“What exactly is Operación de Venganza?” Holliday asked.
“On the day following Fidel Castro’s death, three nuclear missiles will be launched at the United States, one aimed at what is now Orlando International Airport, but which in 1962 was McCoy Air Force Base. McCoy is where the U-2 that discovered the missiles landed and where all further U-2 flights over Cuba originated. The other two missiles will be aimed at Miami. The warheads are one megaton each.”
“How could the Brotherhood know when Fidel was going to die? You can’t keep missiles like that ready to launch indefinitely.”
“They know because one of their number is going to assassinate him, Jaime Cardinal Lucas Ortega y Alamino, the archbishop of Cuba. He always celebrates the Feast of St. Lazarus with El Comandante. His death will look natural, a stroke or seizure of some kind.”
“How did you discover all this?” Holliday quizzed.
“I worked for the ministry all of my adult life, always in low-level positions. I never was given even a bicycle for transportation to the ministry from my home, let alone an automobile.” The white-haired man shook his head. “My last job was as a driver and part of the security detail for Deborah Espin.” Domingo Cabrera smiled sadly. “In Cuba the one thing more invisible than a chauffeur is a black chauffeur; people speak of things they should not, as though you were not even there. And Deborah Espin is a very heavy drinker, as well. Her tongue gets very loose when she has been drinking. My mistake was to listen.” He shrugged. “In the end someone discovered that I knew too much and I had to disappear. My only other choice would have been to die peacefully in my bed with a bullet in my brain like many others at the ministry before me.”
“I still don’t understand the purpose of it all,” Holliday said after a moment’s thought. “Wiping out Orlando and Miami is going to kill a lot of people, but for what? It’s a horrible, meaningless gesture.”
“The Brotherhood knows that on the death of Fidel, Raul and his family will flee the country. Raul keeps una jet ejecutivo at Ciudad Libertad Airport in the Atabay District of Havana for just this purpose. It is only ten minutes away from his home. With Raul gone, the country will descend into chaos.
“Eventually a military dictator will rise above the rest, but it is unlikely to be one of the Brotherhood’s choosing, and between the death of Fidel and the rise of this new strongman a great deal of damage will be done. The only way to stop this, at least according to the Brotherhood, is to enact Operación de Venganza and force the United States to invade Cuba.
“The embargo would disappear overnight, the old Cuban families would take back what was theirs fifty years ago and so will the American companies that Fidel nationalized. It will begin a new era of prosperity for our country without bloodshed. Cuban bloodshed at least.”
Holliday stared at Eddie’s white-haired older brother. The plan made a terrible, mad kind of sense. Under any other circumstances an American invasion of Cuba would have seen the United States vilified and ostracized around the world, but with a million or two dead by nuclear fire in a sneak attack worse than Pearl Harbor, an invasion would not only have just cause, but it would be politically correct, as well. Swift retribution. With that scenario in play, any president would be guaranteed four more years, no matter how low his polling numbers were.
“Dear God,” whispered Holliday.
Domingo Cabrera smiled sadly. “I am afraid God has not visited Cuba in many years, Colonel Holliday.”
“When is the Feast of Lazarus?”
“The twenty-first day of this month. Seven days from now.”
“So there’s nothing we can do to stop this thing.”
“No, Colonel, I am afraid there is nothing we can do at all.”
The man who had carried the two oversized Halliburton suitcases on the Air Cubana flight booked into the Disney Contemporary Resort and used his Amex card to prepay his two-week reservation. With that done, he gave the single dark blue Samsonite case he’d purchased in Houston to a bellboy, picked up his room key and went back outside.
He turned down the offer of one of the half dozen or so valet parkers, then took the Chrysler out into the enormous complex of parking lot that served the Contemporary Resort as well as several other Disney facilities. After he ensured that no one was watching, he removed two local New Orleans plates from the trunk, removed the rental Texas plates and screwed on the ones from Louisiana.
He’d spent an hour in New Orleans looking for the same model of Chrysler just to confuse things if it came to that. Finally he put the fourteen-day permit on the dashboard, locked the car and walked back to the hotel. He asked the concierge to get him a cab, tipped the man and rode to Orlando International Airport in time to catch a one-ten JetBlue flight to Nassau, which arrived an hour later.
In Nassau he switched from his authentic but bogus American passport to his Cuban diplomatic passport and caught the three-fifteen Compañía Panameña de Aviación Airlines flight to Havana via Panama City. The flight took a little less than five hours all told and he arrived back in Havana in time for a late dinner in the Comedor de Aguiar dining room at the Hotel Nacional.
With his dinner completed, he took out the pocket-sized Inmarsat satellite phone, pulled out the blade antenna and dialed the suitcases in Orlando. The suitcases immediately demanded his authorization code, which he sent. Following that, he ran a series of test numbers to the suitcases, which then informed him that everything was in order.
He ended the data communication function, folded away the blade antenna and then had a look at the dessert menu. He chose the Copa Lolita crème caramel with two scoops of vanilla ice cream and a rum and raisin sauce. He ate his dessert slowly, savoring each bite, then had the waiter fetch him a Bolívar Petit Belicosos and a Havana club on the rocks. He lit the cigar and blew a swirl of the rich aromatic smoke into the air. He took a sip of his drink and leaned back against the banquette. He smiled happily. All in all, it had been an excellent day.
PART THREE
LIFTOFF
18
Vatican secretary of state Cardinal Antonio Niccolo Spada contemplated the remains of his breakfast on the lap table lying over his thighs and wondered how it was that Thomas Brennan, a lowly parish priest, always found some way to disturb his digestion.
At his age the cardinal’s breakfast was not what it used to be—which had once been asparagus spears topped with two fried eggs, crumbled pancetta and bread crumbs seasoned with Parmesan, followed by sfogliatelli stuffed with ricotta and/or cannoli along with several cups of strong espresso.
Now it was what lay before him: a single soft-boiled egg, a piece of dry, whole-grain toast and tea with lemon. On occasion when he felt like living dangerously, he would add a small glass of freshly squeezed orange juice, more for the irony of the fact that the Vatican kitchen’s oranges were inevitably Jaffas imported from Israel than for the flavor. In fact, he’d developed a taste for powdered Tang in the ’60s and still much preferred it.
Spada picked up his glasses from the night table and put them on. He looked around the bedroom and wondered if all the struggle had been worth it. He imagined that one day in the near future he would die here, hopefully in an undisturbed sleep.