“My own home and my head nearly got blown off,” she said, “because you guys were a few days behind the guy assigned to whack me! That doesn’t inspire a lot of confidence, gentlemen. I don’t feel myself bonding here.”
“Look, I can put Alex on protective administrative leave,” De Salvo said. “This happened one other time in my memory. That’s what we did and it worked.”
“But where do I go?” asked Alex. “I’m not sure I have faith in the system you’re presenting to me.”
“Where would you like to go?” Ramirez asked. “Within reason.”
She considered it. “What are we talking about? Short-term witness protection?” she asked. “Something ‘flyover’? Arizona? New Mexico? Grand Rapids, Michigan?”
“Something like that. There’s a lot of latitude.”
“I’m not buying into this, gentlemen,” Alex said. “Part of me says I could go underground by myself and survive just as well.” She thought of the two million dollars in the bank. “Maybe even better.”
“Than what?” MacPhail asked. “We can’t help without your cooperation.”
Silence rolled around the room like a fog. Finally, “Well, maybe you should make that trip to Cuba, after all,” De Salvo said as a joke.
“Maybe I should,” Alex answered, not as a joke.
MacPhail and Ramirez glanced at each other. “What trip?” MacPhail asked.
“One that’s not going to happen,” Alex said.
Another uneasy silence rolled around the room. Then, “If you have something good, we need to hear about it, okay?” MacPhail said. “Cuba? Can you talk about this?”
Alex glanced to De Salvo, who threw her a shrug. She looked back to MacPhail and Ramirez. “Can I talk about it?” she asked her boss.
De Salvo opened his hands and nodded.
“This goes back to a previous operation,” Alex began. “A friend of a friend has unfinished business in Cuba. Goes back many years. He’s looking for someone to go to Cuba with him. A woman.”
De Salvo looked to Alex. “Give them the back story,” he said.
She did, in a five-minute mini-clinic, running from the catastrophe in Ukraine to the most recent dinner in Brooklyn.
“How long would the trip to Fidel’s socialist paradise take?” De Salvo asked.
“Maybe a couple of weeks,” Alex said. “A month at most. That’s what Paul was talking about.”
“Paul?” MacPhail asked.
“Her quasi-organized crime guy who’s running this,” said De Salvo.
“He’s not OC himself but he knows people,” Alex answered. “We don’t have anything on him except where he was born and who his old man was.”
“Sometimes that’s enough,” MacPhail said. “But no matter. Maybe we can use this.” He paused, then asked, “You’re on a first-name basis with this guy? Good work.”
“Don’t make more of it than it is, all right?” she answered sharply.
“A trip to Cuba would get her off the New York streets for a time while we wrap up Manuel Perez,” Ramirez offered.
“Far off the streets. No one would ever look in Cuba, I got to say. On that score, it’s brilliant. And the beaches are great, I hear,” MacPhail said. “I know Canadians. And Germans. They go snorkeling and scuba diving every February. It’s cheap.”
“He means drinking and fornicating, most likely,” Ramirez said.
“Gentlemen, let’s bring it back to our immediate problems, okay?” De Salvo said. “Is this a possibility?”
“Yes, it’s a possibility for us if it works for you,” MacPhail said. “And there’s one other iron that we might be able to get in the fire. Want to hear it?”
“Go ahead,” Alex said.
“Okay, look, I hear things,” MacPhail said. “Caribbean desk. They often use freelance people in Cuba. What are you going in for? What purpose specifically?”
“My friend seems to think that a sizeable amount of money is stashed somewhere. He wants to go grab it. At least that’s what he’s telling me, though whether he’s telling me everything is another question,” Alex said. “Some of what he says doesn’t wash. But I feel he’s got credibility on the money angle.”
“Okay,” MacPhail resumed. “What are you supposed to do on this trip?”
“Pose as his wife where necessary and watch his back.”
“So he could help you on an operation in return for you helping him, correct?” MacPhail asked. “And all of this would be off the books? No one would even know … that’s what you’re saying?”
“In essence, yes,” Alex said.
“We could put her on leave,” De Salvo said. “There’d be no official record of where she is.”
MacPhail settled back. “Let me run a name past you,” he said. “Roland Violette.” The name drew blanks from Alex and her boss. “Nothing?” MacPhail asked.
They shook their heads.
“Roland Violette was a CIA employee in the 1950s and 1960s,” MacPhail said. “Turned out he was a Russian agent. He ratted out several CIA operatives in Central America to the Soviets in the ‘70s, then defected to Cuba in the ‘80s. He’s been there since.”
“So?” Alex asked.
“He’s been making noises about coming back to the U.S.,” MacPhail said. “Says he’s got a packet of Cuban intelligence goodies to bring with him. We could use someone to go in, check out the situation, and get him on a covert flight out if he’s worth it. Interested?”
Alex glanced to her boss, then back to MacPhail. “Might be,” she said.
“We’re dealing with him through the Swiss Embassy in Havana,” MacPhail said. “If you can get yourself onto the island, we can get you off … maybe seven to ten days later. Would that allow you enough time to keep your capo happy also?”
“Don’t know. I can ask.”
“Why don’t you tell him, not ask him?”
“That might work too,” she said.
“Why don’t you do that?” MacPhail asked. “We can work within a time frame that will cover the next thirty days. See when your friend wants to go into Cuba, when he wants to get airlifted out.” MacPhail glanced at De Salvo. “What do you think? How crazy is this?”
“It might work,” De Salvo said. He turned to Alex. “I can have someone step up and run your operations for you, we can clean up the Perez mess, your Mafia guy gets his payback from the Federov operation, and you get out of town.”
Alex turned back to her boss.
“If I’m going to do this,” she said, “I’m going to need some quick background. I’m not going to a place like Cuba cold. I need to know what I’m doing.”
“I can arrange it,” De Salvo said.
TWENTY-THREE
Late that afternoon, Alex’s guards took her to a townhouse maintained by the FBI on East 38th Street between Lexington and Third. The building had six apartments. Two NYPD guards sat in the lobby, which was concealed from street view behind two locked doors.
Alex was given a three-room apartment on the third-floor rear. It was pleasantly appointed, clean, and safe. The Feds also sent a housekeeping team over to her home on West 61st Street. The housekeepers retrieved clothing and everything else she requested and moved her in by that evening at 9:00 p.m. She settled in, knowing that she would be moving again within a few days, if the Cuban mission received a green light.
De Salvo came by that evening. He had files on flash drives for her and a fresh laptop. They had a working dinner over Thai takeout.
“So,” Alex asked at length, “what can you tell me?”
“Almost everything you need to know is on the drives,” he said. “Hope you don’t mind some heavy reading.”
“I don’t,” she said, “but I want to know what you know. You’ve been on Central America and the Caribbean your whole career. What stands out?”
“Well, here’s a tidbit you won’t hear from anyone else,” De Salvo said. “As Americans fled Castro’s takeover in 1959, people with connections to the U.S. Embassy dropped off a lot of stuff for safekeeping. Valuables like jewels, furs, stock certificates, antiques, even boxes of money. It’s still there to this day. The ‘U.S. Interests Section,’ located in the old U.S. Embassy, is technically part of the Swiss Embassy. But it’s fully staffed by American personnel and is an embassy in all but name. That this is a part of the Swiss Embassy is just a mutually convenient legalism, both for us and the Cubans. Everything is in a room that’s been kept locked ever since 1960. It’s so sensitive that the stuff has never been inventoried. No one knows what kind of identification accompanies the items. I doubt if there’s anyone alive who was physically on the premises to take the items in. Couple that with the fact that most of the people who dropped that stuff off are dead. The ultimate fate of such property? Who knows? Stuff like that is going to make your buried money look like an easy case.”