The Ransom of Black Stealth One

TWENTY-FIVE

The man who had shown a Finnish passport and the name Einar Fredriks to a customs official could have seen treetops in Chapultepec Park from the triple-glazed high window of the Soviet Embassy in Mexico City. Instead, Karel Vins leaned back in the swivel chair and placed his bootheels on the desk before him. “How do you like the pattern, Jorge?” Vins had trained these men and his Spanish was excellent.

Jorge Ocampo’s was better. Before the Soviets took him to Cuba he had been tenth-generation Mexican. His short, sturdy brown body and strong aquiline nose were pure Indio, though European stock had favored him with eyes that were not quite brown enough to be black. “May I sit?”

“Of course, of a certainty,” Vins exclaimed, smiling at Jorge and at Mateo Carranza, the scarred veteran whose reddish hair marked him, a Cuban, with his Castilian extraction. A few kilos lighter than Ocampo and only slightly taller, Carranza did not carry himself like a fighter. It had been known to give him an edge—and all Carranza needed was an edge. Men of the usual stamp—say, KGB— would have automatically favored Mateo Carranza over the swarthy peasant, Jorge. Vins was not hampered by such bigotry; and besides, Jorge had stood his ground with a Kalashnikov to cover the escape of his revered Lobo after Vins, some years before, had been wounded near the Nicaraguan border. Mateo was more of a loner, and probably would have deserted military life for armed robbery years before, were it not for his aged mother in Matanzas. She, it seemed, had thought the world of Mateo. So, in his way, did Karel Vins, alias Vawlk, alias Lobo. Vins had known both men in rough times, and knew what they were made of. He had chosen them carefully. “Sit, sit,” he urged, smiling. He snapped the edges of his bootsoles together. “What do you think of these?”

Mateo, whose slouching carriage and stolid face made him appear dull at times, was nothing of the sort. “I think they are yanqui boots,” he said. Jorge merely looked and shrugged.

“Exactly right. You remember a surveillance school session after all this time?”

Mateo Carranza ran a forefinger under his nose to hide a smile. “No, but I remember how you think. To claim otherwise would be lying, Major.”

Vins dropped his feet and leaned forward. “No more rank, Mateo. Not this time. I am your lobo, if you like, and you will follow me as always. But this time, I think, we must consider ourselves more as equals, even brothers.” He let it sink in, knowing the two latinos were not close, that Jorge did not really trust a man like Mateo. “Mateo: you recall the bar in Camaguey?”

“He recalls many bars, many places,” Jorge said.

“But you were with me too, Jorge,” Vins said. “I was standing you drinks for saving my pelt in Nicaragua.”

“Ay, Madre de Dios,” Mateo said. “The money.”

“The marked money,” Vins insisted, one finger raised.

“Not here, if you please,” said Mateo, looking around him.

Vins beamed and stood up, stepping over to rap a wall which was surfaced with padded canvas. “Why not here, compadre? This is not an ordinary embassy room. This is a GRU room. I control the ears here. It is, in fact, the only room in Ciudad Mexico where we can speak as we like”—he paused and released another smile, prefabricated but always useful—“of the things we like. So: I saw the roll you carried was marked. And I knew how you had gotten it.”

“A man must eat,” said Mateo, flushing. “His mother must eat, too.”

“And is your mother well?” asked Vins, who knew exactly how she had fared.

“Among the saints in Heaven,” said Mateo, crossing himself.

“Lo siento mucho, it is much regretted,” Vins replied. Nothing tied Carranza to his home now, and their interchange had stressed the fact. “But I mention Camaguey only to refresh you on certain things we discussed that night.”

“You burned the fucking money, is what you did,” Jorge said, between awe and dismay.

“To protect my friend against his error,” Vins reminded him, now beginning to pace the floor. The pacing was important; it brought watching men to higher alertness, more readiness to pledge a risk. “But what did I tell you both?”

“Something,” said Jorge, “about the danger of a little money, and the safety of much money.”

“I remember. I was not that drunk,” Mateo said, prepared to argue the point. “We spoke of the ways a man gains that kind of safety. We seemed to be largely in agreement.”

Vins stopped pacing and faced the two seated men, no longer smiling. “If you have lingering suspicions that this room has ears, listen now: how much money would it take for all of us to become disappeared ones, desaparecidos, on our own terms, with a villa and a complacent maid for the rest of our lives? But not, if we are wise, in Cuba.”

Now Mateo and Jorge did look at each other, more in puzzlement than friendship. Then Jorge named a figure. Mateo waited and named a higher one, which would have made Vins smile if he had been watching through one-way glass.

“Then you would certainly do it for,” he paused, and named a much higher figure. Jorge jumped. Mateo lost his slouch. Vins put his knuckled fists on the desk and leaned forward, letting the smile seem to arrive of its own volition. “The amount that could be yours is ten times as much.”

Jorge closed his eyes, shook his head, opened them again.

Mateo, laconically: “And whom must we kill?”

“Perhaps one man, perhaps none,” said Vins, straightening, hands on hips, a commanding presence. “And it may turn out that we return empty-handed. It depends on some things we may not control—but each of us just may have the chance to retire among the anonymous rich. For a warrior, it is the opportunity of a lifetime.”

“Ten lifetimes,” Mateo said. “But you, el lobo? Why?”

Vins would not simply identify Maksimov by name, nor the power shifts initiated by the hated liberals of the Gorbachev regime. Too many “ifs” remained to talk politics with peons. But he could read a soldier’s face, and he no longer doubted the wisdom of his choices for a team. “No man reaches the top by pushing; he must be pulled up.”

“For that, a thousand thanks,” said Jorge.

“For nothing, Jorge, but I was referring to myself. And what happens if the man who is pulling you up, finds himself pushed from behind?”

“He breaks his ass and so do you,” said Mateo, making Jorge smile.

“And some men at the top actually jump,” Vins told them. “And if another at the top even suspects he intends to. jump, that other man will push him.”

“There are too many pushers in this world and not enough pullers,” Jorge observed.

“No man pushes me,” said Vins, with the wolfish grin that had inspired his sobriquet. “The only question is: may I pull you both?”

Jorge was first, but Mateo stood too, both of them making a gesture Karel Vins had taught them as a part of esprit de corps, a very old gesture, older than Czars, as old as Caesars. They stood erect, proud, right fists clenched over their hearts.

“I have already told you, but I repeat it now, and we will not speak of this again until we are driving on the last leg of this mission,” Vins said, just a shade more somber than threatening. “We have a mission, and it requires the movement of a great fortune. All this is approved, just as you were approved.”

“As you, too, were approved,” Mateo interrupted, smirking.

Vins caught his snarl inside and inverted it. “As I too was approved,” he agreed, perfectly aware that Mateo Carranza was already beginning to test the notion of equality. I may have to shoot this son of a whore yet, he thought. “We will pursue the mission, pay the money to a man for a piece of military hardware, turn that hardware over to certain authorities—and try to recover the money. All approved; what is not sanctioned is what we just might do with the money afterward.”

For all his faults, Mateo had his flashes of insight. “I do not see why, Lobo, if we control the money to begin with, we do not simply disappear immediately.”

“The hardware it buys,” said Jorge, surprised.

“Fuck the hardware,” Mateo said with a smile.

“Because that hardware is an aircraft of absolutely crucial importance to world socialism and the Soviet Union,” Vins said tersely. “You will bear in mind that I am a patriot.” And this time his smile was unfeigned, lopsided, and a little sad. “But not the kind of patriot to have my ass broken for nothing.”