James Bruno reports on national security and politics, and is the author of four bestselling books. He has been interviewed by CNN, Fox News, NPR, BBC, SiriusXM Radio and other media. He is a contributor to Washington Monthly and Politico Magazine.
His thrillers have been Amazon Kindle Bestsellers, reaching #1 in Political Fiction and #1 in Spy Stories. THE FOREIGN CIRCUS is a Kindle bestseller in Political Humor and Diplomacy. Mr. Bruno has been a speaker at International Thriller Writers' ThrillerFest. He recently appeared on CNN's "The Hunt" with John Walsh in connection with an FBI Ten Most Wanted murder case.
Mr. Bruno served as a diplomat with the U.S. Department of State for twenty-three years. Previously, he was a military intelligence analyst with the Defense Department. He holds M.A. degrees from the U.S. Naval War College and Columbia University, and a B.A. from George Washington University.
His assignments have included Cuba, Guantanamo Naval Base (as liaison with the Cuban military), Pakistan/Afghanistan, Vietnam, Cambodia and Washington, DC. He has spent ample time at the White House and has served in a Secret Service presidential protective detail overseas. He also knows the Pentagon, CIA and other foreign affairs agencies well.
Based on his experiences, James Bruno's novels possess an authenticity rarely matched in the political thriller genre. His commentary in Politico ("Washington and the World"), CNN, Fox News, Washington Monthly, NPR, SiriusXM Radio and foreign media has won national and international attention.
His books can be purchased in either ebook or print edition from Amazon.com, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, iTunes and other online retailers. Read his political commentary at Washington Monthly and POLITICO Magazine.
His thrillers have been Amazon Kindle Bestsellers, reaching #1 in Political Fiction and #1 in Spy Stories. THE FOREIGN CIRCUS is a Kindle bestseller in Political Humor and Diplomacy. Mr. Bruno has been a speaker at International Thriller Writers' ThrillerFest. He recently appeared on CNN's "The Hunt" with John Walsh in connection with an FBI Ten Most Wanted murder case.
Mr. Bruno served as a diplomat with the U.S. Department of State for twenty-three years. Previously, he was a military intelligence analyst with the Defense Department. He holds M.A. degrees from the U.S. Naval War College and Columbia University, and a B.A. from George Washington University.
His assignments have included Cuba, Guantanamo Naval Base (as liaison with the Cuban military), Pakistan/Afghanistan, Vietnam, Cambodia and Washington, DC. He has spent ample time at the White House and has served in a Secret Service presidential protective detail overseas. He also knows the Pentagon, CIA and other foreign affairs agencies well.
Based on his experiences, James Bruno's novels possess an authenticity rarely matched in the political thriller genre. His commentary in Politico ("Washington and the World"), CNN, Fox News, Washington Monthly, NPR, SiriusXM Radio and foreign media has won national and international attention.
His books can be purchased in either ebook or print edition from Amazon.com, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, iTunes and other online retailers. Read his political commentary at Washington Monthly and POLITICO Magazine.
Amazon Bestseller in "Political Humor" and "World Politics/Diplomacy"
An ambassador orders his staff into the lawless interior of a civil war-torn country as guerrillas are targeting foreigners for assassination. Hundreds of millions of dollars of U.S.-bought weaponry are channeled to Afghan religious fanatics, the future Taliban. White House players leak classified information to the media, then blame the leaks on career civil servants. Diplomats succumb to the temptations of exotic overseas sexual playgrounds. Political hacks and campaign money bundlers are rewarded with ambassadorships in a diplomatic spoils system that hearkens back to the Robber Baron age. Computer nerds Edward Snowden and Bradley Manning steal a veritable Croesus of sensitive national security information and give it away free to our adversaries.
What's wrong with this picture? Everything. Our foreign policy is in the hands of the clueless, the self-serving and the politically corrupt. Read this book first. Then fill out papers to emigrate. The author provides a first-hand view from inside the belly of the beast of the U.S. foreign policy establishment. His insights are so spot-on that government censors have blocked out whole sections of text. The Foreign Circus will have you alternatively laughing and shaking your head. And when you read tomorrow's headlines, you'll have a better appreciation why Washington screws up.
An ambassador orders his staff into the lawless interior of a civil war-torn country as guerrillas are targeting foreigners for assassination. Hundreds of millions of dollars of U.S.-bought weaponry are channeled to Afghan religious fanatics, the future Taliban. White House players leak classified information to the media, then blame the leaks on career civil servants. Diplomats succumb to the temptations of exotic overseas sexual playgrounds. Political hacks and campaign money bundlers are rewarded with ambassadorships in a diplomatic spoils system that hearkens back to the Robber Baron age. Computer nerds Edward Snowden and Bradley Manning steal a veritable Croesus of sensitive national security information and give it away free to our adversaries.
What's wrong with this picture? Everything. Our foreign policy is in the hands of the clueless, the self-serving and the politically corrupt. Read this book first. Then fill out papers to emigrate. The author provides a first-hand view from inside the belly of the beast of the U.S. foreign policy establishment. His insights are so spot-on that government censors have blocked out whole sections of text. The Foreign Circus will have you alternatively laughing and shaking your head. And when you read tomorrow's headlines, you'll have a better appreciation why Washington screws up.
"A frightening story that gets you thinking, what if . . ." ~Tim Green, the New York Times bestselling author
Readers of Silva, Forsyth and Ludlum will enjoy this taut political thriller in which corrupt White House officials sell out to the American and Russian mobs to re-elect a weak President Corgan at all costs. American ambassadors and Russian spies who get in the way are killed. Diplomat Bob Innes falls into this conspiracy of political intrigue and murder and becomes the target of hired assassins and Russian mafia hitmen. He and Lydia, a beautiful Russian escort to powerful men, work with the FBI to bring down the President's men and the Russian mob's Godfather. Al Malandrino, a colorful New York mob boss, becomes their unexpected ally. PERMANENT INTERESTS authentically captures political intrigue, greed and treachery in the highest levels of government. And it all comes crashing down in face of relentless pursuit of the truth by the system's would-be victims.
"TRIBE is basically an exceptional book. It's the kind of book that is so interesting you wish the author had given you more information, more insight, more detail to chew over while the battle rages on. . . a brilliant book that is well-paced and -plotted with many interesting layers." ~ Fiona Ingram for Readers Favorite
"James Bruno deserves wider attention. In "Tribe"...he shows a deep knowledge of the politics in Washington DC, and of the intrigue within the CIA and intelligence community. This gives his story that much more impact. I predict Bruno will...climb his way onto some bestseller lists." ~ Eric Wilson, New York Times bestselling author
"Your reading will move along...at a breathless pace. A frightening description of a possible future and hence a warning. ~ Steve Moore for BookPleasures"
Afghanistan: Battlefield of Power - Graveyard of Reputations
CIA ops officer Harry Brennan put months of careful planning into Operation TALISMAN, aimed at giving a knockout blow to al-Qaeda in Afghanistan. Then CIA headquarters shuts it down with no explanation. As he investigates why, Harry, a rebel at heart, runs afoul of the CIA's leadership and the White House as he gets in the way of a huge oil deal, one that promises to ensure a President's re-election, troop withdrawal from Afghanistan and vast wealth to the oilmen who are behind the plot. Harry's life is in danger. Worse, so is that of his daughter, Laurie, who is kidnapped by Islamist terrorists in Yemen. Harry Brennan sets out to expose a conspiracy and in doing so, save his daughter's life. In Yemen to rescue Laurie, Harry becomes the target of Predator drone missiles--aimed by his CIA boss...
CIA ops officer Harry Brennan put months of careful planning into Operation TALISMAN, aimed at giving a knockout blow to al-Qaeda in Afghanistan. Then CIA headquarters shuts it down with no explanation. As he investigates why, Harry, a rebel at heart, runs afoul of the CIA's leadership and the White House as he gets in the way of a huge oil deal, one that promises to ensure a President's re-election, troop withdrawal from Afghanistan and vast wealth to the oilmen who are behind the plot. Harry's life is in danger. Worse, so is that of his daughter, Laurie, who is kidnapped by Islamist terrorists in Yemen. Harry Brennan sets out to expose a conspiracy and in doing so, save his daughter's life. In Yemen to rescue Laurie, Harry becomes the target of Predator drone missiles--aimed by his CIA boss...
"James Bruno has broken the thriller mold with CHASM . . . a tour de force!" ~ Gloria Nagy, New York Times bestselling author
A top secret program to resettle war criminals in our communities, men guilty of the most horrendous crimes imaginable. An American diplomat who blugeoned his family to death, disappeared and remains free to this day. A massive White House cover-up. These really happened. Operation Paperclip, run by the CIA, gave us Nazi scientists and SS murderers. William Bradford Bishop massacred his mother, wife and three young sons in 1976 and has been on the lam ever since. CHASM is based on these true covert programs and evildoers. Don't read it before bedtime. You won't be able to sleep. Promise . . .
. . . Peace in the Balkans is fragile. The White House's political fortunes hang on ensuring that shaky peace deals hold firm. In a top secret codicil, the U.S. agrees clandestinely to take in scores of Balkan war criminals. This super-secret program is Operation CHASM. CHASM gets out of hand as war criminals go on a rampage of arson and murder across the U.S. Mike Gallatin's young daughter is almost killed. Drawing on his detective skills, the Cleveland investigator finds out about CHASM -- but almost at the cost of his own life as the ruthless National Security Adviser, John Tulliver, orders Gallatin's "recall." Written by a former insider, CHASM is about Washington powerholders, who, in pursuit of their own ambitions, take actions which trample on the little guy. But one average citizen, a victim of their policies, embarks on a quest to expose the hypocrisy and lies. It also demonstrates how malicious policies can overwhelm their implementers, dragging them into hellish behavior and self-destruction.
Readers of Silva, Forsyth and Ludlum will enjoy this taut thriller written by a man who worked in the twilight world of government secrets.
. . . Peace in the Balkans is fragile. The White House's political fortunes hang on ensuring that shaky peace deals hold firm. In a top secret codicil, the U.S. agrees clandestinely to take in scores of Balkan war criminals. This super-secret program is Operation CHASM. CHASM gets out of hand as war criminals go on a rampage of arson and murder across the U.S. Mike Gallatin's young daughter is almost killed. Drawing on his detective skills, the Cleveland investigator finds out about CHASM -- but almost at the cost of his own life as the ruthless National Security Adviser, John Tulliver, orders Gallatin's "recall." Written by a former insider, CHASM is about Washington powerholders, who, in pursuit of their own ambitions, take actions which trample on the little guy. But one average citizen, a victim of their policies, embarks on a quest to expose the hypocrisy and lies. It also demonstrates how malicious policies can overwhelm their implementers, dragging them into hellish behavior and self-destruction.
Readers of Silva, Forsyth and Ludlum will enjoy this taut thriller written by a man who worked in the twilight world of government secrets.
"Extraordinary! This is definitely going to be the book of the month if not the book of the year."
~ Mauricio Claver-Carone, host, "From Washington al Mundo," SiriusXM Radio
"Havana Queen is red hot. James Bruno establishes a visceral sense of place, tells an intriguing story, and delivers a Cuban cigar box full of thrills. "
~ Raymond Benson, NYT bestselling author of James Bond continuation novels and The Black Stiletto saga
"Havana Queen is a likeable, rip-roaring thriller written by an author, James Bruno, who knows how to merge a realistic absorbing account of life in Cuba with fast-paced action into an exciting fun read."
~Midwest Book Review
"This book is damn near impossible to put down after you've started into it. A thoroughly riveting tale!"
~ Books Are Cool
"Havana Queen is the best military thriller that I have read in a long time." ~ Examiner.com
Political turmoil engulfs Cuba. As the Castros’ rendezvous with mortality finally arrives, FBI Agent Nick Castillo is swept up in a maelstrom of espionage, intrigue and guerrilla war. Amazon Kindle Bestselling author James Bruno delivers another knockout thriller!
Cuba roils with political unrest as Fidel and Raul Castro sink deeper into dementia and failing health. In a desperate ploy to save the communist regime, sultry female Cuban spymaster Larisa Montilla takes on the CIA in a tit-for-tat shadow war of assassination. As the bodies pile up, FBI Agent Nick Castillo defies orders and travels clandestinely to Havana to save would-be defector Colonel Henrique Marcial from joining the body count.
But Nick gets more than he bargained for. He falls into a trap set by Montilla, Fidel’s heir to power. When torture fails to pry secrets from Nick, the cunning and beautiful Montilla applies the power of seduction – and he succumbs. But Montilla’s leverage over Nick is matched by his discovery of a deep secret in her past, leading to a war of wits. Nick escapes and joins Col. Marcial’s growing guerrilla force to oust the Castro regime.
Washington calls Nick back to ferret out a web of spies deep inside the U.S. government which Havana has patiently built up over the years -- traitors who are hemorrhaging official secrets. But he must navigate a wilderness of mirrors that leads him to an assassination plot against the Castros’ No. 1 enemy – the President of the United States.
Steeped in the world of government secrets, with service in Cuba and Gitmo, the author makes you feel like you’ve been cleared into a Top Secret program, confident that you have the inside information.
Cuba roils with political unrest as Fidel and Raul Castro sink deeper into dementia and failing health. In a desperate ploy to save the communist regime, sultry female Cuban spymaster Larisa Montilla takes on the CIA in a tit-for-tat shadow war of assassination. As the bodies pile up, FBI Agent Nick Castillo defies orders and travels clandestinely to Havana to save would-be defector Colonel Henrique Marcial from joining the body count.
But Nick gets more than he bargained for. He falls into a trap set by Montilla, Fidel’s heir to power. When torture fails to pry secrets from Nick, the cunning and beautiful Montilla applies the power of seduction – and he succumbs. But Montilla’s leverage over Nick is matched by his discovery of a deep secret in her past, leading to a war of wits. Nick escapes and joins Col. Marcial’s growing guerrilla force to oust the Castro regime.
Washington calls Nick back to ferret out a web of spies deep inside the U.S. government which Havana has patiently built up over the years -- traitors who are hemorrhaging official secrets. But he must navigate a wilderness of mirrors that leads him to an assassination plot against the Castros’ No. 1 enemy – the President of the United States.
Steeped in the world of government secrets, with service in Cuba and Gitmo, the author makes you feel like you’ve been cleared into a Top Secret program, confident that you have the inside information.
HAVANA QUEEN
(excerpt)
Si yo me pierdo, que me busquen en…Cuba
~ Federico García Lorca
PROLOGUE
“Rudolph Valentino stayed here. Also Charlie Chaplin. And there was Clark Gable and el gran maestro Caruso. Rico Caruso? What was his full name? When he sang at the Campoamor. And they say Greta Garbo…”
“Who gives a shit?” Jorge shot back. “Why do you keep saying all these famous people stayed here? That was a long time ago. And all those people are dead anyway. “
“…and Winston Churchill! Him too!” Yesdasi continued.
“Wrong, chica. He stayed at the Nacional. But, I said, stop this!”
Yesdasi snapped out of her reverie and blinked. “Why should I stop? We live in a place where many famous people stayed. Just think—”
But before she could slip back into her reverie, Jorge grabbed her chin with his rough worker’s hand. “Yesdasi! Look at me! Look into my eyes!”
Yesdasi frowned. Her dark eyes were those of a little girl who had been told she may not have another cookie.
“Listen to me. We live in a shithole. Correction. We exist in a shithole. Look!” He made a sweep with his other hand. “One hundred fifty families are crammed into this dump. It hasn’t seen a lick of fresh paint in fifty years. The plumbing is shot. Shit and piss pool on the ground floor. No electricity half of the time.”
“La Reina is still majestic, Jorge. This place has soul. One day…”
“The queen is dead! Long live the queen!” Jorge backed off, wagging a finger at his wife. “One day we’ll be in Miami! Away from all this.”
“The hell we will. Dream on, Jorge. You’re forty-two years old. Make the best with the cards we’re dealt.”
Jorge slumped into a hard wooden chair beside the ancient crooked dining table. He leaned forward and covered his face with his palms.
The door opened. An old woman ushered in two boys in red-scarfed pionero uniforms. They ran to the Chinese-made television and tuned to SpongeBob Squarepants, via a pirated signal from an illegal rooftop dish.
They moaned. “Bananas again?”
“Hush!” their grandmother responded. “You’re lucky I could find those. That Yuma TV is spoiling you kids. You think this is America? See how fat those American kids are.”
Jorge kissed his mother on the cheek. An astute woman, she instantly read the faces of her son and daughter-in-law. “You two been arguing again?”
“Ah, it’s nothing, Mama,” he said.
“Same old stuff,” Yesdasi added.
He nodded. “We’re packed like sardines in this old hotel. Plants are growing out of its fissures. We’re like rats in some old Roman ruins. Five hundred worthless pesos a month gets us next to nothing. I don’t think about me and Yesdasi so much as the boys. I want them to have a future.”
“Watch your mouth, hijo,” Mother said. “That CDR bitch down the hall has ears like a bat.”
“‘Siempre contigo, Fidel!’ Right down to the bottom of the Caribbean on this sinking ship with El Jefe.” Jorge snapped a mock military salute.
Yesdasi grabbed her husband by the sleeve and pulled him onto the small balcony. “Listen to your mother, Jorge. The last thing I need is a husband in jail. Just watch it.”
Jorge’s grimace melted into a smile. “God, I still love the fire in those beautiful eyes.” He pulled her close. “Remember how we danced? We loved salsa even more than sex.” He kissed her. They lingered in an embrace. A tile from the balcony above fell on Jorge’s head.
“Shit!” he yelled and looked up.
“Hey, Ortega! Keep it down, will ya? I’m trying to get some rest,” a male’s voice admonished from the neighboring unit.
“Rest from what?” Jorge retorted. “A job at a Ministry of Construction that carries out no construction?”
“Ah. Go fuck yourself!” the other man shouted back.
“Never mind him.” Yesdasi placed a finger over his lips.
They looked out over central Havana, a vista of drab decaying buildings, broken streets and a scattering of vintage vehicles. Jorge shook his head.
* * *
The man turned a corner. Out of breath, the pudgy fellow labored under a fully packed army duffel bag. His short legs and fat ass lent a duck-like waddle to his gait. As he approached the minivan, his younger cohort quickly got out and opened the rear door. The short man was about to heave the duffel in, then stopped in mid-motion.
“What in God’s name is this crap?” A tall pile of tangled cables and plastic parts lay in the van’s rear compartment.
“I don’t know,” said the young man. “Got it from an Army guy in return for some Playboys my girlfriend picked up cleaning rooms at the Cohiba. I think it’s bulldozer parts. I’ll figure it out later. Somebody’ll buy them. Come on. Let’s get a move-on!”
The other threw in the duffel and got behind the wheel. The side of the van read, “Hospital Comandante Manuel Fajardo.” They screeched off.
Once on Avenida Salvador Allende heading toward central Havana, they relaxed.
“So, what’s in the duffel?” The young man, Oscar, slumped in the passenger’s seat, feet propped on the dash board, fingers rapidly tapping out some infernal reggaeton tune on the dash.
Carlos lit a cigarette and inhaled deeply. “Nipple shields, wound cleanser, hooks and retractors, drip collectors, diabetic lancets, some diagnostic shit…shipment donated from Sweden. Just came in.”
Oscar squinted. “Wha’?”
Carlos exhaled smoke. “Hey, trust me. This stuff’ll move. I’m trying to get my hands on some lorazepam. It’s all the rage among kids with fat remittances from Miami. Can’t sell it fast enough. They say the high is short, but intense. Sort of like an orgasm.”
Traffic, as always, was light. A hodge-podge of ‘50s Chevies, DeSotos, and Studebakers huff-puffed along the route with Russian Ladas, military vehicles, Soviet-era trucks, hotel taxis, and a sleek diplomatic limo, or two.
“So, Carlos, if you don’t get caught, what’s your plan? With the money, I mean?” Oscar asked.
Carlos looked over at his partner and took another drag on his cigarette. Eyes were back on the road. “You know. I hate stealing. From the state, from anybody. I was raised right. I’m a guajiro. Cut sugar cane as a kid out in Camaguey. We had nothing, but we never stole. Lived off of the sweat of our brow. I do this…” He jerked his thumb back toward the loot. “…because I have to. We all do. But my goal is to open up a paladar in five years. It’ll be the best private dining in Havana.” He took his hands off the wheel and bracketed an imaginary placard. “Siboney is gonna be the name. I already got a chef lined up. Suppliers. The whole shooting match. How about yourself?”
Grim determination formed across Oscar’s face. His eyes were transfixed onto the distance. “Me. I’m getting out. Got an uncle in Fort Lauderdale. Owns a bedding store. Says a job is waiting for me if I can get there okay. Who knows? Maybe he’ll make me his partner one day.”
“You’ll get yourself killed kid. Fish bait in the Florida Strait. Not worth the risk. Apply for a visa. I hear the wait is under ten years now.”
“No. Can’t wait that long. I’d rather be fish food than waste my life here. But I got a plan. Uncle Frank is gonna buy me a plane ticket to Quito. No visa needed for Cubans there. Then I head north. Simple as that.”
The hospital van pulled in at the apartment building. “LA REINA” stood in bold stone relief over the outside columned entrance. Carved almost a century ago by Italian or Catalan stoneworkers, the letters were caked in black soot. Seraphim and angels graced the sides, their wings long since broken. Little paint remained on the cracking walls of the former lobby. The tops of the sweeping interior archways were hidden as the result of the installation of a makeshift extra floor to accommodate more residents. Such additions, inserted wherever the original ceilings were high, are called barbacoas – barbecues, in that they resemble the middle-level grills of those devices.
Carlos and Oscar hauled their booty up the curved entrance stairway.
A young black woman with screaming twin babies asked in a hushed voice, “Carlos, you got the nipple shields? I’m sore.”
“Sure do. Right after the CDR block meeting tonight, when I usually make sales.”
The men dragged their stuff over to the birdcage lift in the center of the dark foyer. Sweaty and out of breath, Carlos said, “Don’t bother pressing the button. Hasn’t worked since who knows when.”
An eighty-something man leaning on his cane shook his head. “Lift is out. Gotta climb. Not me though. I can’t do no ten floors with this heart.” He patted his chest.
“Fucking thing’s out again?” Carlos kicked the elevator shaft folding door with all his might. Jugulars bulging, face beet-red, he lifted his head and bellowed, “Me cago en tu madre!”
A creaking sound echoed off the walls, followed by a deep groan that sounded as though it came from the belly of a monster. Silence followed. Residents stopped what they were doing and looked up, then at one another. Flakes of plaster and dust floated down like snow and settled on their heads and clothing.
Carlos and Oscar looked at each other, frozen in place.
On the eleventh floor, the Ortega boys averted their eyes from SpongeBob at the first tremor. They looked to their mother and father. Wide-eyed, the parents rushed to scoop their children in their arms.
The mother of twins did the same ten floors below in the stairwell.
Carlos shouted to Oscar, “Let’s get the hell out of—”
The implosion was all encompassing, merciless, swift.
CHAPTER ONE
U.S. Naval Station, Guantanamo Bay, Cuba
The day was beautiful, cloudless and serenely quiet at The Line, the northwest perimeter gate of the U.S. Naval Station at GTMO. Base Commander Captain Wally T. Andrus fidgeted as he waited for his counterpart to appear from the Cuban side. His watch read 0958. His team — USMC detachment commander Colonel John Compoli, aide Lieutenant Commander Steve O’Malley and Spanish interpreter Marine Corporal Lance Rueda — peered silently through the chain link fence. The American side featured a guard shack flanked by concrete-filled cinder blocks and oil drum berms garishly painted in red and yellow. Atop the guard shack was a sign: “North East Gate – Marine Barracks – Ground Defense Security Force.” Old Glory fluttered atop the flagpole as if indifferent to the host country on whose territory it was planted. Opposite, some thirty yards away, was a high archway topped by a sign boldly proclaiming, “Republica de Cuba – Territorio Libre de America.” The Cuban flag and pole were inexplicably smaller than their U.S. counterparts.
The monthly meetings on The Line were actually convivial. So much so, in fact, one would not discern that the venue was one of only two points held over from the Cold War where enemies meet. The other point was Panmunjom in the Korean DMZ. Berlin’s Glienicke “Bridge of Spies” belonged to the history books. And while the Allenby Bridge, the India-Pakistan Wagah Border crossing and the Cypriot Green Line could offer moments of tense drama, they lacked the gravity of junctures where empires, and their surrogates, met and sometimes clashed.
In the movie, A Few Good Men, the fictional Colonel Jessup famously said, “I eat breakfast three hundred yards from four thousand Cubans who are trained to kill me.” That, of course, was Hollywood melodrama. Andrus loved throwing out that line when hosting visiting VIPs at the base commander’s residence or at the Windjammer Club restaurant.
Three Cubans in olive drab marched out of one of the single-story buildings flanking the archway. Their leader, a gray-haired dark complexioned man with a paunch, nodded, signaling they were ready to meet. The two delegations, lined up in rank order, strode toward a white line in the asphalt exactly in the middle of the boundary. Falling into place on either side, they halted, stood at attention and saluted. They then shook hands all around.
Brigadier General Marcos López y López gestured for the Americans to join them at a long, narrow table and folding chairs on the Cuban side, under the archway. The comandante of Cuba’s Eastern Military Region was accompanied by Frontier Brigade Commander Col. Henrique Marcial Arribe, Intelligence Officer Carlos Amenares Sánchez and a young female interpreter bearing private’s insignia, a name patch that read, “Navarro,” and out-of-place pink lipstick. Proud members of the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias, or FAR – except for Amenares, a member of the Ministry of Interior’s feared secret police.
As the delegates took their seats, a FAR enlistee served strong cafecitos and simple biscuits. The venues alternated between the two sides. When the U.S. Navy hosted, in true blue USN tradition, a fairly lavish catered meal was served inside an air conditioned tent. The FAR delegates relished those affairs as evidenced by their repeated helpings of the heavy American fare. The FAR, like the rest of Cuba, alas, lacked the resources to put on a small banquet for their Yankee counterparts.
As the proceedings began, flies buzzed around increasingly sweaty brows. The overhead sun was relentless, the archway’s shade providing little relief.
The agenda was typically mundane: coordination of measures to put out brush fires —usually started by an animal blundering into a Cuban minefield; the U.S. had removed its minefields — fence repair notification, new construction around Camp Delta, scheduling the orderly repatriation of Cuban escapees, weed eradication. The purpose of the monthly get-togethers was to prevent potential flare-ups from erupting between the two adversaries.
Capt. Andrus took stock of the Cubans as his interpreter translated his opening remarks. López y López, a battle-hardened veteran of Angola, was sixty, if a day, and was clearly on his pre-retirement final tour of duty. His demeanor was jovial, even jolly at times. His eyes, however, were steely, on guard. The squinty-eyed, slouch-shouldered, humorless MININT intel officer, Amenares, had the air of a man who spent his time preying on people on behalf of himself as well as the state. Col. Marcial stood in stark contrast to his cohorts. A six-foot-two, muscled Afro-Cuban, he was lantern-jawed and handsome, alert, quiet, observant. His handshake was viselike; not necessarily intentionally, but the grip of a powerful man. He had the right qualities for a soldier whose job it was to be the first to confront the American superpower should the balloon go up. Andrus pondered that Marcial would probably be the guy first in line to run three hundred yards to kill him while he ate breakfast.
Seventy-five minutes later, the meeting was concluded. The two delegations rose, gathered their papers and proceeded back to the white strip separating the Republic of Cuba from America’s oldest overseas naval base.
The ritual was repeated. Smart salutes, followed by handshakes. The last to shake Andrus’s hand was Marcial. The tight grip was held two-to-three seconds longer than customary. Marcial fixed Andrus with a firm, direct gaze. But there was something more in those midnight eyes and demi-grin. Searching. Assurance. Something.
When Marcial released his grip, Andrus felt something in his palm. Paper. Marcial held his gaze a second longer. Warning. Caution. In any case, a visual man-to-man message. Andrus pulled his handkerchief out to wipe his brow, a ploy to deposit the slip of paper in his pocket.
Andrus waited until his chauffeured sedan was a full mile on the road back to headquarters before retrieving the paper slip palmed on him by the Cuban officer. He opened it.
I want to defect.
* * *
“It’s a dangle. No doubt about it. We play along. Feed him crap. Mess with their minds. Teach the bastards a lesson. They won’t know which way’s up when we’re through with them.” Bart Morgenstern pulled his squat, overweight body out of his seat, leaned forward, knuckles pressed on the conference table. “I don’t buy it for a minute.”
Nick Castillo liked the brilliant, slovenly Brooklyn native. His body might be slow, but his mind was not. And he deviated one hundred-eighty degrees from the usual buttoned down, colorless FBI headquarters types. He was arguably the best counterintel analyst the agency had. He was on Hanssen’s trail before anyone else was. And he was feared and loathed in Beijing for all the PRC moles he’d exposed in Silicon Valley. A French Sûreté official once likened him to a truffle hog: he could sniff around and root out enemy spies without missing a beat. It was a Gallic compliment.
“Maybe he’s a double agent. But maybe he’s not,” said Lena Moreno, one of Castillo’s young agents in the Field Intelligence Group, FIG for short, in the bureau’s Miami Field Office. “We’ve at least got to test him.”
“But we can’t box him like other assets under assessment,” retorted Morgenstern; “box” being shorthand for polygraph, the lie detector. “And the Cubes know this. He’s under their control. Totally. Believe me. We can’t afford to be taken in again. I say we just ignore it. Otherwise, we feed him shit.”
Morgenstern was referring to a constant stream of phony Cuban defectors and turncoats who’ve been showing up at U.S. embassies, military bases and in the United States for decades. Havana’s spymasters send in these ringers for several reasons. First, to flush out and identify American intelligence officers. Second, to gain insight into how the CIA manages defectors and those it recruits to spy for them. Third, to feed disinformation in order to get Washington to make bad policy decisions. And last, to screw with the heads of American intel officers, leading them into a wilderness of mirrors, building paranoia to the point that even true-blue Cuban turncoats would not be trusted. Once it had achieved its goals, Havana sometimes would then feed stories to the world media on how it had tricked its North American nemesis once again. Many a career has wound up in the political graveyard as a result.
“Here’s the thing,” Castillo said. “Our CI Division and the CIA’s CI Center are taking this guy seriously. They assign the case to this office because he passed the note to the GTMO base commander who was standing on our side of The Line. Whatever. This is a joint op. We validate him. Or not. If so, we run him. If not, we drop him.”
“And the Castro boys whip up the eggs we’ll have on our collective faces…,” Morgenstern interjected.
Castillo picked up a bound stack of FBI Intelligence Information Reports and CIA raw intel. The cover sheet showed “TOP SECRET” in bold orange-red letters. Flipping through them, he summarized.
“On Sunday, another building collapsed in central Havana, killing a record eighty-six people; thirty-five were children. Riots broke out on the Malecón. They taunted Havana’s party boss, who went to try to calm tempers. A building collapses in Havana on average every three days. The economy is going down the tubes fast. Food is short. Crime is way up. People there are talking about mass migration to Florida. The Cuban people want change.”
“Yeah, but…,” Morgenstern tried to say.
“And here’s why it may be different now,” Castillo said, raising his voice a tad. “Fidel Castro is eighty-seven. Raúl Castro is eighty-two. The Cuban revolution is fifty-four. The actuarial tables meet the revolution.”
As the new Assistant Special Agent in Charge –ASAC - A-Sack – Castillo knew then and there that the country of his forebears would be pulling him into a maelstrom. And he dreaded the prospect.
CHAPTER TWO
Havana
The GAZ jeep coughed and choked along broad Paseo Avenue, black fumes billowing from its exhaust. The patched-up Soviet era military vehicle struggled to maintain forty miles an hour. The young Army private chauffeuring it shrugged apologetically to his passenger. Col. Marcial smiled back and took in the sites. Having been stationed in eastern Cuba for the past seven years, he seldom got back to Havana.
Looming ahead was the José Martí Memorial, a towering phallus of a monument visible from most parts of the city. The great poet and patriot sat brooding over his beloved city in carved stone at the bottom of the memorial. Next to it was the sprawling, trapezoidal Palace of the Revolution and Communist Party headquarters. The Castro boys ruled Cuba from there. Built in the 1950s under the Batista regime, the stark office labyrinth was inspired by European Fascist architecture. Marcial’s smile faded as his eyes took it in.
A vast vacant asphalt parade ground, devoid of any organic thing, lay across the avenue from the Palace. Marcial recalled many an hour standing at attention and marching on the grounds in the unrelenting southern sun. If anyone actually could spare an egg, it would fry quickly on the stove-hot surface.
The GAZ chugged left onto Salvador Allende Avenue, past the glass and concrete National Theater, then right on Calle 19 de Mayo and another sharp right into a parking lot. The private quickly got out and stood at attention as Col. Marcial stepped out the doorless side. Towering over him were two eight-story rectangular office buildings even more devoid of character than the Mussolini-inspired Palace. More East German-imbued, the Ministry of Interior headquarters was a place almost every Cuban steered clear of by choice. As he approached the main building, the visage of Che Guevara in bronze piping mounted on a concrete façade covering the entire height of the building gazed valiantly at the horizon. Hasta la Victoria Siempre – “Ever Onward to Victory” declared large scrawl under his chin.
A young MININT lieutenant met Marcial at the entrance, saluted and ushered him to the elevator and up to the eighth floor. The elevator doors opened to a reception area connected to a large office suite. A plaque on the wall said, “Vice Minister – Directorate of Intelligence – Brig. Gen. Alfredo García Menéndez.”
García greeted Marcial with a firm handshake and a hearty pat on the back.
“My God, Marcial. Don’t you ever age? You look younger. How long has it been?” The balding Vice Minister scratched his forehead. He clenched a lancero cigar between his teeth.
“El Salvador,” Marcial said.
“Ah. That long? Those were the days, eh? Jungle battles fulfilling our internationalist duty. Now…now we manage tourist hotels and taxi fleets. And how is…” He searched his mind. “María.”
“Marisol,” Marcial corrected him.
“Right. Marisol. How is she? Beautiful girl.”
“We’re divorced. But Yuri is well. He will graduate from José Maceo this year.”
“Another camilito in the family. Wonderful,” García said.
Camilitos were graduates of any of the eight military academies, the so-called Camilo Cienfuegos schools. García and Marcial had been classmates at the prestigious General Máximo Gómez Academy in the capital.
García ushered Marcial into his office suite.
“You know Amenares,” García said, signaling to the mirthless MININT major. Amenares offered a limp hand. “And here we have compañera Larisa Montilla. From the U.S.A. Department.” García did not elaborate further. The woman wore civilian clothes; no rank was visible.
The woman stood and greeted Marcial, but said nothing. Light brown hair tied back and hazel eyes, erect bearing, forties, Castilian good looks and formal demeanor.
Marcial took in the office. Spare and bare with the exception of a photo of El Jefe pinning a medal on a younger García, the obligatory official photo of President Raúl Castro and two African masks on the far wall.
Angola. The Lomba River. Under attack. Marcial’s mind raced back over two decades. South African long-range artillery raining down, chewing up their encampment. Lt. Alfredo García Menéndez shouting orders to fleeing Angolan MPLA guerrillas to return to their positions. Explosions. Lt. Marcial pinned down, trying to call in MiGs to strike at the enemy positions. Limbs, blood, brains flying through the air. Total chaos.
“Henrique,” repeated García. “I said, would you like coffee?”
Marcial broke out of his daydream. “No thank you, general.” Moros y cristianos – Moors and Christians, Marcial thought. The national Cuban dish, black beans and rice. He was the black bean in this office of otherwise all-white attendees. It’s always that way at the senior levels. Yes, Fidel opened up opportunities to Afro-Cubans long denied them. But when it came to truly running things, the sons, and some daughters, of Europe retained the levers of power, as it had always been.
“So, the transfer went okay? The American captain took it? No hitches?” García asked.
“Yes. It went easily. He took it and slipped it into his right pants pocket,” Marcial said.
“Good,” said García.
Amenares and Montilla took notes.
“Now we want you to stay in Havana until the next scheduled meeting on The Line.
“But, my command…”
“Not to worry. It’s in the hands of your capable subordinate, Lt. Col. Blanco. You will be put up in bachelor’s quarters.”
“I thought I was to just pass the note. That’s it.”
“There may be more asked of you.”
“I’m a simple soldier. Not a spy.”
“You are a patriot, Colonel.”
A pause.
“Why me?”
García looked at Montilla. Her eyes revealed nothing that Marcial could detect.
“You have a sterling record. And you satisfy a certain profile. They will find you more credible,” García said.
“Profile. You mean because I am black? That’s it?”
“It’s more complex than that, Marcial,” García said.
Marcial stared at the floor, elbows on his knees, hands clasped, and slowly shook his head.
García then ended the meeting and stood up. “We will be in touch,” he said formally as he shook Marcial’s hand.
* * *
Marcial took the jeep to his temporary quarters near Ciudad Libertad in the western outskirts of the city. He changed into civilian clothes and headed with his driver to the Malecón, the broad esplanade bordering the sea. Traffic, as always, was light. He loved the Malecón. The sea breeze invigorated him, the expansive aquamarine sea liberated him. He closed his eyes and breathed deep. Marisol. Hand-in-hand they walked. For hours. Up and down. Sometimes talking. Often silent, yet close, as lovers are. He was a cadet. She was a student nurse. Their needs were simple then. Long talks over ice cream at Coppelia. Swims at Bacuranao Beach. Salsa dancing. Los Van Van concerts. Love-making on the rocks below the Malecón. Things were so uncomplicated then.
Marcial directed the driver to pull over near the old mob-owned Riviera Hotel. Straight out of the 1950s, just like so many of the cars. A city frozen in time. He hopped out onto the sidewalk next to a skateboard park. A dozen, or so, boys zoomed around, pushing the envelope of their skills, shouting both encouragement and ridicule. A bunch of girls watched, cheered and flirted. When the big olive green military vehicle pulled up with the MININT-uniformed driver and ministry plates, they halted their fun. The skateboarders cruised to a stop. The girls looked away. Smiles turned to scowls. Sullen faces and defiant eyes greeted Marcial.
Comemierda!” someone spat. “Shiteater” was an epithet often reserved for communist officials, but always behind closed doors. This was different.
“Hey! Who said that?” the driver shouted, now standing and belligerent.
“Jaime, you can go back. I’d like to walk now. Thanks,” Marcial told his young driver. The GAZ roared off, belching black diesel exhaust in its wake.
Since the 1994 social unrest known as the Maleconazo when Havanans took to the streets to protest fast declining economic conditions following the abrupt end of Soviet and East Bloc subsidies, the regime had been able to keep a lid on things.
Every hundred meters an officer of the Policía Nacional Revolucionaria kept watch; patrol cars crept along the road. Encased surveillance cameras mounted on lamp posts and buildings were pervasive. Marcial could see that the authorities clearly were more present and on heightened alert.
Marcial continued down the Malecón. Like all country boys, he found Havana grand and majestic. A dowager, once stunning, now faded, falling apart. A city possessing a majesty and proportion outsized to the confines of a small island nation; as if, like Rome or Vienna, it were once the capital of a great empire. The Cuban character is also thus. Too big, too ambitious for an island people. A sense of grandeur reflected in the imaginations of those who built Havana. And in the leadership.
His leisure stroll took Marcial past the José Martí stadium. The sea was rough this day, big waves crashing against the rocks. The few cars and rickety trucks that passed along the esplanade did little to interfere with the gorgeous view of sea against cloud-strewn sky. There were also few people. The Malecón was a place for nocturnal activity. At night it bustled with strollers, kids, lovers, foreign tourists, hustlers and whores.
Ahead lay a place reviled by a few, but fascinating to many. An off-limits magnet. A foothold in Cuban soil of a land of contradictions, hope and danger. A place that is, yet isn’t. The United States Interests Section building. Seven stories of concrete and glass, vintage 1953. But unlike most of Havana, upgraded and functional. Concrete berms, a black iron fence, a few forlorn palm trees and bored Cuban guards encircled the complex. A barren concrete plaza lay before the structure. Socialismo o Muerte! proclaimed a billboard.
As Marcial walked by, opposite the building’s front was a small forest of twenty-meter-high flagpoles topped by black flags, each with a single white star, fluttering defiantly before the U.S. mission. This was José Martí Anti-Imperialist Plaza, erected to counter propaganda emitted from a scrolling electronic sign on the American building during the Bush II era.
The U.S. Interests Section of the Embassy of Switzerland isn’t an American embassy, nor is it truly a part of the Swiss diplomatic representation. But it operates more or less like an embassy. Hence, a place that is, yet isn’t.
Marcial never fought Americans. He’d fought counterrevolutionaries and their South African allies in Angola. He’d assisted freedom fighters in Central America. But he’d never even met an American before his assignment as Frontier Brigade Commander at Guantanamo. Though he would never utter a word about it, he found the American naval captain and his cohorts friendly, hospitable. They seemed open, constructive and jovial. But this didn’t mean anything. His job was to protect the Republic of Cuba from their nefarious schemes. He dreamt one day he would be saluting the Cuban flag on the naval base that the Americans occupied illegally.
The note-passing episode left him uneasy. This was work best left to professional spies. Dirty work. Not soldier’s work. He could accept it assuming it was a one-time deal. But it wasn’t. Gen. García made that clear. He looked up at the U.S. Interests Section again. If only you knew, he thought, and shook his head.
He took a right off the Malecón. It wasn’t until he stopped to buy a cold soft drink that he noticed a figure some twenty meters to his rear. A man in a blue shirt. He had been leaning against the wall of the Riviera. Nothing out of the ordinary. Just another un- or under-employed male watching the world pass by. A common sight. But Marcial’s military mind was trained to spot anomalies, to track details. And now this man was in his moving orbit.
He finished his drink and headed into central Havana. Going nowhere special. It was refreshing to be in a big city again. Havana dwarfed Guantanamo City and was relatively more prosperous. Though the unpainted, decaying apartment complexes, rutted streets and torpor among the inhabitants signaled anything but dynamism. Yet wherever one went, the syncopations of salsa, rhumba, son, reggaeton beat from windows, door stoops and sidewalks. Couples threw themselves into extemporaneous dance.
Every other block, or so, was a vacant lot, standing walls devoid of internal structure as if bombed out; or a small mountain of rubble where buildings once stood. They’d been picked clean of anything salvageable. Stick-thin mangy dogs roamed in search of anything edible.
When he was a captain, Marcial had a buddy, also a captain, whose family had been wealthy white landowners in the old days. Some of them stayed on to serve the revolution. On Friday nights, when they’d had one too many glasses of rum, his buddy would rail about “The Lost City of Havana. A shining gem, now a pile of ruins.” Marcial himself had no reference point to pass such judgment. A simple guajiro, son of semi-literate farmers from Oriente, three generations from slavery.
Marcial stopped to “tie” his shoe. The man in the blue shirt hovered behind, looking away as if pondering the universe.
Marcial gravitated in the direction of the clamor of voices. Another mound of rubble lay before him. This one was much bigger. A small mountain of bricks, spidery rebars, plaster dust and water pipes jutting out like fractured bones of a felled beast. Two concrete angels lay shattered on the street curb like celestial corpses.
“Housing now! Housing now! Housing now!” chanted a group where the front entrance of the Reina used to be.
Across the street, a phalanx of middle-aged women, all dressed in white, made a circular march in silence. They carried photos of loved ones.
A crowd was gathering. A young woman with a tape recorder was making the rounds. She wore a tee shirt which proclaimed, “DON’T HIT ME. I’M JUST A BLOGGER.” She shoved the mic in front of Marcial’s face.
“What about you, friend? How do you feel about this? Over a hundred buildings collapse in Havana every year. Eighty-six innocents lost their lives in this one. What do you have to say?”
He waved her off and backed away. Marcial turned to another rubbernecker, an old man with no teeth.
“What’s this all about,” Marcial asked.
“These people are survivors,” said the man.
“Of what?”
“Heh, heh. Where you been compañero? Under a rock? This is the Reina. Collapsed last week. Record number killed. People had enough. They’re pissed. Everybody’s afraid of being crushed to death in their homes. The whole goddamn city’s falling apart.”
“Who’s that young woman? She with Granma, or something?”
The old man scoffed. “Shit no, compañero. Why that’s Yamilé. Some say she’s a hero, others that she’s a gusana. Troublemaker she is. She puts out all kinds of criticism against the government over the computer.”
“You mean the internet?”
The old man shrugged. “Whatever.”
“And those women over there?” asked Marcial.
“The Ladies in White. You really been under a rock, huh?”
“Why are they walking silently in a circle like that?” Marcial continued, ignoring the old man’s digs.
“More gusanas. At least that’s what those clowns in the CDR over there say.” He nodded in the direction of a group of counter protesters shouting angrily at the demonstrators.
“The Ladies in White, they want their loved ones released from jail. They come to show support for the Reina victims. Yamilé comes to spread the news. And the CDR types launch another repudiation rally against the whole lot. What’s this country coming to? El Jefe needs to crack down.”
The thirty counter protesters of the local Committee for the Defense of the Revolution waved placards reading, “Fatherland or Death!” “Down with Counterrevolutionaries!” “El Jefe Leads – We Follow.” They shook their fists and shrieked at the demonstrators.
The CDR activists marched closer to the homeless protesters. A pushing match ensued. One of the pro-government agitators broke from formation and shoved the internet blogger Yamilé, who went careening out of control against Marcial, knocking him down onto the sidewalk.
Like a bullet, the Army colonel shot back up, grabbed the shoving man and threw him down into the street with all his might. Landing face first, a couple of teeth flew out, followed by a stream of blood from his mouth.
Several of the man’s comrades rushed over and proceeded to pummel Marcial.
“Gusano traitor!” they yelled and piled on. The homeless Reina demonstrators joined in, attacking Marcial’s assaulters.
Regaining her balance Yamilé recorded the melée with her cell phone. Within half a day, it would shoot around the world via cyberspace.
A distant klaxon came nearer and nearer. Police cars and two paddy wagons screeched to a halt. Cops rushed out to separate the brawlers.
“Leave me alone! I’m not fighting! You have no right!” screamed Yamilé as two policewomen grabbed each arm and dragged her off to a paddy wagon.
As police pulled the pro-government ruffians off of Marcial, he got to his feet. Just as he was regaining his balance, one of the cops yanked him by an arm toward a paddy wagon.
Marcial swung a powerful fist into the cop’s solar plexus. The lawman went down, clutching his abdomen and gasping for air.
The fireworks thunderflash inside Marcial’s head was followed quickly by a stream of blood from where the billy club met his skull.
CHAPTER THREE
Union City, New Jersey
Wednesday
La Paloma Restaurant on Bergerline Avenue was only two blocks to Weehawken Cemetery, three minutes on foot. But this afternoon it would take an hour-and-a-half. María Mirabel de la Cruz told her son, Paco, to hold the fort as she ran some errands.
“When will you be back, Mom?” the lanky teenager asked as he practiced invisible hoop shots while glued to an overhead TV broadcasting ESPN coverage of Boston battling it out against Orlando.
“I gotta go to Shop Rite to get some things for the house. Then to the shoe repair. And I got to pick up our wholesale order at Palisades Supplies. And some other stuff.”
“Yeah sure. OK,” Paco murmured, half-tuned out.
“I need you to watch the lechón asado. We got the Cuban-American Freedom Association banquet tonight. That lechón has to be succulent. They love it.”
Silence.
“Paco! Did you hear me?”
“Uh. Yeah. Sure. The lechón. Succulent.”
María wagged a finger at her son. “I’m gonna call you to make sure. If you let that pork turn to leather, I’m gonna cuff you so hard! And get off your lazy ass and do something, ocioso. Learn how to run a business. Like your father and I did. Came here with nothing and now we can afford to send you to Rutgers.”
Paco broke from his trance long enough to give his mother a peck on the cheek.
“Don’t worry. Everything’ll be fine,” he assured her. “Those old dinosaurs will get to feast on their succulent dead pig flesh.”
María laughed. Before exiting, she placed two large posters in the front window. One was of the Pope with the caption: “God Bless America.” The other said, “FREEDOM – DEMOCRACY FOR CUBA. Annual CAFA Banquet – La Paloma Restaurant.”
She straightened out the Cuban and American flags on either side of the outside entrance before taking off in her Chevy van.
She turned right onto Bergerline Avenue, drove seven minutes in congested traffic, hung a right onto 39th Street, then a left on JFK Boulevard until she arrived at Shop Rite. She took her time picking up some groceries and household items. María next entered the ramp for 495 West to end up twenty minutes later in Lyndhurst at a Dominican-owned shoe repair at a low-end strip mall. After dropping off her shoes, she strolled up and down the row of shops – Carnicería de las Americas, Ortiz Gold & Jewelry, Café Caribe, Marco’s Pizza. She looked into each shop window, focusing on the images mirrored from her rear. She walked through a five-foot wide space separating two of the buildings marked by drainage pipes and litter, ended up in the grubby rear delivery area of the shops, walked in a circle, then passed back through the narrow space.
Back in her van, María drove to East Rutherford where she picked up some pastries from Santiago Bakery. More window shopping, followed by a pit stop deep into the mall.
Then back across the river and over to North Bergen, onto 4th Avenue, then a sharp u-turn to double back along the same route, all the while scrutinizing every vehicle to her rear as well as front – make, year, color, condition, license plate.
After a stop at Palisades Supplies for some restaurant items, María parked the van on a dead end street a few blocks from La Paloma, carefully eyeballed the length and breadth of the trash-strewn short strip, bordered by a near-vacant parking lot and a small deteriorating warehouse.
Yakov Peters, deputy head of the Soviet Cheka, once said, “The best quality of a spy is patience.” And the one thing that they constantly drummed into the heads of new recruits of the General Directorate of Intelligence in Havana was, “There is no such thing as too much security.”
María was number one in her class in running a surveillance detection route, or SDR. In her final exam, the DGI assigned twenty experienced officers to cover her. She lost them within ten minutes. María attributed her talent in part to her plain face-in-the-crowd and square body. She was a person no one looked twice at, except Ramón, who was equally nondescript. He made a good husband.
Conducting a good SDR entailed constant tracing and re-tracing of routes to identify that recurrent face, car, clothing, motorcycle, physique that would give away a tail. And going through choke points in order to winnow out surveillance operatives. And María never took shortcuts. Life in solitary at a federal penitentiary was something she had no intention risking.
When they were slipped into the Mariel exodus by the DGI in 1980, María and Ramón dreaded leaving their native land for the Main Adversary – Moscow’s and Havana’s ideological nemesis, the United States. But they made their way well into American society and the virulently anti-Castro Cuban exile community. Eventually, they would be allowed to return to retire and to collect the medals awarded to them by El Comandante. As Principal Resident Agent in New Jersey, María had developed over the years a wide-ranging network of deeply embedded moles and subagents who provided a wealth of intelligence and carried out active measures in the service of their Cuban masters. The steady damage done to the reactionary exile leaders was immeasurable.
María crossed Hillside Avenue on foot, skirted a row of houses and proceeded along a path through a wooded area into Weehawken Cemetery. Again, she was hyper-alert of her surroundings. She crossed the cemetery’s circular drive and walked slowly to the pre-designated rendezvous point. She saw the small white cross painted on a maple tree, indicating the dead drop was ready for pick-up.
Almost hidden in bushes was the grave of Albert Vadas, Medal of Honor winner for heroism in fighting the Spanish at the Battle of Cienfuegos, 1898. She knelt in feigned prayer, carefully surveying her surroundings without moving her head. When confident she was safe, María made the sign of the cross, stood up and circled behind the headstone to retrieve the package left by the Center’s agent overseeing her, under cover as a diplomat in the Cuban mission to the U.N.
The click of cold metal behind her left ear was not part of the game.
* * *
Herndon, Virginia
Thursday
He popped another dexlansoprazole. Acid reflux wasn’t something he’d wish on anyone. His diet he could control. Nerves, however, were another matter. And whenever his debt level got out of control, or he was out on a mission, as he was today, Luís Gabaldón’s stomach rebelled.
He wondered if his new case officer from the Cuban Interests Section was too green. This was the third time in the last ten months he was instructed to meet at Ralph Fendrick’s Used Auto Parts Lot in Spotsylvania, Virginia. It was over seventy miles from Herndon through northern Virginia’s can of worms road system. An-hour-and-a-half if the perennial traffic congestion was merely insane rather than homicidal. And the fact that it was already ninety degrees and near a hundred percent humidity at 10:00 am added to the aggravation.
“And don’t forget to stop at Macy’s after the bank to pick up my new dress. You got the ticket?” Mercedes asked.
“Yeah. And don’t ask me again. You think I’m stupid?” Luís put his Dodge pick-up in gear and proceeded to back out of the driveway of a ranch house nearly identical to the scores of others in his cul-de-sac-pocked tract housing neighborhood.
“Wait up!” she yelled, scampering over to him from the front door in pink fluffy slippers, a too-long moo-moo and curlers in her hair.
“You’re not stupid, Luís. Just slow on the uptake sometimes. I need money for groceries. And Little Louie needs to pay for his football equipment this week. Those cleats alone are two hundred dollars. Matilda’s behind on her prom preparations. She needs to order a gown and make an appointment at the hair salon…”
Luís shut his eyes and massaged his forehead. He then grabbed for the bottle of Extra Strength Tylenol he kept in the glove compartment. He prayed the fifty-megaton headache that was coming on wouldn’t work with the stomach acid to cause him to vomit.
“…and for a car repair shop owner you’re not too swift about keeping up on car payments. Little Louie’s Grand Am is behind by two months…”
Luís screeched out of the driveway, smoke shooting out as the rubber met the road in his escape from Robin Hood Drive.
He pulled onto Fairfax County Parkway behind a behemoth bus filled with camera-crazy Asian tourists. Black diesel filled the Dodge pick-up’s cabin. Luís honked futilely.
“Groceries.” Hah! he thought. If you regard the rarefied, galactically-priced fare at Whole Foods as “groceries,” or daily doses of designer coffee at Starbucks at four bucks a pop as “groceries,” then, sure, we’re the all-American family. With four cars, genuine NFL equipment for a highschooler, prom preparations that rivaled those for Oscar night and annual pilgrimages back to Santo Domingo to see family and shell out subsidies to them. And on it went. Two mortgages, taxes that only went up, and business and health insurance that bordered on the extortionate. They had traded steady but uncomplicated poverty back in the old country for the so-called American Dream of boundless materialism and its huge costs.
He tossed seventy-five cents into the collection basket giving access to the Dulles Toll Road. Traffic moved smoothly.
Luís had been proud of his achievements here. Started his own business repairing cars. Then the contracts came. First the Herndon police. Followed by the county government car fleet. He bought two more garages. Finally, the biggest kahuna of them all: the USG. Specifically, the Pentagon. His reputation firmly established as a reliable and fair auto-repair businessman, Luís landed a sizeable contract with the Defense Department to maintain and repair several fleets of official cars.
The money was good, but the more he made, the more they spent. Vacations, a boat, cars, and a revolving credit line that took in Macy’s, Neiman-Marcus, Gucci, Redskins tickets, you name it. It was amazing, he thought. America the Beautiful, to be sure. But also America the Spendthrift. Everybody fell for it. And everybody’s paying the price.
He’d be a bankrupt grease monkey had he not met Corrales years back. He took a loan from a guy he thought was a loan shark. Nice fellow, though. Well groomed, with that smooth self-confidence exhibited by successful attorneys and CEO’s. His Cuban accent so close to his own Dominican. They hit it off. Corrales gave him five grand at the outset. Easy terms. When that was gone, Luís went back to Corrales with head bowed, to ask for an extension of payment. “No problem,” said the handsome Cuban. “Here’s ten more.” And, oh. “Do you think you could give me copies of the Pentagon’s motor pool?” A funny request, but what the hell.
After the next ten grand, Corrales asked for more detail. Which cars were assigned to what officials. Their daily routes. Their full names. Their home addresses. The payments rose when Luís let a “friend” of Corrales work on some of the cars on weekends. The money was good and getting better. But, again, there was a price to pay in meeting Corrales’s demands while still running his business and attending to the voracious needs of his family. He slept fitfully, his back ached constantly, and his stomach churned.
On I-95 south, Luís put into the CD player some soothing Latin string music. He thought through more clearly all the demands being made upon him. Too many to have to answer to. Thank God he was a teetotaler, didn’t use drugs; had no interest in other women. He and Mercedes attended church every Sunday. All he really needed was…money.
Luís had made up his mind to up his demands. Fifty grand. Yep. And that was only the beginning. He had other Latino friends who did business with the government whom he could tap for all kinds of info to sell. But he had no loyalty to the stinking Castro regime or to Cuba. This was strictly business. He forked over useless information about government cars in return for payment. An American business transaction. Nothing more.
Ralph Fendrick’s Used Auto Parts Lot was little more than a car dump. One of many eyesore auto boneyards scattered around rural white trash Virginia where one could put one’s hands on a door for a ’78 Impala, or a fuel injector for an ’89 Lincoln Continental, and so on.
After paying his respects to Redneck Fendrick, Sr., Luís went poking around the corpses and detritus of autos past. He made his way to the back, piled high with wrecks. He found the 1991 red Toyota Corolla and waited, as instructed. He heard the crush of straw under a foot and turned.
“You’re not Corrales,” were his last words.
* * *
Key West, Florida
Friday
The sentry waved Ulices Peña through the main gate at Saratoga Avenue. He drove his van, displaying “Peña Painting – Have Brush, Will Travel - Key West,” under the large sign reading U.S. Naval Station Key West. He passed the F-5 squadron belonging to Fighter Composite Squadron One-Eleven and proceeded to the family housing complex at Sigsbee Park. He returned a mock salute to Chief Warrant Officer Bud O’Reilly, one of his supervisors and a man never without a joke.
Waiting for him at the house to be painted that day was his crew of five men. He assigned tasks and went to work.
Peña returned to his vehicle to complete some paperwork: paint orders, invoices, payroll tax computations, work mileage, number of fighters on the runways this morning and observable activity at the 749th Military Intelligence Company HQ. The last two entries were made in code in tiny script on page fifty-three of a paint catalog.
His cell phone chirped. Bud O’Reilly wanted to meet him at the administration building to go over some contract details. Ulices told his crew, started the engine and took off.
He was met in front of the small conference room by O’Reilly, who opened the door for him, then took off. Seated at the table were Lt. Commander Don Watson, of the Office of Naval Intelligence, and FBI agent Nick Castillo.
“How’s Uncle Horacio?” Watson asked. “Any news?”
“No. Nothing,” Ulices replied.
“No contact from the courier?” Watson asked.
“Nope. None,” Ulices said.
“Coffee?” Nick asked, offering a styrofoam cup of steaming office swill.
“Thanks.” He took the cup.
Nick removed documents from a yellow manila folder. He set them in front of Ulices. They were stamped SECRET – NOFORN – ORCON. No Foreign – Or Contractor dissemination.
“We’d like you to hand these over to the courier next time you rendezvous,” Nick said. “I think tío Horacio will find them interesting.”
At five-feet-four, Ulices never had pictured himself as a Latin James Bond. He was a house painter. Oil vs latex. Natural bristles vs synthetic. Brick red vs terra cotta. These were his expertise. Not passing secrets from one government to another, or playing games of international deceit.
But he fell into it. Almost no choice. On his last trip to Santa Clara to see family three years ago, Uncle Horacio appeared on his doorstep. This was an uncle he barely ever saw growing up. He was off in Africa, they said, serving the revolution. In Moscow, at the Cuban embassy. In Havana. Always somewhere but in Santa Clara.
Horacio was completely off the radar screen after Ulices’s parents left Cuba with their three kids in the eighties. Miami High School, vocational training, his own small business, a modest house in the ‘burbs, fine Cuban-American wife, two boys, Dolphins games. Security. America is the greatest country on earth and Ulices would do anything to repay what the nation had done for him.
“So,” Uncle Horacio had said, “That girl you knocked up while at high school in Santa Clara. That daughter she had. Your eyes. Your smile. Beautiful girl.” He showed Ulices a photo. A betting man would indeed wager that a DNA test would confirm the connection. The child was indeed beautiful. He had loved her mother – as much as a sixteen-year-old could love. But his parents’ move out of the country ended it. Much to their relief. Ulices never heard from the girl again.
“Idania is her name. Graduated with honors in microbiology. Now she is applying for a job with the Pedro Kourí Institute in Havana. Very prestigious. World travel. Access to the special hard currency stores.” Horacio paused and shook his head.
“Yes?” Ulices prompted.
“Ah. A complication. No party ties. No connections. Priority is given for the children of deserving party members for these jobs. To reward those who have served the revolution. As for those who fled la Patria…” He shook his head again.
“I can arrange a meeting. I am sure she would love to see her father,” Horacio said.
And he did. The meeting was emotional for both. Father and daughter hugged as if they’d reunited after a long spell rather than not having ever met. His heart was hers.
Dear Uncle – Colonel – Horacio had hooked his nephew. In return for some hazily defined favors from Ulices, the uncle would grease the skids for Idania to pursue her dreams.
It was a pact with the devil, Ulices knew. Spy for Castro in return for assuaging the guilt he’d felt for having abandoned his baby.
“You absolutely did the right thing coming to us, Ulices,” Nick said.
Ulices snapped out of his reflection. “Yeah. Sure. I love this country. I owe it so much. That’s why I reported my uncle’s approach to the FBI as soon as I got back. But I’m a simple painter. This stuff makes my head spin. And I don’t like doing secret things. Pretending to spy for them when I’m really spying for you. How long do I have to do it?”
Nick leaned forward. “Listen to me, Ulices. What you’re doing is a great service to your country. The information you feed to the Cubans helps keep them off guard. And their dealings with you help us to get insight on how they operate in this country. I can’t give you an end date. Maybe when Fidel is dead.”
Ulices shook his head. “That one will never die.”
He departed with the documents which he would lock up in a safe deposit box until he got the signal.
The signal came in the form of a phone call a week later. The male voice gave him the address of a pay phone on Roosevelt Boulevard and a time to be there. He was told during that call to be at the Winn Dixie supermarket on the same boulevard at 9:00 that evening.
Ulices called his wife to say he’d be working late and asked for a grocery shopping list. Up and down the supermarket aisles. Nothing out of the ordinary. He stuck his head into the ice cream freezer. Rocky Road was what he searched for. Ah! Found one, the last! As he placed it in his cart, a standard mail envelope had mysteriously appeared where the large envelope Nick had given him had been. A brush pass executed by a magician. He quickly stuffed it into his paint splattered coveralls. He looked around. No sign of anyone making a quick exit.
As he settled into the driver’s seat of his van, Ulices looked left and right. Then he pulled out the envelope and carefully opened it. In the dim illumination of the parking lot lights, he brought the sheet of paper to his face. It was blank.
Tap, tap. He rolled down his window.
~ Federico García Lorca
PROLOGUE
“Rudolph Valentino stayed here. Also Charlie Chaplin. And there was Clark Gable and el gran maestro Caruso. Rico Caruso? What was his full name? When he sang at the Campoamor. And they say Greta Garbo…”
“Who gives a shit?” Jorge shot back. “Why do you keep saying all these famous people stayed here? That was a long time ago. And all those people are dead anyway. “
“…and Winston Churchill! Him too!” Yesdasi continued.
“Wrong, chica. He stayed at the Nacional. But, I said, stop this!”
Yesdasi snapped out of her reverie and blinked. “Why should I stop? We live in a place where many famous people stayed. Just think—”
But before she could slip back into her reverie, Jorge grabbed her chin with his rough worker’s hand. “Yesdasi! Look at me! Look into my eyes!”
Yesdasi frowned. Her dark eyes were those of a little girl who had been told she may not have another cookie.
“Listen to me. We live in a shithole. Correction. We exist in a shithole. Look!” He made a sweep with his other hand. “One hundred fifty families are crammed into this dump. It hasn’t seen a lick of fresh paint in fifty years. The plumbing is shot. Shit and piss pool on the ground floor. No electricity half of the time.”
“La Reina is still majestic, Jorge. This place has soul. One day…”
“The queen is dead! Long live the queen!” Jorge backed off, wagging a finger at his wife. “One day we’ll be in Miami! Away from all this.”
“The hell we will. Dream on, Jorge. You’re forty-two years old. Make the best with the cards we’re dealt.”
Jorge slumped into a hard wooden chair beside the ancient crooked dining table. He leaned forward and covered his face with his palms.
The door opened. An old woman ushered in two boys in red-scarfed pionero uniforms. They ran to the Chinese-made television and tuned to SpongeBob Squarepants, via a pirated signal from an illegal rooftop dish.
They moaned. “Bananas again?”
“Hush!” their grandmother responded. “You’re lucky I could find those. That Yuma TV is spoiling you kids. You think this is America? See how fat those American kids are.”
Jorge kissed his mother on the cheek. An astute woman, she instantly read the faces of her son and daughter-in-law. “You two been arguing again?”
“Ah, it’s nothing, Mama,” he said.
“Same old stuff,” Yesdasi added.
He nodded. “We’re packed like sardines in this old hotel. Plants are growing out of its fissures. We’re like rats in some old Roman ruins. Five hundred worthless pesos a month gets us next to nothing. I don’t think about me and Yesdasi so much as the boys. I want them to have a future.”
“Watch your mouth, hijo,” Mother said. “That CDR bitch down the hall has ears like a bat.”
“‘Siempre contigo, Fidel!’ Right down to the bottom of the Caribbean on this sinking ship with El Jefe.” Jorge snapped a mock military salute.
Yesdasi grabbed her husband by the sleeve and pulled him onto the small balcony. “Listen to your mother, Jorge. The last thing I need is a husband in jail. Just watch it.”
Jorge’s grimace melted into a smile. “God, I still love the fire in those beautiful eyes.” He pulled her close. “Remember how we danced? We loved salsa even more than sex.” He kissed her. They lingered in an embrace. A tile from the balcony above fell on Jorge’s head.
“Shit!” he yelled and looked up.
“Hey, Ortega! Keep it down, will ya? I’m trying to get some rest,” a male’s voice admonished from the neighboring unit.
“Rest from what?” Jorge retorted. “A job at a Ministry of Construction that carries out no construction?”
“Ah. Go fuck yourself!” the other man shouted back.
“Never mind him.” Yesdasi placed a finger over his lips.
They looked out over central Havana, a vista of drab decaying buildings, broken streets and a scattering of vintage vehicles. Jorge shook his head.
* * *
The man turned a corner. Out of breath, the pudgy fellow labored under a fully packed army duffel bag. His short legs and fat ass lent a duck-like waddle to his gait. As he approached the minivan, his younger cohort quickly got out and opened the rear door. The short man was about to heave the duffel in, then stopped in mid-motion.
“What in God’s name is this crap?” A tall pile of tangled cables and plastic parts lay in the van’s rear compartment.
“I don’t know,” said the young man. “Got it from an Army guy in return for some Playboys my girlfriend picked up cleaning rooms at the Cohiba. I think it’s bulldozer parts. I’ll figure it out later. Somebody’ll buy them. Come on. Let’s get a move-on!”
The other threw in the duffel and got behind the wheel. The side of the van read, “Hospital Comandante Manuel Fajardo.” They screeched off.
Once on Avenida Salvador Allende heading toward central Havana, they relaxed.
“So, what’s in the duffel?” The young man, Oscar, slumped in the passenger’s seat, feet propped on the dash board, fingers rapidly tapping out some infernal reggaeton tune on the dash.
Carlos lit a cigarette and inhaled deeply. “Nipple shields, wound cleanser, hooks and retractors, drip collectors, diabetic lancets, some diagnostic shit…shipment donated from Sweden. Just came in.”
Oscar squinted. “Wha’?”
Carlos exhaled smoke. “Hey, trust me. This stuff’ll move. I’m trying to get my hands on some lorazepam. It’s all the rage among kids with fat remittances from Miami. Can’t sell it fast enough. They say the high is short, but intense. Sort of like an orgasm.”
Traffic, as always, was light. A hodge-podge of ‘50s Chevies, DeSotos, and Studebakers huff-puffed along the route with Russian Ladas, military vehicles, Soviet-era trucks, hotel taxis, and a sleek diplomatic limo, or two.
“So, Carlos, if you don’t get caught, what’s your plan? With the money, I mean?” Oscar asked.
Carlos looked over at his partner and took another drag on his cigarette. Eyes were back on the road. “You know. I hate stealing. From the state, from anybody. I was raised right. I’m a guajiro. Cut sugar cane as a kid out in Camaguey. We had nothing, but we never stole. Lived off of the sweat of our brow. I do this…” He jerked his thumb back toward the loot. “…because I have to. We all do. But my goal is to open up a paladar in five years. It’ll be the best private dining in Havana.” He took his hands off the wheel and bracketed an imaginary placard. “Siboney is gonna be the name. I already got a chef lined up. Suppliers. The whole shooting match. How about yourself?”
Grim determination formed across Oscar’s face. His eyes were transfixed onto the distance. “Me. I’m getting out. Got an uncle in Fort Lauderdale. Owns a bedding store. Says a job is waiting for me if I can get there okay. Who knows? Maybe he’ll make me his partner one day.”
“You’ll get yourself killed kid. Fish bait in the Florida Strait. Not worth the risk. Apply for a visa. I hear the wait is under ten years now.”
“No. Can’t wait that long. I’d rather be fish food than waste my life here. But I got a plan. Uncle Frank is gonna buy me a plane ticket to Quito. No visa needed for Cubans there. Then I head north. Simple as that.”
The hospital van pulled in at the apartment building. “LA REINA” stood in bold stone relief over the outside columned entrance. Carved almost a century ago by Italian or Catalan stoneworkers, the letters were caked in black soot. Seraphim and angels graced the sides, their wings long since broken. Little paint remained on the cracking walls of the former lobby. The tops of the sweeping interior archways were hidden as the result of the installation of a makeshift extra floor to accommodate more residents. Such additions, inserted wherever the original ceilings were high, are called barbacoas – barbecues, in that they resemble the middle-level grills of those devices.
Carlos and Oscar hauled their booty up the curved entrance stairway.
A young black woman with screaming twin babies asked in a hushed voice, “Carlos, you got the nipple shields? I’m sore.”
“Sure do. Right after the CDR block meeting tonight, when I usually make sales.”
The men dragged their stuff over to the birdcage lift in the center of the dark foyer. Sweaty and out of breath, Carlos said, “Don’t bother pressing the button. Hasn’t worked since who knows when.”
An eighty-something man leaning on his cane shook his head. “Lift is out. Gotta climb. Not me though. I can’t do no ten floors with this heart.” He patted his chest.
“Fucking thing’s out again?” Carlos kicked the elevator shaft folding door with all his might. Jugulars bulging, face beet-red, he lifted his head and bellowed, “Me cago en tu madre!”
A creaking sound echoed off the walls, followed by a deep groan that sounded as though it came from the belly of a monster. Silence followed. Residents stopped what they were doing and looked up, then at one another. Flakes of plaster and dust floated down like snow and settled on their heads and clothing.
Carlos and Oscar looked at each other, frozen in place.
On the eleventh floor, the Ortega boys averted their eyes from SpongeBob at the first tremor. They looked to their mother and father. Wide-eyed, the parents rushed to scoop their children in their arms.
The mother of twins did the same ten floors below in the stairwell.
Carlos shouted to Oscar, “Let’s get the hell out of—”
The implosion was all encompassing, merciless, swift.
CHAPTER ONE
U.S. Naval Station, Guantanamo Bay, Cuba
The day was beautiful, cloudless and serenely quiet at The Line, the northwest perimeter gate of the U.S. Naval Station at GTMO. Base Commander Captain Wally T. Andrus fidgeted as he waited for his counterpart to appear from the Cuban side. His watch read 0958. His team — USMC detachment commander Colonel John Compoli, aide Lieutenant Commander Steve O’Malley and Spanish interpreter Marine Corporal Lance Rueda — peered silently through the chain link fence. The American side featured a guard shack flanked by concrete-filled cinder blocks and oil drum berms garishly painted in red and yellow. Atop the guard shack was a sign: “North East Gate – Marine Barracks – Ground Defense Security Force.” Old Glory fluttered atop the flagpole as if indifferent to the host country on whose territory it was planted. Opposite, some thirty yards away, was a high archway topped by a sign boldly proclaiming, “Republica de Cuba – Territorio Libre de America.” The Cuban flag and pole were inexplicably smaller than their U.S. counterparts.
The monthly meetings on The Line were actually convivial. So much so, in fact, one would not discern that the venue was one of only two points held over from the Cold War where enemies meet. The other point was Panmunjom in the Korean DMZ. Berlin’s Glienicke “Bridge of Spies” belonged to the history books. And while the Allenby Bridge, the India-Pakistan Wagah Border crossing and the Cypriot Green Line could offer moments of tense drama, they lacked the gravity of junctures where empires, and their surrogates, met and sometimes clashed.
In the movie, A Few Good Men, the fictional Colonel Jessup famously said, “I eat breakfast three hundred yards from four thousand Cubans who are trained to kill me.” That, of course, was Hollywood melodrama. Andrus loved throwing out that line when hosting visiting VIPs at the base commander’s residence or at the Windjammer Club restaurant.
Three Cubans in olive drab marched out of one of the single-story buildings flanking the archway. Their leader, a gray-haired dark complexioned man with a paunch, nodded, signaling they were ready to meet. The two delegations, lined up in rank order, strode toward a white line in the asphalt exactly in the middle of the boundary. Falling into place on either side, they halted, stood at attention and saluted. They then shook hands all around.
Brigadier General Marcos López y López gestured for the Americans to join them at a long, narrow table and folding chairs on the Cuban side, under the archway. The comandante of Cuba’s Eastern Military Region was accompanied by Frontier Brigade Commander Col. Henrique Marcial Arribe, Intelligence Officer Carlos Amenares Sánchez and a young female interpreter bearing private’s insignia, a name patch that read, “Navarro,” and out-of-place pink lipstick. Proud members of the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias, or FAR – except for Amenares, a member of the Ministry of Interior’s feared secret police.
As the delegates took their seats, a FAR enlistee served strong cafecitos and simple biscuits. The venues alternated between the two sides. When the U.S. Navy hosted, in true blue USN tradition, a fairly lavish catered meal was served inside an air conditioned tent. The FAR delegates relished those affairs as evidenced by their repeated helpings of the heavy American fare. The FAR, like the rest of Cuba, alas, lacked the resources to put on a small banquet for their Yankee counterparts.
As the proceedings began, flies buzzed around increasingly sweaty brows. The overhead sun was relentless, the archway’s shade providing little relief.
The agenda was typically mundane: coordination of measures to put out brush fires —usually started by an animal blundering into a Cuban minefield; the U.S. had removed its minefields — fence repair notification, new construction around Camp Delta, scheduling the orderly repatriation of Cuban escapees, weed eradication. The purpose of the monthly get-togethers was to prevent potential flare-ups from erupting between the two adversaries.
Capt. Andrus took stock of the Cubans as his interpreter translated his opening remarks. López y López, a battle-hardened veteran of Angola, was sixty, if a day, and was clearly on his pre-retirement final tour of duty. His demeanor was jovial, even jolly at times. His eyes, however, were steely, on guard. The squinty-eyed, slouch-shouldered, humorless MININT intel officer, Amenares, had the air of a man who spent his time preying on people on behalf of himself as well as the state. Col. Marcial stood in stark contrast to his cohorts. A six-foot-two, muscled Afro-Cuban, he was lantern-jawed and handsome, alert, quiet, observant. His handshake was viselike; not necessarily intentionally, but the grip of a powerful man. He had the right qualities for a soldier whose job it was to be the first to confront the American superpower should the balloon go up. Andrus pondered that Marcial would probably be the guy first in line to run three hundred yards to kill him while he ate breakfast.
Seventy-five minutes later, the meeting was concluded. The two delegations rose, gathered their papers and proceeded back to the white strip separating the Republic of Cuba from America’s oldest overseas naval base.
The ritual was repeated. Smart salutes, followed by handshakes. The last to shake Andrus’s hand was Marcial. The tight grip was held two-to-three seconds longer than customary. Marcial fixed Andrus with a firm, direct gaze. But there was something more in those midnight eyes and demi-grin. Searching. Assurance. Something.
When Marcial released his grip, Andrus felt something in his palm. Paper. Marcial held his gaze a second longer. Warning. Caution. In any case, a visual man-to-man message. Andrus pulled his handkerchief out to wipe his brow, a ploy to deposit the slip of paper in his pocket.
Andrus waited until his chauffeured sedan was a full mile on the road back to headquarters before retrieving the paper slip palmed on him by the Cuban officer. He opened it.
I want to defect.
* * *
“It’s a dangle. No doubt about it. We play along. Feed him crap. Mess with their minds. Teach the bastards a lesson. They won’t know which way’s up when we’re through with them.” Bart Morgenstern pulled his squat, overweight body out of his seat, leaned forward, knuckles pressed on the conference table. “I don’t buy it for a minute.”
Nick Castillo liked the brilliant, slovenly Brooklyn native. His body might be slow, but his mind was not. And he deviated one hundred-eighty degrees from the usual buttoned down, colorless FBI headquarters types. He was arguably the best counterintel analyst the agency had. He was on Hanssen’s trail before anyone else was. And he was feared and loathed in Beijing for all the PRC moles he’d exposed in Silicon Valley. A French Sûreté official once likened him to a truffle hog: he could sniff around and root out enemy spies without missing a beat. It was a Gallic compliment.
“Maybe he’s a double agent. But maybe he’s not,” said Lena Moreno, one of Castillo’s young agents in the Field Intelligence Group, FIG for short, in the bureau’s Miami Field Office. “We’ve at least got to test him.”
“But we can’t box him like other assets under assessment,” retorted Morgenstern; “box” being shorthand for polygraph, the lie detector. “And the Cubes know this. He’s under their control. Totally. Believe me. We can’t afford to be taken in again. I say we just ignore it. Otherwise, we feed him shit.”
Morgenstern was referring to a constant stream of phony Cuban defectors and turncoats who’ve been showing up at U.S. embassies, military bases and in the United States for decades. Havana’s spymasters send in these ringers for several reasons. First, to flush out and identify American intelligence officers. Second, to gain insight into how the CIA manages defectors and those it recruits to spy for them. Third, to feed disinformation in order to get Washington to make bad policy decisions. And last, to screw with the heads of American intel officers, leading them into a wilderness of mirrors, building paranoia to the point that even true-blue Cuban turncoats would not be trusted. Once it had achieved its goals, Havana sometimes would then feed stories to the world media on how it had tricked its North American nemesis once again. Many a career has wound up in the political graveyard as a result.
“Here’s the thing,” Castillo said. “Our CI Division and the CIA’s CI Center are taking this guy seriously. They assign the case to this office because he passed the note to the GTMO base commander who was standing on our side of The Line. Whatever. This is a joint op. We validate him. Or not. If so, we run him. If not, we drop him.”
“And the Castro boys whip up the eggs we’ll have on our collective faces…,” Morgenstern interjected.
Castillo picked up a bound stack of FBI Intelligence Information Reports and CIA raw intel. The cover sheet showed “TOP SECRET” in bold orange-red letters. Flipping through them, he summarized.
“On Sunday, another building collapsed in central Havana, killing a record eighty-six people; thirty-five were children. Riots broke out on the Malecón. They taunted Havana’s party boss, who went to try to calm tempers. A building collapses in Havana on average every three days. The economy is going down the tubes fast. Food is short. Crime is way up. People there are talking about mass migration to Florida. The Cuban people want change.”
“Yeah, but…,” Morgenstern tried to say.
“And here’s why it may be different now,” Castillo said, raising his voice a tad. “Fidel Castro is eighty-seven. Raúl Castro is eighty-two. The Cuban revolution is fifty-four. The actuarial tables meet the revolution.”
As the new Assistant Special Agent in Charge –ASAC - A-Sack – Castillo knew then and there that the country of his forebears would be pulling him into a maelstrom. And he dreaded the prospect.
CHAPTER TWO
Havana
The GAZ jeep coughed and choked along broad Paseo Avenue, black fumes billowing from its exhaust. The patched-up Soviet era military vehicle struggled to maintain forty miles an hour. The young Army private chauffeuring it shrugged apologetically to his passenger. Col. Marcial smiled back and took in the sites. Having been stationed in eastern Cuba for the past seven years, he seldom got back to Havana.
Looming ahead was the José Martí Memorial, a towering phallus of a monument visible from most parts of the city. The great poet and patriot sat brooding over his beloved city in carved stone at the bottom of the memorial. Next to it was the sprawling, trapezoidal Palace of the Revolution and Communist Party headquarters. The Castro boys ruled Cuba from there. Built in the 1950s under the Batista regime, the stark office labyrinth was inspired by European Fascist architecture. Marcial’s smile faded as his eyes took it in.
A vast vacant asphalt parade ground, devoid of any organic thing, lay across the avenue from the Palace. Marcial recalled many an hour standing at attention and marching on the grounds in the unrelenting southern sun. If anyone actually could spare an egg, it would fry quickly on the stove-hot surface.
The GAZ chugged left onto Salvador Allende Avenue, past the glass and concrete National Theater, then right on Calle 19 de Mayo and another sharp right into a parking lot. The private quickly got out and stood at attention as Col. Marcial stepped out the doorless side. Towering over him were two eight-story rectangular office buildings even more devoid of character than the Mussolini-inspired Palace. More East German-imbued, the Ministry of Interior headquarters was a place almost every Cuban steered clear of by choice. As he approached the main building, the visage of Che Guevara in bronze piping mounted on a concrete façade covering the entire height of the building gazed valiantly at the horizon. Hasta la Victoria Siempre – “Ever Onward to Victory” declared large scrawl under his chin.
A young MININT lieutenant met Marcial at the entrance, saluted and ushered him to the elevator and up to the eighth floor. The elevator doors opened to a reception area connected to a large office suite. A plaque on the wall said, “Vice Minister – Directorate of Intelligence – Brig. Gen. Alfredo García Menéndez.”
García greeted Marcial with a firm handshake and a hearty pat on the back.
“My God, Marcial. Don’t you ever age? You look younger. How long has it been?” The balding Vice Minister scratched his forehead. He clenched a lancero cigar between his teeth.
“El Salvador,” Marcial said.
“Ah. That long? Those were the days, eh? Jungle battles fulfilling our internationalist duty. Now…now we manage tourist hotels and taxi fleets. And how is…” He searched his mind. “María.”
“Marisol,” Marcial corrected him.
“Right. Marisol. How is she? Beautiful girl.”
“We’re divorced. But Yuri is well. He will graduate from José Maceo this year.”
“Another camilito in the family. Wonderful,” García said.
Camilitos were graduates of any of the eight military academies, the so-called Camilo Cienfuegos schools. García and Marcial had been classmates at the prestigious General Máximo Gómez Academy in the capital.
García ushered Marcial into his office suite.
“You know Amenares,” García said, signaling to the mirthless MININT major. Amenares offered a limp hand. “And here we have compañera Larisa Montilla. From the U.S.A. Department.” García did not elaborate further. The woman wore civilian clothes; no rank was visible.
The woman stood and greeted Marcial, but said nothing. Light brown hair tied back and hazel eyes, erect bearing, forties, Castilian good looks and formal demeanor.
Marcial took in the office. Spare and bare with the exception of a photo of El Jefe pinning a medal on a younger García, the obligatory official photo of President Raúl Castro and two African masks on the far wall.
Angola. The Lomba River. Under attack. Marcial’s mind raced back over two decades. South African long-range artillery raining down, chewing up their encampment. Lt. Alfredo García Menéndez shouting orders to fleeing Angolan MPLA guerrillas to return to their positions. Explosions. Lt. Marcial pinned down, trying to call in MiGs to strike at the enemy positions. Limbs, blood, brains flying through the air. Total chaos.
“Henrique,” repeated García. “I said, would you like coffee?”
Marcial broke out of his daydream. “No thank you, general.” Moros y cristianos – Moors and Christians, Marcial thought. The national Cuban dish, black beans and rice. He was the black bean in this office of otherwise all-white attendees. It’s always that way at the senior levels. Yes, Fidel opened up opportunities to Afro-Cubans long denied them. But when it came to truly running things, the sons, and some daughters, of Europe retained the levers of power, as it had always been.
“So, the transfer went okay? The American captain took it? No hitches?” García asked.
“Yes. It went easily. He took it and slipped it into his right pants pocket,” Marcial said.
“Good,” said García.
Amenares and Montilla took notes.
“Now we want you to stay in Havana until the next scheduled meeting on The Line.
“But, my command…”
“Not to worry. It’s in the hands of your capable subordinate, Lt. Col. Blanco. You will be put up in bachelor’s quarters.”
“I thought I was to just pass the note. That’s it.”
“There may be more asked of you.”
“I’m a simple soldier. Not a spy.”
“You are a patriot, Colonel.”
A pause.
“Why me?”
García looked at Montilla. Her eyes revealed nothing that Marcial could detect.
“You have a sterling record. And you satisfy a certain profile. They will find you more credible,” García said.
“Profile. You mean because I am black? That’s it?”
“It’s more complex than that, Marcial,” García said.
Marcial stared at the floor, elbows on his knees, hands clasped, and slowly shook his head.
García then ended the meeting and stood up. “We will be in touch,” he said formally as he shook Marcial’s hand.
* * *
Marcial took the jeep to his temporary quarters near Ciudad Libertad in the western outskirts of the city. He changed into civilian clothes and headed with his driver to the Malecón, the broad esplanade bordering the sea. Traffic, as always, was light. He loved the Malecón. The sea breeze invigorated him, the expansive aquamarine sea liberated him. He closed his eyes and breathed deep. Marisol. Hand-in-hand they walked. For hours. Up and down. Sometimes talking. Often silent, yet close, as lovers are. He was a cadet. She was a student nurse. Their needs were simple then. Long talks over ice cream at Coppelia. Swims at Bacuranao Beach. Salsa dancing. Los Van Van concerts. Love-making on the rocks below the Malecón. Things were so uncomplicated then.
Marcial directed the driver to pull over near the old mob-owned Riviera Hotel. Straight out of the 1950s, just like so many of the cars. A city frozen in time. He hopped out onto the sidewalk next to a skateboard park. A dozen, or so, boys zoomed around, pushing the envelope of their skills, shouting both encouragement and ridicule. A bunch of girls watched, cheered and flirted. When the big olive green military vehicle pulled up with the MININT-uniformed driver and ministry plates, they halted their fun. The skateboarders cruised to a stop. The girls looked away. Smiles turned to scowls. Sullen faces and defiant eyes greeted Marcial.
Comemierda!” someone spat. “Shiteater” was an epithet often reserved for communist officials, but always behind closed doors. This was different.
“Hey! Who said that?” the driver shouted, now standing and belligerent.
“Jaime, you can go back. I’d like to walk now. Thanks,” Marcial told his young driver. The GAZ roared off, belching black diesel exhaust in its wake.
Since the 1994 social unrest known as the Maleconazo when Havanans took to the streets to protest fast declining economic conditions following the abrupt end of Soviet and East Bloc subsidies, the regime had been able to keep a lid on things.
Every hundred meters an officer of the Policía Nacional Revolucionaria kept watch; patrol cars crept along the road. Encased surveillance cameras mounted on lamp posts and buildings were pervasive. Marcial could see that the authorities clearly were more present and on heightened alert.
Marcial continued down the Malecón. Like all country boys, he found Havana grand and majestic. A dowager, once stunning, now faded, falling apart. A city possessing a majesty and proportion outsized to the confines of a small island nation; as if, like Rome or Vienna, it were once the capital of a great empire. The Cuban character is also thus. Too big, too ambitious for an island people. A sense of grandeur reflected in the imaginations of those who built Havana. And in the leadership.
His leisure stroll took Marcial past the José Martí stadium. The sea was rough this day, big waves crashing against the rocks. The few cars and rickety trucks that passed along the esplanade did little to interfere with the gorgeous view of sea against cloud-strewn sky. There were also few people. The Malecón was a place for nocturnal activity. At night it bustled with strollers, kids, lovers, foreign tourists, hustlers and whores.
Ahead lay a place reviled by a few, but fascinating to many. An off-limits magnet. A foothold in Cuban soil of a land of contradictions, hope and danger. A place that is, yet isn’t. The United States Interests Section building. Seven stories of concrete and glass, vintage 1953. But unlike most of Havana, upgraded and functional. Concrete berms, a black iron fence, a few forlorn palm trees and bored Cuban guards encircled the complex. A barren concrete plaza lay before the structure. Socialismo o Muerte! proclaimed a billboard.
As Marcial walked by, opposite the building’s front was a small forest of twenty-meter-high flagpoles topped by black flags, each with a single white star, fluttering defiantly before the U.S. mission. This was José Martí Anti-Imperialist Plaza, erected to counter propaganda emitted from a scrolling electronic sign on the American building during the Bush II era.
The U.S. Interests Section of the Embassy of Switzerland isn’t an American embassy, nor is it truly a part of the Swiss diplomatic representation. But it operates more or less like an embassy. Hence, a place that is, yet isn’t.
Marcial never fought Americans. He’d fought counterrevolutionaries and their South African allies in Angola. He’d assisted freedom fighters in Central America. But he’d never even met an American before his assignment as Frontier Brigade Commander at Guantanamo. Though he would never utter a word about it, he found the American naval captain and his cohorts friendly, hospitable. They seemed open, constructive and jovial. But this didn’t mean anything. His job was to protect the Republic of Cuba from their nefarious schemes. He dreamt one day he would be saluting the Cuban flag on the naval base that the Americans occupied illegally.
The note-passing episode left him uneasy. This was work best left to professional spies. Dirty work. Not soldier’s work. He could accept it assuming it was a one-time deal. But it wasn’t. Gen. García made that clear. He looked up at the U.S. Interests Section again. If only you knew, he thought, and shook his head.
He took a right off the Malecón. It wasn’t until he stopped to buy a cold soft drink that he noticed a figure some twenty meters to his rear. A man in a blue shirt. He had been leaning against the wall of the Riviera. Nothing out of the ordinary. Just another un- or under-employed male watching the world pass by. A common sight. But Marcial’s military mind was trained to spot anomalies, to track details. And now this man was in his moving orbit.
He finished his drink and headed into central Havana. Going nowhere special. It was refreshing to be in a big city again. Havana dwarfed Guantanamo City and was relatively more prosperous. Though the unpainted, decaying apartment complexes, rutted streets and torpor among the inhabitants signaled anything but dynamism. Yet wherever one went, the syncopations of salsa, rhumba, son, reggaeton beat from windows, door stoops and sidewalks. Couples threw themselves into extemporaneous dance.
Every other block, or so, was a vacant lot, standing walls devoid of internal structure as if bombed out; or a small mountain of rubble where buildings once stood. They’d been picked clean of anything salvageable. Stick-thin mangy dogs roamed in search of anything edible.
When he was a captain, Marcial had a buddy, also a captain, whose family had been wealthy white landowners in the old days. Some of them stayed on to serve the revolution. On Friday nights, when they’d had one too many glasses of rum, his buddy would rail about “The Lost City of Havana. A shining gem, now a pile of ruins.” Marcial himself had no reference point to pass such judgment. A simple guajiro, son of semi-literate farmers from Oriente, three generations from slavery.
Marcial stopped to “tie” his shoe. The man in the blue shirt hovered behind, looking away as if pondering the universe.
Marcial gravitated in the direction of the clamor of voices. Another mound of rubble lay before him. This one was much bigger. A small mountain of bricks, spidery rebars, plaster dust and water pipes jutting out like fractured bones of a felled beast. Two concrete angels lay shattered on the street curb like celestial corpses.
“Housing now! Housing now! Housing now!” chanted a group where the front entrance of the Reina used to be.
Across the street, a phalanx of middle-aged women, all dressed in white, made a circular march in silence. They carried photos of loved ones.
A crowd was gathering. A young woman with a tape recorder was making the rounds. She wore a tee shirt which proclaimed, “DON’T HIT ME. I’M JUST A BLOGGER.” She shoved the mic in front of Marcial’s face.
“What about you, friend? How do you feel about this? Over a hundred buildings collapse in Havana every year. Eighty-six innocents lost their lives in this one. What do you have to say?”
He waved her off and backed away. Marcial turned to another rubbernecker, an old man with no teeth.
“What’s this all about,” Marcial asked.
“These people are survivors,” said the man.
“Of what?”
“Heh, heh. Where you been compañero? Under a rock? This is the Reina. Collapsed last week. Record number killed. People had enough. They’re pissed. Everybody’s afraid of being crushed to death in their homes. The whole goddamn city’s falling apart.”
“Who’s that young woman? She with Granma, or something?”
The old man scoffed. “Shit no, compañero. Why that’s Yamilé. Some say she’s a hero, others that she’s a gusana. Troublemaker she is. She puts out all kinds of criticism against the government over the computer.”
“You mean the internet?”
The old man shrugged. “Whatever.”
“And those women over there?” asked Marcial.
“The Ladies in White. You really been under a rock, huh?”
“Why are they walking silently in a circle like that?” Marcial continued, ignoring the old man’s digs.
“More gusanas. At least that’s what those clowns in the CDR over there say.” He nodded in the direction of a group of counter protesters shouting angrily at the demonstrators.
“The Ladies in White, they want their loved ones released from jail. They come to show support for the Reina victims. Yamilé comes to spread the news. And the CDR types launch another repudiation rally against the whole lot. What’s this country coming to? El Jefe needs to crack down.”
The thirty counter protesters of the local Committee for the Defense of the Revolution waved placards reading, “Fatherland or Death!” “Down with Counterrevolutionaries!” “El Jefe Leads – We Follow.” They shook their fists and shrieked at the demonstrators.
The CDR activists marched closer to the homeless protesters. A pushing match ensued. One of the pro-government agitators broke from formation and shoved the internet blogger Yamilé, who went careening out of control against Marcial, knocking him down onto the sidewalk.
Like a bullet, the Army colonel shot back up, grabbed the shoving man and threw him down into the street with all his might. Landing face first, a couple of teeth flew out, followed by a stream of blood from his mouth.
Several of the man’s comrades rushed over and proceeded to pummel Marcial.
“Gusano traitor!” they yelled and piled on. The homeless Reina demonstrators joined in, attacking Marcial’s assaulters.
Regaining her balance Yamilé recorded the melée with her cell phone. Within half a day, it would shoot around the world via cyberspace.
A distant klaxon came nearer and nearer. Police cars and two paddy wagons screeched to a halt. Cops rushed out to separate the brawlers.
“Leave me alone! I’m not fighting! You have no right!” screamed Yamilé as two policewomen grabbed each arm and dragged her off to a paddy wagon.
As police pulled the pro-government ruffians off of Marcial, he got to his feet. Just as he was regaining his balance, one of the cops yanked him by an arm toward a paddy wagon.
Marcial swung a powerful fist into the cop’s solar plexus. The lawman went down, clutching his abdomen and gasping for air.
The fireworks thunderflash inside Marcial’s head was followed quickly by a stream of blood from where the billy club met his skull.
CHAPTER THREE
Union City, New Jersey
Wednesday
La Paloma Restaurant on Bergerline Avenue was only two blocks to Weehawken Cemetery, three minutes on foot. But this afternoon it would take an hour-and-a-half. María Mirabel de la Cruz told her son, Paco, to hold the fort as she ran some errands.
“When will you be back, Mom?” the lanky teenager asked as he practiced invisible hoop shots while glued to an overhead TV broadcasting ESPN coverage of Boston battling it out against Orlando.
“I gotta go to Shop Rite to get some things for the house. Then to the shoe repair. And I got to pick up our wholesale order at Palisades Supplies. And some other stuff.”
“Yeah sure. OK,” Paco murmured, half-tuned out.
“I need you to watch the lechón asado. We got the Cuban-American Freedom Association banquet tonight. That lechón has to be succulent. They love it.”
Silence.
“Paco! Did you hear me?”
“Uh. Yeah. Sure. The lechón. Succulent.”
María wagged a finger at her son. “I’m gonna call you to make sure. If you let that pork turn to leather, I’m gonna cuff you so hard! And get off your lazy ass and do something, ocioso. Learn how to run a business. Like your father and I did. Came here with nothing and now we can afford to send you to Rutgers.”
Paco broke from his trance long enough to give his mother a peck on the cheek.
“Don’t worry. Everything’ll be fine,” he assured her. “Those old dinosaurs will get to feast on their succulent dead pig flesh.”
María laughed. Before exiting, she placed two large posters in the front window. One was of the Pope with the caption: “God Bless America.” The other said, “FREEDOM – DEMOCRACY FOR CUBA. Annual CAFA Banquet – La Paloma Restaurant.”
She straightened out the Cuban and American flags on either side of the outside entrance before taking off in her Chevy van.
She turned right onto Bergerline Avenue, drove seven minutes in congested traffic, hung a right onto 39th Street, then a left on JFK Boulevard until she arrived at Shop Rite. She took her time picking up some groceries and household items. María next entered the ramp for 495 West to end up twenty minutes later in Lyndhurst at a Dominican-owned shoe repair at a low-end strip mall. After dropping off her shoes, she strolled up and down the row of shops – Carnicería de las Americas, Ortiz Gold & Jewelry, Café Caribe, Marco’s Pizza. She looked into each shop window, focusing on the images mirrored from her rear. She walked through a five-foot wide space separating two of the buildings marked by drainage pipes and litter, ended up in the grubby rear delivery area of the shops, walked in a circle, then passed back through the narrow space.
Back in her van, María drove to East Rutherford where she picked up some pastries from Santiago Bakery. More window shopping, followed by a pit stop deep into the mall.
Then back across the river and over to North Bergen, onto 4th Avenue, then a sharp u-turn to double back along the same route, all the while scrutinizing every vehicle to her rear as well as front – make, year, color, condition, license plate.
After a stop at Palisades Supplies for some restaurant items, María parked the van on a dead end street a few blocks from La Paloma, carefully eyeballed the length and breadth of the trash-strewn short strip, bordered by a near-vacant parking lot and a small deteriorating warehouse.
Yakov Peters, deputy head of the Soviet Cheka, once said, “The best quality of a spy is patience.” And the one thing that they constantly drummed into the heads of new recruits of the General Directorate of Intelligence in Havana was, “There is no such thing as too much security.”
María was number one in her class in running a surveillance detection route, or SDR. In her final exam, the DGI assigned twenty experienced officers to cover her. She lost them within ten minutes. María attributed her talent in part to her plain face-in-the-crowd and square body. She was a person no one looked twice at, except Ramón, who was equally nondescript. He made a good husband.
Conducting a good SDR entailed constant tracing and re-tracing of routes to identify that recurrent face, car, clothing, motorcycle, physique that would give away a tail. And going through choke points in order to winnow out surveillance operatives. And María never took shortcuts. Life in solitary at a federal penitentiary was something she had no intention risking.
When they were slipped into the Mariel exodus by the DGI in 1980, María and Ramón dreaded leaving their native land for the Main Adversary – Moscow’s and Havana’s ideological nemesis, the United States. But they made their way well into American society and the virulently anti-Castro Cuban exile community. Eventually, they would be allowed to return to retire and to collect the medals awarded to them by El Comandante. As Principal Resident Agent in New Jersey, María had developed over the years a wide-ranging network of deeply embedded moles and subagents who provided a wealth of intelligence and carried out active measures in the service of their Cuban masters. The steady damage done to the reactionary exile leaders was immeasurable.
María crossed Hillside Avenue on foot, skirted a row of houses and proceeded along a path through a wooded area into Weehawken Cemetery. Again, she was hyper-alert of her surroundings. She crossed the cemetery’s circular drive and walked slowly to the pre-designated rendezvous point. She saw the small white cross painted on a maple tree, indicating the dead drop was ready for pick-up.
Almost hidden in bushes was the grave of Albert Vadas, Medal of Honor winner for heroism in fighting the Spanish at the Battle of Cienfuegos, 1898. She knelt in feigned prayer, carefully surveying her surroundings without moving her head. When confident she was safe, María made the sign of the cross, stood up and circled behind the headstone to retrieve the package left by the Center’s agent overseeing her, under cover as a diplomat in the Cuban mission to the U.N.
The click of cold metal behind her left ear was not part of the game.
* * *
Herndon, Virginia
Thursday
He popped another dexlansoprazole. Acid reflux wasn’t something he’d wish on anyone. His diet he could control. Nerves, however, were another matter. And whenever his debt level got out of control, or he was out on a mission, as he was today, Luís Gabaldón’s stomach rebelled.
He wondered if his new case officer from the Cuban Interests Section was too green. This was the third time in the last ten months he was instructed to meet at Ralph Fendrick’s Used Auto Parts Lot in Spotsylvania, Virginia. It was over seventy miles from Herndon through northern Virginia’s can of worms road system. An-hour-and-a-half if the perennial traffic congestion was merely insane rather than homicidal. And the fact that it was already ninety degrees and near a hundred percent humidity at 10:00 am added to the aggravation.
“And don’t forget to stop at Macy’s after the bank to pick up my new dress. You got the ticket?” Mercedes asked.
“Yeah. And don’t ask me again. You think I’m stupid?” Luís put his Dodge pick-up in gear and proceeded to back out of the driveway of a ranch house nearly identical to the scores of others in his cul-de-sac-pocked tract housing neighborhood.
“Wait up!” she yelled, scampering over to him from the front door in pink fluffy slippers, a too-long moo-moo and curlers in her hair.
“You’re not stupid, Luís. Just slow on the uptake sometimes. I need money for groceries. And Little Louie needs to pay for his football equipment this week. Those cleats alone are two hundred dollars. Matilda’s behind on her prom preparations. She needs to order a gown and make an appointment at the hair salon…”
Luís shut his eyes and massaged his forehead. He then grabbed for the bottle of Extra Strength Tylenol he kept in the glove compartment. He prayed the fifty-megaton headache that was coming on wouldn’t work with the stomach acid to cause him to vomit.
“…and for a car repair shop owner you’re not too swift about keeping up on car payments. Little Louie’s Grand Am is behind by two months…”
Luís screeched out of the driveway, smoke shooting out as the rubber met the road in his escape from Robin Hood Drive.
He pulled onto Fairfax County Parkway behind a behemoth bus filled with camera-crazy Asian tourists. Black diesel filled the Dodge pick-up’s cabin. Luís honked futilely.
“Groceries.” Hah! he thought. If you regard the rarefied, galactically-priced fare at Whole Foods as “groceries,” or daily doses of designer coffee at Starbucks at four bucks a pop as “groceries,” then, sure, we’re the all-American family. With four cars, genuine NFL equipment for a highschooler, prom preparations that rivaled those for Oscar night and annual pilgrimages back to Santo Domingo to see family and shell out subsidies to them. And on it went. Two mortgages, taxes that only went up, and business and health insurance that bordered on the extortionate. They had traded steady but uncomplicated poverty back in the old country for the so-called American Dream of boundless materialism and its huge costs.
He tossed seventy-five cents into the collection basket giving access to the Dulles Toll Road. Traffic moved smoothly.
Luís had been proud of his achievements here. Started his own business repairing cars. Then the contracts came. First the Herndon police. Followed by the county government car fleet. He bought two more garages. Finally, the biggest kahuna of them all: the USG. Specifically, the Pentagon. His reputation firmly established as a reliable and fair auto-repair businessman, Luís landed a sizeable contract with the Defense Department to maintain and repair several fleets of official cars.
The money was good, but the more he made, the more they spent. Vacations, a boat, cars, and a revolving credit line that took in Macy’s, Neiman-Marcus, Gucci, Redskins tickets, you name it. It was amazing, he thought. America the Beautiful, to be sure. But also America the Spendthrift. Everybody fell for it. And everybody’s paying the price.
He’d be a bankrupt grease monkey had he not met Corrales years back. He took a loan from a guy he thought was a loan shark. Nice fellow, though. Well groomed, with that smooth self-confidence exhibited by successful attorneys and CEO’s. His Cuban accent so close to his own Dominican. They hit it off. Corrales gave him five grand at the outset. Easy terms. When that was gone, Luís went back to Corrales with head bowed, to ask for an extension of payment. “No problem,” said the handsome Cuban. “Here’s ten more.” And, oh. “Do you think you could give me copies of the Pentagon’s motor pool?” A funny request, but what the hell.
After the next ten grand, Corrales asked for more detail. Which cars were assigned to what officials. Their daily routes. Their full names. Their home addresses. The payments rose when Luís let a “friend” of Corrales work on some of the cars on weekends. The money was good and getting better. But, again, there was a price to pay in meeting Corrales’s demands while still running his business and attending to the voracious needs of his family. He slept fitfully, his back ached constantly, and his stomach churned.
On I-95 south, Luís put into the CD player some soothing Latin string music. He thought through more clearly all the demands being made upon him. Too many to have to answer to. Thank God he was a teetotaler, didn’t use drugs; had no interest in other women. He and Mercedes attended church every Sunday. All he really needed was…money.
Luís had made up his mind to up his demands. Fifty grand. Yep. And that was only the beginning. He had other Latino friends who did business with the government whom he could tap for all kinds of info to sell. But he had no loyalty to the stinking Castro regime or to Cuba. This was strictly business. He forked over useless information about government cars in return for payment. An American business transaction. Nothing more.
Ralph Fendrick’s Used Auto Parts Lot was little more than a car dump. One of many eyesore auto boneyards scattered around rural white trash Virginia where one could put one’s hands on a door for a ’78 Impala, or a fuel injector for an ’89 Lincoln Continental, and so on.
After paying his respects to Redneck Fendrick, Sr., Luís went poking around the corpses and detritus of autos past. He made his way to the back, piled high with wrecks. He found the 1991 red Toyota Corolla and waited, as instructed. He heard the crush of straw under a foot and turned.
“You’re not Corrales,” were his last words.
* * *
Key West, Florida
Friday
The sentry waved Ulices Peña through the main gate at Saratoga Avenue. He drove his van, displaying “Peña Painting – Have Brush, Will Travel - Key West,” under the large sign reading U.S. Naval Station Key West. He passed the F-5 squadron belonging to Fighter Composite Squadron One-Eleven and proceeded to the family housing complex at Sigsbee Park. He returned a mock salute to Chief Warrant Officer Bud O’Reilly, one of his supervisors and a man never without a joke.
Waiting for him at the house to be painted that day was his crew of five men. He assigned tasks and went to work.
Peña returned to his vehicle to complete some paperwork: paint orders, invoices, payroll tax computations, work mileage, number of fighters on the runways this morning and observable activity at the 749th Military Intelligence Company HQ. The last two entries were made in code in tiny script on page fifty-three of a paint catalog.
His cell phone chirped. Bud O’Reilly wanted to meet him at the administration building to go over some contract details. Ulices told his crew, started the engine and took off.
He was met in front of the small conference room by O’Reilly, who opened the door for him, then took off. Seated at the table were Lt. Commander Don Watson, of the Office of Naval Intelligence, and FBI agent Nick Castillo.
“How’s Uncle Horacio?” Watson asked. “Any news?”
“No. Nothing,” Ulices replied.
“No contact from the courier?” Watson asked.
“Nope. None,” Ulices said.
“Coffee?” Nick asked, offering a styrofoam cup of steaming office swill.
“Thanks.” He took the cup.
Nick removed documents from a yellow manila folder. He set them in front of Ulices. They were stamped SECRET – NOFORN – ORCON. No Foreign – Or Contractor dissemination.
“We’d like you to hand these over to the courier next time you rendezvous,” Nick said. “I think tío Horacio will find them interesting.”
At five-feet-four, Ulices never had pictured himself as a Latin James Bond. He was a house painter. Oil vs latex. Natural bristles vs synthetic. Brick red vs terra cotta. These were his expertise. Not passing secrets from one government to another, or playing games of international deceit.
But he fell into it. Almost no choice. On his last trip to Santa Clara to see family three years ago, Uncle Horacio appeared on his doorstep. This was an uncle he barely ever saw growing up. He was off in Africa, they said, serving the revolution. In Moscow, at the Cuban embassy. In Havana. Always somewhere but in Santa Clara.
Horacio was completely off the radar screen after Ulices’s parents left Cuba with their three kids in the eighties. Miami High School, vocational training, his own small business, a modest house in the ‘burbs, fine Cuban-American wife, two boys, Dolphins games. Security. America is the greatest country on earth and Ulices would do anything to repay what the nation had done for him.
“So,” Uncle Horacio had said, “That girl you knocked up while at high school in Santa Clara. That daughter she had. Your eyes. Your smile. Beautiful girl.” He showed Ulices a photo. A betting man would indeed wager that a DNA test would confirm the connection. The child was indeed beautiful. He had loved her mother – as much as a sixteen-year-old could love. But his parents’ move out of the country ended it. Much to their relief. Ulices never heard from the girl again.
“Idania is her name. Graduated with honors in microbiology. Now she is applying for a job with the Pedro Kourí Institute in Havana. Very prestigious. World travel. Access to the special hard currency stores.” Horacio paused and shook his head.
“Yes?” Ulices prompted.
“Ah. A complication. No party ties. No connections. Priority is given for the children of deserving party members for these jobs. To reward those who have served the revolution. As for those who fled la Patria…” He shook his head again.
“I can arrange a meeting. I am sure she would love to see her father,” Horacio said.
And he did. The meeting was emotional for both. Father and daughter hugged as if they’d reunited after a long spell rather than not having ever met. His heart was hers.
Dear Uncle – Colonel – Horacio had hooked his nephew. In return for some hazily defined favors from Ulices, the uncle would grease the skids for Idania to pursue her dreams.
It was a pact with the devil, Ulices knew. Spy for Castro in return for assuaging the guilt he’d felt for having abandoned his baby.
“You absolutely did the right thing coming to us, Ulices,” Nick said.
Ulices snapped out of his reflection. “Yeah. Sure. I love this country. I owe it so much. That’s why I reported my uncle’s approach to the FBI as soon as I got back. But I’m a simple painter. This stuff makes my head spin. And I don’t like doing secret things. Pretending to spy for them when I’m really spying for you. How long do I have to do it?”
Nick leaned forward. “Listen to me, Ulices. What you’re doing is a great service to your country. The information you feed to the Cubans helps keep them off guard. And their dealings with you help us to get insight on how they operate in this country. I can’t give you an end date. Maybe when Fidel is dead.”
Ulices shook his head. “That one will never die.”
He departed with the documents which he would lock up in a safe deposit box until he got the signal.
The signal came in the form of a phone call a week later. The male voice gave him the address of a pay phone on Roosevelt Boulevard and a time to be there. He was told during that call to be at the Winn Dixie supermarket on the same boulevard at 9:00 that evening.
Ulices called his wife to say he’d be working late and asked for a grocery shopping list. Up and down the supermarket aisles. Nothing out of the ordinary. He stuck his head into the ice cream freezer. Rocky Road was what he searched for. Ah! Found one, the last! As he placed it in his cart, a standard mail envelope had mysteriously appeared where the large envelope Nick had given him had been. A brush pass executed by a magician. He quickly stuffed it into his paint splattered coveralls. He looked around. No sign of anyone making a quick exit.
As he settled into the driver’s seat of his van, Ulices looked left and right. Then he pulled out the envelope and carefully opened it. In the dim illumination of the parking lot lights, he brought the sheet of paper to his face. It was blank.
Tap, tap. He rolled down his window.