Hostage in Havana

back? Maybe he’s just teasing. Or he’s got some final double-double game going.”

“American-interests section of the Swiss Embassy,” Fajardie said. “As I said. They assess it as serious, although everyone agrees that the man is completely unstable. One day he wants to come back, next day he’s not so sure. So he needs enticement.”

“He’s been negotiating a deal,” Menendez said.

“I understand that,” Alex said, “but how do you know he really wants to defect back? Maybe your information’s wrong. Dare I say, it often is.”

“It isn’t,” Fajardie snapped. His tone was frosty. “It isn’t, and we want him back. If we can coax him onto a plane, we need to do it.” He paused. “We’re told that he still has an eye for the ladies. So what better way than to send someone like you, Alex – good-looking, obviously in our employ, versatile in English and Spanish – to entice him onto an aircraft off the island? Bringing with him,” Fajardie added in conclusion, “any goodies he might have for us. Anything he’s toting would be just a bonus. Much appreciated, but a bonus.” He paused. “So if you could drop in on a meeting with him and get him onto the small aircraft that we’re going to arrange to lift you and him and your Mafia pal out of there …? Well, that would be a wonderful thing for everyone, wouldn’t it?”

Alex watched the eye contact between the three men shoot around the table, like the ball in an old arcade game. Pinball wizards, all of them. The Who’s deaf, dumb, and blind kid would have loved this trio. But in the eye contact, she wondered what she wasn’t being told. What and how much.

“What are you going to do with him once you get him back?” she asked. “Take him out to tea? Pin a medal on his chest? Push him out a window?”

“Don’t be silly,” Fajardie said.

“I’m not being silly. I’m asking. I know it’s unusual for someone with a sense of ethics to be sitting in front of you, but that’s what you have here. So maybe you could answer my question?”

“There’s not much we can do if he sets foot on American soil, Alex,” Fajardie answered. “He’s worked out a deal through lawyers in New York. I’m not even a party to it, but I do know that if we violated it once he’s back, we’d be looking at criminal and civil suits for a decade, from him or his dear relatives. He’s not worth it, Alex. We’re just trying to button up some old business.”

Alex was about to ask more when Sloane resumed. “It’s all in the file we’re going to give you. Everything that we know. Take it with you. You’ll move toward Cuba the day after tomorrow.”

“We want Violette before he changes his mind,” Fajardie said, “which he changes as quickly as he changes his underwear, assuming anyone has spare underwear in Cuba these days.”

“And you’re sure the man you’re dealing with is the real thing?” Alex asked. “Ronald Violette?”

“There are some correspondences,” Sloane said, easing slightly, “handwritten. Violette’s proposals to us via the Swiss. We had the handwriting analyzed. It’s him. We know that.” He paused. “There are scans of the letters. You can take a look.”

“Just curious. Are they in English or Spanish?” she asked.

“English. Does it matter?”

“No,” Alex said.

“Good,” Fajardie said. He plopped a bound file on the table between them, plus a smaller envelope containing the flash drives.

“Take a look at this stuff tonight,” he said, “and call me with any questions. Meanwhile, tomorrow morning, the agency will outfit you for your trip. Passport. Weapon. Money. After that, you’re on your way.”

Fajardie eased back for a moment, appearing as if he was proposing to say something further. Alex held onto the silence.

Finally, Fajardie uncorked. “Ronald Violette,” he said, “the shrinking Violette. He won’t be forced, Alex. He must be nursed along. Prodded and cajoled, charmed, tricked, or bamboozled. He flirts with leaving the island, then never does. But the time might finally be right. So he needs to be goosed, juiced, reduced, deduced, or seduced – or anything to get him onto that aircraft. Clear? Opaque? Transparent? That’s your assignment, Alex, and you’ll probably have one roll of the dice over his morning shot of rum. Anything. Just get his filthy traitorous butt on that plane out of there in any way you can. Fun, right?”

“Fun,” she said.

“Which reminds me, if you can get us some Havana Club or a handful of Cohibas or Bolivars, it wouldn’t be a bad thing, either.”

“I thought you disagreed with the embargo,” she said.

“I do. But I have my own personal needs as a drinker and a smoker, all right?” He winked. She eyed the file, her mind a warren of doubts. Then, for some reason, her own brief career flew before her mind’s eye, as well as that of Roland Violette. What did she have in front of her, sandwiched between the covers of a manila envelope, other than a testament to an aging man’s life?

How should he be seen, and how should she see him if she found him in Cuba? As a man who had set out to achieve one set of goals but then had worked toward the opposite? A man who had betrayed others? Or, in his bizarre fidelity to his lifetime companion, Rica, was he a man who had found a higher loyalty and been true to that instead? For a moment, she tried to push ideology aside. Surely, Violette could see through capitalist values much the same way she could see through Communist ones. She wondered what it could have been like to make such a step of loyalty to one’s partner that one was obligated to spend the back end of one’s life in a place as isolated as Cuba.

“I’m still not buying this completely. If Violette is so widely hated here, why bring him back at all?” she asked. “Other than to prosecute him. Why cut him any sort of a deal?”

“We make deals with people we hate every day,” Fajardie said. “Plus, if you want me to be ornery, it’s not your job to wonder about such things. It’s your role to either accept the mission, argue out of it, or resign. The choice is yours.”

“I figured you’d explain it that way,” she said, thinking about the two million dollars in the bank, then thinking about the bullets that crashed through her apartment window.

“Is there any other way to explain it?” Fajardie asked graciously.

“None at all,” Alex said with a sigh. “I get where you’re coming from.” She reached forward and accepted the files, and with them the assignment in Havana. “Okay,” she said. “I don’t like it, but okay.”

“That’s kind of my attitude every morning in this place,” Fajardie said. “Why should you be living a different life than I am?”

“No reason I should,” she said. They missed her sarcasm.

Fajardie turned to Sloane and Menendez. “Thank you, gentlemen,” he said. They rose and were out the door in another minute. Alex would have followed, but she felt Fajardie’s hand on her wrist. Then he released. He glanced back to the table and indicated she should sit again.

“A final detail or two, Alex,” he said. He moved to the door and closed it.

It was obvious to Alex that Fajardie had something significant to add. She sat.

“A couple of creeps those guys,” he muttered of the duo that had just left.

“Imagine that in this agency,” she said.

“Yeah, right,” he agreed. “And now I’m going to be one too.”

“Want to spit it out?” she asked.

“I’m going to tell you your real assignment in Cuba.”

Alex stiffened slightly.

“There’s a larger issue there,” Fajardie said. “Potentially a huge one. It will most likely develop on your visit, but it’s absolutely at the top level at this moment. Well beyond the purview of those two clowns who just left.”

“Wait a minute,” Alex asked. “Is the Violette operation genuine or not?”

“Absolutely,” Fajardie said, “and it’s the perfect cover within the agency for your second task in Cuba. There is, in fact, a second defector, a much more important one, who is holding a top-drawer bag of goodies for us. ‘Figaro,’ we’re supposed to call him, until we learn more. I am not even sure who he is, but the package he’s selling is quite impressive. Potentially a first-rate defector with two eyes on the future, whereas Brother Violette is of the third-rate variety with one bleary eye on the past. Follow?”

“Vaguely. This Figaro – is that his cover name or one our side gave him?”

“His, I believe. Why?”

“A theory of mine,” she said, warming to the subject, “which has been borne out in recent times. The more