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

by A. C. Fuller

  Seleste and Delfino didn't respond.

  "What's going on?" I asked again.

  "Where are we?" Greta asked.

  "No problem," Seleste said.

  "Look behind you," I whispered to Greta.

  She turned and asked, "We're still in Havana?"

  Seleste watched the officer in his car. Delfino looked straight ahead.

  Greta tapped his shoulder. "¿Por qué todavía estamos en La Habana?"

  "Wait," Delfino said, not turning around. "Quiet."

  That's when I started to get nervous.

  Maybe it was something in his voice, or maybe it was the way he was staring straight out the front window of the car. I'm not sure, but my eyes kept returning to the officer, who was taking his time with the papers. And then he was on a cell phone.

  I gripped Greta's hand tightly to reassure her, but also to reassure myself.

  She leaned in and pecked me on the cheek. "It's probably nothing. I read in the guidebook that police checkpoints are routine."

  A few minutes later, sweat was starting to trickle down my back. Given all I'd been through, getting arrested or killed at a police checkpoint in Cuba seemed a sad way to go, especially before I'd had my morning coffee.

  Finally, the officer got out of his car and walked over, much more slowly than necessary. He handed Seleste a clipboard that held a piece of paper I couldn't decipher. "Firma aqui. Y revisa esas cajas."

  Seleste signed and checked a few boxes, then handed the clipboard to the officer. I wasn't sure, but I thought she'd slid a small stack of bills under the paper.

  "Que tengas un buen día," the officer said.

  Seleste eased onto the highway, and I let out a sigh I'd been holding in for the last two minutes.

  "No problem," Seleste said.

  "What was that?" Greta asked.

  Delfino turned, a thin smile across his face. "Greta, you speak pretty well, right?"

  "Si," she said.

  "Ever heard the expression a la izquierda?"

  "I know that izquierda means 'left,' but I didn't know it was an expression."

  "It's how things get done in Cuba. There is an official way things get done. A way they are supposed to get done, and then there's how things actually get done, which is a la izquierda, on the left."

  "Like the American expression 'under the table'?"

  "Si. Si. Without la izquierda, day-to-day life in Cuba would cease."

  "What was the form he had you fill out?" I asked. I was starting to think that "No problem" was the only English phrase Seleste knew, so I looked to Delfino for an answer.

  "Technically, we are a colectivo, a collective taxi that's permitted to take tourists around Cuba. We have all the correct papers, and we actually do this to make a living. Seleste does, anyway."

  "If you have the papers, why the bribe?"

  Greta leaned back and swung her legs onto my lap. "Didn't you hear him, Alex? It's a la izquierda."

  "Why are we still in Havana?" I asked.

  "We had to drive around for a while," Delfino said. "Traveling at night looks more suspicious."

  "You drove around all night?"

  "Well, we also parked for a while."

  "No problem," Seleste said.

  I was about to settle in for what I assumed would be a long drive when Seleste slowed the car and turned onto a small side street. "Are we at Innerva's?" I asked.

  Delfino laughed as Seleste stopped the car in front of an old white house with a broken stone path. "We still have to earn money," Delfino said. "Plus, this makes you look less suspicious. Stay put."

  He hopped out of the car. I knew what Seleste would say if I asked her what was going on, so I didn't bother. But I didn't have to wait long to find out.

  When Delfino emerged from the house, he was trailed by a couple who looked even more like tourists than Greta and I did. They were both tall and deeply tanned, and both wore shorts, hiking boots, thick socks. They were even carrying matching red backpacks.

  They slid into the rear seats, folding their long legs and wedging them under the seats. They didn't seem to mind, however. When I turned and offered a polite smile, they both beamed at me, like they were high on life. And probably coffee.

  "You guys headed to Sierra Maestra as well?" the woman asked. She had a European accent, but one I couldn't immediately place.

  "We're not," I said, not knowing what she was talking about. "We're going to…what was it called again, honey?"

  Greta gave me a look that I took to mean, "How could you put me on the spot?" but I hoped our new friends would take to mean, "How could you not remember where we are going?"

  Luckily, Delfino stepped in. "They look like hikers to you?" he laughed.

  Greta smiled awkwardly. "We're here visiting religious sites. Heading to the town of…what was it called?"

  "Baracoa," Delfino said.

  "That's right," Greta said. "Amazing history there. Old churches and such."

  "I'm Alex," I said, reaching to shake the man's hand. "And this is Greta."

  The man extended his hand and shook with an enthusiasm I wasn't expecting, and that didn't seem appropriate for the circumstances. "I'm Richard. Great to meet you!"

  The woman leaned forward and put both hands on my shoulders. "And I'm Ursula. We're as good as married." Then she put her hands on Greta's shoulders. "So amazing to meet you!"

  "Where are you from?" I asked, trying not to be too annoyed by their sheer enthusiasm.

  "Can't place the accent?" Richard asked.

  "Nope."

  Ursula leaned forward in her seat until she was inches from Greta's face. "Guess."

  "Uhh…Switzerland," Greta said.

  Richard shook his head.

  "Scotland?" I asked.

  "Close," Richard said. "We're from London, but we've been living in Australia for the last three years."

  "Backpacking?" I asked, trying to conceal the mild distaste I was already feeling for them.

  Of course, there was nothing actually wrong with them. But their chiseled bodies, radiant health, and utter glee at being alive was a bit grating, especially since I'd spent the night folded up in a forty-seven-year-old Peugeot.

  "We were," Ursula said. "Did both coasts, hitchhiked across the country—"

  "We skied Kosciuszko," Richard interrupted.

  "We swam in Lake Corangamite," Ursula gushed. "Remember that eel, Richard?"

  Ursula made a kind of slithering gesture with her arm up Richard's shirt.

  Richard giggled. "Of course I do, dollface. Alex, did you know that Lake Corangamite is the largest saline lake in Australia?"

  "Actually, I did. I'm up to date on all the saline lake data," I said.

  Greta crossed her eyes and stuck out her tongue at me.

  "Oh, a geography buff?" Richard asked.

  Apparently this guy didn't have a sarcasm detector. "He was kidding," Greta offered.

  After a few more minutes of small talk, during which I learned more than I ever wanted to know about the different colors of sand on the beaches of Australia, Greta and I turned around to face forward.

  I heard a sound I didn't know I was missing until I heard it. The crinkling of a plastic wrapper. Something orange and brown appeared in my peripheral vision.

  "Protein bar?" Richard asked.

  "Sure, thanks," I said.

  Ursula handed me a thermos. "Coffee?"

  Greta swung around. "Yes yes yes. I mean, yes, please."

  "Why Greta, I do believe you're developing a drinking problem," I teased.

  "Sometimes you fall off the wagon and sometimes you gotta jump. This is my jumping point."

  "Thanks for your hospitality," I said to Richard.

  "We always share with fellow travelers," he said. "Karma and all."

  Greta and I split the best-tasting peanut butter protein bar I'd ever had, then shared the coffee, which was weaker than I like but still not bad.

  "Thanks," I said to Richard when we'd f
inished. "That hit the spot. Now if I could just check my phone, life would be perfect."

  "Phone?" he asked. "When we have five hundred miles of scenery to enjoy?"

  "Five hundred?" I asked.

  Richard looked at Ursula. "About five hundred, right dollface?"

  "Right, honey. As the crow flies, Parque National de Turquino is about four hundred miles, but with the way this highway meanders—"

  "It's five hundred, easy," Richard said, finishing her thought.

  Luckily, the coffee was hitting my bloodstream and making me feel a bit more optimistic, so I was able to suppress a sarcastic expression of joy.

  Instead I smiled, took Greta by the hand, and listened as Richard and Ursula explained the changing landscape that passed before us.

  20

  For hours, Cuba unfolded around us. I'd always seen it on maps, where it's a smallish island, mentally juxtaposed with images of Fidel Castro, or Al Pacino in Scarface, or archival footage of JFK looking solemn.

  It was hard to connect that little bent hyphen on maps with the distant horizons all around me. Fields of crops I couldn't identify spread out toward mountains that weren't shaped like any I'd ever seen. Occasional fearless bicyclists rode in the breakdown lanes of the highways.

  The road twisted and turned, taking us through varied landscapes: hills, plains, marshland, villages, towns, curious little industrial parks that didn't look like the ones I was used to seeing in Seattle. And every few miles, another propaganda billboard with Spanish phrases that I couldn't understand.

  When I asked Greta about the billboards, she frowned. "They're odd," she said. "My Spanish isn't good enough to get all the nuance, but they're not talking about the honor of the proletariat or the glory of labor. It's all 'we will win in the end' and 'our spirit is indomitable' and stuff like that."

  "Well, that's down to the Americans, isn't it?" Ursula interjected. "I mean, sorry, no offense. But that whole embargo thing was originally intended to make the Cubans give up on communism, right? And sixty years on, their main slogan is 'Fuck you, Yankee, we'll never give up.' Seems like the cause-and-effect there is pretty obvious."

  I nodded. Hard to argue with that, even if I'd felt like rehashing Cold War politics with a strange hiker in the back of a decrepit Peugeot.

  As the sun reached its zenith and the car began to feel like a pizza oven with wheels, we pulled off the main highway and onto a surprisingly smooth dirt road, which took us over a couple rises and toward a cluster of low buildings. I knew this entire trip was out of my hands, so I tried not to worry about the fact that I had no idea where we were going.

  We pulled up in front of a one-story cinderblock structure with a couple café tables in front, shaded by a long awning made of dried palm fronds. Seleste turned off the car's noisy engine and rattled something in Spanish that Greta, Richard, and Ursula seemed to understand.

  "She says this is a tobacco farm," Greta translated, "and we're stopping here for lunch and a bathroom break. There's also a free tour of the drying shed, and they have cold drinks."

  I didn't care that deeply about the tobacco, but I realized that right then a bathroom and some cold drinks sounded like the best ideas I'd ever heard. The facilities turned out to be much more modern than I expected, and scrupulously clean in a way that made me imagine some fastidious little old lady making sure her guests were taken care of. When I emerged, I saw Greta and the two hikers being led off down a well-worn path by a tall, dark-skinned Cuban man in a straw hat. I hustled to catch up.

  The guide led us about a hundred yards down to a twenty-foot-tall triangle made of palm fronds, a kind of A-frame barn. It was open at both ends, and an intense, rich aroma surrounded it. As we stepped into its blessed shade, we were hit by the dark smell of tobacco, which filled almost every inch of the space inside. Broad leaves were stacked geometrically in bins and hanging at precise intervals along strings, and I realized there wasn't a single thing in here that would have been materially different in 1850.

  The structure of the building was natural wood, the bark still clinging to the beams in patches. The palm fronds were uniformly sized, obviously carefully selected. The guide said something in Spanish, but Greta interrupted him. "Una vez es suficiente. Puedo traducir por mi esposo."

  The guide smiled and launched into what seemed to be a memorized speech.

  "He said he could do the presentation twice, in Spanish and English, but I told him I'd translate for you," Greta said in a low voice as the guide continued, gesturing at the leaves.

  "Wow, apparently these buildings are designed to be replaced every so many years, that's why they're built this way," she whispered a moment later. "There's a gradual turnover in the walls, and eventually the whole structure."

  The guide continued, making some kind of expansive gestures, and Greta said, "Okay, cool. Apparently this building breathes. Like, it's literally designed to have an inhale-exhale kind of gas exchange, developed over centuries to dry the tobacco just right."

  The guide's body language changed then, and even before Greta translated, I knew that now he was talking about money. He went on for some time, and Greta, Richard, and Ursula all nodded knowingly.

  When he finished, he went to lead us back toward the car, and Greta filled me in. "All Cuban tobacco goes to the government, which turns it into cigars in the official factories, making the famous Cuban brands. But ten percent of the harvest returns to the farmers in the form of finished cigars, which they can smoke themselves or resell, so long as they don't price it below the official brand."

  It clicked into place for me then. "So we stopped here to use the bathroom, get some cold drinks, and buy cigars. I bet Seleste takes all of her colectivo passengers here."

  "Yeah. They make a few bucks, Seleste's tourists get a nice little free tour and a comfortable rest stop, everyone comes out ahead. It's actually kind of elegant."

  At the café tables under the awning, plates of sandwiches had been set out. Cigars were laid out on a counter, next to a menu of prices for the drinks in the fridge.

  The sandwiches were classic Cubanos: swiss cheese, mustard, pickles, and some magical form of ham, all pressed between crusty bread. They went beautifully with the ice-cold sodas in old-fashioned glass bottles that emerged chilled from the fridge. It felt good to sit in the shade, unkink my legs and back after long hours folded into a tiny seat, and enjoy a decent little lunch and the cool, tobacco-scented breeze. I felt so relaxed I almost didn't notice Delfino hailing the straw-hatted guide and handing him a small thumb drive. They grinned at each other and the guide slapped Delfino on the shoulder affectionately.

  "Hey Delfino," I asked as he rejoined our party, "can I ask what that was or is it secret?"

  His eyes flickered briefly to Richard and Ursula, who were paying attention to the display of cigars, and he shrugged. "Not secret. Dropping off the stuff I promised Reynaldo I'd bring him next time. Both Atlantis movies, a couple seasons of American cartoons, and a cracked copy of Photoshop. Reynaldo's into graphic design."

  I nodded. "So they provide sandwiches, tours, and clean restrooms for your passengers at no extra charge, you bring them customers for drinks and cigars, and Reynaldo gets pirated movies and software. La izquierda, right?"

  Delfino smiled. "Yeah, you get it. No one gets cheated, everyone gets by. Internet here in the farmlands sucks, so I can help out guys like him pretty easy."

  "Because you have… right. I bet Innerva has the best internet connection in the country, doesn't she?"

  "Man, I get faster download speeds than Castro does." Delfino grinned. Like most tech nerds his age, he couldn't resist bragging about his system.

  Thinking about Innerva made me realize something. Unless I'd lost track of a day someplace, today was her ransomware deadline. She might already have pulled the trigger.

  Private intelligence services might be shutting down all over the U.S. Markets could be descending into chaos at this moment. There could be a media and internet c
ircus happening, or data coming to light that would topple the government.

  None of that seemed to affect the cool breeze or the shady palm fronds, though. I wasn't in the digitized world now. Even weirder was the idea that I had no way of knowing whether all that was happening. Even if Delfino knew, which I doubted since he'd been in the same car all day, there was no way he'd tell me.

  I had no smartphone in my pocket, no laptop with ten tabs of news open, no TV over the bar with CNN scrolling chyrons reading "Entire security state explodes—Alex Vane believed at fault." I was cut off entirely from the information ecosystem I'd always lived in, and if someone was in fact live-tweeting the apocalypse, I was missing it.

  Then Greta returned to the table with a few fat cigars, and when she told me how little she'd paid for them, half of my brain wanted to send her to get a dozen more. The other half, though, had been acutely reminded that despite appearances, we weren't here as tourists. We were on our way to meet the woman who held the fate of half the world in her typing fingers, and it didn't feel like the time to stock up on robustos.

  21

  After the farm, we continued east for another six hours, making it almost all the way across Cuba. Ursula and Richard talked excitedly the whole time, sometimes to us, sometimes to each other, as we passed through towns like Santa Clara, Camaguey, and Las Tunas, where the land became marshier and fields of sugarcane began appearing around us.

  Every minute that passed, I came up with new questions for Innerva, but they all paled compared to the biggest question: had her attack been carried out? By now, her deadline had passed and, with no Internet access and no one to ask, we were in the dark. My guess was that something had gone wrong with it, a delay of some kind, or a change of plans. Otherwise, why would Innerva have sent for us?

  The Innerva I knew wouldn't stick around to chat with me if she'd just carried out the greatest hack in the history of the world, especially one that would get her tried for treason, or worse.

  In her letter, she hadn't said anything about the attack, but she'd mentioned needing me. Needing Greta. And, the more I thought about it, the more I thought that we were about to get more deeply involved in her project than we'd ever intended.