The Betrayal Game - [Mikhal Lammeck 02]

by David L. Robbins

  “Let me just be clear, Calendar. If I walk away, you take my job and ruin my reputation. But if I help you, and I get caught, I have to kill myself. Is that right? Because walking away from this just started looking a lot better to me.”

  Calendar opened his hands to show they were empty of more lies at the moment.

  “Okay. I couldn’t exactly tell you this early on, but if you do walk away, I gotta kill you.”

  Lammeck’s heart plummeted, but he wasn’t stunned to hear this. He understood secrets, and he was aware that he already carried too many of Calendar’s. The assassination plot, pills, the invasion, the Mob.

  “Is this how the CIA recruits? Death threats?”

  “Let me lay it out for you. We’re at war with Communism. Every chance we get, this is how that war’s fought, in secret. It’s a hell of a lot better than a nuclear fireball. Right now Cuba’s a battleground. Consider yourself a soldier. This is a soldier’s deal. Win or die trying.”

  “Does that include poison cigars and blowing the arm off some innocent kid who got in the way?”

  “Johan tell you that?”

  Lammeck was silent.

  “The answer is yes,” Calendar said. “It includes that. And a lot more, if necessary.”

  The big man lifted the bag off the seat. He laid it in Lammeck’s lap.

  “Hang on to those pills until I tell you who to deliver them to. It might take a week or two. And put something on that cheek, Professor. That’s gonna swell if you don’t.”

  Lammeck got out of the Cadillac, lifting the duffel behind him. Without another word, Calendar pulled from the curb. Lammeck hefted the bag and walked to his front door.

  Inside, he clicked on one light, then dragged the duffel onto a couch. He didn’t hesitate to untie the string at the end of the duffel and spread open the bag.

  Lammeck stood back, as if the bag belonged to Pandora. He paused, staring at the open mouth, then cinched the drawstring tight without looking inside.

  In the kitchen, he poured rum over some cubes from the freezer, and returned to the den. On the sofa were the duffel, the pill bottle, and a white envelope. Lammeck stood, sipping the siete, looking over these bits of Calendar that were lodged in his life now like shrapnel. He held the cooling glass to the bruises on his face.

  * * * *

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  March 29

  National Archives

  Havana

  “PROFESSOR?”

  Lammeck gazed up from the chaos of books on his desk. One of the old librarians, Miro, approached.

  “¿Sí?”

  “Your dinner is here.”

  Lammeck answered in Spanish. “I don’t think I ordered any food.”

  “I do not know, señor. But a man has brought it for you. Should I send him up?”

  “Do you know this man?”

  “No. And he gave me no name.”

  “I’m too busy to eat. Thank him and send him off.”

  Miro hesitated. Lammeck asked, “With respect, is there something else?”

  “Professor, I see the work you are doing. I think it will be good for my country, your work. I see also you are careless with your health at times. You should eat. For the sake of the work.”

  “I agree.” Captain Johan rounded a wall of shelves, bearing a brown paper sack. Grease splotched the bag’s sides.

  “Thank you,” Lammeck said to Miro. The librarian inclined his head to Johan on his way out.

  The captain set the bag on a table near Lammeck. Without a word, he spread open the sack and laid out paper plates, napkins, and plastic forks. Three cardboard containers were opened; the aromas of meat, rice, and beans curled under Lammeck’s nose like a beckoning finger. From Johan’s jacket pocket came a silver hip flask.

  “You have been working too hard, my friend. The old man is right. What good does it do to ruin a promising book and yourself in the process? Come along. Coma.”

  Lammeck rose from his carrel, realized he was standing for the first time in hours. Johan handed him the flask while spooning out portions of white rice, black beans, and seasoned pork. Lammeck allowed himself a strong pull of the siete he knew would be inside the flask.

  Johan sat in front of his own heaping plate. He accepted the flask for a swallow, then tucked into the meal. Lammeck’s hunger was slower to arouse.

  “I have not seen you in almost two weeks,” the policeman remarked. “Did you get the New York Times article I left on your porch?”

  That was the night Lammeck first met Bud Calendar. “Yes, thank you.”

  “You have been very busy. How is your book coming?”

  Lammeck’s head was a repository of facts mined from the dusty archives, priceless nuggets for his research. But more distracting were the events of the past eleven days. Lammeck fixed his gaze on Johan before answering, trying to gauge what the man might know, if he might see some vestige of swelling on Lammeck’s cheek, if he had any sense of the secrets Lammeck carried, the conspiracy he’d entered into. He tamped out of his face and voice any hint that, ever since accepting the botulinum from Calendar, he’d been waiting for Johan to arrive at his house to arrest him. “It’s consuming me,” he answered.

  “I see it on you, my friend. Your eyes are bloodshot. Besides, you’ve labored long and hard in your life to get such a magnificent waistline. Why let it all wither away? Cuba is not a place for such self-sacrifice.”

  Lammeck forked a portion of pork and rice. Johan watched him, beaming.

  “It pleases me to see you, Professor. I have missed our chats. And while I respect your discipline, I must insist we see each other more regularly.”

  “I’m sorry. It’s just lately, I’ve been putting a lot of pressure on myself.”

  “Why lately?”

  Lammeck chose his words carefully. “I just have a sense something might be happening soon. I wanted to get in as much research as I could before that.”

  Johan raised his fork to buy a moment while he chewed. When he’d swallowed, he chased the meat with a swig of rum.

  “Professor,” the policeman said, smacking his lips happily, “your instincts are correct. I have news.”

  Lammeck set down his plastic fork; his appetite for information was greater than for the meal.

  “I could not mention this before. I did not have all the facts, and it is quite a major development. But we have completed our interrogations, and now I can tell you in better detail. On March 18, in Miramar not far from your house, we intercepted a very important meeting of anti-revolutionary leaders. We detained several of the coordinators of the underground’s military wing. These traitors were discussing a plan to place a petaca—a plastic explosive— under a platform where Fidel was scheduled to review a parade next week. One of the conspirators, Humberto Sorí Marín, was a minister in Fidel’s cabinet. He was also the chief of Unidad’s underground military wing.”

  Another disaffected government official. Instantly, Brutus came to Lammeck’s mind, with Fidel in the role of Caesar. When Caesar saw that Brutus, his friend and protégé, was with the assassins in the Senate, he covered his face with his robe and submitted to the knives. Lammeck doubted that Fidel Castro, when he found out about this Sorí Marín, was so heartbroken as Caesar.

  “This was to be a putsch of huge proportions, Professor. A number of highly placed officials were ready to take part. The undersecretary of finance, the deputy commandant of the San Antonio de los Baños air base, the president of the Cuban Sugar Institute, several navy flag officers, and, in a personal shock to me, the chief of the secret police.”

  Johan raised the silver flask in toast to himself. “I have been promoted. I am now the number two official in my department.”

  Lammeck’s jaw hung open at the scale of the planned coup. He forgot to congratulate Johan and could only say, “You’re kidding.”

  “I could never concoct a joke this sordid. I am not kidding.”

  The policeman seemed amused, even impressed wit
h the plot as he described it. “Once Fidel was eliminated, rebel officers were to seize the air base. At the same time, several naval ships would undergo mutinies. The plan was to exert control over the air and sea around Havana. Next, the University of Havana was to be taken over by dissident students. The police in the city would be led into revolt by my former superior, wretched man. Across Cuba, the underground would immediately seize or destroy all communications and public utilities. “Without Fidel, the revolution was expected to fall into bedlam. The rebels would seize power. Then Che, Raul, and any others of importance who opposed them would be shot. I flatter myself into thinking I would have been among those put against the paredón.”

  An alarm rang in Lammeck’s gut. Were Felix or any of the others in his crew part of this plot? Had one of them betrayed Lammeck? Had Johan brought him a final meal and a flask before taking him away? Lammeck looked down at his food, to hide his eyes while he calmed himself. He dropped a hand beneath the table, to finger through his pant leg the poison capsule in his pocket. No. Felix wasn’t in the underground; he was Calendar’s asset, the same as Lammeck.

  He reached for the flask from Johan.

  “Without question, Captain, you would’ve been among the first to be shot.”

  “Thank you.”

  “The scope of the conspiracy. It sounds huge. Is the underground that big?”

  “Many in the privileged classes continue their resistance. But the people, the men and women on the street and in the fields, they love the revolution. There will be no bedlam, Professor.”

  Lammeck drank. Johan smiled with satisfaction.

  “How much of this is public knowledge?” Lammeck asked.

  “The arrests will be announced soon. The full extent of the plot is being held in confidence for a time. But, as always in Cuba, little is kept quiet. We do what we can. You understand, Professor.”

  Lammeck nodded. “Not a word.”

  “After we have a clearer picture, I will feel free to allow you more curiosity.”

  “What’ll happen next?”

  “More arrests. A handful of show executions to loosen tongues.”

  Lammeck couldn’t keep his distaste from his face. In his research, he’d tallied over five hundred firing squad executions in the first four months of the revolution alone. So much blood spilled, he thought, how could this be liberation?

  Johan noted Lammeck’s discomfiture.

  “How can you quibble over this, Professor? Your nation’s official policy is to assassinate Cuba’s leader. We both know your CIA has been involved in the same sort of murderous schemes in other nations. Yet when Cuba defends its own government against saboteurs, you wrinkle your nose. This is monumental hypocrisy.” Johan pointed at the cooling plate of food in front of Lammeck. “Eat. You are not thinking clearly.”

  Even reproving, Johan stayed good-natured. Lammeck forked another bite. But Johan had put his finger squarely on the debate which had obsessed Lammeck all his life: How can a state advocate political murder?

  “There is more,” Johan said, interrupting Lammeck’s thoughts. “Today. A momentous event. Perhaps even more dangerous than the Sorí Marín plot.”

  Lammeck wrestled down one more wave of worry that Johan was going to spring Felix on him.

  “What happened?”

  “This morning, your president suspended the last of the United States’ sugar quota with Cuba. That is the end, Professor. Sugar was the final link between our two countries. Now there is neither diplomatic relations nor trade. You and I are officially enemies.”

  “And I’ll bet the Soviet Union stepped in and agreed to buy all the sugar Fidel can sell them.”

  “Before Kennedy’s ink was dry on the suspension.”

  “Johan.”

  “Yes, Professor, I know. This is a prelude to war. I came to advise you this may be a good time for you to go home.”

  “I can’t.”

  “There are very few Americans in Cuba right now, my friend. My office keeps track of them all. Each is being advised to leave. Anti-American sentiment is only going to get worse. You and I both suspect this invasion is coming soon. When it does, I will have my hands full protecting Fidel. I do not want the added burden of worrying about you.”

  Lammeck thought about the duffel bag hidden in his kitchen cabinet. There was more that Calendar was going to ask of him. The CIA agent had made it clear: Lammeck was a dead man if he left Cuba. Now Johan was saying he might get strung up by a mob if he stayed.

  He shook his head; to Johan it looked like a No, but Lammeck was ruing what he’d gotten caught up in. Again, he sensed that momentum that could only be the current of history, sweeping him along. He made himself remember what it felt like, should he be left alive to write about it.

  * * * *

  CHAPTER NINE

  April 1

  Havana harbor

  THE DOCK WAS WELL lit. Huge cranes unloaded crates, pallets, whole vehicles, and set them on the quay where fifty men swarmed over them with forklifts, wrenches, and hammers. The shouts back and forth around the maze of wooden slats, from beneath bulging nets being lowered to the concrete, were in a Babel of languages, English, Spanish, Czech, Portuguese, Malay. In all the activity and electric glare, Calendar backed into one of the few deep shadows he could find.

  The hull of the moored ship towered four stories above the dock. Lines tying the freighter to hawsers were as thick as a man’s leg, the anchor was the size of a truck. Calendar, for all his travels, had no love of the ocean. His interests had always been land based.

  This cargo ship carried Malaysian registry, but her name on the prow was in English. That afternoon, Eastern Princess had stopped in Freeport, Bahamas, to pick up one last round of cargo and two passengers.

  Calendar waited twenty minutes, watching from behind a shed wall down the quay. He wished for a cup of coffee. The late hours of spy work were the worst part of the job. That, and being kept waiting. If your job was to kill people for politics, you needed to be better than your targets. Stronger, smarter, have a taste for sacrifice, be at least as dedicated to your ideals, and punctual.

  Finally he stepped out of the cloaking shadow. He issued a low, tweeting whistle.

  A young woman stood alone under a dock light, looking up and down the quay. She wore a knee-length black leather coat, wrong for the weather. At Calendar’s whistle, she walked his way. He receded back into the dark.

  He watched her move toward him. She was maybe five foot six, brown curly hair cut above the shoulder. Nothing special, except her eyes. They were blue, intense, under heavy brows. She stopped at the edge of the shadows. Calendar spoke in Russian.

  “Skolko tebe let?” How old are you?

  She cocked her head.

  “Deviatnadtsat.” Nineteen.

  “Skolko Aliku let?” How old is Alek?

  “Dvadtsat odin.” Twenty-one.

  Calendar muttered in English, “I don’t fucking believe this.”

  The girl crossed her arms against her leather coat. A large handbag hung off her shoulder. She shifted her weight to one leg. Her English came hesitantly. She drilled Calendar in the gloom with a blue, petulant stare. “Is problem?”

  “Yeah, this is problem. I wasn’t told I was gonna be getting Spanky and Darla.”

  “Who? We are not these people.”

  “They’re kids. I wasn’t told I was gonna be getting kids.”

  Switching to Russian, she retorted, “And I was not told I was getting an asshole.” She returned to English to finish. “There. Problem, too.”

  Calendar ran a hand over his crew cut. He checked his watch, but the radioactive dial had lost its glow. He jutted his wrist into the light. 1:46 A.M.

  “Where’ve you been? You’re a half hour late.”

  “Trachalas s Alikom.” Fucking Alek.

  Calendar made a fist and bit his lip. “Where is he, honey?”

  “Customs. Bringing luggage. He come now.”

  “What does h
e know?”

  “Ya nye ponimayu.” I don’t understand.

  “What does he know about you?”

  “I will be loyal wife. He got mystery job. I support, he trusts. Is all.”

  “What’s the cover story?”