Hostage in Havana

Perez waited. He perched his rifle in the second-story window.

He had a clear line of sight to the small house with the Brazilian flag. He could see the commotion at the other side of the wall too, army trucks unloading soldiers, probably from Cienfuegos. But they weren’t his concern. He was used to shooting under pressure.

He lowered his eye to rifle’s sight. The rear door of the building opened, and a limping man with a hickory cane emerged. Then a woman in a police uniform came out. He waited. Then the woman emerged whom he had missed in New York. He grinned. That tiny miss a few weeks back had created all these complications. The woman, Alex LaDuca, was followed by a man. They were moving quickly, all of them, everyone except the crazy-looking old guy with the cane. Alex and the younger man were holding hands. Well, so be it. Let the lovebirds have their moment.

Perez moved his rifle onto his intended target. The right side of the victim’s head was beneath the red dot of his laser. This was such an easy shot that he almost felt bad. Just as the first of the escapees reached the pier, and he prepared to pull the trigger, an explosion erupted at the gate. The army had blown the door inward. A wave of smoke rolled across the courtyard. Still, it wasn’t enough to distract Perez. His future with his family was at stake, and these CIA guys he had been dealing with would have to make good on their promise to get him and Nicoleta and the girls back together.

He swung the rifle around, put the red beam on the head of his victim, and pulled the trigger. There was nasty recoil to the rifle but a tremendous satisfaction. He knew a single-shot kill when he saw one, a human head blowing apart, a crimson mist of blood and brains exploding from the bullet’s impact. And that’s what he saw.

Alex never heard the rifle shot. But she heard the crack of the bullet on Roland Violette’s skull. She heard a strange guttural sound escape his lungs and mouth, and almost instantaneously, she heard his body hit the ground. His attache case landed nearby.

She pulled her hand free of Paul’s, turned, and stared. And at the same time, she could hear soldiers pushing through the wreckage of the iron gate.

For too long a moment, she stopped and stared at the fallen man. His last wish had been to return to the country he had disdained and be buried on American soil. But old grudges died hard. It was never meant to happen.

The noise of advancing soldiers grew louder.

“Alex! Alex!” Paul was back at her side, barking at her. “Come on! Now or never! We have to get out of here!”

He tried to pull her toward the aircraft, but she balked. She grabbed the attache case from the ground. There was a splattering of blood on it. Then she turned and ran toward the pier.

Major Mejias and his wife were already in the airplane. The propellers started up again, and the door was open. Alex and Paul reached the end of the pier, and the soldiers opened fire. Paul turned and brazenly drew a pistol. He fired wildly at the oncoming soldiers, but, as on the day of their arrival, his volleys only caused them to scatter.

Alex reached the aircraft and darted onto it, crouching into a far seat in the second row. The aircraft started to move from the pier, the door still open and Paul outside. Alex realized that without help, as the plane accelerated, he was in danger of being left behind. Alex bolted to the door and extended a hand as Paul turned toward the plane. A bullet punched the body of the plane and then a second. A third shot hit a few inches above her head. Paul jumped forward and Alex pulled. His foot slipped but he grabbed part of the door frame. She pulled him on board. The aircraft turned rapidly in the water and the passenger door closed. Then a bullet blew out a side window.

The pilot threw the throttle forward, and the plane fishtailed on the water. Facing away from the shore, it was a harder target to hit. But shots ripped past it and into the water. All four passengers kept their heads down. The navigator sat low in his seat, as did the pilot. The plane gained momentum as the first rays of sun started to streak across the sea.

They lifted off, and the Cessna rose above the water. The aircraft was a thousand meters from shore, then twelve hundred. A final shot pinged against its fuselage but didn’t penetrate. Then they were in the sky, getting as far from the island as possible before the pilot banked and turned to the southeast.

A palpable sense of relief flooded the passengers, tempered by the parting sight of Roland Violette lying dead on a Cuban beach. For several minutes no one spoke, aside from the pilot who checked in with air traffic controllers in the Cayman Islands. Alex muttered a silent prayer of thanks.

Finally, Paul broke the silence. He turned to Alex. “Communists,” he said. “Can’t do anything right. Can’t run a captive country and can’t even shoot straight.”

SIXTY-THREE

For the next week, Alex lived in limbo.

In New York, her employers insisted that she go for a physical at New York Hospital, where they had all the proper doctors lined up. Since she knew this was both protocol and a wise health decision anyway, she didn’t protest. So she spent her first three days back in the U.S. in a private hospital.

It could have been worse. She managed to sleep a good deal. Friends came by to see her, including Ben, with whom she made up. She entrusted him with the two letters given to her by the young boy Guillermo and asked him to mail them for her. He said he would.

When she got out of the hospital, on her fourth day back, she took a taxi to her home on West 61^st Street. The living room window was still boarded up. The place reminded her of pictures she has seen of Berlin during World War II. The building manager told her that repairs could be made just as soon as they received signed permission.

She signed the form and packed up a few things, called her old mentor, Joseph Collins, and arranged to stay at his son’s unused apartment on East 21^st Street.

Then there was her first trip back to Fin Cen. She did this in the evening when most of the personnel were out. It would have been too much to see everyone at once, and there were parts of her trip that she simply didn’t feel like discussing. She spent ninety minutes with her boss, Andrew De Salvo, over Chinese takeout and cold beer. She was put back in charge of Operation Parajo and learned the two most salient details of where Operation Parajo stood:

Numero uno: the gunman who had shot at her had been taken into custody by the CIA and “turned into an asset,” whatever that meant these days. He was, in short, “neutralized.” Then again, other enemies would always be out there.

Numero dos: The Dosis were still out there somewhere, having slipped thought the holes in the worldwide dragnet. Alex’s indictments and the arrests she had ordered had brought much of the Dosi worldwide enterprise to its knees and just about ruined it financially. But the snake still had its head.

“So where are we now?” Alex asked. “Back at the beginning?”

“No, we’re entering an endgame,” Andrew De Salvo said. “These things take years, not months. And that’s if we’re lucky. You did a whale of a job once again. That’s what they tell me from D.C. Came back with an interesting haul from the Pearl of the Antilles. They want to see you in Washington, by the way. Things are under control here. You can take another ten days for R amp;R if you want.”

“I want.”

“Washington actually means Langley,” he added.

“Doesn’t it usually?”

Two afternoons later, Alex found herself in the familiar office in the west wing of the CIA headquarters, sitting in front of Maurice Fajardie, who was unraveling samples from the mishmash of notes, charts, and printouts that had traveled north with her on the Cessna. The Cubans hadn’t quite entered the twenty-first century of intelligence compiling, so much of the information had a retro look – plenty of colors. Agency analysts were now trying to determine what red and green and orange pages meant. But the preliminary feedback from the intelligence analysts was highly positive regarding the material from both Major Mejias and the late Roland Violette.