Cuba

CHAPTER TWELVE

Six hours after William Henry Chance and Tommy Carmellini walked out of the University of Havana science building, Dr. Bouchard was on his way to Washington via Mexico City with two of the culture samples in his diplomatic pouch. Three hours later one of the lowest-ranking mission employees with diplomatic status left on a plane to Freeport, there to transfer to a flight to Miami, and then on to Washington. This employee carried the other two samples in her diplomatic pouch.

Chance and Carmellini were dropped at their hotel after changing clothes in the van. “Burn those clothes immediately, and don’t touch them with your bare hands,” Chance told the driver.

At the hotel both men went straight to their rooms, stripped, and stood in the shower for as long as they could stand it.

Standing under the shower head Chance waited for the first symptom to announce its arrival. Every now and then he shuddered, despite the hot water, as cold chills ran up and down his spine. He had a raging headache. When he got out of the shower he toweled himself dry, got in bed and arranged a wet, cool washcloth across his forehead.

The lab worker writhing on the floor, the startled face of the guard the instant before he died — these scenes played over and over in his mind. The death throes of the lab worker were bad enough, but the face of the guard, when he saw the pistol rising, saw the silencer, knew Chance was going to shoot: that face Chance would carry to his grave.

He shouldn’t have had to kill the guard. The truth of the matter was that he panicked when the lab worker died horribly; he stood in the air locks thinking he or Carmellini would be next, any second. He had wanted out of that building so badly he had thrown caution to the wind and bolted blindly for the front door. It was a miracle that there weren’t two or three guards standing by the main entrance, that they didn’t have guns out as the two figures from biological hell stepped out of the elevator.

Ah, the stink of Lady Luck.

Lying there in the darkness he thought about microorganisms, wondered what was in the sample vials, wondered why the lab worker, who must have been immunized, died such a painful, horrible death.

One thing was certain: The Cubans were well on their way to having biological weapons. And the only conceivable target was the United States.

With his head pounding, unable to sleep, he turned on his small computer and typed an E-mail reporting the intrusion and his findings. After he encrypted the message, he used the telephone on the desk to get on the Web and fire the message into cyberspace.

Then he went back to bed, and finally to sleep.

The American stood amid the shards of glass looking at the body of the lab worker. He wore a protective garment that covered him head to toe and a mask that filtered the air he breathed. He looked at everything, taking his time, then exited the laboratory through the air lock.

Alejo Vargas was waiting for him. He said nothing, merely waited for the American to talk.

“The virus has apparently mutated,” the American said finally. “I thought the strain was stable, but …” He gave the tiniest shrug.

“Mutated?”

“Possibly.”

“Come now, Professor. I have not asked for scientific proof. Tell me what you think.”

“A mutation. A few days with the electron microscope would give us some clues. We need to do more cultures to be sure. It would help if I could dissect the dead man, see how the disease affected him.”

“Like you did the others?”

“You told me they were killers, condemned men. We had to know!”

“What if the disease gets away from you at the morgue? What if it spreads to the general population?”

“With the proper precautions the danger is minuscule. Man, the advancement of human knowledge requires—”

“No,” Vargas said. He gestured to the lab. “If that gets away from us, for whatever reason, there won’t be a human left alive on this island.”

“Then don’t ask me for opinions,” the professor snapped. “You can guess as well as I.”

Alejo Vargas’s eyes narrowed to slits. His voice was cold with fury. “I wanted to use an anthrax agent, but no, you insisted on poliomyelitis. Now you tell me it mutated, as I feared it might.”

The damned fool, the American thought. Of course he had insisted on a virus — for Christ’s sake, his life work was studying viruses, not bacteria.

Vargas continued, pronouncing the sentence: “We spent all this money, built the warheads, installed them, and we took huge risks to do it. Don’t talk to me of acceptable risks.”

The professor was not the type to calmly submit to lectures from his intellectual inferiors. “Don’t get wrathy with me, Vargas. You’re a stupid, ignorant thug. I didn’t design the universe and I can’t take responsibility for it. I merely try to understand, to learn, to increase the store of man’s knowledge.”

The American lost his temper at that point and spluttered, “Biology isn’t engineering, goddammit! Sometimes two plus two equals five.”

Vargas turned his back on the professor. He stared into the lab, which appeared cold and stark under the lights yet was full of poisonous life.

“I don’t understand what happened in there,” the American said. “He didn’t just fall. It looks like there was a struggle.”

“Someone broke in,” Vargas said.

The professor was horrified. “Broke in? Past the guards? Who would be so foolish?”

“Someone who wanted to see what was in there,” Vargas said, and turned to look at the other man’s face. A note of satisfaction crept into his voice as he added, “Probably Americans. Perhaps CIA.”

The professor looked startled, as if the possibility had not crossed his mind.

“Come, come, Professor, don’t tell me you thought your work here in Cuba would remain a secret forever.”

“I am a scientist,” the American said. “Science is my life.”

Vargas snorted derisively. “Your life!” he said softly, contemptuously.

The professor lost it. “Fool!” he shouted. “Idiot! You sit in this Third World cesspool and think this crap matters—fool!”

“Perhaps,” Vargas said coldly. He was used to Professor Svenson, an unrepentant intellectual snob, the very worst kind, and American to boot. “I would like to stay and trade curses with you today but there is no time. The workers are waiting outside. You are going to show them how to clean up the lab, then you will determine exactly what happened to the viruses. You will write down all that must be done to check the warheads. You will have the report hand-delivered to me. If you fail to do exactly what I say, you will go into the crematorium with the lab worker. Do you understand me, Professor?”

“You can’t threaten me. I’m—”

Alejo Vargas flicked his fingers across the professor’s cheek, merely a sting. He stared into his eyes. “You suffer from a regrettable delusion that you are irreplaceable—I can cure that. If you wish, you can go to the crematorium right now. Two body bags are not much more trouble than one.”

When Vargas left, Olaf Svenson sat and hid his face in his hands.

He had never thought past the scientific problems to the ones he now faced. Oh, he should have, of course: he knew that Vargas intended to put the virus into warheads. He shut his mind to the horror — he wanted to see if the mutation could be controlled. No, he wanted to see if he could control the mutation of the viruses. The scientific challenges consumed him. Vargas had the money and the facilities — Olaf Svenson wanted to do the research.

He was going to have to get out of Cuba, and as soon as possible. The university thought he was in Europe — that was where he would go. The CIA probably had no evidence, or not enough to prosecute him in an American court. If he went to the airport and took a plane now they probably would never get enough — Vargas certainly wasn’t going to be a willing witness.

He waited a few minutes, long enough for Vargas to clear off upstairs, then stood and took a last fleeting look at the lab. With a sigh he turned his back on what might have been and walked to the elevator. In the lobby he took the time to give detailed instructions to the workers who would clean up the lab, answered the foreman’s questions, then watched as they boarded the elevator. When the elevator door closed behind the workers, Professor Svenson nodded to the guards at the entrance of the building, set off down the street and never looked back.

The P-3 Orion antisubmarine patrol plane flew over a sparkling sea. The morning cumulus clouds would form in the trade winds in a few hours, but right now the sky was empty except for wisps of high stratus.

The glory of the morning held no interest for the P-3’s crew, which was examining an old freighter anchored in the lee of an L-shaped cay. A few palm trees and some thick brush covered the backbone of the little island, which had wide, white, empty beaches on all sides.

“Whaddya think?” the pilot asked his copilot and the TACCO, the tactical coordinator, who was standing behind the center console.

“Go lower and we’ll get pictures,” the TACCO suggested. He passed a video camera to the copilot.

The pilot retarded the throttles and brought the plane around in a wide, sweeping turn to pass down the side of the freighter at an altitude of about two hundred feet. The copilot kept the video camera on the freighter, which was fairly small, about ten thousand tons, with peeling paint and a rusty waterline. A few sailors could be seen on deck, but no flags were visible.

“I’ll get on the horn,” the TACCO told the pilot, “see if the folks in Norfolk can identify that ship. But first let’s fly over the ship, get the planform from directly overhead.”

The TACCO knew that the computer sorted ship images by silhouettes and planforms, so having both views would speed up the identification process.

Professor Olaf Svenson was standing in line at Havana airport to buy a ticket to Mexico City when he saw Colonel Santana arrive out front in a chauffeur-driven limousine. Through the giant windows he could clearly see Santana get out of the car, see the uniformed security guards salute, see the plainclothes security men with Santana move tourists out of the way.

Svenson turned and rushed away in the other direction. He dove into the first men’s room he saw and took refuge in an empty stall.

Was Santana after him?

The acrid smell of a public rest room filled his nostrils, permeated his clothing, made him feel unclean. He sat listening to the sounds: the door opening and closing as men came and went, feet scraping, water running, piss tinkling into urinals, muttered comments. Sweat trickled down his neck, soaking his shirt.

Slam! Someone aggressively pushed the rest room door open until it smashed against the wall.

The minutes crawled.

Santana was an animal, Svenson thought, a sadist, a foul, filthy creature who loved to see fellow human beings in pain. Svenson had seen it in his eyes. Even the smallest of bad tidings was delivered with a malicious gleam. Svenson suspected that as a boy Santana had enjoyed torturing pets.

What would Santana do to an overweight, middle-aged scientist from Colorado who tried to escape the country?

The door slammed into the wall again, and Svenson jumped.

Torture? Of course. Santana would want to inflict pain. Svenson felt his bowels get watery as he thought about the pain that Santana could dish out.

Every sound caused him to move, to jump.

He consulted his watch again. Just a few minutes had passed.

0 God, if you really exist, have mercy on me! Don’t let Santana find me. Please!

Home. He wanted to go home so badly. To his apartment and cats and flowers in planters. To his neat, safe little haven, where he could shut out the evil of the world.

Someone slapped the side of the stall, said something unintelligible in Spanish. Probably wanted him to hurry up, to get out and let the next man in.

Svenson made a retching sound. And almost lost his breakfast.

He tried retching audibly again, less forcefully.

The person standing beside the stall walked away, the door to the rest room opened and closed.

Where was Santana?

Maybe he wasn’t coming. Surely by now if he were searching the terminal he would have looked into this restroom.

Could it be?

Or perhaps Santana was standing outside, waiting for him to come out, for the sheer joy of dashing his hopes when he thought the coast was clear. Santana would do a thing like that, Svenson told himself now.

He felt so dirty, so wretched. He wiped at the sheen of sweat on his face, wiped his hands on his trousers.

He watched the minute hand of his watch, watched it slowly circle the dial, counted the seconds as it moved along so effortlessly.

With every passing minute that Santana didn’t come he felt better. Yes. Perhaps he wasn’t looking. He must not be. If he were looking he would have been in this restroom, would have opened the door, would have jerked him from the stall and arrested him and put the cuffs on him and dragged him across the terminal and thrown him into a police car.

But Santana didn’t come.

After an hour of waiting, Olaf Svenson began thinking about how he was going to get out of the country. He needed another passport. If he used his own, the security people might not let him through the immigration checkpoint.

He pulled up his pants, washed his hands thoroughly, and went out into the main hall of the terminal. Keeping an eye out for Santana, he went to the ticket desk for Mexicana Airlines and stood where he could watch the agent. When handed a passport, the man glanced up, comparing the face to the photo. Just a glance, but a glance would be enough. Using a stolen passport with a photo that didn’t match his face was too much of a risk. Svenson knew he would have to use his own, dangerous though it would be.

Screwing up his courage, Olaf Svenson got in line. “Ciudad Mejico, por favor.” He handed the passport to the agent, who glanced into his face, then handed the passport back.

An hour later Svenson went through the immigration line. The uniformed official didn’t look up, merely compared the passport to a typed list that lay on his desk, then passed it back. He did not stamp the document.

Olaf Svenson took a seat in the waiting area and used a filthy handkerchief to wipe perspiration from his forehead.

A reprieve. The powers that rule the universe had granted him a reprieve.

He would have liked to have had the opportunity to study the latest viral mutation, but the risk was just too great. A lost opportunity, he concluded. Oh, too bad, too bad.

When the plane from Madrid touched down at Havana airport with Maximo Sedano aboard, Colonel Santana and two plainclothes secret police officers were there to meet him. They stood beside Maximo while he waited for his luggage, then the two junior men carried it to the car while Maximo walked beside Santana.

Colonel Santana said nothing to the finance minister, other than to say Alejo Vargas wanted to see him, then he let the bastard stew. He had learned years ago that silence was a very effective weapon, one that cost nothing and caused grievous wounds in a guilty soul. All men are guilty, Santana believed, of secret sins if nothing else, and if left to suffer in silence will usually convince themselves that the authorities know everything. After a long enough silence, often all that remains to do is take down the confession and obtain a signature.

One of his troops drove while Santana rode in the back of the car with his charge. Not a word was uttered the whole trip.

Maximo seemed to be holding up fairly well, Santana thought, not sweating too much, retaining most of his color, breathing under control. The colonel smiled broadly, a smile that grew even wider when he saw from the corner of his eye that Maximo Sedano had noticed it.

Ah, yes. Silence. And terror.

The car drove straight into the basement of the Ministry of Interior, where Maximo Sedano was hustled to a subterranean interrogation room.

“I demand to see Vargas,” Maximo said hotly when they shoved him into a chair and slammed the door shut.

“You demand?” asked Santana softly, leaning forward until his face was only inches from Maximo. “You are in no position to demand. You may ask humbly, request, you may even pray, but you don’t demand. You have no right to demand anything.”

Santana seated himself behind the desk, across from Maximo. He took out the interrogation form, filled out the blanks on the top of the sheet, then laid it on the scarred wood in front of him.

“Where,” Santana asked, “is the money?”

Maximo Sedano inhaled through his nose. He smelled dampness, urine, something rotting, meat or vegetable perhaps … and something cold and slimy and evil. It was here, all around him, in this room — the very stones reeked of it. Before Castro the secret police belonged to Fulgencio Batista, and before him Geraldo Machado, and so on, back for hundreds of years. This was a secret room that never saw the light, where justice did not exist, where force and venality and self-interest ruled. Here shadow men without conscience or scruple wrestled with the enemies of the dictator. The room reeked of fear and blood, torture and maiming, pain and death.

Maximo pushed the images aside. With a tenuous composure, carefully, completely, honestly, he explained about the accounts and the German and the people at the bank. He related what they said to the best of his memory. He told about the ice pick and the men’s room, everything, withholding only his intention of transferring the money to his own accounts.

Santana had questions, of course, made him repeat most of it two or three times. When the colonel had it all written down, Maximo signed the statement.

“Where are the transfer cards?” Santana asked.

“In Switzerland. I left them at the bank.”

“Why?”

“If there has been some mistake, if the money was stolen by someone at the bank, then the banks have valid, legal transfer orders they must honor. They must send the money to the Bank of Cuba.”

“So where is the money?”

“It is not in those accounts, obviously. I think the money has been stolen.”

For the first time, Santana was openly skeptical. “By whom?”

“By someone who had access to the account numbers. El Presidente insisted on keeping a record of them in his office. I would look there first.”

“Why not your office? Is it not possible one of your aides learned the numbers, passed them to someone who—?”

“All the numbers of the government’s foreign accounts, including the accounts controlled exclusively by el Presidente, are kept in a safe in my office under my exclusive control. None of my staff has access — only me.”

Again Santana smiled. “You realize, of course, that you are convicting yourself with your own mouth?”

Maximo threw up his hands. “I tell you this, Santana. I do not have the money. If I had fifty-four million dollars I would not have taken the plane back to Cuba. I would not be sitting in this shithole talking to a shithead like you.”

Santana ignored the insult and jotted a few more lines on his report. Personally he believed Maximo — if the man had the money he would have run like a rabbit — but to say so would give Maximo too much leverage. And Maximo said that he killed a man with an ice pick, which certainly seemed out of character. Santana raised an eyebrow as he thought about Rall. Maximo Sedano killing Rall — well, the world is full of unexpected things.

He left Maximo Sedano sitting in the chair in the interrogation room while he went to find Vargas. The minister was in his office listening to a report of the laboratory burglary from one of the senior colonels, who had just returned from the university.

Santana knew nothing of the burglary, had not been informed before he went to the airport. He stood listening, asked no questions, waited for Alejo Vargas.

An hour passed before Vargas was ready to talk about Maximo. “He is downstairs in an interrogation room,” Santana said. “Here is his statement.” He passed it across. Vargas read it in silence.

“The money is not in the accounts,” Vargas said finally.

“So he says.”

“And you think he is telling the truth?”

“Sir, I don’t think Maximo Sedano has what it takes to steal that kind of money and come back here to face you. He knew he would be met at the airport. He was expecting it.”

Vargas said nothing, merely blinked.

“Actually, his suggestion about the account numbers at the president’s residence is a good one. If there was a leak, it was probably there. Fidel probably left the book lying around — he had no organizational sense.”

“And?”

“I know of no one in Cuba with the computer expertise to get into the Swiss banks electronically and steal that money, but there are plenty of people in America who could. A lot of them work for the American government.”

“People were stealing money from banks long before computers were invented,” Vargas objected. “Anybody could have bribed a bank officer and stolen that money. The Yanquis are the most likely suspects, however.”

Vargas well knew that everything that went wrong south of Key West was not the fault of the United States government, but he was too old a dog to think that the people who ran the CIA were incompetent dullards too busy to give Cuba a thought.

“The Americans say that shit happens.”

“They often make it happen,” Vargas agreed, and stood up. “Let us talk to Maximo. Perhaps we can save a soul from hell.”

Going down the stairs Vargas said to Santana, “Maximo has been plotting to get himself elected president when Castro passes: Today would be a good time to let him know that such a course is futile.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Some pain, I think. Nothing permanent, nothing life-threatening. We will need his expertise in finance later on.”

“Yes, sir.”

A petty officer came to find Jake Grafton. The sailor led the admiral to the Air Intelligence spaces, where he found Toad and the AIs gathered around a television monitor.

“A P-3 took this sequence a few hours ago,” Toad told the admiral, “in the Bahamas. It’s an anchored North Korean freighter. The P-3 is going to fly directly overhead here in a minute and get a shot looking straight down. We’ll freeze the video there.”

The perspective changed as the plane came across the top of the ship. The clear blue water seemed to disappear, leaving the ship suspended above the yellow sandy bottom. Just before the P-3 crossed above the ship, Toad froze the picture.

He stepped forward, pointing to dark shapes resting on the sand under the freighter. “I think we’ve found the rest of the stolen warheads,” he said. “The people on the Colón dumped them here in the ocean for the North Koreans to pick up later.”

Jake stepped forward, studied the picture on the television screen. “Can this picture be computer enhanced?”

“They are working on that in Norfolk right now.”

“How certain are they about the identification of the ship?”

“Very sure. Undoubtedly North Korean.”

When the National Security Council met to be briefed about developments in Cuba, the president’s mood was even uglier than it had been a few days before. He listened with a frozen frown as the briefer described the biological warfare research laboratory in the science building at the University of Havana. He covered his face with a hand as the briefer explained that some of the warheads from Nuestra Señora de Colón appeared to be resting on a sandy ocean floor in the Bahamas, with a North Korean freighter anchored nearby.

“The good news,” the briefer said brightly, “is that the freighter seems to be in Bahaman territorial waters.”

“Do you have a plan?” the president asked General Totten.

“Yes, sir. At our request, the Bahamans have formally requested that a United States ship board and search the North Korean freighter, which has violated their territorial waters. The nearest U.S. ship will be there in three hours.”

“And if the North Koreans raise the anchor and sail away?”

“We’ll stop the ship anyway, remove any United States government property that we find.”

“Another international incident!” the president grumped. “The North Koreans will shout bloody murder, then the Cubans will join the chorus.”

The national security adviser jumped right in. “Sir, the Cubans can’t prove we had CBW warheads in Gitmo.”

“Can’t prove? If Fidel Castro doesn’t have a stolen artillery shell on his desk right now I’ll kiss your ass at high noon on the Capitol steps while CNN—”

“Sir, we think—”

“Let me finish! Don’t interrupt! I’m the guy the congressmen are going to fry when they hear about this fiasco. Let me finish.”

Silence.

The president swallowed once, adjusted his tie. “And now,” he said, trying to keep the acid out of his voice, “we learn the Cubans have a biological weapons lab in a building in the heart of Havana, at the university there. Is that correct?”

“Yes, sir.”

“What I would like to know is this: Have the Cubans got any way of using biological weapons on the United States right now? Today? Have they got a delivery system?”

“Sir, we don’t know.”

“Well, by God, in my nonmilitary opinion we ought to find out just as fast as we can. Does anybody in this room agree with that proposition?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Another thing I want to know: Somebody explain again how the goddamned Chemical Weapons Treaty will make countries like Cuba decide not to build biological and chemical weapons.”

The silence that followed that question was broken by the chairman of the joint chiefs, General Tater Totten:

“The Chemical Weapons Convention. Agreement won’t dissuade anyone who wants these weapons from building them. All it will do is force us to rid ourselves of the weapons that deter others from using these things. Chemical and biological weapons are only employed when a user believes his enemy cannot or will not retaliate in kind. Your staff knew that and wanted the treaty anyway so that you could brag about it on the stump and win votes from soccer moms who don’t know shit from peanut butter.”

The president eyed General Totten sourly, then surveyed the rest of them. “At least somebody around here has the guts to tell it like it is,” he muttered.

The chairman continued: “Doing the right thing isn’t the same as getting the right result. We could use more of the latter and less of the former, if you ask me.”

“Don’t push it, General,” the president snarled.

The gray-haired general motored on as if the president hadn’t said a word. “To get back to your question, of course the Cubans have a delivery system, or several. Biological weapons are the easiest of all weapons to employ. The delivery system could be as simple as planes rigged to spray microorganisms into the atmosphere: after all, Cuba is just ninety miles south of Key West; jets could be over Florida in minutes. Or a few teams of Cuban saboteurs could induce the toxins into the water supply systems of major cities — tens of millions of people could be infected before anyone figured out there was even a problem.”

Here was the classic dilemma: The U.S. was prepared to fight a nuclear war to the finish and lick anyone on the planet in a conventional war. Hundreds of billions of dollars had been spent on networks and communications, on precision weapons and missile systems, on an army, navy and air force that were the best equipped, trained, and led armed forces on earth. So if there were an armed conflict, no sane enemy would confront the United States on a conventional or nuclear battlefield: guerrilla warfare and terror weapons were the alternatives.

“What the Cubans probably don’t have,” General Totten continued, “is the engineering and industrial capacity to turn tankfuls of toxins into true weapons, weapons that are safe to handle, can be stored indefinitely, and aimed precisely. That’s why they want to get their hands on that shipload of biological warheads.”

“So how do we prevent the use of CBW weapons?” the president asked.

“You have to deter the bad guys,” Tater Totten explained. “You have to be willing to do it to them worse than they can do it to you. And they have to know that you will.”

“You’re saying that if the Cubans murder ten million Americans, we have to kill every human in Cuba?”

“That’s right. Mutually assured destruction.”

“M-A-D.”

“Insane. But there is no other way. If these people think you lack the resolve to retaliate in kind, you just lost the war.”

“If anyone kills Americans we will retaliate,” the president said. “That’s been U.S. policy since George Washington took the oath of office.”

The general concentrated on straightening a paper clip, then bending it into a new shape.

Finally, when the president had had his say, when the national security adviser had summed up the situation, the chairman spoke again: “The agent in Havana who found the lab had a request. It was in the last paragraph of his message this morning. Mr. Adviser, do you wish to discuss it?”

The adviser obviously didn’t wish to discuss it; he could have raised the point at any time during the meeting and hadn’t. A flash of irritation crossed his face, then he said, “I’ve gone over that request with the staff, and with State, ah, and both staff and State feel it is completely out of bounds.”

“What request?” the president asked curtly.

“Sir, staff and State feel the request is absolutely out of the question; I struck it from the agenda.”

“What request?” the president repeated with some heat.

“The agent wants Operation Flashlight to happen at one-thirty A.M. tomorrow,” Tater Totten said.

“And that is?” the president said, frowning.

“He wants the power grid in central Havana knocked out.”

“Oh. Now I remember. You want to blow some high-voltage towers.”

“That’s correct, sir. This operation was discussed and approved three weeks ago.”

“Oh, no. Three weeks ago I gave a tentative approval, tentative only. Sabotage of a power network of a foreign nation is a damn serious matter. Back when I was in school we called that an act of war.”

“It still is,” the national security adviser said. He was something of a suck-up, General Totten thought.

“I think this matter deserves more discussion,” the president said.

“Yes, sir.”

“What happens if the people setting these charges are arrested?”

The director of the CIA reluctantly stepped in. “Sir, that is one of the inherent risks of clandestine operations. The men who set the charges know the risks. We know the risks. The fact is that the possible gains here make the risks worth running. That’s the same cost-benefit analysis we make before we authorize any clandestine operation.”

“What if one of these people is arrested? Can the Cubans prove they work for the CIA?”

“No, sir. They will appear to be Cuban exiles, in Cuba creating mischief on their own hook.”

“This operation gives me a bad feeling in the pit of my stomach,” the president said. “There are too many things going wrong all at once.”

General Totten could hold his tongue no longer. “There is no time to be lost,” he said. “Four vials of microorganisms taken from a biological warfare laboratory located just ninety miles south of Key West in the capital of a communist country hostile to the United States are this very minute being examined in laboratories in the Washington area. Cuba could become another Iraq, armed to the teeth with chemical and biological weapons. This nation cannot afford to let that happen. Cuba is only ninety miles away. The risk is simply too great.”

The president glared around the room. Looking for someone to blame, General Totten thought.

“Mr. President, Flashlight will take hours to pull off,” the CIA director said. “I’ve already given the order for it to proceed.”

“You’ve already given the order?” The president repeated the words incredulously.

“There was no time to be lost,” the director shot back. “These things take hours to set in motion. The execution time is one-thirty A.M., less than six hours away.”

The chairman of the joint chiefs leaned forward in his chair, rested both elbows on the mahogany table. “Mr. President, we have no choice in this matter. None at all. If this administration fails to move aggressively to learn exactly what the Cuban threat is and take steps to meet it, you will almost certainly be impeached and removed from office by Congress for dereliction of duty.”

The president looked as if he were going to explode. This was a side of him the voters never saw. A control freak, like most politicians, he hated just being along for the ride. Watching the president seethe, Tater Totten knew his days on active duty were numbered. The CIA director had better start thinking about retirement, too.

“Who is our agent in Cuba?” the president demanded.

The director looked startled. Names of agents were closely held, never discussed in meetings like this. Yet he couldn’t refuse to answer a direct question from the president of the United States. “Sir, if you need that information, I could write it on a sheet of paper.” The director grabbed a notepad and did so. He tore off the sheet, folded it once, and passed it down the table. The president put the folded paper in front of him but didn’t open it.

“I want to know who authorized this man”—the president tapped on the folded paper with a finger—“to go to Cuba to see what cesspools he could uncover.”

“Sir, this mission was authorized by this council two months ago.”

“Then why in hell didn’t someone mention it when we were discussing getting our warheads home from Guantánamo Bay? Why wasn’t that cargo ship escorted from pier to pier? Why in hell didn’t we get those warheads out of there two months ago, two years ago? Why in hell can’t you people get a goddamn grip?”

Silence followed that outburst. It was broken when the chairman said, “Instead of fretting over the timing, let’s pat ourselves on the back for being smart enough to have an agent in Havana. It’s the Cubans’ weapons lab, not ours.”

When Tater Totten walked out of the room, he still had his letter of resignation from the joint chiefs in his pocket. He had prepared it when the national security adviser struck Operation Lightbulb from the agenda. Maybe he should have laid the letter on the president and retired to the golf course before these fools drove this truck off the cliff. He had no doubt the mess in Cuba was about to blow up in their faces, and soon.

The American warship nearest the unnamed cay where the North Korean freighter was anchored was a destroyer out of Charleston, South Carolina, manned by naval reservists on their annual two-week tour of active duty. The destroyer had been on its way to Nassau for a weekend port call when the flash message rolled off the printer.

The destroyer’s flank speed was 34 knots, and she was making every knot of it now as she thundered down the Exuma Channel with a bone in her teeth.

From five thousand feet Jake Grafton could see the destroyer plainly even though it was twenty miles away. And he could see the wake lengthening behind the North Korean freighter, Wonsan.

“Damn scow is getting under way,” Rita said disgustedly. She was flying the V-22. “It’ll be in international waters long before the destroyer gets there.”

“Wonder how many warheads they pulled out of the water?”

“We’re going to find out pretty soon,” Jake muttered. “If this guy stops and lets us board him, he won’t have a warhead aboard. If he refuses to heave to, he’s got a bunch.”

“What are you going to do, Admiral, if he refuses to stop?”

Jake Grafton didn’t have an answer to that contingency, nor did he want to make the decision. If that eventuality came to pass he would ask for guidance from Washington, pass the buck along to people who would probably refer it to the politicians.

“The Wonsan is turning northeast,” Rita observed. “She’ll probably go between Cat Island and San Salvador.”

“Let’s go down,” Jake Grafton said, “hover in front of this guy, see if he’ll stop” He was sitting on the flight engineer’s seat just aft of the pilots.

Five minutes later the Osprey was in helicopter flight with the rotors tilted up, descending gently in front of the Wonsan, which was up to five or six knots now. Jake Grafton could see four people on the bridge, standing close together and gesturing at the Osprey. The copilot was watching the clearance, telling Rita how much maneuvering room she had.

“Closer,” Jake said.

Rita Moravia kept the Osprey moving in. Luckily the wind was from the west, so she could keep the twin-rotor machine on the starboard side of the freighter, yet pointed right at the bridge. This kept the wind on her starboard quarter.

She stopped when the distance between her cockpit and the bridge glass was about fifty yards. The right rotor was still well above the top of the freighter’s crane, which was mounted amidships.

“Closer,” Jake said again, “but watch your clearance.”

The copilot glanced nervously at Jake. “Give me clearance,” Rita snapped at him, which brought him back to the job at hand.

She maneuvered the Osprey until it was completely on the starboard side of the Wonsan, then she dropped it until she could see the length of the bridge.

The captain — he might have been the captain, wearing a dirty, white bridge cap — stepped through the door of the bridge onto the wing and stood looking into the cockpit, fifteen feet away. He had his hands pressed against his ears, trying to deaden the mighty roar of the two big engines. The downwash from the rotors raised a storm of sea spray, which was soaking him, and now it carried away his hat.

“Closer,” Jake said one more time.

“The air is sorta bumpy coming around this superstructure.”

“Yeah,” the admiral said.

Ten feet separated the nose of the V-22 from the rail of the bridge wing. Rita eased the Osprey forward a foot at a time, until the refueling probe and three barrels of the turreted fifty-caliber machine gun that protruded from the nose were no more than eighteen inches from the rail.

“Aim the gun at the captain,” Jake said.

The copilot flipped a switch, then looked at the captain’s head, and the machine gun faithfully tracked, following the aiming commands sent to it from the gunsight mounted on the copilot’s helmet.

The captain’s face was now less than ten feet from Jake Grafton’s. He was balding, a bit overweight, in his late fifties. The rotor wash lashed at him and tore at his sodden clothes, making it difficult for him to keep his footing. Groping for a rail to steady himself against the fierce wind, he looked at the three-barreled machine gun, which tracked him like a living thing, then at Jake Grafton on the seat behind the Osprey pilots.

The captain turned and shouted something over his left shoulder; he held on with both hands as he went through the door onto the enclosed bridge.

“Watch it,” Jake muttered into his lip mike. “This guy may be fool enough to turn into you.”

Rita was the first to realize what was happening. She felt the need to turn left to hold position. “The ship is slowing,” she said. “I think he’s stopped his engines.”

In a few seconds it became obvious that she was correct. Rita backed away until the distance between the cockpit and ship was about fifty feet.

“I think he lost his nerve, Admiral.”

“Look at the stuff on his deck,” the copilot said, pointing. “Looks like he pulled up a bunch of warheads.”

The freighter was drifting when the destroyer arrived a half hour later and coasted to a stop several hundred yards away. In minutes the destroyer had a boat in the water.

When armed Americans were standing on the Wonsan’s deck, Jake tapped Rita on the shoulder.

“Let’s go home.”

“I listened to the tape from Alejo Vargas’s office this afternoon,” Carmellini said to Chance. They were walking the Prado looking for a place to eat dinner. To have a decent selection and palatable food, the restaurant would have to be a hard-currency place. Although the best restaurants were in ramshackle houses in Old Havana, tonight Chance wanted music, laughter, people.

“Someone told Vargas all about the break-in at the university lab, the contamination, the dead lab worker. They spent most of the day running the fans at the lab, trying to lower the count of the stuff in the air before they went in.”

“What did they say about the dead man, why he died?”

“That had them stumped. He was vaccinated. They called in a Professor Svenson.”

“Olaf Svenson?”

“No one used a first name.”

“It must be him. I’ve heard of him. Damned potty old fool. He was at Cal Tech for years. Thought he was at Colorado now. A genius, almost won a Nobel Prize.” He snapped his fingers. “That photo we gave Bouchard — that must have been Svenson.”

“Well, he is their main man down at the lab, to hear the conversation at Vargas’s office.”

“So why did the lab worker die? Wasn’t he vaccinated?”

“The stuff mutated, according to the professor. Mutated again, he said.”

“Well, what the hell is it? Did they say that?”

“Some kind of polio.”

“Polio doesn’t kill that quickly,” Chance objected.

“This kind does. The lab worker wasn’t the first, apparently. The professor wanted to dissect him like the others but Vargas ordered the body burned immediately.”

They paused on a corner, watched the people who filled the sidewalks under the crumbling buildings. Just down the walk to the left a Cuban was trying to sell trinkets to a pair of Germans and having no luck. To the right a tall young white guy, American or Canadian probably, was locked in a passionate embrace with a local girl.

“Sun, sex, and socialism,” Carmellini muttered. “Makes you wonder why there aren’t more Cubans.”

Chance closed his eyes, enjoyed the caress of the breeze on his face and hair. He could hear snatches of music amid the honk of car horns and traffic sounds. Havana was very much alive this evening, as it was every evening.

Finally he opened his eyes, looked again at the Cubans and tourists swirling about him. And Carmellini standing there, quite nonchalant, looking bored.

“Do they have any ideas about who broke in?”

“Americans. CIA scum. No evidence, but they’re sure.”

Chance nodded.

“There was talk,” Carmellini continued, “of rounding up likely suspects, doing some thorough interrogations, just to see what might turn up. That was Colonel Santana’s suggestion: apparently he is a rare piece of work. Vargas overruled him. Said they couldn’t torture tourists every time the CIA did something they didn’t like or soon they wouldn’t have any tourists.”

“Sensible.”

“Anything else?”

Carmellini shrugged, scratched his chin. “I listened to almost three hours’ worth of that stuff, and you know, they didn’t mention Fidel Castro even once.”

“Didn’t say his name?”

“Nope. And the technician said he hadn’t heard them mention Castro all day.”

“Curious.”

“It’s odd. I would have thought—”

After a bit Chance said, “The lab is just the tip of the iceberg. There must be machinery for drying out the cultures, for packing the microorganisms into warheads or mixing them into some sort of chemical stew to be sprayed from planes. There must be trucks that transport this stuff from place to place. And then there are the weapons: where the hell are they?”

They went into one of the nightclubs and found an empty table. Six whores were sitting around the table beside them. The girls were drinking daiquiris and having a fine, loud time. One of the girls looked the two men over while the band tuned up just a few feet away.

“Washington wants more information,” Carmellini said, ignoring the whores.

“They would.” Chance chewed on his lip for a bit, then picked up the wine list. “Tonight’s the night we go into Vargas’s safe. Are you comfortable with that?”

Carmellini took his time answering. Chance was about to repeat the question when he said, “If the alarms are off.”

“They’ll be off.”

“Sure.”

“Trust me.”

When the waiter came they ordered dinner.

“So tell me again about the Ministry of Interior,” Carmellini said. “Everything you can recall. Everything.”

Chance leaned back, closed his eyes, tried to visualize how the building looked when he had stepped from the taxi out front on his way to his meeting with Alejo Vargas.

“There is a guard kiosk out front on the sidewalk. You then walk through the front entrance to the guard station inside. They check your credentials again, call whoever you say you want to see. This person comes to get you, leads you through the halls to the office you are to visit.”

“Cameras?”

“Security cameras mounted high in corners, monitored by the main guard station. There are two separate systems, at least, with pictures playing on separate monitors.”

“Infrared sensors?”

“I think so ….” The fact is he should have paid more attention. Looked more carefully, consciously noted what he was seeing. “Yes, I remember seeing one.”

“Motion detectors?”

“No.”

“Laser alarms?”

“Yes, mounted at ankle height.” Presumably these were only on when the building was not occupied.

“Alarms on the windows?”

“Yes.”

“Vibrators on the glass?”

“No.” If there had been vibrators, the computer would have had a much more difficult job sorting out the voices from the electronic noise of the vibrators when it tried to read the light refracted by the crystals.

“Were there internal security doors, doors that might be closed when the building is not occupied?”

“Yes. Every hall had them, but I doubt they were ever used.”

“And internal security stations?”

“I saw none.”

Carmellini thought about it. Closed security doors made a burglar’s access more difficult, but they provided a peaceful, quiet place for a burglar to work once he had gained entry.

“Do they have backup power when the power goes off?” Carmellini mused.

“They must,” Chance replied thoughtfully. “A backup generator of some type. I’m going to walk in assuming that they do, but I’ll be improvising as I go.”

“We’ll sure as hell find out soon enough, won’t we?” Carmellini said, and grinned. That was the first grin he had managed all afternoon. The death of the lab worker had hit him hard, but the cool execution of the guard at the front door by William Henry Chance had hit him like a punch to the solar plexus. Chance just gunned the man down and kept on trucking, as if killing another human being were something he did every morning before lunch.

All evening Carmellini had studied the older man, watched him for a sign that the murder of the guard was anything more than absolutely routine. And he had seen nothing. Nothing at all. Chance looked as if he might be having dinner in a restaurant in the Bronx with a Yankees game from a kitchen radio as background noise.

Carmellini stared at the food on the plate that the waiter put in front of him. He didn’t want a mouthful. But what he wouldn’t give for a stiff drink! He sipped at a glass of water, felt his stomach knot up.

“Order a drink,” Chance said as he used his knife and fork. “One. Something on the rocks. You need it. We have a long night ahead.”

Carmellini looked around for the waiter, and found himself staring at one of the whores at the next table, who gave him a big grin. He grinned back. A man just has to keep things in perspective.