by Mark Dawson
She hadn’t discounted the possibility that Logan was double-dealing, but that seemed the least credible of the reasons for what had happened.
“How did he find her?”
“We can’t say for sure. Either he’s got a leak inside his camp, or he’s not been careful enough with how he runs his operations.”
“Where is she?”
“I don’t know,” Beatrix said. “But we’ll find out soon enough. It isn’t Melissa that Lincoln wants. It’s you.”
Danny stood a little straighter. “He can have me.”
“Let’s not get too far ahead of ourselves.”
“It’s my fault Melissa is here. All of it—it’s all because of me. I should’ve been happy in Hong Kong. I should’ve left her to get on with her life.”
“Stop,” Beatrix said. “Just stop. There’s no point in blaming yourself.”
“It’s true, though, isn’t it?”
She bit her lip.
“We might as well face up to it. None of this would have happened without me.”
“We don’t have time for self-pity,” she said sharply. “Feeling sorry for yourself isn’t going to help. It’s not your fault—it’s Logan’s. He’s the one who messed up. He needs to fix it.”
“Why would you think that he can?”
“Maybe he can; maybe he can’t. We spoke about it on the way back. We could think about giving him one of the tapes. He thinks he could use it at Langley.”
“But that’s our leverage,” he protested.
“It’s part of it,” she agreed. “We’d have the other tape, plus your testimony. But if Logan can build a case against Lincoln, he might be able to use that to persuade others who are close to him to switch sides. He seems to think that might be possible.”
“And what do you think?”
“I don’t know. Maybe. If the right people decide that Lincoln is about to become toxic, they might decide that it’s in their best interests to disassociate themselves from him. Maybe.”
“Lots of maybes.”
“That’s all I’ve got.”
“It feels like a gamble,” he said.
“It is a gamble. But we don’t have anything else.” She rubbed her forehead. “We don’t have to decide anything now. It’s late.”
Danny was distracted and didn’t hear her. “We can’t just sit here and wait.”
“No, Danny,” she said firmly. “That’s exactly what we do.”
“He wants me. Lincoln wants me dead.” Danny looked away, gazing out of the window at the dark street beyond. “If that’s what it takes.”
Beatrix exhaled, too tired for patience. “Don’t be a martyr,” she said. “I’m tired and sore. I need to get some sleep. Things will look different in the morning.”
Danny turned away from the window and looked down at his shoes. He sighed. “Sure.”
She got up, her whole body aching. “I’m not giving up. We’ve come all this way. Please, Danny—trust me. Go and get some sleep. We can talk about this again in the morning.”
“All right. Tomorrow.”
She waited for him to disappear back to his room and then took out her phone and called again.
Alfredo answered this time. “Hello.”
“Did you get the message?”
“I did. And it is in hand. I will report when there is something to say.”
87
The car bounced up and down and slowed, the brakes wheezing as it finally came to a stop. Her legs were aching from being pressed up against her body for so long; she turned over so that she could try to arrange herself in a different way, but there wasn’t enough space to do anything other than keep her knees held up against her chest. She had slithered around so that she was lying diagonally, but, even then, it had only bought her a few extra inches. Not enough to stop the cramp. And she couldn’t avoid lying in the pool of slowly drying vomit.
She heard the doors opening, then footsteps, then the sound of a key being pushed into the lock of the trunk. The lid opened, and she looked out into the darkness of the early morning. She saw two men outside; their hands slithered beneath her shoulders and grasped her ankles, and she was hauled out and turned around so that her feet were on the ground. The hands withdrew and, without their support, her legs buckled; she slumped forward, but was caught again before she could hit the ground. They moved her around so that she could rest against the side of the car.
She looked around. They had stopped at the end of what looked like a harbour. There was a concrete apron that ran over to a wall and, beyond that, she saw a wide body of water. To the left, a tall bridge crossed the water where it narrowed. The terrain rose sharply at the mouth of a bay, and the moon washed down over all of it.
One of the men from the car took her elbow and walked her to a row of warehouses that faced the water.
“Where are we?” she asked him.
“That doesn’t matter,” the man said.
“What are we doing here?”
“You’re going to be staying here for a little while,” he said. He handed her a bottle of water. “Drink.”
She took the bottle and put it to her lips.
The man spoke with an American accent. He had short hair and a muscular neck that was almost too wide for his head.
“Why is this happening? I haven’t done anything wrong.”
“You’ve been tangled up in your father’s business,” he said, taking the bottle away and screwing the cap back on it. “You could make this a lot easier if you told us where we could find him.”
“I don’t know,” she said. “I came to Cuba to meet him.”
“We’ll try to make sure you can still meet,” he said. “But you’re going to have to wait here with us while we arrange it.”
The man opened the door and indicated that Melissa should go inside. The warehouse was large, two storeys with a main room and two additional rooms that were accessed from the rear on the ground floor. The main room had seating, a television and some very basic kitchen appliances; the man ushered Melissa through it to the two doors at the back.
“You’ll be in here,” he said.
He opened the door on the right so that she could look inside. There was a bed, a chair and a wooden set of drawers. There were no windows, and the room was lit by a single naked bulb.
“The bathroom is here,” the man said, indicating the second door. “I’d go now. We’re going to have to lock the door while you’re in the bedroom.”
Melissa went into the bathroom. It was in poor condition, with a stained toilet, a sink and a cracked and dusty mirror. There was no window here, either.
“Hurry up,” the man said.
Melissa looked at her reflection in the mirror. Her skin was pale and her lips were bloodless.
She looked just as she felt.
Terrified.
88
Logan had been in bed for an hour. He had taken a warm bath, necked two shots of gin from the minibar and then put on the white noise that usually helped him to drift off, but none of it was helping. His face was sore, for a start, with an ugly scrape from where his skin had been abraded by the road as he had slid across it. But he could have ignored that. His mind was racing and, save taking a Xanax, he knew himself well enough to realise that it wasn’t going to quiet down.
In the end he gave up. He opened his eyes, reached for his phone, checked the time—four in the morning… Jesus—and then swung his legs out of bed. He went over to the window and pulled the cord to open the blinds. Havana was laid out before him, the crumbling grandeur of a city that had been starved of proper investment for so long. The government could only do so much, and they were making a virtue out of the sense of history that still hung over the city and, beyond that, the country itself.
Logan’s family had a long history with Cuba. His grandfather had been involved in the gambling industry and had invested heavily in a number of casinos that had catered to the flow of American tourists who came for the climate, t
he cigars and the prostitutes. His fortune had been wiped out by the revolution, sending the Logans into a tailspin from which they had never really recovered. The old man, chased by banks for loans that he would never be able to pay back, had put a noose around his neck and hanged himself in the garage of the mansion that had just been foreclosed.
His father had been involved in the abortive Bay of Pigs invasion; he had been responsible for the recruitment of Cuban exiles and then had helped to oversee their training on Useppa Island, the territory off the Florida coast that had been leased for that purpose. The failure of the counter-revolution had put an end to what had once been a promising career in intelligence; William Senior had often joked that he would one day have plush offices at Langley from where he would be able to reach out and shape events around the world. He had delivered the prediction with a nod and a wink, but Logan had known that his father was serious in his ambition. His aspirations had been strangled, however, in the ignominy of the operation’s failure, and he had never mentioned them again. His career had come to a halt and, rather than suffer the disgrace of a sideways move into a division where he would just see out the rest of his career, he had quit and gone freelance. That business had failed, and, as he wrote in his suicide letter, failure was something that he simply could not tolerate. He had gone out into the woods behind their house and eaten his service weapon.
Logan had promised himself that he would take up the same career and that he would do better: he would leave a legacy of which his own sons could be proud.
And then last night had happened…
The irony of the situation was not lost on him: his career, like his father’s, and like his grandfather’s before him, might come to an end on this godforsaken island.
No. That is not going to happen.
He got dressed and went out for a walk. He needed to think, and he always thought best when he was exercising. The Meliá Cohiba was on the Malecón, and he followed it toward the embassy at 55 Calzada. He walked toward the thicket of flagpoles that separated the embassy from the esplanade and passed through them, lost in contemplation. He found his thoughts running back to his father’s failures, and he kept walking.
He tried to think of a way in which he could repair the damage, but he could not. Caprice—whoever she really was—had said that Danny Nakamura was on the island. The inspector general had made it very plain: they needed Nakamura’s testimony. He had been there, with Lincoln, in Vietnam. He had spoken to the Degar who had witnessed Lincoln’s cowardice, and their posthumous accounts would shine a bright light upon his subsequent mendacity.
But that was going to be difficult now. Nakamura was hidden, and, without his daughter, Logan doubted that he would cooperate. Why would he? Logan could offer him everything else—a new identity, a new life wherever he wanted—but he knew that the only reason Nakamura wanted those things was in order to spend his autumn years with her. And that was no longer something that Logan could promise.
He had failed. The IG would blame him, and consequences would follow.
He stopped and sat against the sea wall, scrubbing his fingers through his wispy hair.
His choices had been circumscribed. The way he saw it, he had only one left.
He took out his phone and dialled.
89
Logan saw a taxi and flagged it down. He got inside and asked to be driven to Miramar. The radio was playing incessant Spanish pop, and he asked the driver to turn it off. That was the last thing he wanted to listen to. He needed a clear head. He needed to be calm.
The driver turned onto Calle 3 and drove on. Logan knew that he was taking an enormous risk, but he knew that he had no other cards to play. It was this or give up and accept the mediocrity that had always been the fate of his family.
The failure of his grandfather.
The failure of his father.
Logan was not going to fail.
The taxi arrived at the café. Casa Pilar was busy enough to offer some anonymity, but not so busy that it would be impossible to notice anyone who might be observing a meet here. Logan took a moment, his hands sweaty against the worn leather seat.
“Sir? We are here.”
Logan breathed in and out—one, two, three—and, summoning as much determination and certainty as he could, he paid the man, stepped outside and made his way to the café.
He went onto the terrace and made his way to the table at the far end, nearest to a set of steps that led down to the beach. A man was waiting there; he had chosen the chair that faced into the terrace, a position from which it would be difficult to approach without him being aware of it.
It was Navarro.
The older man saw him coming and stood. “Logan.”
Logan was nervous, and the prospect of a sit-down with Navarro made it much worse. Navarro was a legend in the Agency; everyone knew that he had been close to Lincoln for years, ever since Vietnam, and that he was the man whom Lincoln used to take care of the problems that he couldn’t take care of in other, more civilised ways. Navarro was elderly now—old enough to be Logan’s father—but that had not made any difference to the utility that he offered. He selected the men who could be trusted, arranged their training, and then oversaw them in the field. Just like he had been doing for the last few weeks in Hong Kong and, now, here. Logan had known that taking down Lincoln would mean going after Navarro, too, and the prospect had frightened him. He was more than frightened now.
Navarro put out his hand, and Logan took it.
“I’d like to say it’s a pleasure to finally meet you,” Navarro said, “but I can’t. You’ve made my life very difficult.”
“I’m sorry about that,” Logan said.
Navarro released his hand and gestured to the other chair. Both men sat down. The waitress came over and asked if they were ready to order.
“Black coffee,” Navarro said.
Logan ordered a coffee and a preparada, a ham croquette. The waitress scribbled the order on her pad and said that she would be back with their coffees.
Logan waited until she was out of earshot. “Thank you for seeing me.”
“I wish you had come to me before.”
“I didn’t need to then.”
“Maybe. But you have less to offer me now.”
“I don’t know about that. You have his daughter, but you don’t have him. You don’t have his evidence.”
“Do you?”
“Not yet. But I can get it.”
Logan watched the older man and saw the steel in his eyes, the cunning. “Can I ask how long you’ve known?”
“About the IG’s investigation? We’ve always known about it.”
“It’s not personal,” Logan tried to argue.
“‘It’s not personal,’” Navarro scoffed. “It’s always personal.”
“Not for me,” he protested. “Butcher’s the zealot.”
“And you just do as you’re told.”
“She’s a hard-ass. She hates what the Agency has become. She’d much rather we just went back to collecting intelligence. Passive.”
“Those days are gone,” Navarro said.
“Maybe they are.”
“What about you?” Navarro said. “You could’ve chosen to be more helpful. Lincoln would have given a lot to have someone senior in the IG’s office.”
“What can I say? I thought he was going down. I chose the wrong side. You can tell him I’m sorry if you want.”
“Are you sorry?”
“I feel foolish. You said he would have given a lot to have someone in Butcher’s camp. He can still have that. I still can help him fix the problem he’s about to have with his reputation.”
“The problem you’ve made worse?”
“Things have changed.”
“They have. You’ve lost your leverage.”
The waitress came back with the coffee, and both men were silent as she put the cups on the table.
Navarro sipped his coffee. “This is good,” he observed.
“Coffee, cigars and rum. The only reasons you’d want to come to this hole.”
Logan held up his cup to acknowledge the sentiment.
“I have to ask,” Navarro said. “How did you find out about Nakamura in the first place? I don’t mind admitting that you’ve got us worried that we have a snake in the camp.”
Logan thought of Donald Miller, his source in Lincoln’s operations group. Would he burn Miller if it was necessary to save his own skin? In an instant, and without thinking twice.
“You do have a leak,” he said. “I can tell you who it is.”
“As part of the package you’re going to offer?”
“If you give me what I want? Sure. Lincoln gets Nakamura, his evidence, the rat in his camp and the source in the IG’s office he wants.”
“That’s more interesting,” Navarro said. “Enough foreplay. Let’s see whether there’s any ground for an agreement. Start with Nakamura. Where is he?”
“I don’t know.”
“Cuba?”
“Yes.”
“With the woman?”
“I believe so.”
“And who is she?”
“She says her name is Caprice. She did some work with us in Hong Kong years ago. We always understood that she was MI6, but that was then. They don’t have anyone with her description on the books now. I’ve checked.”
“Do you have pictures of her?”
Logan shrugged. “A couple from Hong Kong, but they’re worthless. She’s been in disguise the whole time. I saw her yesterday for the first time without it. She doesn’t look anything like what we thought.”
“Can you describe her?”
“I’ve already sent a report back to HQ. I’ll have a composite tonight. I’ll give you a copy.”
“She’s been almost as irritating as you,” Navarro said. “I’d very much like to meet her.”
“I think that’s possible.”
Navarro picked up his coffee cup and put it to his lips. He sipped the thick black liquid, his eyes on Logan the whole time. There was a sharp intelligence there; Logan reminded himself, as if a reminder was even necessary, that he couldn’t make the mistake of underestimating him.