The President looked as if he was going to reply to Hoboken, but didn’t, instead shaking his head.
“The protocol, Mr. President,” DCI Lammelle said, “provides that when the secretary is not available, the message goes to the next person on the list, in this case the DCI, me. When I got it, I immediately went to see Mr. Ellsworth and we came here together.”
“That answers the second part of my question,” the President said. “But not the first.”
“To the best of my knowledge, sir, Secretary Cohen is in New York at the UN,” Ellsworth said.
“Doing what?”
“As I understand the matter, sir, the French are experiencing beach erosion problems in Normandy.”
“What the hell can that possibly have to do with us?”
“The French position, Mr. President,” Lammelle said, “as I understand it, is the problem began in the spring of 1944, when we landed our invasion force there and tore them up—the beaches, I mean—in so doing. And that therefore we should pay for restoring their beaches to their pre–June sixth, 1944, condition.”
“Well, I can understand that,” Hoboken said.
“And how much is that going to cost the American taxpayer?” Truman Ellsworth asked innocently.
“I don’t know,” Lammelle said. “I understand the secretary is trying to get the French to charge the cost of restoring their beaches in Normandy against their debt to us. So far, they have been unwilling to do so.”
“That’s going to have to go on the back burner,” the President said. “Tell Secretary Cohen not to give the Frogs a dime until she clears it with me.”
“Yes, sir.”
“First things first, I always say.”
“Yes, sir.”
“So explain this to me,” the President said, waving Castillo’s report.
“What is it you don’t understand, Mr. President?”
“Practically none of it,” the President admitted. “But let’s start with all these Rent-a-Spooks he’s hired from Sparkling Water Due Diligence, Inc. What the hell? Who exactly are these people and what are they going to do for me?”
“Several years ago, Mr. President, several companies were formed to furnish certain services to the intelligence community on a contract basis,” Ellsworth answered. “What happened, Mr. President, is that the FBI, the DIA, and others realized that some of the best people, particularly those in the Clandestine Service—”
“Spooks.”
“Yes, sir. Many of them had reached retirement age, or length of service—one can retire from the Clandestine Service after twenty years—and were not interested in continuing to serve beyond their twenty years because they could make a great deal more money working for industry and Wall Street.
“Eventually sort of an employment agency, which called itself ‘Blackwater,’ came into being to match the needs of Wall Street and industry with available personnel. That quickly evolved into Blackwater providing Wall Street and industry—who didn’t want it to get out that they had spies on their payrolls—with the appropriate personnel on a contract basis.
“When the Agency began to miss the Clandestine Service personnel who had retired—they really needed them—it occurred to the Agency that if Wall Street could hire these ex-spies, so could they. And that’s how it began, Mr. President. And I must say it’s worked out well.”
“You are using ex-spies from this Blackwater thing to do the CIA’s spying—is that what you’re telling me?”
“Since I took over as DCI, Mr. President, I have been moving more toward Sparkling Water and away from Blackwater.”
“Why is that?”
“Blackwater kept raising its prices, Mr. President. Not only did Sparkling Water come to me and offer the same quality ex-spies for less money, but also the services of ex–Delta Force Special Operators and retired Secret Service personnel. The Delta Force people were unhappy performing services for Wall Street. So the Agency has just about moved to placing all its contract business with Sparkling Water.”
“So you know who the people on here are?” the President asked, waving Castillo’s report.
“Yes, sir, I do.”
“And you’re going to tell me about them, right?”
“Yes, sir. May I have a look at Colonel Castillo’s report, sir?”
“Why don’t you have your own copy?”
“Because it says ‘Duplication Forbidden,’ sir. Right at the top.”
“Okay. Who are they?”
“Leverette and Gregory, Mr. President, are both Afro-Americans and retired from Delta Force,” Lammelle began.
“What’s Afro-American got to do with anything? Why did you have to bring that up? You know full well my administration is color blind.”
“I think it probably has something to do with their being able to move inconspicuously around Somalia, Mr. President,” Ellsworth said. “Most of the people in Somalia are Afro-Amer… African… of the Negro race.”
“I don’t think you’re supposed to say that either,” the President said.
“Mr. and Dr. Britton are also African-Americans,” Lammelle said.
“Why does Castillo think he needs a doctor in Somalia?”
“She’s a Ph.D., Mr. President, a philologist, not a physician.”
“She’s a stamp collector?” the President asked incredulously.
“Stamp collectors are philatelists, Mr. President. Philologists are language experts.”
“Okay, so she speaks whatever gibberish they speak in Somalia. Why not say that, that she’s an interpreter? I’m beginning to wonder if Castillo is purposely trying to confuse me.”
“I don’t know if Dr. Britton speaks Af-Soomaali or not, Mr. President,” Ellsworth said.
“Speaks what?”
“Af-Soomaali, Mr. President, the language spoken in Somalia.”
“Of course she does,” the President said impatiently. “If she doesn’t speak Af-soo… whatever you said… why would Castillo be taking her there? But find out for sure. If she doesn’t, that would really sound fishy to me.”
“Yes, sir, Mr. President.” Ellsworth paused, then went on: “Mr. Britton is a former Secret Service agent, Mr. President. And before that he was an undercover detective in Philadelphia.”
“Does he speak Af-soo whatever?”
“I just don’t know, Mr. President,” Ellsworth confessed.
“Mr. and Mrs. Sieno, Mr. President,” Lammelle said quickly, “are both retired from the Clandestine Service of the Agency.”
“Both of them are retired CIA spies?”
“We like to think of people like that as ‘field officers,’ Mr. President,” Ellsworth said.
“Why can’t you people call a spade a spade?” the President said.
“Many African-Americans find the term ‘spade’ offensive, Mr. President,” Robin Hoboken said. “I for one would never think of calling CIA field officers ‘spades.’”
The President glared at his spokesman.
“Actually, Mr. President, I’m not sure whether the Sienos are Italian-Americans or Latinos,” Lammelle said.
“If you two are the best intelligence people we have,” the President said, “the country’s in deep trouble. Get the hell out of here!”
[TWO]
The Presidential Suite
The Meliá Cohiba Hotel
Verdado, Havana, Cuba
1425 10 June 2007
General Sergei Murov and his security detail had not gone to Havana openly. That would not be in the tradition of the Cheka and its successor organizations. Instead, their documents identified them all as members of the Greater Sverdlovsk Table Tennis Association and Mr. Murov as Grigori Slobozhanin, the chief coach thereof.
His true identity was known of c
ourse to General Jesus Manuel Cosada, who had replaced Raúl Castro as head of the Dirección General de Inteligencia, or DGI, when Señor Castro had replaced his brother, Fidel, as president of the Republic of Cuba.
General Cosada therefore ordered that the visiting Ping-Pongers be housed in the five-star high-rise Meliá Cohiba Hotel on Avenida de Maceo, more commonly known as the Malecón, the broad esplanade that stretches for four miles along the coast of Havana.
He did so for several reasons. He knew that General Murov and President Castro were close personal friends, for one thing, and for another that the Presidential Suite was equipped with state-of-the-art cameras and microphones—some of them literally as small as the head of a pin—with which the visit of General Murov could be recorded for posterity and other purposes.
General Cosada’s expert in this type of equipment, Señor Kurt Hassburger, who had immigrated to Cuba from the former East Germany and really hated Russians, had also installed a microphone and transmitter in the lid of the cigar humidor Señor Castro would give—filled with Cohiba cigars—to General Murov as a little “Welcome Back to Cuba” memento.
When General Cosada and President Castro entered the Presidential Suite carrying the humidor of cigars, they were wearing the customary attire of senior officials of the Cuban government.
In the early days of the Cuban revolution, the Castro forces had raided a government warehouse and helped themselves to U.S. Army equipment the Yankee Imperialists had given to the Batista regime. This included U.S. Army “fatigue” uniforms and combat boots, which Fidel promptly adopted as the revolutionary uniform, primarily because they were far more suitable for waging revolution than the blue jeans, polo shirts, and tennis shoes he had been wearing.
When the revolution had been won, Fidel and Raúl and their subordinates had continued to wear the fatigues because—depending on who you were listening to—they represented solidarity with the peasants and workers or because they were much more comfortable in the muggy heat of Cuba than a suit and shirt and necktie would have been.
The fatigues President Castro and General Cosada were wearing today were of course not the ones liberated from Batista’s warehouse—there was a tailor on the presidential staff who made theirs to order—but they looked like U.S. Army fatigues.
General Murov thought their uniforms made them look like aging San Francisco hippies. Or Wanna-Be-Warriors at a Soldiers of Fortune convention.
Murov was far more elegantly attired. When he had been the cultural attaché of the Russian embassy in Washington he had regularly watched J. Pastor Jones and C. Harry Whelan, Junior, on Wolf News to keep abreast of what the American reactionaries were up to.
Their programs were in part sponsored by Jos. A. Bank Clothiers and the Men’s Wearhouse. Eventually, their advertisements got through to him and he investigated what he thought were their preposterous claims by visiting an emporium of each.
There he found that not only was the reasonably priced clothing they offered superior to that offered for sale in Moscow, but that they really would give you two suits—or an overcoat and a suit, or two overcoats, or a half dozen shirts and neckties and a sports coat and slacks—absolutely free if you bought one suit at the regular price.
He found this fascinating because recently, having nothing better to do, he had been flipping through the SVR manual on rezident operations and had come across an interesting item buried in the manual as a small-font footnote. It stated that anything purchased, including items of clothing, deemed by the rezident as necessary to carry out intelligence missions could be billed to the SVR’s Bureau for the Provision of Non-Standard Equipment.
Murov had turned almost overnight into a fashion plate. And he was not only happy with the way he looked—as the spokesman for Men’s Wearhouse said he would be—but convinced that the SVR man who had written the footnote was right on the money. How could one be a really good spy wearing clothing that made one look as if one was drawing unemployment?
This of course applied to the staff of the rezident, the junior spies, so to speak. They shouldn’t look like they were drawing unemployment, either. He went to the management of both Men’s Wearhouse and Jos. A. Bank and asked them if he could throw a little business their way, what could they do for him? Not in terms of free sports coats, but in cash?
A mutually agreed upon figure—5.5 percent of the total—was reached, and Murov sent his staff to both establishments with orders to acquire a wardrobe in keeping with the high standards expected of SVR spies, and not to worry about what it cost, as the bill would be paid by the SVR’s Bureau for the Provision of Non-Standard Equipment.
President Castro handed General Murov the humidor of Cohibas, and Murov handed General Cosada the case of Kubanskaya.
“Fidel sent these for you,” Raúl said.
“How kind of him.”
“I really appreciate the Kubanskaya, Sergei,” Raúl said. “You can’t get it in Cuba.”
“I understand we’re selling a lot of it to Venezuela,” Sergei replied.
“Yeah, but between us, it’s hard to get from there, too. Fidel is a little overenthusiastic about that ‘Drink Cuban’ program of his. It means we’re supposed to drink rum and it’s treasonous to the revolution to import spirits made anywhere else. So I have to remember to hide my Kubanskaya when he comes by the house. And whenever I take a chance and get the Bulgarians to slip me a case on the quiet through their embassy here, the sonofabitches are on the phone next day asking, ‘So, what are you going to do for Bulgaria now?’”
“Bulgarians do tend to be a bit greedy, don’t they?” Sergei asked rhetorically. “Did you ever see them eat?”
“I’d hate to tell you what Fidel calls them,” Raúl said.
“How is Fidel?”
“He sends his regards along with the cigars.”
“Well, thank him for the Cohibas when you see him.”
“I will. You’ve heard he’s stopped smoking himself?”
No, Murov thought, but if I had to smoke these, I’d stop smoking myself.
Among other intelligence Murov had acquired while he was the rezident in Washington was that all the good cigar makers had fled from Cuba immediately after the revolution. The really good ones had gone to the Canary Islands, where they continued to turn out Cohibas and other top-of-the-line cigars.
The Cuban Cohibas were not really Cuban Cohibas, in other words. When Murov saw the humidor of Cuban Cohibas, he had immediately decided to take it to Moscow, where he would give them to people he didn’t like, and he hoped ol’ Raúl wouldn’t expect him to light up one of the ones he had given him.
“No, I hadn’t,” Murov said.
“He said he feels better now that he’s stopped smoking.”
“Well, I can understand that,” Murov replied, and mentally added, If he was smoking these steadily, I’m surprised they didn’t kill him.
“So tell me, Sergei,” Raúl said, “what brings you to Havana?”
“I need about a dozen of your best DGI men,” Murov replied. “For a month, maybe a little longer.”
“To do what?” General Cosada asked.
“Vladimir Vladimirovich wants to entertain three people now in Argentina, and I need your people to assist them in getting on the plane to Moscow.”
“What three people?” Raúl asked.
“Former SVR Polkovnik Dmitri Berezovsky, former SVR Podpolkovnik Svetlana Alekseeva, and Lieutenant Colonel C. G. Castillo, U.S. Army, Retired.”
“Why don’t you go to the Venezuelans?” General Cosada asked. “I know they don’t like the American. For that matter any Americans.”
“Have you already forgotten Major Alejandro Vincenzo, Raúl? Sic transit gloria, Major Alejandro Vincenzo?”
“I don’t like to think about Alejandro,” Castro said. “But no, I haven’t forgotten t
he loss of my sister Gloria’s second-oldest son. But it momentarily slipped my mind that that bastard Castillo was responsible for what happened to him.”
“Raúl,” Murov asked, “does the fact that that bastard Castillo killed your nephew in Uruguay change our conversation from ‘What can the SVR do for the DGI?’ to ‘What can the DGI do for the SVR?’”
President Castro considered that a moment.
“No,” he said finally. “It doesn’t. Where we are now is ‘What can the SVR do for the DGI, in exchange for what the SVR wants the DGI to do for the SVR?’”
When Murov didn’t immediately reply, Castro went on, “I wouldn’t want this to get around, Sergei, but neither Fidel nor I ever really liked Vincenzo. But he was our sister’s kid, and you know how that goes: We were stuck with him.”
“And between you and me, Sergei,” General Jesus Manuel Cosada said, “the sonofabitch was always sucking up to Fidel. He wanted my job.”
“But then why did you send him to Uruguay?” Murov asked.
“Sending him there,” Cosada said, “is not exactly the same thing as sending him there and hoping he got to come back.”
“Jesus Christ, Jesus!” Raúl said. “If Gloria ever heard you say that, you’d be a dead man!”
“I asked why you sent him, feeling the way you apparently felt, to Uruguay,” Murov said.
“Well, when the Iraqi Oil-for-Food people told us what they wanted…”
“Which was?” Murov asked.
“They wanted the UN guy, Lorimer, dead.”
“Because he ripped them off for sixteen million dollars?”
“Well, once he’d done that, they knew he couldn’t be trusted. And he knew too much, too many names. He had to be dead. They didn’t seem to care too much about the money,” Raúl said.
“Which got Raúl and me to thinking…” Cosada said.
“What would happen if we sent Alejandro down there with the Hungarians…” Raúl said.
“For which they were offering us a lot of money,” Cosada picked up. “And they took out Dr. Lorimer…”
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