Joseph Guarneri was murdered. Garcia was last known to be in Cuba as a member of Cuban State Security in 1981 and remains a member of the Cuban Communist Party … Notes between FBI and CIA were never compared or correlated at the time. SpAg J.N.H., 07/19/1993.
Julio Garcia, Alex mused. How many Cubans had that name? Five thousand? Ten thousand? She proceeded to the next email. This one, from the CIA, was a series of briefs on Roland Violette. Alex made some coffee, then spent an hour reading the reports and reviewing surveillance photos, the most recent taken fifty-six days earlier.
She noted that Violette had been stationed in Washington, then Madrid, which rang some loud bells for her. Within the last year she had worked out of the U.S. Embassy and the CIA office in the Spanish capital. She wondered if her contacts from those operations might be able to tell her things that might not be in the official summary.
“Okay,” she told herself. Bringing Violette out of Cuba was the assignment.
She wasn’t the only one whose brains felt like scrambled eggs these days, she realized. She read a pair of blurbs from a CIA contact with a Honduran passport who had encountered Violette in Havana by chance six weeks earlier.Examiner’s note: HW File 7-TF, 05/14/11: Roland Violette sits in Juanita’s Cafe on the Calle San Rafael … and he tells the old stories over and over. They frequently have no appearance of reality and bear not even a faint resemblance to the truth.But he has told them so often over his morning daiquiris that it’s obvious he’s come to believe them himself. Sad. His head has turned to mush with a destroyed spirit and body to match …
This was followed by another examiner’s note from within the last two weeks.Ronnie the Violet, also known as Ronnie the Deep Purple Red [some recent sorehead had written while reviewing the file] remains a rat bastard. May he burn in hell forever over what he did to this agency in the ‘70s and ‘80s.
She reread that one-line entry. It was fascinating that Violette still elicited such strong feelings. His defection had been a full quarter century earlier, and the damage that he had done went even farther back. But she was intrigued, too, that someone else had preceded her through this file within the last few days. She could feel someone’s hot breath on it. Were the fingerprints from this present operation or some other?
Then she recalled that if Violette was looking to return to America, the file had undergone a Lazarus effect. It was back from the dead. She decided to do a little water testing of her own and threw a few keystrokes onto the computer, trying to make her own comments on the file. But the file was closed and refused to receive any new amendments. She looked at the initials following the examiner’s notation: HW.
She didn’t know an HW, but she would now look out for one. HW was clearly senior enough to add his or her own notes to the file, which meant that HW carried some weight in the CIA.
And since the file was closed to her but not to HW, that told her something too.
Okay, she would double check this herself. Her fingers worked the keyboard. Via secure email, she fired an inquiry to a colleague she had worked with in Madrid. She asked for anything the Madrid office might give her on Roland Violette and his defection. He had worked at the CIA office there in the 1980s, she noted, and the office had been on the top floor of the embassy. So surely Madrid had files. And surely they could share, even if the files didn’t officially exist. Since she wouldn’t have time to read through entire documents, she asked for an overview.
Then, for good measure, she sent the same dispatch to her old friend Gian Antonio Rizzo in Rome. Alex had worked with him on various occasions in the past, including the Madrid assignment. He was a retired municipal policeman who continued to moonlight for the CIA. Rizzo always had his ear to the ground, always had some odd bit of pertinent information. If nothing else, he was always amusing.
If she were lucky – and often she wasn’t – she would be able to compare the three responses. By the time she finished, it was ten minutes to five. She was so deep in thought, searching for implications and inferences, that at first she didn’t hear the three low rings of her cell phone. She stared at it in an unfocused way. It sounded a fourth time before she answered.
“It’s ‘no go’ on Gilberto, beautiful,” Sam purred. “I told you I’d try to call him, since he was my old informant in Havana, but he died seven years ago. His store folded, his son works for the Castro government out in the Sierra Maestra, and another family runs a bodega out of his storefront.”
“So you don’t know anyone else on the island?” she asked.
“Gilberto was my best guy and he’s gone,” he said. “Sorry.”
“But do you hear anything?” she asked. “Unofficial or otherwise?”
Sam shrugged. “Just some low level stuff. The U.S. diplomats are teed off because Cuba gets a free pass on human rights abuses from most of the world’s democracies. Diplomatic visitors from Canada, Australia, and Switzerland never criticize the Castro regime or meet with dissidents while they’re on the island. A friend showed me a confidential diplomatic cable sent to the State Department from Havana. The cable was transmitted in November 2010 and was signed by the top American diplomat in Habanera town. It said there were economic motives behind the suck-up approach. But if so, these countries weren’t getting much in return. The rewards for acquiescing to Cuban sensitivities were laughable: over-pumped dinners and for those who bowed lowest a photo- op with drooling old Fidel or dithering old Raul. Big fat deal, huh? And that’s all I hear, other than the fact that all the Cuban dissidents supported by Washington for decades were old, out of touch and so split petty squabbles that the United States needed to look elsewhere for future leaders. Like Miami, maybe.”
“I appreciate your insights,” she said. She wondered if someone had gotten to Sam in the hours since they’d seen each other. She rejected the notion. Sam was his own man these days.
Then Sam interrupted her thoughts. He said he had also made a few other calls about Paul Guarneri’s father and found an old contact who’d known Joseph Guarneri during the 1961 invasion. The old man had been a good soldier and a stand-up guy to his comrades-in-arms, Sam’s unidentified contact said. And he had been hip deep in a number of anti-Castro endeavors in the late sixties.
“CIA stuff, Sam? Do you think?” Alex asked.
“More than likely,” Sam said. “You can just about take that to the bank.”
“Here’s the funny part, Sam,” Alex said. “I spent two hours going through Joseph Guarneri’s FBI file this afternoon. It mentioned all the racketeering, the family, the contacts, touched on the anti-Castro stuff-but it uttered not a peep about the CIA. The CIA wasn’t even mentioned in Guarneri’s file. What do you think?”
Sam laughed. “Typical. The CIA would never share information with the FBI, and the FBI is too dumb to discover it on their own.”
“Should I make something of the omission?” Alex asked.
“In an FBI file?” Sam said. “No. Forget it. When it comes to the FBI, never attribute to duplicity what can be attributed to laziness, pigheadedness, or stupidity,” Sam said. “They miss the big picture all the time. They probably missed it here.”
“That or they’re keeping a second file they won’t let me see,” she said.
“There’s always that,” Sam said philosophically. “Anything else I can do?”
“Keep my cell number handy if you think of anything else. And I’ll keep yours.”
“God bless,” Sam said, then, “Oh, I remember the other thing I was going to tell you,” he said. “Thought of it right after I got back inside the fortress.”
“What?” She was almost starting to like Sam. Almost.
“A travel tip. Havana has two million people,” he said. “And one million of them are police. So be careful. Don’t get pinched by the Cuban cops. It’ll take you years to get out.” Then he rang off.
TWENTY-EIGHT
At his hotel in Manhattan’s East Fifties, Manuel Perez ran his room card through the slot in the door above the doorknob. The little green light came on. He pushed the door open. His hand was still on the knob when a blackjack smashed across his temple above the right ear. The blow staggered him. A second intruder, crouched behind the door, came from the left with a baseball bat and took out Perez’s knee from the left side. A second harder blow to the lower back dropped him to the floor.
