The Shadow File (An Alex Vane Media Thriller, Book 4)

by A. C. Fuller

  "Alex."

  "Relax?"

  "I was gonna say 'chill,' but yeah."

  "Sorry," I said, opening the curtains and staring out at the deserted street below.

  "Can't we just enjoy ourselves?"

  "What do you mean?"

  "We're in Cuba. We're waiting for Innerva. She'll either contact us or she won't, right? We may as well enjoy ourselves."

  It was typical Greta, and I loved it.

  The bed wasn't a standard U.S. mattress size, but it was definitely small, somewhere between a twin and a double. I sat gingerly on the corner, knowing that if I flopped down as Greta had, it might launch her into the ceiling.

  She turned toward me, and I put my hand behind her head. "You know how I've always been a little bit uptight," I said.

  She cracked a beautiful smile, mocking and loving at the same time. "You don't say."

  "Seriously, I'm trying to say something real here. It's like, every time I think I'm about to loosen up, something happens that sets me on edge again. And already I'm seeking out the next thing."

  "You didn't choose what happened to James, or what they did to you."

  Greta and I had talked about the torture, and the therapist Greta recommended had helped. At least I thought so. "I know," I said. "I know I didn't choose it. But sometimes I get the feeling that I don't want to relax, that my natural state is to be a little—"

  "Uptight?"

  "I was gonna say 'focused', but okay. Take what you said a minute ago. It never would have occurred to me to enjoy myself while we're here. I get something in my head, something that needs to be done, and everything drops away until that thing is done. It's like there's no room for anything else in my brain, or anywhere in my consciousness, really. Even though I know, rationally, that there's nothing we can do and that we should sip rum until Innerva contacts us, it's like I can't let go. And I wonder whether I seek out these experiences because I can't help it."

  Greta pressed her head into my hand. "Do you remember in New York, when I said that I wished you were twenty percent more like Freddy Mercury?"

  "You said it a bunch of times, and yeah, that's what I'm talking about."

  Greta inched herself up and lay across my lap, staring straight up into my eyes. "I was wrong."

  I looked away for a second, uncomfortable with her intensity, then looked back. Greta didn't often admit to being wrong, at least when it came to me, and I wasn't sure what to make of it.

  Before I could respond, she went on. "I was wrong to say it and wrong to believe it. And, more importantly, I was wrong about you."

  "What do you mean?"

  "I know you wanted me back the whole time of the separation, and I know you realized some things while we were split up, which is great. I definitely had real issues with the way you were. But I think that the separation was as much about me learning some things. When I asked you to move out, I believed you were the one to blame."

  "I was."

  "You were in a bad place, and it was hurting the relationship. But that doesn't mean it was all on you. You're too hard on yourself, Alex. Anyway, let me say what I'm trying to say."

  She closed her eyes and I ran my hand through her silky black hair. I'm usually a pretty verbal person. I always want to know what is going to be said next. But, at that moment, I didn't really care what she was going to say. It wasn't that her words weren't important. More that I felt like I already understood her message from the love in her voice.

  It might have been the first time in our relationship that I felt at peace.

  "When I said 'I was wrong,' I meant it. While we were apart, I dated a few guys and each time I felt like I was betraying you. Not that I didn't have the right to date them, but it never felt right. I was still mad at you—hence the whole No Fly List, red zinfandel thing—but I could never relax with anyone else. So I started thinking about why I could be disappointed and furious, but still feel like I'm only supposed to be with you."

  She paused, and I thought she might be finished. I closed my eyes, feeling a wave of fatigue pass through me, as though every cell in my body realized at the same instant that it needed rest and rejuvenation.

  I think I was half asleep when she said, "Marriages only work when you accept the other person as they are. It's not fair to say that you wish they were twenty percent more like someone else."

  "I always took it as a joke," I said sleepily.

  "It was, but it revealed something about me. I did wish you were a little different, but that wish was about me, not you. It was about my desires, and my discomforts. Anyway, it was selfish, and I'm sorry. Alex, are you still awake?"

  I opened my eyes and looked down at her. I'd heard every word she said through a kind of gray fog. "I am. I was listening. Thanks for telling me."

  Suddenly, she rolled off me and used a strength I barely knew she had to pull me onto my back in the center of the bed. "You know what couples do while they're on vacation?"

  "I'm starting to get a sense of it," I said, taking off my shirt.

  Greta straddled me and ran her hands up my chest, massaging the spot where my neck met my shoulders before removing her top. Even at my lowest points, I'd never stopped thinking she was beautiful. I'd just been too obsessed with work to care. But I wasn't thinking about work.

  I reached up and cupped her breasts.

  Looking down at me, she said, "I love you exactly as you are."

  12

  "What are we going to do with this beautiful day?" Greta's voice roused me and I poked my head out from under the sheet.

  "You're up," I said.

  Greta walked up to the bed and handed me a small cup of coffee as I sat up. "Been up for an hour."

  "Is this real coffee?"

  "Yes, and it's sooooo gooooood."

  "You drank coffee?"

  "I did, two cups, and I feel like the Energizer Bunny."

  I sipped the coffee, which was black and insanely rich, like a melted chocolate bar. "That amount of caffeine for you is like if a normal person did an eight-ball of cocaine."

  "I feel like my brain dropped into my heart and all it can do is think about how much it loves everything."

  I laughed as Greta opened the curtains, letting in a stream of sunlight. An old air-conditioning unit had been churning away all night, and the room had stayed cool enough to sleep well, but I could tell that wasn't going to be able to keep up with the heat of the day.

  "Seriously, though," Greta said. "What are we going to do?"

  I thought for a moment, sipping my coffee. "Innerva knows we're here. In Cuba, I mean. And she knows we're staying at one of the out-of-the-way places around Havana. But she probably doesn't know which one. We have no Internet or cell phone service here. As far as I know, there's no way for Innerva to track us. And even she can't hack into Maria's brain."

  "So, what do we do?"

  "I figured we'd wander around. Innerva will be looking for us. Or, more likely, will have people doing that for her. My bet is that if we hang out, she'll find us."

  "So, let's hang out," she said, throwing my jeans and a t-shirt onto the bed.

  I gave her my can-I-at-least-finish-my-coffee look, but her excitement was contagious, and five minutes later we were out the door.

  I did finish the coffee, though. It would have been criminal to waste something that good.

  Greta and I wandered through Old Havana as the day turned from warm to sweltering.

  Everything in Havana looked like it was chronically not-enough. Like the budget ran out halfway through the job, whether that job was building a building, or getting dressed. The best-dressed people on the backstreets were children on their way to school, each one decked out in a neat, clean school uniform. Younger kids ran around shirtless and shoeless, as did more than a few men of different ages.

  A hawker carrying an elaborate stack of brooms, scrub brushes, plastic jugs and buckets turned sideways to shimmy past us in the narrow street, shooting us an apologetic s
mile before resuming her drawn-out, rhythmic call to business. I glanced at Greta for a translation, but she just shrugged. Whatever syllables the saleswoman were calling were too threadbare for Greta to catch.

  I had a hard time putting what I was seeing into context. My initial impulse was to categorize this place as a poverty-stricken third-world country, but there were important things missing. For one thing, there were no beggars. At all. Everywhere I'd been, including New York and Seattle, a couple tourists like us would be approached by homeless folks asking for alms. Here, there weren't any. Everyone seemed to be poor, but nobody seemed destitute.

  I mentioned this to Greta, and she said "Part of that is I'm not seeing any disabled people. Nobody crippled or chronically ill. Maybe what they say about Cuban healthcare is true."

  "Maybe," I said, "but maybe we're not seeing the sanatoriums full of inconveniently unhealthy people. We also haven't seen a single person wearing glasses, and I don't think that's because everyone has twenty-twenty vision."

  "Good point," Greta nodded, then smirked. "Still, though, you have to admit they've somehow cured Flat Butt Syndrome. This place is a Sir-Mix-a-Lot paradise."

  She wasn't kidding. The predominant mode of dress for Havana women seemed to be somewhere between "snug-fitting" and "painted on." The tight clothes suited the relaxed atmosphere. Everyone had something they were doing, but the requirements for how they did it didn't seem especially stringent. It was a city free of the concept of business-casual clothing.

  We visited the Hotel Nacional de Cuba, which had passed from investor to investor, from mobsters and teamsters, and had finally been nationalized after the revolution that brought Castro to power. We even saw the room named after Jean-Paul Sartre, who had visited Cuba to interview Che Guevara after the revolution. It was preserved in an opulent Art Deco splendor that bore absolutely no resemblance to the city we'd woken up in that morning. It felt like a theme park where tourists could visit a pre-Revolution version of Cuba, when it was still a playground for rich foreigners, full of quaint locals who knew their proper place.

  As we wandered the city, we saw a lot of that kind of facade, restaurants and bars that seemed to be putting on a show of being charmingly Cuban, while a block away people got on with the mundane business of actually being Cuban.

  We passed dozens of striking buildings, many from the 19th and early 20th centuries and most in sorry disrepair. In front of a stone structure that looked like it had once been an apartment building, but now had only three of its four walls, Greta approached an old man ambling down the sidewalk. "¿Por qué no reparan el edificio?"

  I zoned out during his long and winding answer, the only word of which I picked up was dinero.

  When the man walked on, Greta told me, "The buildings are all privately owned, and no one has the money to repair them. He kept saying, 'There's no money. There's no money.'"

  "It's beautiful in a way, isn't it?"

  "Beautiful and tragic. I wasn't expecting this. It's a magnificent city. But they need infrastructure work even more than we do in the States."

  We passed through a small stone square, where a boy and his father were playing soccer. In the center of the square, we stopped in a patch of sunlight that was creeping through the surrounding buildings.

  "The sun feels different here," Greta said. "It's ten in the morning and it's like the sun is hungover and taking it out on me."

  I laughed and we moved on, past more half-gorgeous, half-dilapidated buildings, more street corner cafeterias, more ugly hairless dogs and beautiful long-haired women.

  Maybe it was because it was the closest Greta and I had come to a vacation in years, or maybe it was the magic of Havana, but I was loving it.

  By the late afternoon, we were standing outside the Virgen María de la Concepción Inmaculada, the building we were supposed to be visiting in Cuba. It turned out to be a towering 240-year-old Roman Catholic cathedral that would have been worth the trip, if that's what our trip had really been about.

  It was a stunning structure made mostly from coral taken from the Gulf of Mexico, and there were marine fossils embedded in the facade. To the left and right, large stone towers of slightly different sizes held gold and silver bells.

  The inside was even more beautiful. The nave had an arched ceiling at least sixty feet high, crystal chandeliers hanging from lower arches, and frescoes from different eras of Cuban art. There must have been room for a thousand people in there.

  After snapping a few photos of the architecture, I sat next to Greta on one of the old wooden pews. "Being in here, with all this old beauty, taking photos on my phone, photos I can't upload to the cloud or post on Facebook, has me wondering why Innerva would choose to operate in Cuba. It seems like the last place a hacker would go."

  "Maybe because it's the last place a hacker like her would go. The last place someone would look for her."

  "True enough," I said, "but it would still be nearly impossible to gain enough network access to do what she wants to do."

  Greta thought for a moment. "But you said that she and James had talked about coming here. They wouldn't have considered it if they weren't sure they could get connected."

  She was right, but the whole thing still seemed odd, and had me worried. What if Innerva hadn't sent those tickets?

  I glanced nervously around the church. There weren't many people there, but the ones who were there didn't look especially threatening. Mostly old Cuban women quietly murmuring rosaries, and tourists like Greta and me, snapping photos and talking quietly. It crossed my mind to wonder whether the gym-toned male couple examining a fresco in the corner felt safe in a country that frowned upon homosexuality.

  We stood and circled the hall, stopping occasionally to examine a piece of art. "You know what I've been thinking?" Greta said. "When we get home, we should talk about having a kid."

  "Oh?" I said, noncommittally.

  For a few years after our only child had been stillborn, I'd wanted to try again, but we'd always found reasons not to. Work. Then moving from New York to Seattle. Then work again. About a year ago, before the separation, Greta told me that she felt too old, and I stopped thinking about it.

  She could tell I was surprised. "We don't need to talk about it now," she said.

  "Is it something you've been thinking about? I mean I—"

  "It's getting safer and safer for women my age. It's still risky, but…"

  She trailed off as we wandered by the gay couple, who stepped aside to let us pass.

  As it often does when I'm hit with something unexpected, my head was spinning slightly. I was excited by the fact that Greta was all-in enough to bring up having a child, but I wasn't sure I still wanted to be a father.

  So, as I often do when I'm feeling something I don't want to feel, I decided it was time for dinner.

  I took Greta's hand and led her out of the cathedral, where the sun had finally—mercifully—vanished into twilight. Halfway to Casa Remedios, a guy on a street corner handed us a flyer with a grin.

  "You guys want a good dinner, some good music?" he asked, and I saw that the flyer was a menu. It was in Spanish and English, and the prices were ridiculously low.

  "Turn it over," the man urged.

  I saw that the other side was a photo of a band with a Spanish name I couldn't read.

  "That's my band," he assured us. "We go on in about an hour, you got lots of time to have a good meal, a couple drinks. It's a good restaurant. You'll like it."

  I exchanged a glance with Greta and we both shrugged. Five minutes later, we were in a recently-remodeled, tile-floored restaurant with a couple stand fans churning the still-hot evening air. Five minutes after that, we had a pair of mojitos that expanded my idea of what a good mojito could be. The cold, minty rum was starting to hit our systems when I heard a voice say "Hey, weren't you on our same flight over?"

  I looked, and it was one of the energetically wholesome teenagers from St. Olaf's, the group we'd shared the plane w
ith. Half a dozen of them, and one of their chaperones, were at a long table, and motioned for us to join them. Their food had already arrived, and looked and smelled enticing.

  We sat chatting with the kids, who kept casting envious glances at our cocktails, and their minder, who kept pretending not to notice. They'd been visiting some of the churches around the city, and were full of historical trivia. I was relieved to be speaking English with somebody, and between that and a nine-dollar platter of lobster and several side dishes, an hour must have gone by, because the next thing I knew we were on our third round of mojitos and the band was warming up.

  Their sound wasn't quite like anything I'd heard before, a mix of salsa and R&B that made you want to dance, but not necessarily while standing up. I reflected that the guy who'd been handing out flyers hadn't lied to us. He'd promised good dinner and good music, and this place delivered on both counts.

  Afterward, as we wove our not-wholly-sober way home to Casa Remedios, I realized that the entire city felt the same way: fundamentally honest in a way I wasn't familiar with. It didn't even occur to me that we might be mugged, a couple half-crocked tourists on our own on strange streets. Many of the Cubans we'd met that day had wanted our money for something, but every one of them, like the band-flyer dude, had offered something of value in exchange. It felt almost confusing to not have people trying to take advantage of me.

  Then we fell into bed, and Greta and I took advantage of each other.

  Later, as I lay on my back, staring at a crack in the ceiling, it crossed my mind that we must have something in common with the gay couple from the church, because they'd been sitting in the corner of the restaurant. Come to think of it, I wasn't sure if they'd been there when we arrived, or if they'd come in after us.

  I turned on my side to look at Greta, whose face was dancing with slivers of moonlight that shifted as the air conditioner blew the curtains. "Do you know if those two guys were already in the restaurant when we got there, or did they come in after us?"

  She didn't respond.

  "Greta?"