The Prisoner of Guantanamo (9 page)

He tried not to drive too carefully on the way back, although he compulsively checked his mirrors for anyone following. The only thing more likely to attract the attention of a cop than drag racing up Dixie Highway would be scrupulously observing the speed limit. Blending in required tailgating, excessive acceleration after stoplights, and generally making an ass of yourself with frequent lane changes. If no one honked at you at least once every five miles, then you probably weren't meeting the standard.

He switched back to his own car, a nine-year-old Corolla, in the parking lot. He felt like a thief loading his sack into the car, and as he headed home he eyed it on the seat beside him. Somewhere inside it, perhaps growing like a tumor, was the memo from MX. It wouldn't have surprised him if it suddenly burst into flame, spontaneously revealing its presence to other drivers. There was a charcoal grill out back at his apartment building, and his neighbors were accustomed to his using it. He would light the papers beneath a pile of briquettes and destroy them. It would take only a few minutes, and the ashes would drift in the nightly breeze that would carry them out over the ocean. A burial at sea, all those forbidden secrets safe at last. Then he would grill some sausages, open a beer, and relax. He could deal with the phones and electronic gear later.

But by the time he was upstairs and safely indoors his curiosity had gotten the best of him. If MX was sending urgent memos and, worse, if station chiefs were daring to make copies for careless field men, then why shouldn't he at least know the latest, if only for self-protection? While his relative autonomy as a “Tree Frog” generally worked to his advantage, it also made him an easy dupe for supervisors eager to employ his services to undermine their rivals. What his taskmasters failed to realize in making such assignments was that in the process Gonzalo often learned as much about their weaknesses as about those of their targets. By imparting such knowledge they were violating the single most important rule of their trade: No one should ever be told more than he explicitly needed to know. Of course, Gonzalo would be making the same mistake by peeking at the forbidden memo.

He knew enough from previous findings that any directive from MX involving source Guadalupe and operative Desert Rose was a likely precursor to renewed upheaval. But as he stared at the sack on his kitchen table, he supposed that for a change it might be better to know more than he was supposed to.

He easily found the document, since it had been the last one into the bag. It was a little crumpled from its voyage across town, so Gonzalo smoothed it on his kitchen table.

First he checked the date. Nine days ago. New enough to be fresh, old enough to have been overtaken by events. He wondered if the imminent exposure of the local field man was somehow related.

The circulation list was intriguing. Besides Miami the memo had gone to station chiefs in Madrid, Khartoum, and Damascus. Madrid was the hub for Europe, Khartoum was at the heart of the current troubles in Sudan, and Damascus was a frequent clearinghouse for operations in the Middle East, although that theater had long been dormant, ever since the days of the Directorate's close relations with various Palestinian factions, some of which had long ago sent fighters to Cuba for training in arms and explosives.

The message was brief:

Guadalupe reports abort incomplete. Desert Rose, José 1, and three others incommunicado. Request immediate assistance all locations. Utmost urgency.

Guadalupe, he knew, was a sort of glorified freelance, with duties similar to Gonzalo's but on a wider field of play. Desert Rose was a name he hadn't come across in years, dating back to the busiest days of cooperation with the Palestinians. José 1 didn't ring a bell, but seemed to have thrown in his lot with Desert Rose and the “three others.” The Directorate was apparently trying to stop this quintet from whatever it had gotten up to, but so far had failed. If all five were now considered off the leash, then they must have crossed the bounds of Directorate orthodoxy.

Figuring there had to be more information on a subject of such importance, Gonzalo plowed through the rest of the pile, but it was all junk, as worthless as the pizza coupons shoved through the mail slot. Expense vouchers and office logistics. A few mild reprimands for over-spending countered by a few plaintive requests for more money. The usual give-and-take between headquarters and any regional office, whether the product is shoes or secrets.

The memo was the only important item in the whole stack, so he reread it, in case he might have missed some implication the first time. The circulation list continued to intrigue him. He shook his head, figuring that he had better light the fire. Whatever was going on here, it seemed like a good time to keep his head down.

But he couldn't, thanks to the message that arrived the very next morning on the shortwave. Two in two days, like the bouncing needle of a seismograph. And the second, in its way, was every bit as disturbing:

Peregrine in nest. Arrange meeting. Highest urgency. Further details Puma.

Gonzalo usually erased his messages as soon as he'd read them. This one he left on his screen for several minutes while he paced the kitchen and turned on the coffeepot. He lit a cigarette and returned for a second look. He pressed the Delete key, but only once, then retrieved the message a final time, if only to convince himself that it wasn't a mirage, a malfunction.

Peregrine was a name representing one of his most intriguing triumphs and dismal failures, although his superiors still held a generally rosy view of the operation. He had long hoped for an opportunity to salvage something from the wreckage, so in that sense he was gratified. But how strange that Peregrine had somehow returned to his original roost, or, as the message described it, “the nest.” Perhaps the further details, soon to arrive at mailbox Puma, would clarify the circumstances of this mysterious development.

At any rate, he sensed that because of the names involved he would soon have to take risks. And in calculating the risks he realized something alarming: He was comfortable here. Settled. Happy, even. That, he now realized, was at the root of his recent bouts of homesickness. They were separation pains, an acknowledgment that he was breaking away. For all its faults, enemy territory had become home, a dangerous development in his profession.

He was also troubled by the timing of this message. Its arrival only ten days after the date of the MX memo led him to believe they must be connected in some way, even if Havana would never have wanted him to know about the former. Whatever storm was brewing, he had just been swept into it.

Gonzalo deleted the message for good, taking a few extra steps that the techies had assured him would wipe it from his hard drive. He hoped they were right. In the wrong hands, those few words would be as damning as a bag of cocaine or a bar of yellowcake uranium.

Then he got down to business, heading out of the parking lot in his Corolla, crossing MacArthur Causeway to Biscayne Boulevard, where he turned north and began scouting for a phone booth. None of the ones he had used before would do. But they were increasingly hard to find, especially ones that took coins. Some agents, he knew, had begun using generic phone cards. Sloppy. He finally spotted a phone in the parking lot of a Denny's. He decided to make the call, then enjoy an American breakfast, the greasy hash browns he'd developed a taste for. At $3.99, how could he resist?

After scanning the parking lot for anyone within earshot, he plugged in a few quarters, then punched in the number for a beeper in Long Island. All the Manhattan lines had been deemed too hot to handle. At the sound of a recorded prompt he punched in a sequence of numbers, a code of acknowledgment that would tell Havana, “Message received, urgency acknowledged, awaiting instructions.” He figured that the postman for the Puma mail drop might not arrive until noon, so he decided not to risk a premature visit.

Now all he could do was wait. So he ate breakfast while reading both the English and the Spanish editions of the
Miami Herald,
amusing himself as always by the rightward drift of the politics in the Latin version—niche pandering at its worst. He then decided that a long walk on the beach was in order for sorting things out. Besides, he was due to meet Lucinda at noon, down by the jetty. Thinking of her, he smiled for the first time all morning. Then he frowned. Yet another reason to fear this assignment. Lose this time and he lost everything.

Gonzalo had found much to sneer at when he had first arrived in America. He had come ashore with the Mariel Boatlift, blending easily with the ten thousand refugees who had come north in the giant flotilla. It was now well known that Castro had released a few thousand prison inmates into the mix, helping set off a South Florida crime wave of epic proportions. Less well known was the dictator's insertion of a few dozen select operatives such as Gonzalo.

Miami offered plenty of easy targets for someone eager to find fault. So much wealth alongside so much misery. Gated communities of feudal poshness. He watched causeway drawbridges open for huge yachts while thousands waited in sweltering cars. Public officials squandered millions on sports arenas for rich athletes and their top-dollar fans while, blocks away, entire communities rotted. On a visit to Fort Lauderdale he watched a ragged Haitian fisherman trying to net dinner on a tidal canal from the edge of a parking lot where a sign said, “Valet only. No bills larger than $20.” It was easy to see this place as Rome in decline, Babylon on the Bay. Gonzalo could be as smug as he liked.

The people in the middle ranks were the ones he couldn't comprehend, so in the evenings he often drove through their trim warrens of one-story homes in the suburbs, as if seeking entry through a last unlocked door. If only he might penetrate their stucco walls, join them on their couches before the flickering TV screens, or at their smoldering grills, or on their rumbling mowers.

No such luck. It was as if they existed in a different dimension, and he always arrived home thwarted and resentful, or cursing the traffic. So he gave it up, kept his head down, tended to his duties, relaxed, and slowly blended into the scenery. And look at where he had wound up—a man with a girlfriend, a steady income, and an apartment he liked on Washington Avenue, only four blocks from the beach at $550 a month. So what if his parking space was next to the Dumpster out back, and there were security bars across his windows, and his car insurance cost him an arm and a leg even for a nine-year-old Corolla. He had everything he needed over there on the beach, and all of it was within range of his bicycle, locked to a rack downstairs.

In thinking back, he supposed he had gotten the first inkling of his current predicament a few weeks ago, during one of his first trips to the park bench at Collins and Twenty-first. A snatch of graffiti scrawled on an emergency phone box had caught his eye: “Castro Fall—You Go Home”—a typical semaphore of rage from some Anglo fed up with Miami's bilingual bazaar. But to Gonzalo the message offered an unsettling truth. El Comandante wouldn't live forever, and when he went, so might Gonzalo's job, income, and passport. You go home? Yes, he just might have to.

All this was on his mind as he plodded down the beach after receiving his new assignment, sidestepping the seaweed and dead jellyfish. He wondered if the Directorate had already contacted others among Peregrine's old network. Perhaps wheels were already in motion. He would find out for sure once he retrieved the message from mailbox Puma.

On his beach walks, Gonzalo preferred to stay close to the surf, away from where the bulldozers groomed the sand for the hotel guests, with their loungers and cabanas. That was another reason he liked his little outpost down by the jetty. The bulldozers never journeyed that far, nor did most tourists. Instead there was a small corps of regulars who had gravitated to the spot just like him, seeking their own corner of paradise.

A Haitian family, the Lespinasses, came twice a week by bus from Allapattah—every Tuesday and Thursday, the father's days off. They always brought their three children, a big blanket, and a battered cooler filled with fresh fruit and Caribbean soft drinks.

There were also Karl and Brigitte Stolz, a retired couple from Germany who had decided to give Miami a try a year earlier, and still seemed stunned by its hyperkinetic brashness.

Then there was Ed Harbin—fiftyish, crew-cut, ex-Army, with a tan so deeply bronzed it seemed to have been applied in layers, each one thinner and harder than the last. Every day Ed swam out to the buoys that marked the exclusion zone for the fishing boats and Jet Skis that ripped up and down the shoreline, and the end of Gonzalo's walks often coincided with some part of Harbin's swim. Gonzalo would sit down to watch from the stones of the jetty while Harbin steadily came and went, never seeming to vary his pace or his stroke through rain or shine, hot or cold. Harbin was wiry, muscles stripped to their essentials except for a small potbelly. When he emerged from the water, two sets of dog tags jangled and glittered against the dripping silver hair on his chest.

Gonzalo had often wondered about those tags. Presumably one pair belonged to Harbin, but whose was the second? A son's? A pal's? Dead or alive? Gonzalo never had the guts to ask. Not much of a spy on matters like those, he supposed.

Harbin never failed to ask about the health and whereabouts of Lucinda, whom he had met a few times, and Gonzalo was always pleased and even proud to keep him informed. He liked to believe that after swimming Harbin indulged in a huge lunch somewhere up the beach, at Jerry's Famous Deli, perhaps, manhandling something sloppy like a cheeseburger with a thick shake. In truth, he had no idea where Harbin went. The shared world of these beachfront regulars was confined to their doings on their little stretch of sand, where they abided by an unspoken agreement that no one would ever pry further without an invitation.

Today Harbin was on his last fifty yards as Gonzalo arrived at the jetty. He watched the man step from the water and reach for a towel, brown eyes glowing in the sunlight of late morning.