“No, we do not need to talk. You need to turn around and leave my property this instant, or you will rot in a jail cell for the rest of your life. Assuming you even survive.”
“Shut up and sit down,” Tracie said. She inclined her head in the direction of the table where he had been sitting earlier and then backed away. There were some questions she wanted answered before she dragged him back to face justice in the U.S.
The general rose slowly to a standing position and regarded her carefully. His head was bleeding but not severely, and Tracie reached into her backpack and tossed him a towel. He plucked it out of the air and placed it against his bleeding forehead.
Polanco’s initial shock at being confronted by an intruder with a gun had receded, replaced by a calculating shrewdness. Although much older than Tracie, the general was also much bigger and in outstanding physical condition. She could see him considering the odds of success should he make another play for her gun.
“Don’t even think about it,” she said. “Take a seat or die. You won’t get lucky a second time.”
Polanco’s already angry expression darkened, but he seemed to recognize now was not the time to resist. He walked across the room, moving slowly but with a swagger that seemed strangely out of sync with his situation. Then he eased his bulk into a chair and gazed up at her expectantly.
“Now what?” he said.
“Now you explain to me why you had your people murder more than a half-dozen innocent Americans in Washington last week.”
Polanco leaned back in his chair. The furious look on his face had disappeared, replaced at least for the moment with one of confusion.
Over the course of her career in the field, Tracie Tanner had become adept at reading people’s expressions—that ability was often the only thing standing between life and death—and her immediate impression was that the Cuban general truly had no idea what she was talking about.
“You are an American,” the general said slowly. “What the hell are you doing in Cuba?”
“That’s not how this works,” Tracie said, her voice steely. “I’m holding the gun, therefore I’ll ask the questions and you will answer them.”
“But you have not asked a question that I can answer. You are raving about murders in Washington, and I can assure you, little niña, that I have not ever been to Washington. Nor would I want to be,” he added sharply, “until I can raise the Cuban flag over your capitol.”
“I’m not talking about you personally. I’m talking about your people.”
“My people? And what people would that be?”
“The people who do your bidding. The people who have helped you steal private property and amass wealth far beyond what you would be capable of earning on your own. The people that helped you afford…this.” She waved her gun around, indicating the palatial estate.
Polanco erupted in laughter. “You think,” he said after a moment, “that I have the kind of influence that would allow ‘my people,’ as you call them, to infiltrate your capitol city? And not just to infiltrate it, but to murder a half-dozen people in it? And then get away? You are obviously insane. How did you get into this country, anyway?”
“Let me refocus you,” Tracie said. “This is my gun. I will use it to ventilate your skull unless you answer these questions to my satisfaction. And you’re running out of time, because I’m running out of patience. Do you understand, General?”
“Ask a reasonable question and I will answer it. So far you have made no sense.”
“Okay,” Tracie agreed. “Let’s try doing this a different way.” She bent toward her backpack.
Polanco’s left hand dropped slowly into his lap.
Tracie froze and said, “Put your hand back on top of the table. Do it now.” She had no doubt the general was armed to the teeth inside his home, and his actions here indicated he must have, at the very least, a knife if not a gun hidden somewhere on his person.
The general glowered at her but did as he was told.
“The next move you make that concerns me,” she said, “even a little bit, will be your last. Don’t make the mistake of thinking I won’t shoot you where you sit.”
The ghost of a smirk flashed across the general’s face and then disappeared, replaced with the innocent expression of a student trying to convince his teacher he hadn’t been cheating on his math test.
Tracie kept the gun pointed at the general as she reached into her backpack and pulled out the same folded sheet of paper she had shown to Gonzalez back in Miami, the paper containing the unusual circular symbol with the odd stick-figure design inside that had taken the place of a signature in the threatening letters received by Edison Kiley. She placed it face-up on the table in front of General Polanco, keeping her gun hand well out of reach.
“Look at it,” she said, and he did. She watched closely to gauge his reaction. His eyes widened and he wasn’t able to stop himself from doing a little double take. It was nothing major, just a little shake of the head. Very minor. If she hadn’t been zeroed in on him she might have missed it.
But she didn’t miss it, and she said, “Okay, General, tell me that’s not the symbol your followers use when they loot and pillage Cuba and now, commit murder in the United States. And then explain yourself before I haul your ass back to the United States to stand trial.”
Polanco huffed softly and then looked up at Tracie. “All right, I will.”
“Don’t try to bullshit me, General. I saw your reaction when you looked at that paper. You tried to hide it but you couldn’t. You recognized that symbol.”
“You are right,” he said, “I did react. But not for the reason you think. What you have shown me is not the symbol of these supposed ‘followers’ of mine that you have convinced yourself are so all-powerful they can sneak into your country and murder people, and then sneak out again.”
Tracie stared down the general as he continued. “That is the symbol of an enemy of the State of Cuba, an American enemy that has done in my country exactly what you accuse me of doing in yours.”
Now it was Tracie’s turn to be confused. “What are you talking about?” she asked.
“The person or persons who claim ownership of that symbol have managed to enter my country several different times somehow—we do not know how—and wreak destruction on an innocent nation, blowing up buildings and in the process killing innocent people.”
“Bullshit,” Tracie said, but in the back of her mind she thought of Gonzalez’s henchman piloting the rubber landing craft into the tiny, secluded inlet just a couple of miles away in complete darkness, with the skill and confidence of a man who had made the trip many times before.
“It is not ‘bullshit,’” Polanco said calmly. “It is the truth.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“You don’t have to believe me. I can prove it to you.”
17
General Antonio Polanco owned a vintage Lincoln Continental Mark II that would be the envy of any classic automobile enthusiast in the States. Its all-white finish gleamed in the stark light of Polanco’s garage, as pristine as new-fallen snow, complemented by fat whitewall tires straight out of 1950s Americana.
Tracie’s eyes widened at the sight of the car, which had not a speck of dust or road grime on it, and which looked as though it had just rolled off the showroom floor. Despite the gravity of the situation, Polanco smiled at her reaction. “This is a 1956 model,” he said proudly, “one of only three thousand that were manufactured. Most have been lost to history in the more than three decades since rolling off the assembly line in Detroit, but not this one.”
“Yeah?” Tracie said gruffly. “Who’d you steal it from?”
Polanco waved a hand as he opened the driver’s door. “This beautiful relic of a bygone age belongs to the people now. Its previous owner was the proprietor of a Havana casino in the pre-revolution days, a man who refused to surrender his unlawfully secured property to its rightful and proper owners. Suffice it to
say, he no longer had need for a car—or any mode of transportation, for that matter—following its seizure.”
“Unlawfully secured,” Tracie said scornfully. “That’s a good one.” She slid into the passenger seat and waited as Polanco fired up the engine. It turned over immediately and purred like a kitten, and the general backed the car out of the garage. He turned around in his circular driveway, rolled down to Villa Blanca, and then accelerated smoothly toward Havana.
Tracie hoped she wasn’t being set up. Polanco wasn’t going to be able to hurt her directly; she had disarmed him before taking one step beyond the man’s screened-in three-season room. And her caution had served her well: Polanco had had a knife and a pistol in his possession.
He was now weapon-free, and although he was much bigger than Tracie, she felt confident that even without the gun in her hand, she could hold her own against the older man in a physical confrontation. He was injured and unarmed, and although she had allowed him to clean and bandage his wound, the gash was ugly and had to be bothering him.
But the fact was that if he chose to stop the car and begin screaming for help once they arrived in any well-populated area, there was little chance she would ever leave Cuba alive. By the time she could react it would likely be too late.
She thought the chances of Polanco doing so were slim, though. The general’s anger and tension seemed to have melted away upon seeing the strange little symbol on Tracie’s piece of paper, until now he was acting almost sociable. He very clearly believed he could prove the symbol did not belong to him or to anyone associated with him, and while Tracie couldn’t imagine how he might manage that, her gut told her to play along and see what happened.
Her vague sense of unease about Gonzalez and his men played a major role in her decision. The feeling that she had been played for a fool back in Miami was getting stronger, and she was inclined to think Polanco was telling the truth, at least insofar as the symbol was concerned.
But while the general had become calmer over the last few minutes, she had not, and she continued to train her gun directly on him as he drove. “You know what’s going to happen if you take one turn I don’t like, or if you make any threatening moves, correct, General?”
He turned and smiled across the front seat at her. “Don’t worry, little niña, I have no reason to attempt to harm you now. Soon you’ll see that whoever sold you the pack of lies serving as your motivation is your real enemy. It is not me, it is not Secretary Castro, and it is certainly not the peace-loving people of Cuba.”
***
The time was now past one a.m., and while Tracie knew a United States city like Miami would still be active at this time of night, the tiny island nation of Cuba seemed to have burrowed into a cocoon.
Even as they approached the outskirts of Havana in General Polanco’s prized classic car, she had to strain to see electric light burning anywhere. Tiny homes, no more than shacks, really, constructed along Villa Blanca gave way to neighborhoods of houses clustered together, all uniformly dark and silent.
The occasional remnant of Cuba’s bustling past could still be seen as they drove, but for the most part the evidence of Havana’s sharp decline under nearly three full decades of Communist rule was everywhere. Decaying infrastructure, shuttered businesses and ancient automobiles—when automobiles could be found at all—testified to the consequences of the Castro government’s iron grip.
They drove for a time in silence, the general perfectly at ease, acting almost as though being hijacked at gunpoint from his own home in the middle of the night was just another day at the office.
They entered the Havana city limits and Tracie’s pulse quickened. “Where’s this proof you claim to have?” she said tersely. The farther they got from the relative privacy of Polanco’s mansion, the more concerned and tense she became.
“Almost there, little niña,” the general said, rubbing the bandage on his forehead gently, almost absently.
He wasn’t kidding. Two more turns, a right followed by a quick left, brought a down-in-the-dumps plaza into view. Most of the buildings were old, predating Castro’s revolution. Some of them had clearly been standing for a century or more. The few examples of newer construction were utilitarian Soviet-style concrete cubes with all the charm and sophistication of a sledgehammer blow to the head.
But regardless of age, none of the buildings were ornate enough to serve as Fidel Castro’s offices, Tracie was certain of that. This entire plaza was the province of much lower-lever bureaucrats, the kind of place where faceless apparatchiks trudged to work every day, cogs in the Communist governmental machine.
Polanco began slowing the car. The area appeared to be deserted except for one man, who lounged on the concrete steps of one of the buildings. The man sipped from a bottle ineffectively concealed in a brown paper bag, watching the progress of the Lincoln with the disinterested gaze of an alcoholic preoccupied with drinking himself into oblivion.
One of the buildings in particular drew Tracie’s attention almost immediately, and it appeared to be where Polanco was even now aiming his car. It was among the older ones in the plaza and was in far worse condition than any of the others. And that was saying something.
The front of the building was two-thirds gone. It had obviously been bombed. The charred, blackened remains of a devastating explosion were clearly visible despite the lack of streetlights. Polanco stopped the car and aimed the headlights at the building and Tracie could see directly inside, through a gaping maw where the front exterior wall—and presumably the front door—had once been.
Interior support beams hung haphazardly, broken into pieces by the force of the blast. A staircase rose out of the rubble but went nowhere, the upper two-thirds having tumbled to the first floor and broken apart. Every window was gone. The explosion had been devastating.
But as badly damaged as the building was—and it was obviously unusable—none of the wreckage was what caught and held Tracie’s attention. All she could do was stare in stunned surprise at the small portion of the front wall that had been left undamaged. On it, someone had painted a symbol, in bold white strokes.
It was the circular shape with the unusual open bottom, complete with the almost childlike rendition of three stick-figure people inside. It was the very symbol Tracie had shown Polanco inside his mansion less than thirty minutes earlier.
18
“What are you trying to pull here?” Tracie demanded, even as she knew what this discovery meant.
“Trying to pull?” Polanco answered. “I am not trying to pull anything. I said I could prove to you that this symbol does not belong to me or to any of my so-called ‘followers,’ and that is exactly what I have done. The symbol was painted by the terrorists who destroyed this building. Clearly, I had no idea you would break into my home and threaten me with deadly violence, just as I had no idea you would show me your version of the symbol, therefore I could not have placed it here for your benefit.”
“This doesn’t prove anything,” Tracie said, although her heart was telling her otherwise. “Who’s to say your people weren’t responsible for bombing this building?”
Polanco put his head back and laughed. “What possible motive would I have for destroying the property of the Cuban people?”
Tracie shrugged. “A political rival works here. The husband of a lover works here. There could be any of a dozen reasons.”
“You are stretching, little niña, and I think you know it. I have no political rivals, at least not inside my country. I have the ear of the most powerful man in Cuba, I have wealth and status, and it is to my advantage to build my country up, not to destroy it.
“And as far as me leveling an entire building because of a romantic rivalry, well, that theory is simply ludicrous. I have no romantic rivals any more than I have political ones, little niña. But if I did, I would simply arrest them and have them shot. I have the authority to do exactly that any time I wish, and I wouldn’t lose even one minute’s sleep at night a
fterward. I have executed many men over a lifetime of service to the state, it would not be a problem for me.”
Tracie stared at the general, who was gazing back at her steadily. Even in the darkness of the Mark II’s interior, she could see his eyes glittering cold and hard. This was a man not unaccustomed to violence, and she believed him when he discussed his personal familiarity with executions.
Polanco continued. “We have had a rash of similar bombings over the past couple of years. They always occur at night, and the targets are always the same—the people’s office buildings. We believe these unprovoked acts of aggression are being perpetrated by a group or groups inside your country—” he stabbed a stubby finger in Tracie’s direction, his voice tight with self-righteous anger—“by terrorists dedicated to overturning Cuba’s legitimate government, the true government of the people.”
Tracie was quiet, thinking, and Polanco said, “We are even fairly certain we know the name of the terrorist group.”
“Is that so?”
“Sí, that is so. We believe the terror group is called ‘Omega 7.’ They have been responsible for a rash of bombings inside your own country against supporters of the people’s government in Cuba. We feel certain there is an offshoot of Omega 7 that has found a way to enter this country and harass, intimidate, and murder peace-loving Cuban citizens.”
A light bulb went on inside Tracie’s head. She had known from the moment she first laid eyes on the strange circular symbol with the open bottom that she had seen it somewhere before, she just hadn’t been able to put her finger on exactly where. Now she knew. It was the Greek letter Omega.
Tracie forced herself to disguise the shock she was feeling and said, “There have been other bombings?”
“Yes,” he said simply. “I told you that already.”
“Was this symbol present at any of the others?”
“Yes.”
“At how many of the others?”
“All of them,” he said.
Tracie Tanner Thrillers Box Set Page 60