It could have been worse. She managed to sleep a good deal. Friends came by to see her, including Ben, with whom she made up. She entrusted him with the two letters given to her by the young boy Guillermo and asked him to mail them for her. He said he would.
When she got out of the hospital, on her fourth day back, she took a taxi to her home on West 61st Street. The living room window was still boarded up. The place reminded her of pictures she has seen of Berlin during World War II. The building manager told her that repairs could be made just as soon as they received signed permission.
She signed the form and packed up a few things, called her old mentor, Joseph Collins, and arranged to stay at his son’s unused apartment on East 21st Street.
Then there was her first trip back to Fin Cen. She did this in the evening when most of the personnel were out. It would have been too much to see everyone at once, and there were parts of her trip that she simply didn’t feel like discussing. She spent ninety minutes with her boss, Andrew De Salvo, over Chinese takeout and cold beer. She was put back in charge of Operation Parajo and learned the two most salient details of where Operation Parajo stood:
Numero uno: the gunman who had shot at her had been taken into custody by the CIA and “turned into an asset,” whatever that meant these days. He was, in short, “neutralized.” Then again, other enemies would always be out there.
Numero dos: The Dosis were still out there somewhere, having slipped thought the holes in the worldwide dragnet. Alex’s indictments and the arrests she had ordered had brought much of the Dosi worldwide enterprise to its knees and just about ruined it financially. But the snake still had its head.
“So where are we now?” Alex asked. “Back at the beginning?”
“No, we’re entering an endgame,” Andrew De Salvo said. “These things take years, not months. And that’s if we’re lucky. You did a whale of a job once again. That’s what they tell me from D.C. Came back with an interesting haul from the Pearl of the Antilles. They want to see you in Washington, by the way. Things are under control here. You can take another ten days for R amp;R if you want.”
“I want.”
“Washington actually means Langley,” he added.
“Doesn’t it usually?”
Two afternoons later, Alex found herself in the familiar office in the west wing of the CIA headquarters, sitting in front of Maurice Fajardie, who was unraveling samples from the mishmash of notes, charts, and printouts that had traveled north with her on the Cessna. The Cubans hadn’t quite entered the twenty-first century of intelligence compiling, so much of the information had a retro look – plenty of colors. Agency analysts were now trying to determine what red and green and orange pages meant. But the preliminary feedback from the intelligence analysts was highly positive regarding the material from both Major Mejias and the late Roland Violette.
“So it was worth my visit?” she asked.
“Very much so,” Fajardie said. “A-list intelligence on a B-list enemy. Not akin to a top intelligence coup against our Muzzie adversaries, for example, but certainly when a hostile regime is ninety miles from our doorstep, an up-to-date snapshot is of great value. Most of Violette’s material was dated and harks back to the sixties, seventies, and eighties. Think bell-bottoms to big hair. But it puts some old cases in order, lets us know who’s still living in Cuba, and fleshes out some other cases. As for the stuff from Major Mejias, we’ve only had a week to look at that, but it’s excellent stuff. Here, let me show you. Look at some of the initial conclusions.”
Fajardie handed Alex a series of documents. Alex riffled through. She read a few of the conclusions that American intelligence analysts had come to:… Cuba remains in the midst of its worst economic and social crisis since the fall of the Soviet Union …… The Cuban people, frustrated with massive unemployment and food shortages, could revolt at any time …… Raul Castro drinks very heavily since the death of his wife. He is more in touch with the people than his brother was, but he would not hesitate to use the military to repress threats to the Communist regime … On the other hand, the overtures of reconciliation to the United States that he has made through the Spanish ambassador to Washington are sincere …… More than 90 percent of all Cuban diplomats assigned to New York and Washington are engaged in espionage …
She looked up. “What about Violette?” Alex asked. “I assume he genuinely wanted to return. Am I correct?”
“You are,” he said. “But old antagonisms die hard around this agency. We had agents butchered in Angola, Colombia, Spain, Cuba, and Venezuela due to this man. Do you think that anyone here was ready to see him return and receive free health care at a federal prison hospital? Do you think anyone had any real affection for seeing that vacuous, deranged, sneering face returning in pseudo-triumph?”
“I doubted it all along,” Alex said. “I posed that question to him myself, but he was too far gone to comprehend.”
“When the possibility of reeling in ‘Figaro’ arose, the possibility of a trade-off took shape. So if someone such as yourself was going to be kind enough to go to the island, scoop up Violette’s final bag of goodies, and return with an even greater additional haul – well then! Stuff began to arrange itself behind the scenes. The Agency beat the FBI to Manuel Perez and made its own deal. Pretty good one, don’t you think? We turned him back to our side and had him take care of some business in Cuba for us.”
“Hitting Violette, you mean?”
“That was part of it.”
“What was the other part?”
“Have you heard the name Julio Garcia recently?”
“Too many times, yes. I believe I should talk to Paul Guarneri about that.”
“I believe you should,” Fajardie said. “Have a nice chat.”
“I have one other stop first,” she said. “Some final points of interest. I’m going to take my queries directly to the source.”
“Be my guest,” said Fajardie.
That afternoon, Alex drove back across the Key Bridge into Washington, where she located a Cuban restaurant called Los Matamoros on a tiny side street in Georgetown. She spotted ex-Major Mejias and Juanita, his wife, at a rear booth.
The emigre couple faced front. Their backs were to the rear wall. They looked as if they were settling into their new life but knew they still had enemies. Mejias’s eyes worked the room as he rose to greet her. A slap of a new cologne assaulted Alex during a token embrace. They sat. In the background, someone had fed the jukebox. Shakira was rocking the place. Nice and loud, great for talking off the record.
For the next ninety minutes, over plates of spicy Montuna chicken and glasses of cold drinks, Senora Mejias kept quiet as her husband told his own story to Alex, who slipped easily into Spanish for the encounter.
Mejias had been five years old when Fidel Castro marched into Havana in 1959, he said. In his youth, he became fervently pro-Castro.
“I believed socialism would eradicate the problems of the Cuban people,” he said. “But after the fall of communism in Eastern Europe and the crash of the Soviet Union in 1991, I had my doubts about socialism. Because of my profession, and my position in state security, I was able to travel. I could see that the socialist system had not functioned in my country or any country that I had seen.”
He paused.
“As years went by, I learned that my parents had come to Cuba from Spain as political refugees, fleeing the fascist Franco. I had the rights to a Spanish passport. You know this, I think. I wanted to return to my parent’s homeland now that sanity had been restored. Juanita wished to leave with me. But the Cuban government routinely blocked passport applications from any of us in sensitive positions. And they took away security clearances and financial allowances for anyone who applied. So I held back because I wished to bring my wife with me. I never applied. That was six years ago. I’ve been preparing my exit since then.”