Valley of the Templars

8

El Templete is located close to Havana Harbor on Avenue Carlos Manuel Céspedes, sometimes called the Avenida del Puerto. The neoclassical building constructed in 1828 is situated exactly in front of the Palacio de los Capitanes Generales, which today is the City Museum of Havana. Across the street is the Hotel Santa Isabel, the grandest of the old hotels in Havana and in the 1700s the home of the counts of Santovenia.

La Templete is surrounded by a wrought-iron fence and looks out onto the Plaza des Armas, a sixteenth-century square once used to assemble and inspect troops and that dates back to the original settlement of San Cristóbal de Habana by Don Diego Velázquez.

The cut-stone frieze below the simple peaked-roof cornice of the building is decorated with arcane symbols of skulls, crosses and intersecting circles that are usually associated with the Holy Trinity. One symbol, exactly in the center of the frieze and directly above the heavy bronze doors of the building, shows four triangles, points facing inward—a Templar cross separated into four distinct parts.

Most of the detail of the frieze is covered by two hundred years of lichen, mold and city grime. Alongside El Templete stands a beautiful and thick ceiba tree in the place where on November 16, 1519, the Villa de San Cristóbal was founded. The tree was highly revered by the natives, who attributed it with great magical-religious powers.

On November 16 each year, Habaneros and people from all over Cuba line up for their chance to take three turns around the magic tree and leave offerings between her huge bulbous roots. For the Indio natives who were here long before Columbus set sail for the New World, this was the Mother Tree, a virtual god that solved all problems and healed all wounds.

Eddie drove the old motorcycle up onto the curb and switched off the engine. On their left was the low wrought-iron fence that surrounded the tree-shrouded Plaza des Armas. On their right, across the broad street, was El Templete, so small it looked more like a mausoleum than a temple. It, too, was surrounded by a wrought-iron fence, this one much higher. Between the fence and the building was a tall, heavy-trunked tree with widespread branches spread like a protective umbrella; this had to be the ceiba tree, the devil tree Eddie’s mother had mentioned. There was also something that looked like a ticket booth on the pathway leading to the old building.

There were tourists milling around inside the fence, some taking pictures of the huge shade tree while others roamed around the tiny windowless building. Other people went in and out of the Museum of Havana directly behind it, and more tourists stood and read the menu and the prices posted for the restaurant inside. Most turned away shaking their heads, but a few actually went in.

Directly in front of them, shaded by an umbrella of her own and seated behind a flimsy-looking card table on a padded stool, was an ancient black woman, her rake-thin body encased in a formless, faded print dress. Her face was a mass of wrinkles and the skin was stretched like leathery parchment over her bony arms. Her feet were bare and she was smoking a narrow cigar. On the table in front of her was a cooler, a large deck of cards, a few silvery trinkets and some strange-looking leather thong necklaces with small cloth bags hanging from them.

“Who is this woman?” Holliday asked.

“Mama Oya,” said Eddie.

“Does she have a real name?”

“If she ever had one, even she has forgotten it,” replied Eddie. They approached the woman behind the card table. Holliday was surprised to see what appeared to be an old-fashioned six-ounce bottle of Coca-Cola lying on a bed of crushed ice in the cooler.

“Hekua hey Yansa,” said Eddie, bowing slightly.

“Hekua hey yourself, Eddie Cabrera, the child who used to be called El Vampiro.” She spoke almost perfect English.

“El Vampiro?”

“It is nothing, Doc,” said Eddie.

The old woman gave a brief cackling laugh as she looked up at Holliday. Her eyes were ice blue and clear with no hint of age. They could have been the eyes of a young girl. “When he was a little boy Eddie would take off all his clothes and walk around the streets of Old Havana in the middle of the night,” said Mama Oya, grinning around her cigar. She turned back to Eddie. “You come about your brother, the white-haired one.”

“You knew this?”

“Mama Oya knows everything. Just like I know your friend is American and was once a soldier.”

“Canadian,” said Holliday.

“No mientas a Mamá Oya, gringo,” said the old woman sharply. “You are an American, you were once a soldier and then you taught soldiers. You hated your father and love your wife still even though she has been gone for many years.”

My God, thought Holliday, literally taking a step back. The wizened creature in front of him couldn’t have known all that. Unless Eddie had somehow managed to tell her. He turned and looked at his friend, the question clear in his expression. Eddie shook his head slowly.

“I know this in the same way as I know that Eddie has crossed an ocean to search for his brother, Domingo, so he might ease his mother’s pain. I know because Mama Oya sits here and sees many things.”

“You have seen Domingo?” Eddie asked.

“I saw him driving Raul’s daughter, the one married to Espin. They came to this place more than once for their meetings in the night.”

“Who came, Mama?” Eddie asked.

“Luis Alberto Rodriguez Lopez Callejas, Luis Perez Rospide, Lieutenant Colonel Rojas.”

“The man who runs Tecnotex SA,” explained Eddie. “They import anything technological…computers, satellite phones—all for the top people only.” He turned to Mama Oya. “Any others, Mama?”

“Jesus Bermudez Cutiño,” said the old woman.

“Director of Military Intelligence.”

“Juan Almeida Bosque.”

“He oversees all real estate transactions and builds hotels exclusively for the use of foreigners.”

“Colonel Brito.”

“CEO of Aerogaviota. It has its own fleet of helicopter based at Baracoa Air Base. The personnel are all military. It is supposed to be for tourism and rentals to foreign businessmen, but it is actually there to provide air support in case of insurrection.”

“Also there was Ramiro Valdés,” said Mama Oya darkly. “A devil, truly.”

“Minister of Informatics and Communications, also minister of the Interior—the Secret Police, also the minister of Agriculture. He is Adolf Hitler, this man. He went to a conference in Venezuela, and the joke in Havana was that he’d gone there to fix their silla eléctrica, their electric chair. He is a sadist and a murderer, amigo, and very dangerous.”

“Were you here on the night when Eddie’s brother disappeared?” Holliday asked.

“Buy something from Mama Oya and perhaps I’ll tell you.”

Holliday took a twenty-dollar bill out of his wallet, laid it on the card table and picked up a freezing-cold Coca-Cola from the cooler. He used the metal bottle opener hanging from a string threaded through a hole high on the side of the container and took a sip.

He was surprised. It tasted exactly like the five-cent bottles he’d bought as a child from Pop Mercier’s grocery store down the street from Uncle Henry’s house in Fredonia, New York. You’d drop a nickel into the slot and it would allow you to drag your drink through a maze of metal tubes until it was free, dripping water and wonderfully chilled on a hot summer’s day.

“It is the same as you remember, isn’t it, gringo?” Mama Oya said. “The Mexicans use sugar instead of corn syrup.”

“Is that so?” Holliday said, trying to be calm in the face of a tiny old woman who seemed to be able to read his mind and then some. He took another long pull on the Coke. She was right; the taste was lighter and sweeter than the heavy goop they sold in cans now. It was like stepping into the past.

“That is so, gringo.” The old woman smiled. “And yes, I was here on the night that Eddie disappeared.”

“Did he speak with you?” Eddie asked.

“Yes.”

“You were still here so late at night?”

“The Plaza des Armas is my home, gringo. I have no other. Domingo knew where I go to dream.”

“What did he tell you, Mama Oya?”

The old woman turned over the top card in her large deck and laid it out on the table. It was a tarot card, but unlike any Holliday had ever seen. It showed a dancing man, his belt hung with skulls, a machete in one hand, a severed head in the other and the face of the devil. The colors of the card were green and black, and the number 7 was printed above the image, as was the name Ogun printed in heavy, dark ink.

“Ogún oko dara obaniché aguanile ichegún iré,” the old woman hissed. “He told me that if Eddie came, to tell him that he had gone to the Valle del Muerte. The Valley of Death.”

Other than looking a little silly, like Mr. Spock in the old Star Trek series, having a Bluetooth screwed into your earhole had a great number of advantages for the average intelligence agent—you no longer looked like a complete idiot talking to yourself in virtually any situation or environment and you could keep in touch with anyone else on your surveillance team. William Copeland Black sat on a stool in the Insomnia Coffee Shop on Grafton Street and kept an eye on Fusilier’s Gate, the main entrance to St. Stephen’s Green. It was a gray day, threatening rain, but there were still lots of people on the pedestrian mall just outside the big picture window of the coffee shop.

Dr. Eugenio Selman-Housein, Fidel’s personal physician, was in play. After an afternoon of shopping on Grafton Street, he was supposed to enter the Green through the Fusilier’s Gate on his way back to the Shelburne. So far he was almost twenty minutes late. Black wasn’t worried—yet—but he was beginning to get that familiar stiffness in the back of his neck that meant something was going wrong.

“Anything?” he said. There was a series of responding clicks in his ear. One click for no, two for yes. Where was the doctor?

And suddenly there he was, walking right by the Insomnia’s window and stopping for the light at Grafton and King streets, a shopping bag in each hand, his expression clearly nervous. He was wearing a hideous Marks & Spencer green cardigan, gray trousers and brown shoes. He looked like a thin, badly dressed owl behind his wire-rimmed spectacles. The doctor crossed King Street to the shopping center on the corner, then crossed again to Fusilier’s Gate and walked into the park.

“Got him. Target is in the park.” Two shopping bags. A black-and-gold one from Zara and a red-on-white one from H and M.”

There was a voice in Black’s ear. “Three. I see him.”

Black started silently counting to himself. At twenty-five, there was nothing; at forty-five, a man in his thirties wearing sunglasses, a leather jacket and a pale green Gucci T-shirt crossed to Fusilier’s Gate from the far side of Grafton Street. He had slicked-back black hair, tanned skin and a single earbud line running down to his T-shirt and then under it.

“Three, he’s got a shadow. Black leather jacket, green T-shirt, cream-colored linen pants.”

“Three. Got him.”

“Three, give him a ten-second lead and then follow him. I’m coming in now. You know what to do,” Black said.

“Yes, sir. Three out.”

“The rest of you keep your eyes open. He’s got ears on. There’s going to be others around.” Once again there was a series of clicks.

Black swallowed the last of his cold coffee, left the store and walked across Grafton Street, thick with tourists even this early in the season, especially with everything in the country being on sale these days. He crossed over to Fusilier’s Gate and quickened his pace. He spotted Major a hundred feet behind Leather Jacket. Major was wearing a London Fog belted raincoat and a gray fedora, looking like something out of a Humphrey Bogart movie. Black spoke quietly. “Three, start the ball rolling.”

Major began walking faster and so did Black. By the time Major had drawn even with the man in the leather jacket, Black was only twenty feet behind them both. Major drew ahead of the man and Black saw the shadow’s shoulders visibly relax. The man slowed his pace, letting Major get even farther ahead. Black put his hand into the right-hand pocket of his suit jacket and popped the top off the fountain-pen-like device he was carrying. In fact, it was a modified version of an insulin pen filled with a light dose of dihydroetorphine.

In high concentrations the Chinese drug is used by zoos to tranquilize rhinoceroses. He laid his thumb across the CO₂ delivery button and lengthened his stride. Ahead of the man in the leather jacket, Major veered slightly and kept walking. He was now directly ahead of the shadow. The shadow dropped back a little, which in turn brought Black almost beside him to the left. Sensing someone behind him, the shadow turned. Black smiled and nodded pleasantly.

The shadow turned again just as Major dropped to one knee and began fiddling with a shoelace. The man in the leather jacket stumbled, trying to get out of Major’s way, and barged into Black, who already had the CO₂ pen in his hand. As the shadow bumped into him, Black jabbed the end of the pen into the man’s thigh and hit the button. The timing was perfect. In the five seconds it took for the drug to take effect, Black and Major managed to get the shadow to a bench and get him seated. Oddly, in the distance he could hear a brass band playing the theme song to SpongeBob SquarePants.

Black took a few extra seconds to go through his jacket pockets. He came up with a billfold and a blue Cuban passport with the words Pasaporte Dimplomatico in gold across the bottom. According to the passport the shadow’s name was Rudolfo Suarez and he was an assistant attaché at the Cuban embassy on Adelaide Court. Not likely. Black put the passport back into the unconscious man’s pocket.

“This is Four. I’ve got a Hispanic couple at the run from the Shelburne entrance to the Green. Something’s up.”

“Fucking hell,” said Black softly. The doctor had been told to wait at the fountain in the center of the park. If he saw two Secret Police coming after him, he was bound to panic. He was pretty shaky as it was. “Stop them, Four.”

“How?”

“How the bloody hell should I know? Arrest them, shout fire, tackle them. Shout out Viva Fidel! Just stop them!” Black turned to Major. “Come on, double time.”

The two men began to stride quickly down the wide paved pathway. A hundred yards ahead of them, they could see the fountain and the bewildered-looking figure of the doctor. Suddenly the skies overhead opened and it began to pour. People in the park began to run for cover. Dr. Eugenio Selman-Housein vanished behind a silvery curtain of rain.

“Goddamn bloody Ireland and its bloody weather,” said Black. He and Major began to run. The brass band was playing “Tonight’s the Night” from the Bugs Bunny/Road Runner Hour.

They reached the fountain and at first Black thought the doctor had rabbited, but then he saw him slouched on a bench a few yards away getting whatever slight protection he could from the large oak tree spreading its branches above him.

“Give him your coat and hat,” Black said to Major.

“But…,” said Major.

“Do it!”

Major did as he was told. Gripping the doctor by the arm, Black led the frightened man down the narrower southern path away from the fountain. Behind them Black could hear raised voices, at least one of then in Spanish.

“Lo que está pasando?” The doctor asked, getting more upset with each passing second.

“Everything’s going to be fine,” soothed Black. He jerked his head and Major peeled off and headed back toward the fountain.

Hunched over against the pounding rain, Black and Selman-Housein moved quickly down the pathway. It was the Garda Band playing under cover of the bandstand’s conical Victorian roof, the brass buttons on their policemen’s uniforms as shiny as their instruments.

They were playing “Teddy Bear’s Picnic” now, much to the delight of their audience, a giggling flock of young children all dressed in yellow slickers, boots and rain hats, just like the children in the Madeleine books his mother had read to Black as a child.

Far behind them now Black heard the frantic wailing of a police car on the far side of the Green.

“I have changed my mind!” Selman-Housein moaned. “Let me go!” The doctor tried to pull away from him, struggling against Black’s grip, but Black held on ever harder, almost lifting the older man off his feet.

“Too late, amigo,” said Black harshly. “You made your bed and now you’re damn well going to lie in it.”

Four was waiting at the open gate exiting onto the street. Four was a man in his fifties named Tommy Thompson, an ex–SAS Special Forces master sergeant with a face like granite and biceps like steel.

“The doctor’s having pangs of homesickness, Tommy,” said Black.

“Not a problem, sir,” replied the hard-faced sergeant. He gripped Selman-Housein by his other arm and together he and Black propelled the smaller man through the gate and across the rain-soaked road to the opposite side. They piloted the Cuban fifty feet south to the front door of Staunton’s on the Green, two Georgian houses joined to make a small boutique hotel.

They lifted him up the single step, pulled open the door, then marched him straight down the main hallway and out the rear patio exit. They stepped back out into the sheeting rain and followed the narrow brick pathway to a small gate. Holding the doctor firmly, Tommy Thompson lifted the latch and the three men stepped out into Iveagh Gardens.

The Gardens, a smaller version of St. Stephen’s Green, was hidden from sight on three sides by buildings and on the fourth by a high brick wall and a screening stand of trees. The gardens had been a gift from Benjamin Guinness of the beer dynasty and named for his son, Edward, the first Earl of Iveagh.

Empty now because of the downpour, the Gardens had a sinister, brooding look like something from an Alfred Hitchcock movie. Ignoring the feeling of imminent doom creeping down his neck along with the rain, Black pointed the doctor down the path to the only public entrance to the Gardens on Clonmel Street, halfway down the park.

“Listen to me! Listen to me!” Selman-Housein screamed. “I must go back to the hotel! I have left important documents there!”

“Come along, then, Doctor—there’s a good fellow,” said Tommy Thompson. “I wouldn’t like to hurt you, now, would I, sir?”

“Me cago en tus muertos!” Selman-Housein screeched. He turned his head and spit in the sergeant’s face.

“Whatever you say, sir,” Thompson said quietly. He wiped the spit and rain from his face, then slapped the Cuban hard across the back of the head.

Clonmel was less a street than a broad alley between two buildings on Harcourt Street. Reaching the open gates of the park, Black saw that the yellow and red fire brigade ambulance was already in place.

“What is this!” the Cuban said, balking, eyes widening at the sight of the ambulance, its rear doors already open and waiting.

“It’s a fucking trolley bus,” said Tommy Thompson. “What did you expect, an embassy limousine, mate?”

“I will not get in this thing.”

“Oh yes, you bloody will,” said Tommy. He grabbed the little man under the armpits and heaved him headfirst into the rear of the ambulance, following close behind. Black stepped up into the ambulance, as well, and together he and the sergeant managed to get the Cuban strapped down onto the gurney inside.

“Why are you doing this to me?” Selman-Housein moaned beseechingly, his eyes filling with tears.

“Verisimilitude,” said Black.

“Qué?”

“To make it look real,” explained Black, slapping a slab of sticking plaster over the man’s mouth, followed by an oxygen mask. That done, Black rapped on the driver’s partition wall with his knuckles. The siren started and they hurtled up Clonmel to Harcourt Street and began to weave through the streets of Dublin at rush hour in the pouring rain. Twenty minutes later, siren still wailing, they reached the N4 and headed west toward the Lujan Bypass and the countryside beyond. Five minutes later, the siren silent, they turned in at Weston Executive Airport and the waiting, unmarked white Gulfstream 5.

Without removing either the mask or the tape, they got Selman-Housein down off the ambulance and up into the sleek white jet. One of the leather couches had been removed from the rear of the aircraft and the gurney fit perfectly, clipping solidly onto the two U-shaped bolts in the fuselage wall. The door closed with a hiss and the pilot and the copilot began to spool up the Gulfstream’s twin Rolls-Royce engines. A few moments later they taxied out to the runway and then hurtled down it, finally leaping into the air and heading southwest, climbing steadily, finally getting out of the rain and into the fading blue sky beyond. Far to the west the sun was already heading downward into the night.

Black finally took off the mask and ripped off the tape from Selman-Housein’s mouth. “Get me down from here,” snapped the Cuban doctor angrily.

“Not a chance,” answered Black. The thought of listening to the man’s complaints for the next six hours was intolerable. He took out his CO₂-powered syringe and recocked the arming lever. He pushed the syringe tip against the bulge of the older man’s fatty love handles and hit the FIRE button. The doctor was unconscious almost instantly. The shot would keep Selman-Housein deep under all the way to Washington. Black smiled. “Render unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s. Render unto Joseph Patchin’s that which is Joseph Patchin’s.”