“I think it’s probably a case of shoot the messenger, Sir John. If Castro is dying I think he’s afraid that he’s going to be blamed. In Cuba that means a bullet in the head, a plane crash or a ‘sudden heart attack.’”
“Mr. Wormold?” Sawyers asked.
“It’s quite possible.”
Sawyers sat back in his expensive-looking leather chair and surveyed the George Stubbs painting hanging there—
Mares and Foals in a Landscape
. One of the perks of the job was to pick paintings for your office. Finally he spoke.
“Do we really want him?”
“I beg your pardon?” Wormold said, his eyes wide with surprise.
“Do we really want him?” Sawyers repeated. “If that’s all he’s got to offer, it doesn’t really amount to much—everyone knows Castro is ailing; he’s had cancer and a bout of divirticulitis that almost killed him. He’s frail and he probably has some sort of dementia.”
“And his mother was something like a hundred and three when she died,” said Wormold sourly. “The man could live forever.”
“His mother was barely sixty when she died,” corrected Black. “And his father was eighty. The whole Castro family longevity story is a myth.”
“So, what do you suggest?” Wormold said, a vague suggestion of a sneer in his tone.
“Call Younger Brother and tell them what we’ve got. They’re probably more interested than we are,” Black answered promptly. For intelligence purposes during World War Two, Younger Brother had been the code name for the United States, while Older Brother was England.
“I like it.” Sawyers nodded. “We’ll let him defect, then send him off to Washington for interrogation.” He smiled. “With you in tow, of course, just to keep them honest.”
“As Caribbean Section head, don’t you think—” began Wormold.
“No, I don’t,” said Sawyers. “Set it up, Black. I’ll make the necessary calls to Langley.”
El Templete is located close to Havana Harbor on Avenue Carlos Manuel Céspedes, sometimes called the Avenida del Puerto. The neoclassical building constructed in 1828 is situated exactly in front of the Palacio de los Capitanes Generales, which today is the City Museum of Havana. Across the street is the Hotel Santa Isabel, the grandest of the old hotels in Havana and in the 1700s the home of the counts of Santovenia.
La Templete is surrounded by a wrought-iron fence and looks out onto the Plaza des Armas, a sixteenth-century square once used to assemble and inspect troops and that dates back to the original settlement of San Cristóbal de Habana by Don Diego Velázquez.
The cut-stone frieze below the simple peaked-roof cornice of the building is decorated with arcane symbols of skulls, crosses and intersecting circles that are usually associated with the Holy Trinity. One symbol,
exactly in the center of the frieze and directly above the heavy bronze doors of the building, shows four triangles, points facing inward—a Templar cross separated into four distinct parts.
Most of the detail of the frieze is covered by two hundred years of lichen, mold and city grime. Alongside El Templete stands a beautiful and thick ceiba tree in the place where on November 16, 1519, the Villa de San Cristóbal was founded. The tree was highly revered by the natives, who attributed it with great magical-religious powers.
On November 16 each year, Habaneros and people from all over Cuba line up for their chance to take three turns around the magic tree and leave offerings between her huge bulbous roots. For the Indio natives who were here long before Columbus set sail for the New World, this was the Mother Tree, a virtual god that solved all problems and healed all wounds.
Eddie drove the old motorcycle up onto the curb and switched off the engine. On their left was the low wrought-iron fence that surrounded the tree-shrouded Plaza des Armas. On their right, across the broad street, was El Templete, so small it looked more like a mausoleum than a temple. It, too, was surrounded by a wrought-iron fence, this one much higher. Between the fence and the building was a tall, heavy-trunked tree with widespread branches spread like a protective umbrella; this had to be the ceiba
tree, the devil tree Eddie’s mother had mentioned. There was also something that looked like a ticket booth on the pathway leading to the old building.
There were tourists milling around inside the fence, some taking pictures of the huge shade tree while others roamed around the tiny windowless building. Other people went in and out of the Museum of Havana directly behind it, and more tourists stood and read the menu and the prices posted for the restaurant inside. Most turned away shaking their heads, but a few actually went in.
Directly in front of them, shaded by an umbrella of her own and seated behind a flimsy-looking card table on a padded stool, was an ancient black woman, her rake-thin body encased in a formless, faded print dress. Her face was a mass of wrinkles and the skin was stretched like leathery parchment over her bony arms. Her feet were bare and she was smoking a narrow cigar. On the table in front of her was a cooler, a large deck of cards, a few silvery trinkets and some strange-looking leather thong necklaces with small cloth bags hanging from them.
“Who is this woman?” Holliday asked.
“Mama Oya,” said Eddie.
“Does she have a real name?”
“If she ever had one, even she has forgotten it,” replied Eddie. They approached the woman behind the card table. Holliday was surprised to see what
appeared to be an old-fashioned six-ounce bottle of Coca-Cola lying on a bed of crushed ice in the cooler.
“
Hekua hey Yansa,
” said Eddie, bowing slightly.
“
Hekua hey
yourself, Eddie Cabrera, the child who used to be called
El Vampiro
.” She spoke almost perfect English.
“
El Vampiro?
”
“It is nothing, Doc,” said Eddie.
The old woman gave a brief cackling laugh as she looked up at Holliday. Her eyes were ice blue and clear with no hint of age. They could have been the eyes of a young girl. “When he was a little boy Eddie would take off all his clothes and walk around the streets of Old Havana in the middle of the night,” said Mama Oya, grinning around her cigar. She turned back to Eddie. “You come about your brother, the white-haired one.”
“You knew this?”
“Mama Oya knows everything. Just like I know your friend is American and was once a soldier.”
“Canadian,” said Holliday.
“
No mientas a Mamá Oya, gringo,
” said the old woman sharply. “You are an American, you were once a soldier and then you taught soldiers. You hated your father and love your wife still even though she has been gone for many years.”
My God, thought Holliday, literally taking a step back. The wizened creature in front of him couldn’t
have known all that. Unless Eddie had somehow managed to tell her. He turned and looked at his friend, the question clear in his expression. Eddie shook his head slowly.
“I know this in the same way as I know that Eddie has crossed an ocean to search for his brother, Domingo, so he might ease his mother’s pain. I know because Mama Oya sits here and sees many things.”
“You have seen Domingo?” Eddie asked.
“I saw him driving Raul’s daughter, the one married to Espin. They came to this place more than once for their meetings in the night.”
“Who came, Mama?” Eddie asked.
“Luis Alberto Rodriguez Lopez Callejas, Luis Perez Rospide, Lieutenant Colonel Rojas.”
“The man who runs Tecnotex SA,” explained Eddie. “They import anything technological…computers, satellite phones—all for the top people only.” He turned to Mama Oya. “Any others, Mama?”
“Jesus Bermudez Cutiño,” said the old woman.
“Director of Military Intelligence.”
“Juan Almeida Bosque.”
“He oversees all real estate transactions and builds hotels exclusively for the use of foreigners.”
“Colonel Brito.”
“CEO of Aerogaviota. It has its own fleet of helicopter based at Baracoa Air Base. The personnel are all military. It is supposed to be for tourism and
rentals to foreign businessmen, but it is actually there to provide air support in case of insurrection.”
“Also there was Ramiro Valdés,” said Mama Oya darkly. “A devil, truly.”
“Minister of Informatics and Communications, also minister of the Interior—the Secret Police, also the minister of Agriculture. He is Adolf Hitler, this man. He went to a conference in Venezuela, and the joke in Havana was that he’d gone there to fix their
silla eléctrica
, their electric chair. He is a sadist and a murderer, amigo, and very dangerous.”
“Were you here on the night when Eddie’s brother disappeared?” Holliday asked.
“Buy something from Mama Oya and perhaps I’ll tell you.”
Holliday took a twenty-dollar bill out of his wallet, laid it on the card table and picked up a freezing-cold Coca-Cola from the cooler. He used the metal bottle opener hanging from a string threaded through a hole high on the side of the container and took a sip.
He was surprised. It tasted exactly like the five-cent bottles he’d bought as a child from Pop Mercier’s grocery store down the street from Uncle Henry’s house in Fredonia, New York. You’d drop a nickel into the slot and it would allow you to drag your drink through a maze of metal tubes until it was free, dripping water and wonderfully chilled on a hot summer’s day.
“It is the same as you remember, isn’t it, gringo?” Mama Oya said. “The Mexicans use sugar instead of corn syrup.”
“Is that so?” Holliday said, trying to be calm in the face of a tiny old woman who seemed to be able to read his mind and then some. He took another long pull on the Coke. She was right; the taste was lighter and sweeter than the heavy goop they sold in cans now. It was like stepping into the past.
“That is so, gringo.” The old woman smiled. “And yes, I was here on the night that Eddie disappeared.”
“Did he speak with you?” Eddie asked.
“Yes.”
“You were still here so late at night?”
“The Plaza des Armas is my home, gringo. I have no other. Domingo knew where I go to dream.”
“What did he tell you, Mama Oya?”
The old woman turned over the top card in her large deck and laid it out on the table. It was a tarot card, but unlike any Holliday had ever seen. It showed a dancing man, his belt hung with skulls, a machete in one hand, a severed head in the other and the face of the devil. The colors of the card were green and black, and the number 7 was printed above the image, as was the name Ogun printed in heavy, dark ink.
“
Ogún oko dara obaniché aguanile ichegún iré,
” the old woman hissed. “He told me that if Eddie
came, to tell him that he had gone to the Valle del Muerte. The Valley of Death.”
Other than looking a little silly, like Mr. Spock in the old
Star Trek
series, having a Bluetooth screwed into your earhole had a great number of advantages for the average intelligence agent—you no longer looked like a complete idiot talking to yourself in virtually any situation or environment and you could keep in touch with anyone else on your surveillance team. William Copeland Black sat on a stool in the Insomnia Coffee Shop on Grafton Street and kept an eye on Fusilier’s Gate, the main entrance to St. Stephen’s Green. It was a gray day, threatening rain, but there were still lots of people on the pedestrian mall just outside the big picture window of the coffee shop.
Dr. Eugenio Selman-Housein, Fidel’s personal physician, was in play. After an afternoon of shopping on Grafton Street, he was supposed to enter the Green through the Fusilier’s Gate on his way back to the Shelburne. So far he was almost twenty minutes late. Black wasn’t worried—yet—but he was beginning to get that familiar stiffness in the back of his neck that meant something was going wrong.
“Anything?” he said. There was a series of responding clicks in his ear. One click for no, two for yes. Where was the doctor?
And suddenly there he was, walking right by the Insomnia’s window and stopping for the light at Grafton and King streets, a shopping bag in each hand, his expression clearly nervous. He was wearing a hideous Marks & Spencer green cardigan, gray trousers and brown shoes. He looked like a thin, badly dressed owl behind his wire-rimmed spectacles. The doctor crossed King Street to the shopping center on the corner, then crossed again to Fusilier’s Gate and walked into the park.
“Got him. Target is in the park.” Two shopping bags. A black-and-gold one from Zara and a red-on-white one from H and M.”
There was a voice in Black’s ear. “Three. I see him.”
Black started silently counting to himself. At twenty-five, there was nothing; at forty-five, a man in his thirties wearing sunglasses, a leather jacket and a pale green Gucci T-shirt crossed to Fusilier’s Gate from the far side of Grafton Street. He had slicked-back black hair, tanned skin and a single earbud line running down to his T-shirt and then under it.
“Three, he’s got a shadow. Black leather jacket, green T-shirt, cream-colored linen pants.”
“Three. Got him.”
“Three, give him a ten-second lead and then follow him. I’m coming in now. You know what to do,” Black said.
“Yes, sir. Three out.”
“The rest of you keep your eyes open. He’s got ears on. There’s going to be others around.” Once again there was a series of clicks.
Black swallowed the last of his cold coffee, left the store and walked across Grafton Street, thick with tourists even this early in the season, especially with everything in the country being on sale these days. He crossed over to Fusilier’s Gate and quickened his pace. He spotted Major a hundred feet behind Leather Jacket. Major was wearing a London Fog belted raincoat and a gray fedora, looking like something out of a Humphrey Bogart movie. Black spoke quietly. “Three, start the ball rolling.”
Major began walking faster and so did Black. By the time Major had drawn even with the man in the leather jacket, Black was only twenty feet behind them both. Major drew ahead of the man and Black saw the shadow’s shoulders visibly relax. The man slowed his pace, letting Major get even farther ahead. Black put his hand into the right-hand pocket of his suit jacket and popped the top off the fountain-pen-like device he was carrying. In fact, it was a modified version of an insulin pen filled with a light dose of dihydroetorphine.