Havana Run

by Les Standiford

  Chapter Nineteen

  Deal awoke as he was being levered out of the backseat of a dark sedan, one pair of hands at his back, another pulling him forward. His own hands had been bound with tape of some sort, he realized, and a length of cloth had been wrapped about his mouth as a gag. More tape had been looped around his ankles, forming a loose hobble.

  “Is awake,” he heard someone say, then felt fingers tug at the knot at the back of his neck.

  “I am sorry,” he heard a voice from the darkness. “It was for your own protection…and ours, of course.”

  Vedetti, he thought groggily, blinking his eyes into focus. There was a pounding behind his right ear where he’d been clipped, but it didn’t seem serious. Whoever had hit him knew what he was doing.

  The gag was pulled away, and he worked his dry lips, trying to formulate a response. They were somewhere in the countryside, he saw by the dim moonlight, the car pulled up in a dusty clearing outside what looked like a farmhouse overhung by trees and surrounded by thick undergrowth. Locusts screeched in the empty darkness surrounding them, keeping time to the pounding in his skull. Shout all you want to out here, he thought, get a worse headache in return.

  “What the hell’s going on, Vedetti?”

  He felt a hand on his shoulder, propelling him forward. He nearly toppled over and realized he’d been hobbled by a binding at his ankles. “Where is Angie?” he managed. “What have you done to her?”

  “Inside, Mr. Deal,” Vedetti’s voice came. “Everything will be explained.”

  Deal felt the grip at his arm tighten, the same guy who’d clipped him back at the hotel, he judged. He took a series of mincing steps across the clearing but balked at the approach to the porch steps.

  “Cut him loose,” he heard Vedetti say. “Where do you think he’s going?”

  There was a grunt from behind him, then Deal felt something brush his pants legs near his ankles. More tape there, he thought, as the bindings were cut, then peeled away.

  He broadened his stance to steady himself and glanced around the clearing, realizing that Vedetti was right. The vegetation surrounding them looked as dense as anything that choked all South Florida when you got half a mile from developed land. He wouldn’t get a dozen yards in that tangle.

  “Come now, Mr. Deal,” he heard Vedetti from the porch above him. “There are persons most anxious to speak with you.”

  Deal glanced up, fighting a bitter laugh. “That’s what I’ve been hearing ever since I came to Cuba,” he said.

  He felt a shove between his shoulder blades then, and felt a lightning surge of anger sweep over him. He allowed himself to stumble forward, then ducked and spun around, driving his elbow into the stomach of the man who had pushed him.

  He heard a satisfying whoosh of air escape the man as he folded over, clutching his stomach. Deal raised his knee, and there came a muffled crunching sound as the man went over sideways with a gasp.

  Deal heard footsteps rushing across the porch toward him and spun once more, clutching his still-bound hands together. He caught the man who was diving toward him with a solid, two-handed blow on the side of the jaw, sending him sprawling into the dust beside the first man he’d dropped.

  That one was struggling to his knees and Deal had raised his hands to deliver another blow when he felt the cold press of steel against his cheek. “That is enough, Mr. Deal,” he heard Vedetti’s voice at his ear. The pistol barrel ground against his cheek for emphasis. “Are you listening to me?”

  Deal nodded slowly, carefully lowering his hands. Vedetti backed away cautiously as his men picked themselves up out of the dirt.

  “Cabrón”, the stocky one who had shoved him muttered, taking a step toward Deal.

  Vedetti called something in rapid-fire Spanish, and the stocky man hesitated. He gave Vedetti a look and then backed away.

  “Can we please go inside, now?” Deal heard Vedetti say. “Quietly.”

  “Why not?” Deal said. And began to mount the stairs.

  Chapter Twenty

  He was moving through the door of the farmhouse into a wavering pool of light cast by a kerosene lantern when he saw her, the sight striking him more powerfully than any punch he’d taken that night.

  “Angie?” he managed. He could hear the disbelief in his own voice.

  She stood in slacks and blouse behind a wooden table in a rustic kitchen, her hair pulled back severely, flanked by a pair of stern-faced men who looked strangely familiar. One was tall with long black hair swept slickly from his forehead, the other a wizened older man who seemed a ringer for the street hustler who’d slapped a picture of Betty Grable in his palm earlier that day.

  “I am Angelica,” she said, her gaze holding his steadily. Finally, she turned and spoke to someone over his shoulder. “Cut his hands loose,” she said.

  “But…” Vedetti protested at his shoulder.

  “What are you waiting for?” she snapped. “Do you think he’s going to hurt me?”

  Deal stared, still stunned. A goddamned good question, he was thinking, as he felt Vedetti’s knife slice neatly through the tape at his wrists.

  The woman standing before him was clearly Angie, but his mind was having grave difficulty accepting that fact. An entire section of his brain had been given over to feelings of tenderness, erotic fantasy, uncharacteristic, longburied notions that had threatened to change his life. Now all of it was being shaken loose, images of a woman moving urgently above him replaced with a brief glimpse of someone he barely knew offering a caress to a dark-haired man on a Havana street, then disappearing into a taxicab.

  “You get around,” Deal managed. “You sure as hell get around.”

  She stared back at him defiantly. “Don’t indulge yourself,” she said, evenly. “There’s more at stake than you know.”

  Deal glanced around the dimly lit room, gradually accepting what seemed impossible. Half a dozen hard-faced men standing about, every one of them as attendant to this woman’s authority as a pack of hounds. What in God’s name had he stumbled into? Mata Hari’s nest? The lair of the Black Widow?

  Whatever it was, one truth had settled upon him as certain and unyielding as a moray’s jaws: she’d suckered him as he had never been before. If he’d never understood the fury of a woman taken for a ride, he thought, he’d have no trouble now.

  He turned back to her, rubbing at the raw skin of his wrists where the tape had been ripped free. “Maybe you should have left me tied up,” he said. “We could have tried it that way. It might have been more fun for you.”

  She colored and moved forward as if to strike him, then stopped herself. She glanced at the tall man with the sweptback hair, who stared back impassively. She turned back to Deal, then, seeming to gather her composure. “I am sorry for what has happened,” she said. “I could not have expected you would be brought here by others.”

  Deal stared back at her in disbelief. His head felt as tenuously attached as some bobble-head doll’s. “So Fuentes is in on this?”

  Her eyes flashed. “Antonio Fuentes is no friend of ours. It was a coincidence that he brought you to Havana. It simplified my task; that is all.”

  Deal shook his head. “I’m afraid you’ve left me way behind, Angie, or whatever your name is. It’s probably just jet lag, but maybe you could fill in the blanks.”

  “That is why we have brought you here,” she said.

  “You mind if I sit down?” He gestured at one of the wooden chairs by the table, and she nodded.

  “Would you like some water?” she asked as he sat.

  “Sure,” he said, putting a hand to the back of his neck. “Water would be good.”

  She said something to one of the men, who went to an ancient refrigerator in a corner and brought him a plastic bottle. Deal stared at it. “Evian?” he asked, holding it up.

  She gave a humorless laugh. “The long reach of capitalism,” she said. “I brought it from Key West, if you w
ant to know.”

  He nodded, taking a swig of the water. When he put the bottle down, one hand casually brushed the sole of his shoe.

  “Maybe you could start by telling me where we are,” he said. He’d peeled and pressed one of Vines’ listening devices into place. Just a wad of gum stuck in the crevice between sole and heel, he saw with a glance. He was also wondering if Vines’ claims about the range of the device had any basis in fact.

  “It is unimportant,” she said. “More to the point is why you are here.”

  “I’ll settle for that,” he said. “The last thing I remember I was on my way to bed in the Santa Isabel.”

  She stared at him for a moment as if she found the statement odd. He’d have to give up the expository dialogue, he told himself. A chancy device, just like all his English teachers said.

  “My name is Angelica Mondescu,” she told him. “You have already met Señor Vedetti.”

  “I thought I had met you, too,” he said. “But that must have been someone else. There was this woman in Key West. She told me her name was Angie Marsh.”

  She closed her eyes momentarily, but whether it was an apologetic gesture or an exasperated one was impossible to tell. “Be patient,” she said finally, and Deal nodded in response.

  “I am a citizen of Cuba,” she told him. “As are all of us here,” she added, with a sweep of her arm.

  Deal glanced at Vedetti. “Somehow I got a different impression this afternoon,” he said.

  Vedetti shrugged. “My parents died in the revolution,” he said. “I was a child when I was taken to Napoli by relatives. It has been more convenient to live as an Italian citizen.”

  “I’m sure,” Deal said, though he had never felt less sure of things in his life.

  “You must understand,” Angelica cut in. “We are patriots. We love this country and its people. We are part of a group that has been working quietly to prepare for the inevitable changes Cuba must soon undergo.”

  “You’re ready to put Batista back on the throne?” Deal asked.

  “Don’t speak foolishness,” she said. “We wish to see the emergence of a democratic nation. Most of the people in Cuba want the same. But no one wants another puppet government run by the business interests of the United States. It is as simple as that.”

  “You’d like to think so, anyway,” Deal said.

  He wondered if there were gnomes somewhere in the bowels of Vines’ listening post taking all this in. Had any alarm been raised? Were sophisticated electronics devices hard at work at this very instant, triangulating his position? Were crack commando units daubing on their camo paint right now, readying for an assault on this remote farmhouse?

  Pleasant enough fantasies, of course. But more likely a tape recorder was grinding away in an unmanned basement room laying down the hiss of static from an out-of-range listening device. And even if they could hear him, there would be no assault forces marshaled on Cuban soil. He’d stand a better chance of rescue if he were stashed in an Iraqi cave. Whatever he was up against, he was on his miserable own. For a moment, he felt an almost wistful yearning for the face of Antonio Fuentes.

  “Democracy will take told in Cuba,” she assured him. “It is the will of our people.”

  Deal nodded. “I hope you’re right,” he said, glancing about the room. “Are we getting to the part where I come into all this?”

  She nodded, glancing at the tall man behind her before she continued. “When we met in Key West, it was impossible for me to be forthright with you. Once you have heard me out, I hope you will understand.”

  “Anything’s possible,” Deal said, though he could not imagine applying logic to what had happened.

  “You must understand that ours is a gravely dangerous position,” she told him. “There are spies everywhere, men willing to betray our ideals for a scrap…” She broke off momentarily, giving an angry toss of her head.

  “Many people have already died for what we believe in,” she continued. “No one can be trusted implicitly. One day a person is a friend, the next day, everything changes…”

  “Tell me about it,” Deal countered.

  “Listen to me,” she said, her voice taking on a new urgency. “It was imperative that we learn the truth…”

  “The truth about what?” Deal cut in.

  “About your father,” she blurted out.

  It was yet another stunner in a night already full of them. Deal stared back, not sure he had heard correctly. “What does my father have to do with this?” He heard the threat in his own voice, saw the tall man take a step forward.

  She turned to the tall man. “Give him the package, Victor.”

  The man glanced at her, then reached for a manila envelope that was lying on a cabinet top. He took another step toward Deal and tossed the envelope on the kitchen table where it landed with a thud.

  Deal glanced at the packet, then back at Angelica. “What is it?” he asked.

  “Go ahead,” she said, “open it.”

  He glanced again at the packet. Surely nothing explosive inside. They’d all be diving for cover, not staring at him expectantly. Still, something was holding his hand from the packet. Some dread, some uncertainty that had been part of the very fabric of his life for as long as he could remember.

  Some kids grow up with ordinary fathers who soldier on through everyday life and everyday jobs with a stop here and there at a baseball game and a birthday party and—so long as fortune smiles—a roof overhead and smiles all around at the evening dinner table. On the other hand, he’d had Barton Deal as his father, and that had been a little like having John Huston drop in from time to time after a hard month’s shooting in Zanzibar.

  Deal had loved his father—hell, everyone had loved his father—but he had also spent a lifetime trying to crawl out from under the man’s enormous shadow. He had no idea what was in that packet lying on the table in front of him, could not fathom what connection a bunch of purported Cuban revolutionaries might be claiming to his old man—but he would lay odds it could only complicate his own life further.

  Still, there was no putting it off. He could no more ignore the challenge of that waiting envelope than he could will himself to stop breathing. He glanced up at Victor, the quiet and handsome man with the swept-back hair, then turned his gaze toward Angelica, a woman he might have loved.

  He was reaching for the packet when the first volley of gunfire rang out.

  Chapter Twenty-one

  The first barrage tore across the façade of the farmhouse in a snapping of splintered wood. Deal heard an answering burst of fire from outside, followed by a sharp cry and a momentary silence that was broken by shouted commands in Spanish.

  Vedetti was running toward the window when the grimy panes disintegrated in a burst of automatic fire that vaporized the glass and blew the curtains to shreds. Vedetti stopped as if he’d hit an invisible wall, then toppled sideways without a sound.

  One of the men on the far side of the room was rushing to extinguish the kerosene lantern when a round blew threw the copper tank. The flattened slug cartwheeled on into the man’s chest, spraying flaming fuel everywhere. The man who’d been hit was enveloped in flames instantly. He staggered forward, waving his arms like a man just emerged from hell.

  Other slugs tore into the wall, some whanging off the front of the ancient refrigerator, others shattering off the porcelain back of the sink. Deal felt shards spray fiery on his cheeks even as he dove beneath the table for cover.

  He had hardly hit the floor when he felt a hand dig fiercely into his hair. “Get up,” he heard her cry. “This way.”

  She yanked again, so hard he thought she’d tear his scalp away. Two of her men were at the shattered window frame spraying fire from their own automatic weapons blindly into the night, then ducking away as the answering fusillades came.

  He scrambled to his knees, cracking his forehead painfully on the edge of the table as he rose. He mad
e it to his feet, staring dumbly at the flaming man now collapsed across the chair where he’d been sitting. The fire had spread to the cabinets on the opposite wall, flames shooting toward the ceiling.

  He heard the clatter of heavier arms from outside and saw the wall beside the window frame erupt inward in a shower of wood fragments and plaster dust. One of the men who’d been crouched there took the last of the volley, the force of it blowing him half a dozen feet across the floor.

  “Go!” she shouted, shoving him hard in the back.

  He hesitated. Whoever was out there firing, it didn’t seem the time to run onto the porch waving a white flag and shouting “Amigo.”

  He turned and stumbled down a hallway, following after Victor, who turned as he ran, motioning wildly for Deal to follow. Deal assumed they were headed toward some rear exit, when the man came quickly to a halt near the hallway’s end and stopped to kick aside a throw rug.

  “Here,” Victor said, bending to grasp an iron ring set in a recess of the floor. He yanked up, bringing a section of flooring away, and Deal felt a wave of cool air rise up from the yawning hole that had appeared.

  “Follow me,” Victor said, then lowered himself quickly into the darkness.

  Deal didn’t hesitate, slipping into the opening the instant the man had disappeared. He gripped the sides of the trapdoor and let himself drop, feeling his feet hit ground just as his fingertips slipped loose. It was utter blackness inside the passage, and he groped about blindly for a moment before he felt a hand on his shirtfront.

  “Come,” he heard Victor’s voice say. At the same time there was the sound of Angelica’s feet dropping to the floor of the passage behind him.

  Deal tried to gauge their progress as the three of them moved quickly along the narrow passage. He kept one hand up to shield himself from bashing his skull against the roughly chiseled roof, at the same time trying to count his paces. He’d taken maybe forty steps, he thought, possibly a few more, when the man in front of him stopped and placed a hand on his chest to hold him back.

  There was an opening just ahead; he saw the outline of an irregular, leaf-strewn opening lit by the glow of moonlight. The sounds of gunfire still echoed in the distance, but in the tangle of underbrush just outside, everything seemed calm.