The Prisoner of Guantanamo (8 page)

“And we as well. Meaning that any information you can offer as to the time and place he came ashore, his initial condition, and so on, will only help us both find the answers to your questions as quickly as possible.”

“All in good time. We must first satisfy ourselves as to the nature of the sergeant's business.”

Meaning that the wounds from this weren't likely to heal quickly. As if to confirm this, Cabral stood, signaling abruptly that the meeting was over. Lewis still held the rolled-up magazine in his right hand. Cabral nodded to a soldier by the door, who disappeared outside.

“They will bring the body from the truck. Your Marines will take it from here.”

They'd zipped Sergeant Ludwig into a Soviet-issue body bag and placed him on a stretcher. The men in the room watched through a side window as the awkward transfer took place. Everyone stood in rigid silence, as if not daring to exit before the formalities of the transfer were completed. Lewis moved toward the door without a further word. No one shook hands or said good-bye.

“That was pleasant,” the captain muttered as they walked toward the American side, trailing the meager cortege of two Marines and the laden stretcher. Falk said nothing in reply. Glancing skyward, he saw that the vultures had drifted south, toward the better pickings of the base landfill.

Back inside the observation post, General Trabert took Lewis aside for a few moments of grim-faced conversation that Falk couldn't hear. Lewis then made his exit as Trabert crossed the room.

“Sounds like they're taking it badly,” the general said. “I suppose you'll need to tie up some loose ends as well.”

“To put it mildly. We'll need an autopsy, for starters.”

“Obviously. Although I gather the Cubans have concluded it's a drowning, or they'd have said otherwise.”

“In the meantime I'll need his records, access to his colleagues, both here and in the States, and also to his family. Any recent letters from home, all that kind of thing. Plus all the rota listings from his unit, to show when he was last on duty, and who he was with. We'll need a full accounting of his movements for his last twenty-four hours.”

Trabert seemed taken aback.

“Is all that really necessary? Unless you know something that I don't.”

Was this the same man who, less than twelve hours ago, had been talking about the need for outside help?

“Well, even if he drowned, the Cubans are right about one thing. It's damned strange where he wound up.”

“I'm not so sure of that. Captain Lewis says those offshore currents are trickier than you think. He figures Ludwig hit a funny tide or something.”

So would this be the party line? A freak current? Maybe that was the real job of this incoming “special team.” A PR chore of glossing things over. Either way, Falk would be checking the Navy's charts, and that's what he told Trabert.

The general gave him a long look.

“Fine. The Navy's port control office will have those. But you look like something else is bugging you. Speak your mind, Falk.”

Speak your mind. Always a dubious proposition when it came from a man with two stars on his sleeve. He decided to be frank anyway.

“I guess I'm a little puzzled, sir. You're the one who called in this delegation from Washington, and as far as I can tell you'd arranged it before I even got to the beach.”

At first the general looked stern, stroking his chin. Then he lowered his head and broke into a sheepish grin.

“My apologies, Falk.” He lowered his voice. “Between you and me, I was using you.”

“Sir?”

“This delegation has been in the works for weeks. I did happen to pass along word of the sergeant's disappearance as I heard about it, of course—it's that kind of crowd, one that wouldn't want any surprises. But any involvement in this affair would be secondary to their real work.”

“Which is?”

“Classified. There's bound to be talk once they're here. The usual gossip. And if people want to believe that their main order of business is the sergeant's disappearance, fine by me. And fine by them.”

“So will they have any interest at all in this case?”

“Only to the extent that it affects their work. Five minutes ago I would have told you that was a zero possibility. But with all that you're asking for, it may raise their eyebrows.”

“It's really the minimum, sir.”

“Fine. Just don't complain to me when they come crawling up your backside. Yours and everybody else's.”

“Just what
are
they coming for, sir? Between you and me.”

Trabert gave him a long look.

“Security matters. Some of it won't be pleasant.” So maybe the rumors were true, after all, just as Tyndall had said. “But I'll tell you what, Falk. I'll keep them off your back as long as you do me a favor.”

“What's that, sir?”

“Keep me posted. When they move, I want to know it. You be my eyes and ears on these people.”

“I'm not sure how much good I can do you. I'm likely to be a little, well, preoccupied.”

“You may change your mind once you've met them. There's a friend of yours on board. Or so he claims. Ted Bokamper.”

For all the shock of hearing the general speak Ted Bokamper's name, Falk supposed he shouldn't be surprised, knowing what he did about the man. But it certainly made the nature of the team's work seem even more intriguing.

“Yes, sir. I know him, all right. I'll do what I can.”

“Good. Then you'll join me in the welcoming party. Touchdown at Leeward Point at eighteen hundred hours. Be at the ferry dock at seventeen thirty.”

“Wouldn't miss it for the world, sir.”

For a change, he really meant it.

CHAPTER SIX

Miami Beach

W
HENEVER
Gonzalo Rubiero was homesick for Cuba—an almost everyday occurrence lately—he made his way by bus or bicycle to a small park at Collins and Twenty-first. It had clipped grass, stately palms, and a lush grove of sea grapes, but the real attraction was the view. It was one of the few places on South Beach where the ocean wasn't walled off by new high-rises or Art Deco revivals.

Gonzalo preferred mornings, seating himself on a shaded boardwalk bench that stank of cat urine and gazing out at the sea. Container ships lined up offshore like targets in a shooting arcade, red-and-white cutouts inching south on the blue horizon. If he stared long enough he could place himself on board—hands gripping the wet rail, sea breeze billowing his guayabera while dolphins leaped in the swells, guiding him homeward.

Suitably pacified, he then walked down the beach, taking an hour to reach the fishing pier and stone jetty at the lower end. The sight of fishermen produced further nostalgia—memories of his father in a wide-brim straw hat, knee-deep in the shallows, flinging a net at schools of minnows. When his aim was true, the clear water fizzed like seltzer.

Spies weren't supposed to get all mopey like this, especially old hands on hostile ground. But these were unsettling times, and the beachfront pilgrimage had become a means of collecting his thoughts amid growing disorder. That seemed especially important just now, at the close of a week that had brought two challenging new assignments in rapid succession.

The first began as a mere janitorial chore. There had been a lot of those lately—cleanup jobs and damage assessments after networks had been rolled up by raids and arrests. Cuban agents had been deported and carted off by the dozens during the past few years, and Gonzalo had always been left behind to suffer the consequences—radios gone silent, mailboxes looted, diskettes plundered. He moved stealthily in the wake of each disaster like an insurance adjuster in the wake of a hurricane, plotting reconstruction even as he scanned for leaking rooftops and cracked foundations. Too often he found both.

His employer's current problems dated back to a shake-up in 1989, but the worst of the recent miseries had begun two years ago, when an operative who had infiltrated the highest corridors of the Defense Intelligence Agency had been identified, arrested, then sent to jail. The latest fallout from that disaster had come only two months ago, when fourteen agents working under diplomatic cover in New York and Washington had been expelled. The casualties included Gonzalo's ostensible handler, a fluttery man in Manhattan who had played the stock market as impulsively as he had played the spy game, vainly trying to keep his four daughters in the right schools and the best prom gowns while still paying his rent on the Upper West Side. It was always nice irony when material attachments did in the enemies of capitalism.

Fortunately the man had never known Gonzalo's real name or address, and there was no shortage of operatives still in place. Gonzalo's boss, a wheezing old fixture of the Dirección de Inteligencia—the Intelligence Directorate, or DI—liked to joke that the South Florida payroll exceeded that of the home office.

But from Union City, New Jersey, down to Little Havana it was a good time for lying low. Which was fine with Gonzalo, seeing as how lying low had always been part of his duties. It had been his lot in life to spy on his own people almost as much as he spied on the Americans, watching carefully for weak links, chiselers, blabbermouths, and potential defectors.

Such a role, as might be expected, kept him isolated. In the upper floors of DI headquarters his existence was known to only a select few, who thought of him as one of a handful of Las Ranas del Árbol, the Tree Frogs, so named for a Cuban species that had invaded Florida's ecosystem eighty years earlier, establishing itself as a dominant but well-camouflaged predator in the state's dampest and darkest corners.

That is why even his handler, Fernandez—the stock player formerly of the Upper West Side—had known only Gonzalo's operational name of Paco. Fernandez was a mere conduit, ensuring that Gonzalo's occasional needs were attended to. His only attempt at independent supervision came just before his expulsion, when he rashly ordered Gonzalo to empty the mail drops of blown agents in Hialeah, Coral Gables, and Kendall.

Knowing it to be a fool's errand, Gonzalo ignored the edict, although out of curiosity he reconnoitered all three locations, discovering, as expected, that each had been staked out by special agents of the FBI. Two of them he recognized from a gallery of snapshots that he'd wrapped in plastic and taped to a cabinet door beneath his kitchen sink. The first of them had been seated by a window in a diner across the street. The second was dressed in painter's clothes at the next location, scraping woodwork at an abandoned storefront. Gonzalo recognized no one at the third drop, but eventually deduced that his rival was the fellow who kept coming and going from a Verizon van. He snapped the man's photo for his gallery, then celebrated the acquisition with a midday feast of roast pork and a papaya milk shake at the Versailles, a Little Havana eatery garishly decked out in wall-to-wall mirrors, the sort of excessive bad taste that always made Gonzalo smile at his fellow expats—in affection, not ridicule. Such misguided striving amid the whining babble of their enraged politics. They never stopped voicing their zeal for deposing El Comandante, yet if they ever succeeded he doubted even one in ten would actually return to Cuba for more than a visit—unless someone was stupid enough to put them in charge, a possibility he attributed only to ideologues at the U.S. Department of State.

Gonzalo was generous with the fruits of his triumphs. By late afternoon that day he had e-mailed a JPEG of the agent's photo to a secure intermediary in Union City, who erased Gonzalo's cyber-fingerprints before forwarding the image to Havana from an Internet café in Passaic. By week's end every field operative in the United States had a copy—except those among the recently disgraced, such as the luckless Fernandez, who was already packing his bags and breaking the news to his tearful daughters.

Word of Gonzalo's newest assignments had come via regular channels. Messages from the home office arrived as needed during an 8 a.m. broadcast by high-frequency shortwave radio. Setting up the radio and tape recorder for the daily transmission was a part of his morning ritual, like making coffee. If he happened to be out, or had company, there was always a repeat performance in the evening.

The signal never lasted more than a few seconds. It produced a series of numbers that Gonzalo taped while a television played loudly in the next room, in case the neighbors were listening.

He then typed in the numbers on a Toshiba laptop, erased the tape, and retrieved a decryption diskette from its hiding place behind the bathroom mirror. A professional search would have discovered it in minutes, but Gonzalo was more worried about the hazards of random chance—a burglar, an overly curious friend, or anyone else who might accidentally discover the diskette and wonder, “What have we here?”

With a few keystrokes, Gonzalo activated the program. Seven years ago it had been state of the art, and so had the Toshiba. Now both were dinosaurs. Any Dade County teenager willing to put aside his Game Boy for a few hours could probably pick apart the encryption. But budgets were in the toilet—had been for years—and shipments of the new equipment kept going to people who were getting caught.

The message produced a sigh of resignation.

         

K out. Janitor requested.

         

Another one bites the dust, he thought. A safe house in Kendall was about to be compromised, probably because of an arrest that had yet to hit the papers. It was Gonzalo's job to launder the premises, a chore about as touchy as a domestic call for a beat cop. It was a nuisance that could turn dangerous at any second. The sooner he got it out of the way, the better.

He wore painter's clothes for these occasions, and had after-hours access to a contractor's panel truck parked in Coral Gables. The house in question was in one of those bland condo subdivisions that looked pretty much like a hundred others in the flat, broiling suburbs off Dixie Highway.

Gonzalo arrived just after dark to find the place a mess—ashtrays full, unwashed pots in the sink, coffee rings on countertops. Dust covered every surface, and the digital displays flashed on the microwave and VCR, meaning they probably hadn't been reset since the last power outage. You could never teach spies to be good housekeepers, but this level of neglect was especially egregious.

The dirt and dishes, however, weren't his concern. His mission was a glorified scavenger hunt, to round up any and all traces of intelligence activity. The only mail to collect was a pile of ad flyers and pizza coupons that had been pushed through the front slot and now lay on the carpet, just inside the door. Judging by the postmarks, no one had been here for at least four days.

Next he checked for stray videotapes, finding the VCR empty. Then he methodically collected four tiny concealed microphones from their customary locations—one behind the bathroom mirror, one beneath the corner of a coffee table in the living room, and one behind the headboard in each of the upstairs bedrooms.

He dropped these treasures into a cloth sack as he moved from room to room, the Cuban Grinch here to steal the FBI's Christmas. In an upstairs hall closet he checked the recording equipment. Ideally the tape should be clear. Yet after rewinding it for a few seconds he heard muffled conversation on playback. He sighed but somehow wasn't surprised. He ejected it with a click and dropped another prize into the sack. The recorder went next, an angular bulge making the sack heavy enough that he had to shift the weight across his right shoulder. Now he really did look like Santa.

In the second bedroom he discovered the biggest security breach yet, after flipping back the dust ruffle on a queen-sized bed to spot a cardboard box hiding on the floor beneath the bed. He slid it across the carpet into the open, and saw to his dismay that it was half filled with papers—cables and faxes, e-mail printouts, just the sort of baubles that might bring down an entire network. Stupidity writ large. No wonder someone associated with this location had been caught. Another ex-military man, if Gonzalo had to guess, one of the hires during the big purge of '89 when Raúl Castro—El Comandante's brother, and the head of the military—had reached across the upper levels of Havana bureaucracy to install one of his generals atop the Interior Ministry, which ran the Directorate. The general, in turn, had recalled some of the Directorate's best and brightest, replacing them with loyal but untrained military hacks. Field men like Gonzalo had been paying for the mistake ever since. In recent years the Directorate had begun hiring back some of the older and steadier hands who'd been purged, but the damage was done.

Gonzalo hefted the box carefully, as if its contents were radioactive. If there had been a fireplace handy—about as likely in Miami as a jalousie window in Alaska—he would have burned the contents on the spot. He briefly considered dispatching the load to the oven, or checking outside for a grill. But the former would take too long, and he was too uncertain about the neighbors for the latter.

So he dumped the papers into the sack, and as he did so one of the sheets toward the bottom of the pile slipped free, oscillating like a parachutist to the floor. He was about to stuff it into the bag when the subject line caught his eye.

         

From: MX

Re: Desert Rose, via Guadalupe.

         

Well, now.

MX was the Directorate's top man, and the subject in question had been the source of abundant speculation and internal rumor during the past few months. He knew that if he held this document in his hands any longer that he would read it, and he didn't want that kind of knowledge. Too burdensome—the sort of information that might get wrapped around your ankles and drag you to the bottom of Biscayne Bay. He dropped the paper daintily into the sack, then bunched the top and slung it across his back, heading for the steps. Why would someone have kept a memo like that? And it was a photostat no less, suggesting that some local imbecile had actually run off a few copies for wider circulation.

Gonzalo was sweating by the time he was downstairs, partly from exertion but also from an onset of nerves. The sound of a slamming door stopped him halfway across the living room. Tensed and silent, he heard voices—the light chatter in English of two women, followed by laughter. They were outside, probably having just left the condo next door. Paper-thin walls and shabby construction were an unavoidable hazard of South Florida safe houses. During Hurricane Andrew they'd lost the roof off one near Homestead Air Force Base. The place stood open to the elements for a full week before anyone did a thing. Fortunately, the neighbors and insurance adjusters were slower to move than their operative, and the waterlogged equipment had been carted off as if it were just another ruined stereo system. If a hurricane had hit this place it might have sent those papers fluttering for miles.

Gonzalo peeped through the front blinds. The two women were getting into a Mazda parked at the curb, apparently harmless, but a reminder that he might soon have company. To be on the safe side, he dropped the sack by the door and quickly retraced his steps through the house, checking one last time for anything he might have missed. Almost as an afterthought he picked up the phone receiver and pressed the Speed Dial button and the number one. It beeped into action, dialing to God knows where. He immediately hung up, and then flew into a rage.

“Stupid, careless, lazy bastards! Fucking idiots!” After twenty-two years in Florida, Gonzalo now cursed mostly in English.

He wasn't quite sure how to deprogram the phone, so after fumbling with the buttons for a few seconds he simply unplugged it and tossed it into the sack. Then he retrieved the upstairs extension and opened the door to leave, checking his flanks from the small porch. The street was clear. The worst of the day's heat was melting into the streets and sidewalks, conserving its energy for morning. Gonzalo decided not to lock the door behind him. If thieves came along and ransacked the rest, all the better. Who knew what sort of mail might arrive in the days ahead, judging from the monumental foolishness already in evidence? Nothing he could do about that, however.