly.
“This decision was basically the substance and result of our conversation,” St. Clair continued. “I realize the importance of it and want to emphasize that my Administration will not tolerate a broad interpretation of the position by your government, Mr. Kornilevski. I’m sure you understand that we want peace. I believe you do, too, and only to maintain peace would your government ever have approached the United States with proposals of such magnitude. I’m determined the world cannot remain at peace if any superpower thinks it can threaten lesser powers with its military superiority.”