Valley of the Templars (7 page)

“How many aircraft do they have officially?” Sinclair asked.

“Supposedly one hundred and thirty-four,” said Axeworthy, “of which the majority are trainers, cargo planes, VIP flights and transports. They list a total of seven attack helicopters and only six MiG 29s, a fighter which was developed in the midseventies and has a very limited range. I think we could conservatively cut that list in half—I doubt they have more than a dozen fighters in flying condition and most of those will be MiG 21s from the midfifties. At a guess the transports and the helicopters are for counterinsurgency use—the Cuban people rising up against Raul and his brother. They simply don’t have the strength to mount an attack against Tortugas, let alone the continental U.S.”

“And the Tucanos?”

“They’re armed with four Hellfire Air to Ground missiles; a flight of half a dozen Tucanos could take out the MiGs at Los Baños from five miles away.”

“What about coastal patrols, the navy?”

“It barely exists, ma’am,” said Axeworthy. “Most of what they had is at the breakers yards at the old Cienfuegos Naval Base. They used to have a bunch of Osa-class missile boats, but they stripped off the Styx missile platforms and put them on land-based mobile
launchers. Most of what they have are a dozen or so Zhuk-class coastal patrol boats mounted with a couple of manually operated machine guns and some even older Soviet P6 torpedo boats with antiaircraft guns bow and stern. The torpedos are long gone and their radar is totally out of date. Useless. The coast guard will take you to Mexico for a fat fee and the Zhuks make regular runs to the twelve-mile limit off Puerto Bolívar in Colombia to pick up product from the go-fasts. Most of the money, minus the Raul and Fidel Tax, finds its way into the pockets of one Rear Admiral Carlos Alfonso Duque Ramos, whose daughter is married to none other than Raul Castro’s bodyguard.” He tapped the screen and a photograph of a handsome man in his midforties appeared.

“Is that supposed to mean something to me?” Sinclair asked.

“His name is Major Raúl Alejandro Rodriguez Castro; he’s Raul’s grandson and Fidel’s grand-nephew. It’s like a Cuban version of the Gotti family.”

The elderly woman ignored the comment. “The army?”

“Another joke. They have thirty-eight thousand men and women of all ranks, and half of them are employed as waiters and housekeeping staff for GAESA, the holding company for the Cuban Defense Ministry. Since the death of Julio Reugeiro, the
Cuban minister of defense, in 2011, the CEO of GAESA is Major Luis Alberto Rodriguez Lopez Callejas, who just happens to be married to Deborah Castro Espin—Raul Castro’s eldest daughter. It’s organized crime run by the military and all in the family—Castro’s family.”

Katherine Sinclair sat back in her expensive leather executive chair and smiled thinly. For the first time since arriving at the Grange, she seemed impressed.

“Well, I’ll be damned,” she said.

Dr. Eugenio Selman-Housein Sosa was desperately frightened. His blood pressure was rising into dangerous numbers, his pulse rate was at least a hundred and thirty beats per minute and his breath was coming in short, painful gasps. If he wasn’t careful he was going to go into ventricular fibrillation and drop dead on the front step of Dublin’s Shelburne Hotel.

As Cuba’s senior cardiologist, Dr. Eugenio Selman-Housein knew this was no exaggeration, and at seventy-seven years of age he was painfully aware that one incidence of VF would probably be his last.

He cursed silently. If only he’d taken the two days he needed at the Swiss conference two years ago, he would have had the cardioverter-defibrillator implanted at the Lindenhofspital in Bern and he wouldn’t be in this situation. Dear God, if only he hadn’t decided to walk back from the Trinity College campus, he wouldn’t be in this situation.

The doctor composed himself as best he could,
nodded to the top-hatted doorman in the red frock coat and stepped into the front lobby and confronted the staircase that led up to reception. He forced himself to climb without relying on the old-fashioned double wooden banister and made his way up to reception. He picked up his key, climbed into one of the refurbished cage elevators and waited as the white-gloved operator took him up to the top floor.

By the time he reached his room and stepped inside, he was gasping for air. He made his way to one of the upholstered club chairs in the sitting room of his one-bedroom suite, picked up his medical bag and dropped it into his lap. He found his bottle of bisoprolol, swallowed a ten-milligram tablet of the beta blocker dry and waited for his adrenaline levels to drop. At the same time he took out his portable battery-operated blood pressure machine, fitted on the cuff and hit the
START
button. He sat back in the chair and closed his eyes. He was carrying around the most terrifying secret in the world and it was literally killing him.

It took the better part of an hour. When his pulse had slowed to a more tractable eighty beats per minute, he called down to the Horseshoe Bar and ordered a bottle of Pyrat Cask dark rum. When it arrived he poured three fingers of the expensive liquor into a Scotch glass and drank it slowly. He poured a second drink, then picked up the telephone.
It was time. To carry the secret any longer was to invite death, and not just from ventricular fibrillation. Two bullets from El Tuerto, the One-Eyed’s famous silver-plated Type-92 Chinese semiautomatic, was just as likely. The phone rang twice and a somewhat nasal voice with a distinctly London accent answered.

“British embassy. How may I direct your call?”

William Copeland Black walked down the carpeted hallway of the principal floor of the British embassy on the Merrion Road in the Ballsbridge suburb of Dublin, home to most of the diplomatic missions in Ireland. He turned into the cultural attaché’s office, a small room with two desks and a tiny window that looked out onto the low-profile embassy’s courtyard, the last place on the property you were allowed to smoke. The only other person in the office was Anabel Bonet, who had supposedly been seconded to the cultural attaché’s office from Scotland Yard’s Art Theft and Forgery Squad to deal with the rash of art thefts that had been plaguing Ireland for the last few years.

The truth of it was that Anabel Bonet had never seen the inside of New Scotland Yard and anything she knew about art came from a first-year course she took at Cambridge. William Copeland Black was no cultural attaché, either, and everyone who was anyone in the embassy knew it, right down to Eva
Burden, the woman who answered the telephone. Both Anabel Bonet and William Black were MI6, tasked with keeping track of any potential terrorist action against the United Kingdom originating in or passing through the Republic of Ireland.

Black sat down behind his desk, pulled open the middle drawer and stared at the yellow packet of Carrol’s Sweet Afton cigarettes. He closed the drawer and looked across at Anabel. “I’ve just had the most intriguing telephone call.”

“Not here, you haven’t,” said Anabel.

“No, it came through the inquiries desk. When he gave them my name, they patched it over to my cellular while I was coming in to work.”

“After a very long lunch, I might add.”

“I went into Dubrays on Grafton Street to hear that writer.”

“Which writer?”

“Simon Toyne, the one with the funny hair. He’s rather good.”

“The phone call?”

“Right. It was from someone named Dr. Eugenio Selman-Housein Sosa. He’s staying at the Shelbourne. He wants to defect, of all things. I didn’t think anyone did that sort of thing anymore. Cold War stuff, you know?”

“Who on earth is Dr. Eugenio Selman et cetera, et cetera?”

“He’s Fidel Castro’s personal physician.”

“Bloody hell!” Anabel frowned. “What’s he doing in Dublin?”

“He’s a cardiologist. There’s a big convention at Trinity this week.”

“And he wants to defect?”

“That’s what he said.”

“Tell him to get into a cab, then.”

“He’s being watched, or so he says.”

“Do you believe him?”

“It’s possible. The Cuban DGI has a very long arm and he’s a VIP.”

“You can’t authorize this on your own.”

“I know. He’s only here until Friday. That’s three days. I’ll have to get on my trolley and visit Babylon tonight.”

“Good luck, mate.” Anabel grinned.

“I should be able to catch the diplomatic flight. No sense in traveling with the great unwashed on Ryanair or something equally disgusting.”

“No sense at all,” said Anabel somberly, then laughed.

At seven p.m. Black climbed into the waiting BAE 125 executive jet and settled back into one of the six cream-colored high-backed leather chairs in the narrow passenger section. Except for the diplomatic bag,
he was the aircraft’s only passenger. He felt a little foolish, but under the circumstances time really was of the essence. If Selman-Housein was serious about his intentions, it meant that something big was up. With Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez’s bowel cancer metastasizing to his liver and his lungs, the thought of one or the other of the two elderly Castro brothers casting off this mortal coil was the kind of thing that precipitated coups and revolutions. The world was in enough trouble without the Caribbean being hit by a political hurricane.

A white-jacketed RAF steward appeared from the front section of the jet and offered him coffee and biscuits. Black accepted and the steward disappeared again. Black ate the biscuits and drank the coffee, then dimmed the light and sat in the darkness, looking out at the night. The black featureless slab of the St. George’s Channel slid by forty thousand feet below their wings. Black smiled. Once upon a time his father had told him a story about crossing the same channel on his way to finding an assassin hell-bent on murdering the king and queen.

Morris Black, his father, had taken a certain ironic pride in being the only Jew working as a detective at Scotland Yard, although he had been fully aware that he would never rise any higher in the force because of that fact. Perhaps because of that he’d become the foremost murder investigator that organization had
ever seen and was called in to deal with the most difficult cases. One of those cases, which he wouldn’t ever discuss in detail until the day he died, had involved him in the intrigues of World War Two intelligence, initially landing him in the Special Operations Executive and eventually, after the war and for the rest of his life, with MI6. Somewhere early along the way, his father, already a young widower by then, had met, become involved with and eventually married his mother, Katherine Sanderson Copeland, who’d been OSS posted to England under Wild Bill Donovan during the war and a CIA officer under Hillenkoetter, Bedell-Smith, John Foster Dulles and John McCone after the war.

He’d loved both his parents very much and had been devastated when both died within a year of each other when he was in his late twenties, but they’d left him with an enduring affection for both the United States and England, an Oxford education, dual citizenship and a legacy’s introduction to the intelligence establishment of both countries. For that very reason he’d spent the last ten years as Washington liaison between MI6 and the CIA. Ireland was just a respite and he knew it—he had too many contacts in the agency not to be posted back there rather than the normally benign intelligence backwater Dublin had become. He could hardly wait. His estranged wife, Chelsea, lived in Anacortes, Washington, quite
successfully working on her third marriage, but at least he’d convinced her to let their young teenage son, Gabe, go to the British School of Washington in Georgetown. If he was posted back to the States, he’d be able to see his son on weekends. Whoever said that spies shouldn’t have families was right—there was no doubt that his marriage had been broken into matchsticks on the jagged rocks of his uncommunicative work as an intelligence officer, but in the end his son had been worth it. He sent up a silent prayer that the kid wouldn’t want to get into the spying business—sheet-metal work or refrigerator technician would be a better career.

The government jet landed at Northolt, a queen’s messenger in an armored Range Rover picked up the diplomatic bag and Black climbed into the waiting Augusta Westland helicopter that would take him to the London Heliport on the banks of the Thames. After that it would be a quick ride upriver in a Targa 31 Marine Unit cruiser, which would drop him off at the Thames security gate of the ziggurat-like headquarters of MI6.

Almost exactly three hours after leaving the embassy in Ballsbridge, Dublin, he was sitting in the expansive office of Sir John Sawyers, pronounced “Saws,” the fifty-six-year-old, dashing James Bond–ish director of the Secret Intelligence Services. He even
looked
like Pierce Brosnan: dark hair, blue-green
eyes with a hundred-dollar haircut, square jaw, square face, six-two or so and dressed by his own tailor on Savile Row. Also in attendance was James Wormold, the gray-haired, overweight and slightly slovenly old guard Section officer who had eventually come to head the Caribbean Section simply by attrition.

Sawyers had been educated at the University of Nottingham, St. Andrews, in Scotland and at Harvard. He spoke with a clearly upper-crust accent, but not plummy enough to be offensive. He and his wife, Shelley, had three children, including the twenty-three-year-old Connie, who was famous for posing with a gold-plated Kalashnikov in front of the family Christmas tree on her Facebook page.

Black had been surprised that his call to the Caribbean Section earlier in the day had been taken seriously enough for a meeting with Sawyers, but nevertheless, here he was.

“You confirmed that the man was actually Dr. Eugenio Selman-Housein Sosa?” Wormold asked. The Section head had the accent and attitude of a fifth-form English grammar teacher.

“Yes, sir.” Black nodded. “I checked with the Shelburne and he is registered there. He’s also registered at the Trinity convention. Just to make sure, I had one of our people take a file photograph over to the registration clerk at the Shelburne and he confirmed it, as well.”

“Why do you think he wants to defect?” Sawyers asked mildly.