She tried to run forward and through them, hoping they wouldn’t shoot out of fear of hitting each other. But it was impossible. There was a rough hand on her arm. She straight-armed the Havana cop who was trying to pull her down. She broke free, but he had slowed her long enough so that her other assailants could converge. She threw a sharp elbow at one of them and must have caught him fully in the jaw, because she felt an impressive impact. The man recoiled.
She screamed and shouted. Loud enough to rouse the dead. She flailed. But now there were hands all over her, trying to pull her to the ground. Someone yoked her from behind; Alex thought it was one of the women. She caught one of them with her leg and wobbled a little, and then they were all falling, the whole scrum of them, onto the filthy pavement and then into the gutter.
Alex was face down. Her clothes were wet. The police were tearing at her arms, trying to pin them behind her and handcuff her. She kicked and screamed until someone held a hand to her mouth to muffle her. Then a pair of cuffs clicked onto one wrist behind her and then onto the other. Her arms felt as if they’d been pulled out of their sockets. She continued to fight, but two of the strongest men now had her pinned.
As she struggled, she looked up and caught a brief glimpse of Paul’s dimly lit third-floor window. He seemed to be standing at the window, the shade slightly to the side, watching. All she could think of was how she had just left him and that he should flee as fast as possible. Or, she wondered, had he set her up?
The hand at her mouth pulled away. “What are you doing?
Who are you?” she demanded in Spanish of her captors. “I’ve done nothing wrong. I’m a citizen of Mexico.”
But they weren’t listening. The insults came back.
“Fight like a little pig, do you?” taunted one of the men. “Little pigs get stuck and grilled in Cuba.”
To take the fight out of her, someone kicked her in the ribs. She saw the kick coming and blocked it with a wrenched arm. She cursed long and hard again. Then someone, it might even have been one of the women, grabbed her by the hair, jerked back her head, and then drove her skull forward into the street. This time she was glad for the garbage since a soaking discarded bag lessened the impact.
Still, the blow stunned her. It took the rest of the fight out of her. The police pulled her to her feet. She felt wobbly and dazed, as if her feet didn’t work. More hands were all over her, frisking her, feeling her, taking whatever she had in her pockets, including money. Something was in her left eye, and she realized that her forehead must have been gashed because blood was running into her eye. It continued to flow and dripped onto her blouse. At the same time, one of the uniformed men was going through her bag. He pulled out her gun, made a fuss over it, and showed it to the others.
She wiped her forehead on her shoulder as best she could. She raised her eyes to the window again. Guarneri had vanished. Or maybe she had seen the wrong window. The police forced her into the back of an unmarked car. It was obviously state security of some sort because the interior was fitted as a police cruiser might be, complete with a divider between the front seat and the back.
From the window, she noticed two vans and more people pouring into the building. Then lights flashed on the dashboard. It started to move, but there was no siren.
The car pulled quickly away from the curb, and she was on a fast bumpy ride through the backstreets of Havana and then on some major ones. Alex was terrified. She tried to memorize the route, but the effort was useless and ended in confusion. There was no point of reference, just unfamiliar streets at dawn in a hostile city.
She trembled. She muttered a prayer aloud. Her body began to ache where she had received hits: forehead, ribs, and arms. Her left breast felt bruised as if she had been punched or groped. The blood continued to trickle steadily into her eye, and she kept wiping it away with her shoulder as best she could.
After a wild ride of several minutes, the police van pulled up in front of a gate. A pair of police guards manually raised a barrier and signaled the car through. The car followed a driveway that led to a garage. Then they were within a police installation.
The driver and his assistant opened the rear door and roughly pulled her out. They marched her into the station. A female guard fell into step beside the officers. They stopped at a booking station. The police undid the handcuffs and gave her a small towel to hold to her forehead as the cut was still trickling blood.
“I’m a Mexican citizen,” she said to anyone who would listen. “I want to see a lawyer. I’ve done nothing wrong.”
No one paid her any attention, as if they all knew exactly who she was. Meanwhile, some mumbling was exchanged between one of her captors and a superior. Alex took this occasion to protest again, claiming she was a citizen of Mexico and demanding to know why she had been abducted.
One of the arresting officers came back, looked her in the eye with doleful brown eyes, then cracked her across the face with his open palm. She staggered back, and someone else blocked her fall. She thought it was one of the female officers.
“Enemy of the Revolution,” he said.
He made a gesture with his arms that suggested holding a rifle.
They sat her down and questioned her. They wanted to know who she was and when she had come into the country. She stuck with her Mexican identity and claimed she had arrived by air from Mexico City and that she had had a fight with her husband and he had dumped her.
She knew that if they checked her story about her arrival she was sunk. She prayed that they kept bad records. Then they stood her in front of a camera and took her picture. She was too dazed to resist. When the picture taking ended, another female guard took her arm and shoved her along a hallway to a cell. An iron door with bars swung open. They pushed Alex in among several other female prisoners, all of them much darker skinned than she was. There were no bunks, just fetid mattresses on the floor, a dirty cracked sink, and a single metal toilet. Everyone looked as if they’d been there for days.
She huddled in a corner on the floor, wondering why anyone with two millions dollars in the bank would accept a job that brought her to a place like this.
How could she have been so crazy? This, she decided, was insane! It went without saying that the operation with Violette had probably crashed now. Or had Violette been a setup to create an incident, to lure an American spy into Cuba?
If she ever got out of here, she told herself, she would live differently. Tears weren’t far away, but she was afraid to show them. She wondered what had happened to Paul – had he escaped or been killed? Then she wondered how anyone would ever find her here.
She trembled not knowing the answer to that question. She was more frightened than she had ever been in her life. Nor had she ever felt so alone.
On the south shore of Cuba, less than a hundred yards from a small inlet twenty miles southeast of Cienfuegos, Manuel Perez was back in his element. His new employers had set him up in a cheerful little sniper’s nest that overlooked the tiny isolated beach. In less than forty-eight hours, his target would appear.
He nursed his provisions and spent many hours examining the new rifle that they had provided for him at Guantanamo. One good shot, one direct hit, was all that stood between him and liberty, as well as freedom for his family, who were still being held by those CIA thugs.
Perez had missed his mark in New York. But he now came to see that as a once-in-a-lifetime event. This time when his target emerged, the range would be shorter, and thanks to the sand on the beach, his target would be moving more slowly.
This one was a setup. As easy as walking into a restaurant and shooting a man in the face. Can’t miss and can’t lose, as long as one gets out of the area fast enough.
That had been his mistake in New York.
He had hung around too long.
It was like missing a shot: learn by the mistake and don’t do it again.
