Cuba

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Try as they might, Ocho Sedano and the old fisherman could not get the water out of Angel del Mar. With both of them pushing and pulling on the pump handle they could just keep up with the water coming into the boat. If either of them stopped, and the other lacked the strength to work the pump quickly enough, the water level rose.

They struggled all night against the rising water. At dawn they knew they were beaten. No one else on the boat was willing to come below and pump. Some said they were afraid of being trapped below deck if the boat should go under, and others plainly lacked the strength. The passengers of the Angel del Mar lay about the deck horribly sunburned, semiconscious, severely dehydrated and starving.

On the evening of the previous day one woman drank sea water. The old fisherman didn’t see her do it, but he knew she had when she began retching and couldn’t stop. She retched herself into unconsciousness and died sometime during the night. When he went up on deck in the middle of the night, she was dead, lying in a pool of her own vomit.

The other children were also dead. Three little corpses, now still forever.

No one protested when he threw their bodies overboard.

Then he went below to help Ocho.

The losing battle was fought in total darkness against an inanimate pump handle and their own failing strength in a tossing, heaving boat as water swirled around their legs. Ocho prayed aloud, sobbed, babbled of his mother, of his deceased father, of the days he remembered from his youth.

The old fisherman remained silent, not really listening to Ocho — who never stopped pumping — but thinking of his own life, of the women he had loved, of the hard things life had taught him. He would die soon, he knew, and somehow that was all right, a fitting thing, the proper end to the great voyage he had had through life. Life pounds you, he thought, knocks out the pride and piss of youth. Live long enough and you begin to see the big picture, see yourself as God must see you, as a flawed mortal speck of protoplasm whose fate is of little concern to anyone but you. You work, eat, sleep, defecate, reproduce, and die, precisely like all the others, no different really, and the planet turns and the star burns on, both quite indifferent to your fate.

He understood the grand scheme now, and thought the knowledge worth very little. Certainly not worth the effort of telling what he knew to the boy, who would also die soon and lacked the fisherman’s years and experience. No, the boy would not appreciate the wisdom that age had acquired.

When the gray light from the coming day managed to find its way down the hatch and showed him the level of the water sloshing about, the old fisherman said “Enough. Out. Up the ladder before she goes under.” He pulled Ocho away from the handle, shoved him up the ladder.

“Up, up, damn you. I want out of here too.” The words made Ocho scramble out of the way.

The sea was empty in every direction. The old fisherman looked carefully, then shook his head sadly. Where were the ships and boats that were usually here? Why had no one seen the drifting wreck of the Angel del Mar?

“Into the ocean with you. The boat is sinking. You must get into the water, swim away, so the mast and lines will not trap you and pull you under when she sinks.”

They stared at him uncomprehendingly.

“Into the water, or not,” he said softly, “as you choose. May God be with you.”

And he walked aft and stepped off the stern of the ship into the sea. The salt water felt refreshing, welcomed him.

Ocho Sedano stood on the rail a moment, then stumbled and fell in. He paddled toward the old man.

“Ocho!” Dora stood there on deck, calling to him.

“You must swim,” Ocho said. “The boat is sinking.” There was little freeboard remaining, the deck was almost awash. Indeed, even as he spoke a wave broke over the deck.

Dora looked wildly about, unwilling to abandon the dubious safety of the boat. Other people joined her, some on hands and knees, unable to stand. They looked at the two men in the water, at the horizon, at the swells, at the sky.

One woman rocked back and forth on her heels, moaning softly, her eyes open.

“Swim,” the old man told Ocho. “Get away before it goes.”

He turned his back on the boat and began swimming. Ocho followed.

After a minute or so Ocho ceased paddling and looked back. The boat was going under, people were trying to swim away. He heard a woman screaming — Dora, perhaps.

The mast toppled slowly as the swells capsized Angel del Mar. Then, with an audible sigh as the last of the air escaped, the boat went under.

Heads bobbed in the swells — just how many Ocho couldn’t tell.

He ceased swimming. There was no place to go, no reason to expend the energy.

He was so tired, so exhausted. He closed his eyes, felt the sun burning on his eyelids.

He opened them when salt water choked him. He couldn’t sleep in the sea.

So that was how it would be. He would struggle to stay afloat until exhaustion and dehydration overcame him and he went to sleep, then he would drown.

The screaming woman would not be quiet. She paused only to fill her lungs, then screamed on.

A line in the sky caught his attention. A contrail. A jet conning against the blue. Oh, to be there, and not here.

He was listening to the screaming woman, trying not to go to sleep, when he felt something bump against his foot. Something solid.

He lowered his face into the water, opened his eyes.

Sharks!

The president of the United States sat listening to the national security adviser with a scowl on his face. The president usually scowled when he didn’t like what he was hearing, the chairman of the joint chiefs, General Tater Totten, thought sourly.

The adviser was laying it out, card by card: The Cubans had at least six intermediate-range ballistic missiles, which the staff thought were probably sited in hidden silos, away from the cameras of reconnaissance planes and satellites. According to the documents obtained from the safe of Alejo Vargas, the missiles now carried biological warheads, apparently a super-virulent strain of polio. Some of the warheads stolen from Nuestra Señora de Colón were now stacked in a warehouse on the waterfront in a Cuban provincial town, Antilla.

Complicating everything were the riots and demonstrations going on in the large cities of Cuba. No one was moving aggressively to quell the unrest; the army was not patrolling the cities; in fact, people in Cuba were openly speculating that Fidel Castro was dead.

CIA believed that Castro was indeed dead; the director said so at the start of the meeting.

“If Castro has bit the big one, who is running the show down there? Who is the successor?” The secretary of state asked that question.

“Hector Sedano, we hope,” the adviser said, glancing at the president, who was examining his fingernails. “Operation Flashlight was designed to whittle Alejo Vargas down to size.”

“Stealing a safeful of blackmail files will hurt Vargas, but it won’t do much to help Hector Sedano,” General Totten muttered. “I seem to recall a CIA summary that says Hector might be in prison just now.”

“That’s right,” the director agreed, nodding. “We think the rioting is directly due to the fact Sedano is in prison. The lid is coming off down there.”

“We’ve had our finger in a lot of Cuban pies,” the president said disgustedly, folding his hands on the table in front of him. “Probably too many. I seem to recall that the CIA did some fast work with a computer, emptied Fidel’s Swiss bank accounts.”

“The money is still in those banks,” the director said quickly. “We just created a few new accounts and moved the money to them. Don’t want anyone to think we are into bank robbery these days.”

“Why not? This administration has been accused of everything else,” the president said lightly. Poking fun at himself was his talent, the reason he had made it to the very top of the heap in American politics. He laced his fingers together, leaned back in his chair. “If we had any sense we would let the Cubans sort out their own problems. Lord knows we have enough of our own.”

A murmur of assent went around the table.

Tater Totten sighed, took his letter of resignation from an inside jacket pocket and unfolded it, placed it on the table in front of him. Then he took out another letter, a request for immediate retirement, and placed it beside the first. He smoothed out both documents, put on his glasses, looked them over.

The secretary of state was sitting beside him. She looked over to see what Totten was reading. When she realized she was looking at a letter of resignation, she leaned closer.

“What is today?” Tater whispered. “The date?”

“The seventh.”

General Totten got out his ink pen, wrote the date in ink on the top of the letter of resignation and the letter requesting retirement. Then he signed both letters and put his pen back in his pocket.

“ … our willingness to work with the new government. In fact, I think this would be an excellent time to end the American embargo of Cuba ….” The national security adviser was talking, apparently reciting a speech he had rehearsed with the president earlier today. As the adviser talked, the president had been looking around the room, watching faces for reactions. Just now he was looking at Tater Totten with narrowed eyes.

He knows, the general thought.

When the adviser wound down, the president spoke before anyone else could. “General Totten, you look like a man with something to say.”

“We can’t ignore six ICBMs armed with biological warheads. We can’t ignore a lab for manufacturing toxins. We can’t ignore a warehouse full of stolen CBW warheads.” He leaned forward in his chair, looked straight at the president, whose brow was furrowing into a scowl. “Fifty million Americans are within range of those missiles. We must move right now to disarm those missiles, put the Cubans out of the biological warfare business, and recover those stolen warheads. We have absolutely no choice. When they find out what the threat is, the American people are not going to be in the mood to listen to excuses.”

Tater Totten looked around the table at the pale, drawn faces. Every eye in the room was on him. “If one of those missiles gets launched at America, everyone in this room will be responsible. That is the hard, cold reality. All this happy talk about lifting embargoes and a new era of peace in the Caribbean is beside the point. We can’t ignore weapons of mass destruction aimed at innocent Americans.”

The silence that followed lasted for several seconds, until the president broke it. “General, no one is suggesting we ignore those missiles. The question is how we can best deal with the reality of their presence. My initial reaction is to wait until a new government takes over in Cuba, then to talk with them about disarmament and return of the stolen warheads in return for lifting the embargo. Reasonable people will see the advantages for each side.”

“Your mistake,” General Totten replied, “is thinking that reasonable people will be involved in the negotiations. Reasonable people don’t build CBW weapons of mass destruction — unreasonable people do. Unreasonable people use them to commit murder for ends they could achieve in no other way, ends they think are worth other people’s blood to attain. Now, that, by God, is reality.”

The secretary of state had snaked the chairman’s letter of resignation over in front of her while he was speaking. Now she showed it to the director of the CIA, who was on her left.

“What is that document?” the president asked.

“My letter of resignation,” Tater Totten said blandly. “I haven’t decided whether to submit it now or later.”

As the president’s upper lip curled in a sneer, the secretary of state put the letter back on the table in front of the general.

“Totten, you son of a bitch! I’m the man responsible.”

“I have to sleep nights,” Tater shot back.

“You reveal classified information to the press, I’ll have you prosecuted.” The president knew damn well that Totten would hold a press conference and tell all. “You’ll spend your goddamn retirement in a federal pen,” the president snarled.

“Bullshit! When the public finds out about polio warheads on ICBMs aimed at Florida, the tidal wave is going to wash you away.” General Totten pointed a finger at the president. “Don’t fuck this up, cowboy: there are too many American lives at stake. Now isn’t the time for a friendly game of Russian roulette.”

“Okay,” the president said, lifting his hands and showing the palms. “Okay! What’s the date on that letter?”

“Today.”

“Make it a week from today. We’ll do this your way, and a week from today you’re permanently off to the golf course with your mouth welded shut.”

Totten got out his pen, changed the date on both the letters, and passed them across the table to the president, who didn’t even glance at them.

“Better get cracking, General,” the president snarled.

“Yes, sir,” said Tater Totten. He rose from his chair and walked out of the room.

At the same time the president and National Security Council were meeting in Washington, the Council of State of the communist government of Cuba was meeting in Havana.

“Where is Fidel?” someone roared at Alejo Vargas as he walked into the room, flanked by Colonel Santana on one side and a plainclothes secret policeman on the other. Santana limped as he walked. He was heavily bandaged about the head and left arm, and moved like a man who was very sore.

Vice President Raúl Castro watched Alejo Vargas take his seat at the table beside the other ministers. His face was mottled, his anger palpable. He motioned for silence, smacked a wooden gavel against the table until he got it, then looked Vargas straight in the face.

“Where is my brother?”

“Dead.”

“And you have hidden the body.”

“The body is being prepared for a state funeral. I didn’t think anyone would object.”

“Liar!” Raúl Castro spit out the word. He stood, leaned on the table, and shouted at Vargas. “Liar! I think you murdered Fidel. I think you murdered him so that you could take over the country.” He waved at the window. “The people out there think so too. You have murdered my brother and arrested the man that he hoped would eventually succeed him, Hector Sedano. Jesus, man, the whole country is coming apart at the seams; they are rioting in the streets!”

Alejo Vargas examined the faces around the table while Raúl shouted. Maximo Sedano was there, his face impassive. Many of the faces could not be read. Most of them merely wanted food to eat and a place to live, something better than the people in the cane fields had. They went to their offices every day, obeyed Fidel’s orders, took the blame when things went wrong — as they usually did — watched Fidel take the credit if things went right, and soldiered on. That had been a way of life for these people for two generations — forty years — and now it was over.

“ … the people loved Fidel,” Raúl was saying, “honored and respected him as the greatest patriot in the history of Cuba, and I think you, Alejo Vargas, had a hand in his death. I accuse you of his murder.”

“Watch your mouth,” Santana told him, but Raúl turned on him like an enraged bear.

“I am vice president of the republic, first in line of succession upon the death of the president,” Raúl thundered at the colonel. “Maintain your silence or be evicted.”

Alejo Vargas had already removed his pistol from his pocket while he sat at the table listening to Raúl. Now he raised it, extended it to arm’s length, and squeezed the trigger. Before anyone could move he pumped three bullets into Raúl Castro, who fell sideways, knocking over his chair. The reports were like thunderclaps in the room, leaving the audience stunned and slightly deafened.

Alejo Vargas got to his feet, holding the pistol casually in front of him in his right hand.

“Does anyone else wish to accuse me of murder?”

Total, complete silence. Vargas looked from face to face, trying to make eye contact with everyone willing. Most averted their eyes when he looked into their face.

“Colonel Santana, please remove Señor Castro from the room. He is ill.”

As a bandaged Santana and the plainclothesman were carrying out the body, Alejo Vargas again seated himself. He placed the pistol on the table in front of him.

“I will chair this meeting,” he said. “We are here today to decide what must be done in light of the recent death of our beloved president, Fidel Castro. He fought a long, valiant fight against the disease of cancer, which claimed him four days ago. Of course the news could not be publicly announced until the Council of State had been informed and decisions reached on the question of succession.

“I do hereby officially inform you of the tragedy of Fidel Castro’s passing, and declare this meeting open to discuss the question of naming a successor to the office of president.”

With that Vargas reached across the table and seized the gavel that Raúl Castro had used. He tapped it several times on the table, sharp little raps that made several people flinch.

“This meeting is officially open,” he declared. “Who would like to speak first?”

No one said a word.

“The news of our beloved president’s death has hit everyone hard,” Vargas said. “I understand. Yet the business of our nation cannot wait. I hereby nominate myself for the office of president. Do I hear a second?”

“I second the nomination,” said General Alba, his voice carrying in the silence.

“Let the record show that I move to make the nomination unanimous,” Admiral Delgado said, his voice quavering a little.

“I second that motion,” General Alba replied, “and move that the nominations be closed.”

One would almost think they rehearsed that, Alejo Vargas thought, and gave the two general officers a nod of gratitude.

Sharks!

The silent predators came gliding in even as Ocho Sedano watched with his face in the water, gray, streamlined torpedoes swimming effortlessly through the half-light under the surface. They seemed to be swimming toward the place where the Angel del Mar had just gone under. No doubt the turbulence and noise from the sinking boat attracted them.

The people thrashing about on the surface were also making noise. Nature had equipped the sharks to sense the death struggles of other creatures, and to come to feed.

He raised his head from the water, shouted, “Sharks. Sharks.” His voice was very hoarse, his throat terribly dry. He sucked up a mouthful of salty seawater, then spit it out.

“Sharks! Do not struggle. Swim away from the wreck, from each other.”

He didn’t know if anyone heard him or not.

A scream split the air, then was cut off abruptly, probably as the person screaming was pulled under.

Another scream. Shouts of “Sharks!” and calls to God.

He felt something rub against his leg, and kicked back viciously. With his face in the water he could see the shark, a big one, maybe eight feet; swimming toward the concentration of people in the water.

He turned the other way, began swimming slowly away.

The old fisherman was nearby, doing the same.

“Do not panic,” the old man said. “Swim slowly, steadily.”

“The others …”

“There is nothing we can do. God is with them.”

He heard several more screams, a curse or two, then nothing. He didn’t want to hear. And he was swimming into the wind, so the sound would not carry so well.

Dora was back there. If she got off the boat. He couldn’t remember if she leaped from the boat before it sank. Perhaps she drowned when the boat went down. If so, that was God’s mercy. Better that than being eaten by a shark, having a leg ripped half off, or an arm, then bleeding in agony until the sharks tore you to pieces or pulled you under to drown.

That there were still things on this earth that ate people was an evil more foul than anything he had ever imagined.

He tired of swimming and stopped once, but the old fisherman encouraged him.

“Don’t die here, son. Swim farther, get away from the sharks.”

“‘They’re everywhere,” Ocho replied, with impeccable logic.

“Swim farther,” the old man said, and so he did.

Finally they stopped. How far they had come they had no way of knowing. The sea rose and fell in a timeless, eternal rhythm, the wind occasionally ripped spume from a crest and sent it flying, puffy clouds scudded along, the sun beat down.

“We will die out here,” he told the old man, who was only about ten feet away.

The fisherman didn’t reply. What was there to say?

Even the tragedy of Dora couldn’t keep him awake. He kept dozing off, then awakening when water went into his nose and mouth.

In the afternoon he thought he saw a ship, a sailing ship with three masts and square sails set to catch the trade winds. Maybe he only imagined it. He also thought he saw more contrails high in the sky, but he might have imagined those too.

He would swim until he died, he decided. That was all a man could do. He would do that and God would know he tried and forgive him his sins and take him into heaven.

Somehow that thought gave him peace.

“Gentlemen, your backing this morning touched me deeply.”

Alejo Vargas was sitting with General Alba and Admiral Delgado in his office at the Ministry of Interior. Colonel Santana was parked in a chair near the window with his leg on a stool and a bandage around his head.

“What happened to you, Colonel?” General Alba asked.

“I was in an accident.”

“Traffic gets worse and worse.”

“Yes.”

“Gentlemen, let’s get right down to it,” Alejo Vargas began. “Right now I don’t have the support of the people. The mobs are out of control. We must restore order and confidence in the government; that is absolutely critical.”

Delgado and Alba nodded. Even a dictator needs some level of popular support. Or at least acceptance by a significant percentage of the population.

“I propose to move on two fronts. I will send a delegate to Hector Sedano, see if he can be enlisted to endorse me. Getting out of prison will be an inducement, of course, but one can’t rely on anything that flimsy. I thought of naming him as ambassador to the Vatican.”

“That would be a popular move,” Alba thought, and Delgado agreed.

“All my adult life I have been a student of Fidel Castro’s political wiles,” Vargas continued. “I learned many things from watching the master. This may seem to you gentlemen to be heresy, but without the United States, Castro would have lasted only a few years in power — had the world turned in the usual way he would have been overthrown by a coup or mass uprising when it became obvious that he could not deliver on his promises. Fidel Castro survived because he had a scapegoat: he had the United States to blame for all our difficulties.”

“One should not say things like that publicly, but there is much truth in that observation.”

“The Yanquis never failed to play their part in Fidel’s little dramas,” Delgado agreed, and everyone in the room laughed, even Santana.

When his audience was again attentive, Alejo Vargas continued: “I propose to unite the Cuban people against the United States one more time, and this time I shall be out in front leading them.”

Jake Grafton had dinner that evening with the commanding officers of the units in the battle group. In addition to the skippers of the ships, the marine landing force commander, Lieutenant Colonel Eckhardt, and the air wing commander aboard United States were also there. Held in the carrier’s flag wardroom, the dinner was one of those rare official functions when everyone relaxed enough to enjoy themselves. Surrounded by fellow career officers, Admiral Grafton once again felt that sense of belonging to something bigger than the people who comprised it that had charmed him about the service thirty years ago. The tradition, the camaraderie, the sense of engaging in an activity whose worth could not be measured in dollars or years of service made the brutally long hours, the family separations, and the demands of service life somehow easier to endure.

He was basking in that glow when one of his aides slipped in a side door and handed him a top-secret flash message from Washington. Jake put on his glasses before he took the message from the folder.

He scanned the message, then read it again slowly. Ballistic missiles in Cuba, biological warheads, Castro dead — he thanked the aide, who left the room.

Jake read the message again very carefully as the after-dinner conversation buzzed around him. The message ordered him to stage commando raids on the suspected ballistic missile sites, “as soon as humanly possible, before the missiles can be launched at the United States.”

“Gentlemen, let us adjourn to the flag spaces,” Jake Grafton said, and led the commanders from the wardroom.

When the group was together in the flag spaces, with the door closed behind them, Jake said, “The course of human events has catapulted us straight into another mess. I just received this message from Washington.” He read it to them. When he finished, no one said anything. Jake folded the message and returned it to the red folder.

He turned to the captains of the two Aegis-class guided-missile cruisers that were assigned to his battle group:

“I want you to get underway as soon as you get back to your ships. Take your ships through the Windward Passage, then proceed at flank speed to a position between the island of Cuba and the Florida Keys that allows you to engage and destroy any missiles fired from Cuba toward the United States. Make every knot you can squeeze out of your ships. Every minute counts. When you come up with an estimated time of arrival, send it to me. We won’t lift a finger against the Cubans until both your ships are in position.”

He shook hands with the captains, and they strode out of the room.

“The rest of us might as well get comfortable. Looks like we are in for a long evening.”

Ocho Sedano looked at it for fifteen minutes before the thought occurred to him that he should find out what it was. Something white, floating perhaps fifteen feet away, slightly off to his right.

Now that the existence of the white thing had registered on his consciousness, he made the effort to turn, to stroke toward it.

He had been in the water all day. The sun would soon be down and he would be alone on the sea. After the sharks this morning there had been only Ocho and the old man; now the fisherman no longer answered his calls. Hadn’t for several hours, in fact. Maybe he just drifted out of hailing range, Ocho thought. That must be it.

The sharks killed all the others, sparing only the two men who had gone off the sinking boat first and swam away from the group. At least he thought the others were dead — he had no way of knowing the truth of it.

He had thought about the decision to swim away from the sinking Angel del Mar all day, off and on, trying to decide just what instinct had told him and the old man to get away from the others. Drowning people often drag under anyone they can reach — no doubt that knowledge was a factor in the old man’s thinking, in his thinking, for he did not want to put the responsibility for his life on anyone but himself.

Perhaps those who were attacked by the sharks were the lucky ones. Their ordeal was over.

Dora — had she been one of them?

Diego Coca was already dead, of course. He died … a day or two ago … didn’t he? Jumped into the sea and swam away from the Angel del Mar.

Ah, Diego, you ass. I hope you are burning in hell.

He reached for the white thing, which of course skittered out of reach. He paddled some more, reached up under it.

A milk jug. A one-gallon plastic milk jug without a cap, floating upside down. Apparently intact. He lifted the milky white plastic jug from the sea, let the water drain out, then lowered it into the water. The thing made a powerful float.

He pulled it toward him.

Hard to hold on to, but very buoyant.

How could he hold it, use the power of its buoyancy to keep himself afloat through the night?

Inside his shirt? He worked the jug down, tried to get it under his shirt. The thing escaped once, shot out of the water. He snagged it, tried it again.

The second time he got it under his shirt. The thing tried to push him over backward, but if he leaned into it, he could keep his weight pretty much balanced over it. Then he could just float, ride without effort.

As long as he could keep the open neck facing downward, the jug would keep him up.

Ocho was celebrating his good fortune when a swell tipped him over. He fought back upright, adjusted the jug in the evening light.

Maybe he should just forget the jug — he seemed to be working as hard staying over it as he did treading water.

With the last rays of the sun in his face, he decided to keep the jug, learn to ride it.

“I’m going to be rescued,” he said silently to himself, “going to be rescued. I must just have patience.”

After a bit he added, “And faith in the Lord.”

Ocho was a Catholic, of course, but he had never been one to pray much. He wondered if he should pray now. Surely God knew about the mess he was in — what could he conceivably tell Him that He didn’t already know?

In the twilight the water became dark. Still restless, still rising and falling, but dark and black as the grave.

He would probably die this night. Sometime during the night he would go to sleep and drown or a shark would rip at him or he would just run out of will. He was oh so very tired, a lethargy that weighed on every muscle.

Tonight, he thought.

But I don’t want to die. I want to live!

Please, God, let me live one more day. If I am not rescued tomorrow, then let me die tomorrow night.

That was a reasonable request. His strength would give out by tomorrow night anyway.

The last of the light faded from the sky, and he was alone on the face of the sea.

La Cabana Prison was an old pile of masonry. In the hot, humid climate of Cuba the interior was cool, a welcome respite from the heat. Yet in the dark corridors filled with stagnant air the odor of mold and decay seemed almost overpowering. The iron bars and grates and cell doors were wet with condensation and covered with layers of rust.

During the day small windows with nearly opaque, dirty glass admitted what light there was. At night naked bulbs hanging where two corridors met or an iron gate barred the way lit the interior; and for whole stretches of corridors and cells there was no light at all.

Hector Sedano saw the flashlight even before he heard people coming along the corridor. One flashlight and two or three, maybe even four people — it was difficult to tell.

The flashlight led the visitors to this cell, and it turned to pin him on the cot.

“There he is.”

“I will talk to him alone.”

“Yes, Señor Presidente.”

One man remained standing in the semidarkness outside the cell after the others left. After the flashlight Hector’s eyes adjusted slowly. Now he could see him — Alejo Vargas.

Vargas lit a short cigarillo. As he struck the match Hector closed his eyes, and kept them closed until he smelled tobacco smoke and heard Vargas’s voice.

“Father Sedano, we meet again.”

Hector thought that remark didn’t deserve a reply.

“I seem to recall a conversation we had, what — two or three years ago?” Vargas said thoughtfully. “I told you that religion and politics don’t mix.”

“You even had a biblical quote ready to fire at me, Mark twelve-seventeen. Most unexpected.”

“You didn’t take my advice.”

“No.”

“You don’t often follow advice, do you?”

“No.”

“I came here tonight to see if you wish to make your peace with Caesar and join my cabinet, perhaps as our ambassador to the Church.”

“You’re the president now?”

“Temporarily. Until the election.”

“Then the title will become permanent.”

“I don’t think anyone will want to run against me.”

“Perhaps not.”

“But let’s take it a day at a time. Temporary acting president Vargas asks you to serve your country in this capacity.”

“And if I say no?”

“I want to sleep with a clean conscience, which is why I came here tonight to make the offer.”

“Your conscience is easily cleansed if that is all it takes.”

“It does not trouble me too much.”

“A man who lives as you do, a lively conscience would hurt worse than a bad tooth.”

“So your answer is no.”

“That it is.”

“But at least you considered my offer, so I can sleep knowing you chose your own fate.”

“My fate is in God’s hands.”

“Ah, if only I had the time to discuss religion with you, an intelligent, learned man. Time does not allow me that luxury. Still, I have one other little thing to discuss with you, and I caution you, this is not the time for a yes or no answer. This thing you must think about very carefully and give me your answer later.”

Sedano scratched his head. Vargas probably couldn’t see past the glow of his cigarillo tip, so it didn’t matter much what he did.

“I want to know what Fidel did with the gold from the pesos. I want you to tell me.”

“Me? I was six years old when he melted the gold, if he did.”

“I think you know. I think Fidel told Mercedes, and Mercedes told you. So I have come to ask you where it is. Will you tell me?”

“She didn’t tell me about gold.”

“I should not have asked so quickly. I told myself I would not do that, then I did. I apologize. I will ask you later, when you have had time to think about the question and all the implications.”

“I can’t tell you what I don’t know.”

“Well, think about it; that is all I ask. Of course I will talk to Mercedes. I think she also told you or the CIA about Fidel’s Swiss bank accounts. When Maximo went to get the money it was not there. I would like to have been there to see the look on Maximo’s face — ah, yes, that was a moment, my friend!”

He chuckled, then drew on the cigarillo, made the tip glow.

“Maximo thinks the Swiss stole it; he is very gullible. I smell the CIA. The CIA could reach into Swiss banks as easily as you and I breathe.”

“The world is quite complex.”

“Isn’t it?” Vargas sighed. “All the strings lead to Mercedes. She knew too much for her own good. I think she will do the right thing. She is a loyal patriot. With Colonel Santana asking the questions, I have faith that she will do what is best for Cuba.”

Hector could feel the sweat beading up on his forehead. He made sure his voice was under his complete control before he spoke. “For Cuba?”

“For Cuba, yes. Cuba and me, our interests are identical. I want the gold, Father, and I intend to get it. As you sit here rotting, you think about that.”

Alejo Vargas turned and walked away, still puffing on the cigarillo.

The smell of the tobacco smoke lingered in the cell for hours. Hector fancied that he could still smell it when daylight began shining through the window high in the wall at the end of the corridor.