Cuba

by Stephen Coonts

  “Sun, sex, and socialism,” Carmellini muttered. “Makes you wonder why there aren’t more Cubans.”

  Chance closed his eyes, enjoyed the caress of the breeze on his face and hair. He could hear snatches of music amid the honk of car horns and traffic sounds. Havana was very much alive this evening, as it was every evening.

  Finally he opened his eyes, looked again at the Cubans and tourists swirling about him. And Carmellini standing there, quite nonchalant, looking bored.

  “Do they have any ideas about who broke in?”

  “Americans. CIA scum. No evidence, but they’re sure.”

  Chance nodded.

  “There was talk,” Carmellini continued, “of rounding up likely suspects, doing some thorough interrogations, just to see what might turn up. That was Colonel Santana’s suggestion: apparently he is a rare piece of work. Vargas overruled him. Said they couldn’t torture tourists every time the CIA did something they didn’t like or soon they wouldn’t have any tourists.”

  “Sensible.”

  “Anything else?”

  Carmellini shrugged, scratched his chin. “I listened to almost three hours’ worth of that stuff, and you know, they didn’t mention Fidel Castro even once.”

  “Didn’t say his name?”

  “Nope. And the technician said he hadn’t heard them mention Castro all day.”

  “Curious.”

  “It’s odd. I would have thought—”

  After a bit Chance said, “The lab is just the tip of the iceberg. There must be machinery for drying out the cultures, for packing the microorganisms into warheads or mixing them into some sort of chemical stew to be sprayed from planes. There must be trucks that transport this stuff from place to place. And then there are the weapons: where the hell are they?”

  They went into one of the nightclubs and found an empty table. Six whores were sitting around the table beside them. The girls were drinking daiquiris and having a fine, loud time. One of the girls looked the two men over while the band tuned up just a few feet away.

  “Washington wants more information,” Carmellini said, ignoring the whores.

  “They would.” Chance chewed on his lip for a bit, then picked up the wine list. “Tonight’s the night we go into Vargas’s safe. Are you comfortable with that?”

  Carmellini took his time answering. Chance was about to repeat the question when he said, “If the alarms are off.”

  “They’ll be off.”

  “Sure.”

  “Trust me.”

  When the waiter came they ordered dinner.

  “So tell me again about the Ministry of Interior,” Carmellini said. “Everything you can recall. Everything.”

  Chance leaned back, closed his eyes, tried to visualize how the building looked when he had stepped from the taxi out front on his way to his meeting with Alejo Vargas.

  “There is a guard kiosk out front on the sidewalk. You then walk through the front entrance to the guard station inside. They check your credentials again, call whoever you say you want to see. This person comes to get you, leads you through the halls to the office you are to visit.”

  “Cameras?”

  “Security cameras mounted high in corners, monitored by the main guard station. There are two separate systems, at least, with pictures playing on separate monitors.”

  “Infrared sensors?”

  “I think so … .” The fact is he should have paid more attention. Looked more carefully, consciously noted what he was seeing. “Yes, I remember seeing one.”

  “Motion detectors?”

  “No.”

  “Laser alarms?”

  “Yes, mounted at ankle height.” Presumably these were only on when the building was not occupied.

  “Alarms on the windows?”

  “Yes.”

  “Vibrators on the glass?”

  “No.” If there had been vibrators, the computer would have had a much more difficult job sorting out the voices from the electronic noise of the vibrators when it tried to read the light refracted by the crystals.

  “Were there internal security doors, doors that might be closed when the building is not occupied?”

  “Yes. Every hall had them, but I doubt they were ever used.”

  “And internal security stations?”

  “I saw none.”

  Carmellini thought about it. Closed security doors made a burglar’s access more difficult, but they provided a peaceful, quiet place for a burglar to work once he had gained entry.

  “Do they have backup power when the power goes off?” Carmellini mused.

  “They must,” Chance replied thoughtfully. “A backup generator of some type. I’m going to walk in assuming that they do, but I’ll be improvising as I go.”

  “We’ll sure as hell find out soon enough, won’t we?” Carmellini said, and grinned. That was the first grin he had managed all afternoon. The death of the lab worker had hit him hard, but the cool execution of the guard at the front door by William Henry Chance had hit him like a punch to the solar plexus. Chance just gunned the man down and kept on trucking, as if killing another human being were something he did every morning before lunch.

  All evening Carmellini had studied the older man, watched him for a sign that the murder of the guard was anything more than absolutely routine. And he had seen nothing. Nothing at all. Chance looked as if he might be having dinner in a restaurant in the Bronx with a Yankees game from a kitchen radio as background noise.

  Carmellini stared at the food on the plate that the waiter put in front of him. He didn’t want a mouthful. But what he wouldn’t give for a stiff drink! He sipped at a glass of water, felt his stomach knot up.

  “Order a drink,” Chance said as he used his knife and fork. “One. Something on the rocks. You need it. We have a long night ahead.”

  Carmellini looked around for the waiter, and found himself staring at one of the whores at the next table, who gave him a big grin. He grinned back. A man just has to keep things in perspective.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  The sun had been down for several hours when Enrique Poveda and Arquimidez Cabrera drove up to the fourth EHV tower they hoped to blow. After a quick look around, they unlocked the padlock on the gate and put on their tool belts. Each of the men picked a tower leg and started up. About ten feet above the ground they found the shaped charges of C-4 plastique still firmly taped to the steel legs. Working in the darkness by feel, each man took a chemical timer from his belt, a device about the size and shape of a fountain pen, and inserted it into the plastique. The timer was already set to explode as near to 1:30 A.M. as possible.

  After setting the timers, they climbed down to the ground, then ascended the other two legs. In minutes they were back on the ground.

  They locked the padlock, closed up the back of the van, and drove away.

  “One more,” Poveda said. He wished he had a map or diagram, but all that had been left behind in Florida. There he and Cabrera and the U.S. Army power grid expert had labored for days over satellite reconnaissance photos, photographs taken from the ground by not-so-innocent tourists, and computer-generated diagrams. They selected the target towers and committed their locations to memory. Not a single sheet of paper left the room with them.

  So now Cabrera pointed down one street and Poveda motioned toward another. The men chuckled. “I am very sure,” Poveda said. “Two blocks down, right turn, then on for a half mile.”

  “Okay.”

  “I am glad it was tonight,” Cabrera said. “The charges had been in place too long, the new padlocks were there too long, I was getting nervous—you know what I mean, my friend?”

  Poveda grunted. He knew. His stomach felt as if it were tied in a knot. He hadn’t felt this uptight about an operation since his first one, fifteen years ago, when he was very young. He had been to Cuba many times since, eight as he recalled, and none of them were as tense as that first time, until now.

  The Cubans had almost caught
him and his partner that time. The partner was eventually caught six years later and died under interrogation, or so they heard months after that. Poveda had promised himself then and there that he would never be taken alive, that he would not die in a Cuban prison.

  Communists! He made a spitting motion out the open window. The communists took everything from the people in Cuba who had worked and saved and built for the future, and gave it to the people who had not. Now look at the place! Everyone poor, everyone on the edge of starvation, the cities and towns and factories rotting from lack of investment. The communists ran off the people who could make Cuba grow, the people the nation needed to feed everyone else. Ah, these bastards deserved their misery, and by God they had had some. Universal destitution was Castro’s legacy, his gift to generations yet unborn.

  Poveda was a pessimist. He knew that soon Castro would be dead and things would change in Cuba. “They’ll forget Fidel’s faults, remember just the good,” he told Cabrera, for the hundredth time. “You wait and see. In a hundred years the church will make him a saint.”

  “Saint Fidel.” Cabrera laughed.

  “I shit you not. That is the way of the world. The people he pissed on the most will call him blessed.”

  “Saint or devil, we’ll fuck the son of a bitch a little tonight,” Cabrera said as the van pulled up to the last tower.

  Poveda killed the van’s engine and lights and the two men got out. Silence.

  “Awful quiet, don’t you think?” Poveda asked.

  Cabrera stood by the van’s rear doors, listening, looking around. Poveda dug in his pocket for the key to the padlock, inserted it.

  It wouldn’t fit. He tried another.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Key doesn’t seem to want to go in this lock.”

  “Let’s get the fuck outta here, man,” Cabrera said, and started for the van’s passenger door.

  A spotlight hit them.

  “Put up your hands,” boomed a voice on a loudspeaker.

  Poveda dropped to his knees, pulled a 9-mm pistol from his pocket. He didn’t hesitate—he aimed at the spotlight and started shooting.

  Something hit him in the back. He was down beside the rear tire trying to rise when he realized he had been shot. People shooting from two directions, muzzle flashes, thuds of bullets smacking into the van like hailstones. A groan from Cabrera.

  “I’m hit, Enrique.”

  “Bad?”

  “I think … I think so.” He grunted as another bullet audibly smacked into his body.

  The bullet that hit Poveda had come out his stomach. He could feel the wetness, the spreading warmth as blood poured from the exit wound. Not a lot of pain yet, but a huge gaping hole in his belly.

  He lifted the pistol, pointed it at Arquimidez Cabrera, his best friend. There, he could see the back of his head. He fired once; Cabrera’s head slammed forward into the dirt. Then he put the barrel flush against the side of his own head and pulled the trigger.

  Sitting in the back of a van just down the street from the Ministry of Interior, William Henry Chance watched the second hand of his watch sweep toward the twelve. It passed 1:30 A.M. and swept on.

  The lights stayed on. Carmellini was looking at his own watch.

  “What the hell is wrong now?” Carmellini asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Oh, Lord.”

  They sat there in the van looking at the lights of the city.

  “It went bad,” Tommy Carmellini said. “Time for us to boogie.”

  “We’ll give them a few minutes.”

  “Jesus, when it doesn’t go down as planned, something is wrong. What are you waiting for, a phone call from Fidel? Let’s bail out while our asses are still firmly attached.”

  “If I had any brains I wouldn’t be in this business,” Chance replied tartly.

  His watch read exactly ten seconds after 1:32 A.M. when the lights of downtown Havana flickered. “All right,” Carmellini said, and whacked his leg with his hand.

  The lights flickered, dimmed, came back on, then went completely out. All the lights. Only automobile headlights broke the total darkness.

  “That’s it. Let’s go,” Chance said to Tommy Carmellini. They opened the back of the van and climbed out while the driver of the van started the engine. Chance walked the few steps back to an old Russian Lada parked at the curb behind the van and got into the passenger seat. Carmellini started the car and turned on the headlights while the van pulled away from the curb.

  The two agents drove down the street toward the Ministry of Interior, a hulking immensity even darker than the night.

  The three guards at the main entrance of the Ministry were illuminated by the headlights when Tommy Carmellini drove up. He killed the engine and pocketed the key as William Henry Chance got out on the passenger side.

  Of course the guards had seen Chance’s uniform from the car’s interior light while the door was open—now they flashed the beam of a flashlight upon him. Then they saluted.

  Chance was dressed in the uniform of a Security Department colonel. He had been to the building several days ago in the daytime wearing civilian clothes: he thought it highly unlikely that anyone who had seen him then would recognize him now. It was a risk he was willing to take. Still, his stomach felt as if he had swallowed a rock as he returned the guards’ salute, and spoke:

  “We were just a block away when the power failed all over this district.”

  “Yes, Colonel. Just a minute or two ago.”

  “And you are?”

  “Lieutenant Gómez, sir, the duty officer.”

  “Have you taken steps to start the emergency generator, Gómez?”

  “Ahh … I was about to do so, Colonel. It is in the basement. I was waiting to see if the power would come back on immediately. Often these outages last but moments and—”

  “The darkness seems widespread, Gómez. Let us start the generator.”

  “Of course, Colonel.” The lieutenant began giving directions to his two enlisted men, who obviously knew nothing about the emergency generator. The lieutenant began by telling them which room the generator was in.

  Chance interrupted again. “Perhaps you would like to take them there, supervise the start-up, Lieutenant. My driver and I will guard the front entrance until you return.”

  “Of course, Colonel.” With his flashlight beam leading the way, the lieutenant and the two enlisted men made for the stairs.

  Carmellini opened the trunk of the car, extracted a duffel bag, which he swung over one shoulder. Without a word to Chance he disappeared into the dark interior of the building.

  Carmellini took the main staircase to the top floor of the building, then strode quickly down the hall to Alejo Vargas’s private office. The door was locked, of course.

  Working in total darkness, Carmellini ran his hands over the door. One lock, near the handle. From the bag he extracted a small light driven by a battery unit that hooked on his belt. He donned a headband, then stuck the light to the headband with a piece of Velcro.

  He checked his watch. It was 1:36 A.M.

  He examined the lock, felt in the bag for his picks.

  Hmmm. This one, perhaps. He inserted it into the lock.

  No.

  This one? Yes.

  The latex gloves didn’t seem to affect his feel for the lock.

  Carmellini had always enjoyed pick work. The exquisite feel necessary, the patience required, the pressure of time usually, the treasure waiting to be discovered on the other side of the door … the CIA had been a damned lucky break. Without that break he would have certainly wound up in prison sooner or later when his luck ran out, because no one’s luck lasts forever.

  He inserted a smaller pick, felt for the contacts …

  And twisted, using the strength of his fingers.

  The bolt opened.

  He stowed the picks, picked up the duffel bag, and opened the door.

  Dark office, with the only light com
ing through the windows, the glow of headlights on the street below, somewhere the flicker of a fire.

  The safe sat in the corner away from the windows. It was old, and huge, at least six feet tall, three feet wide and three feet deep. Painted on the door of the safe was a pastoral scene; above the landscape arranged in a semicircle were the words “United Fruit Company.”

  After a quick glance at the safe, Carmellini turned his attention to the rest of the room. He searched quickly and methodically. First the drawers of the desk. One of them held a pistol, one a bottle of expensive scotch whiskey and several glasses, one pens and pencils and a blank pad of paper. Several lists of names, phone numbers, addresses …

  The lower right drawer of the desk was locked. A small, cheap furniture lock. He opened it with a knife, began examining files. The files seemed to be on senior people in the government, girlfriends, vices, lies told, bribes offered and accepted, that kind of thing.

  He flipped through the files quickly, stacked them on the desk, and moved on.

  The crystals were on the windowsill. A rack of books was below the window. A cursory check revealed no files peeking out between the books.

  The displays of old coins didn’t even rate a glance. Back before he worked for the government the coins would have made his juices flow, but not now.

  On to the credenza. Many files in there. Carmellini sampled them, looking for anything on biology, weapons, strange code names. When he saw something he didn’t understand he opened the file and glanced at the papers inside. People—most of these files were on people. Unfortunately Tommy didn’t recognize the names. He added the files to the stack on the desk.

  Now he came to the safe. They must have lifted it to this floor with a crane before the windows were installed, he thought. He checked every square inch of the exterior to see if the safe was wired. No wires.

  Tommy Carmellini tried the handle.

  No.

  Turned the circular combination dial ever so carefully to the right, maintaining pressure on the handle. If the safe had been closed hastily, all the tumblers might not have gone home. He took his time.

  No. The safe was locked.

  He checked his watch. Now 1:47.