years.
The truth of it was that Anabel Bonet had never seen the inside of New Scotland Yard and anything she knew about art came from a first-year course she took at Cambridge. William Copeland Black was no cultural attache, either, and everyone who was anyone in the embassy knew it, right down to Eva Burden, the woman who answered the telephone. Both Anabel Bonet and William Black were MI6, tasked with keeping track of any potential terrorist action against the United Kingdom originating in or passing through the Republic of Ireland.
Black sat down behind his desk, pulled open the middle drawer and stared at the yellow packet of Carrol’s Sweet Afton cigarettes. He closed the drawer and looked across at Anabel. “I’ve just had the most intriguing telephone call.”
“Not here, you haven’t,” said Anabel.
“No, it came through the inquiries desk. When he gave them my name, they patched it over to my cellular while I was coming in to work.”
“After a very long lunch, I might add.”
“I went into Dubrays on Grafton Street to hear that writer.”
“Which writer?”
“Simon Toyne, the one with the funny hair. He’s rather good.”
“The phone call?”
“Right. It was from someone named Dr. Eugenio Selman-Housein Sosa. He’s staying at the Shelbourne. He wants to defect, of all things. I didn’t think anyone did that sort of thing anymore. Cold War stuff, you know?”
“Who on earth is Dr. Eugenio Selman et cetera, et cetera?”
“He’s Fidel Castro’s personal physician.”
“Bloody hell!” Anabel frowned. “What’s he doing in Dublin?”
“He’s a cardiologist. There’s a big convention at Trinity this week.”
“And he wants to defect?”
“That’s what he said.”
“Tell him to get into a cab, then.”
“He’s being watched, or so he says.”
“Do you believe him?”
“It’s possible. The Cuban DGI has a very long arm and he’s a VIP.”
“You can’t authorize this on your own.”
“I know. He’s only here until Friday. That’s three days. I’ll have to get on my trolley and visit Babylon tonight.”
“Good luck, mate.” Anabel grinned.
“I should be able to catch the diplomatic flight. No sense in traveling with the great unwashed on Ryanair or something equally disgusting.”
“No sense at all,” said Anabel somberly, then laughed.
At seven p.m. Black climbed into the waiting BAE 125 executive jet and settled back into one of the six cream-colored high-backed leather chairs in the narrow passenger section. Except for the diplomatic bag, he was the aircraft’s only passenger. He felt a little foolish, but under the circumstances time really was of the essence. If Selman-Housein was serious about his intentions, it meant that something big was up. With Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez’s bowel cancer metastasizing to his liver and his lungs, the thought of one or the other of the two elderly Castro brothers casting off this mortal coil was the kind of thing that precipitated coups and revolutions. The world was in enough trouble without the Caribbean being hit by a political hurricane.
A white-jacketed RAF steward appeared from the front section of the jet and offered him coffee and biscuits. Black accepted and the steward disappeared again. Black ate the biscuits and drank the coffee, then dimmed the light and sat in the darkness, looking out at the night. The black featureless slab of the St. George’s Channel slid by forty thousand feet below their wings. Black smiled. Once upon a time his father had told him a story about crossing the same channel on his way to finding an assassin hell-bent on murdering the king and queen.
Morris Black, his father, had taken a certain ironic pride in being the only Jew working as a detective at Scotland Yard, although he had been fully aware that he would never rise any higher in the force because of that fact. Perhaps because of that he’d become the foremost murder investigator that organization had ever seen and was called in to deal with the most difficult cases. One of those cases, which he wouldn’t ever discuss in detail until the day he died, had involved him in the intrigues of World War Two intelligence, initially landing him in the Special Operations Executive and eventually, after the war and for the rest of his life, with MI6. Somewhere early along the way, his father, already a young widower by then, had met, become involved with and eventually married his mother, Katherine Sanderson Copeland, who’d been OSS posted to England under Wild Bill Donovan during the war and a CIA officer under Hillenkoetter, Bedell-Smith, John Foster Dulles and John McCone after the war.
He’d loved both his parents very much and had been devastated when both died within a year of each other when he was in his late twenties, but they’d left him with an enduring affection for both the United States and England, an Oxford education, dual citizenship and a legacy’s introduction to the intelligence establishment of both countries. For that very reason he’d spent the last ten years as Washington liaison between MI6 and the CIA. Ireland was just a respite and he knew it—he had too many contacts in the agency not to be posted back there rather than the normally benign intelligence backwater Dublin had become. He could hardly wait. His estranged wife, Chelsea, lived in Anacortes, Washington, quite successfully working on her third marriage, but at least he’d convinced her to let their young teenage son, Gabe, go to the British School of Washington in Georgetown. If he was posted back to the States, he’d be able to see his son on weekends. Whoever said that spies shouldn’t have families was right—there was no doubt that his marriage had been broken into matchsticks on the jagged rocks of his uncommunicative work as an intelligence officer, but in the end his son had been worth it. He sent up a silent prayer that the kid wouldn’t want to get into the spying business—sheet-metal work or refrigerator technician would be a better career.
The government jet landed at Northolt, a queen’s messenger in an armored Range Rover picked up the diplomatic bag and Black climbed into the waiting Augusta Westland helicopter that would take him to the London Heliport on the banks of the Thames. After that it would be a quick ride upriver in a Targa 31 Marine Unit cruiser, which would drop him off at the Thames security gate of the ziggurat-like headquarters of MI6.
Almost exactly three hours after leaving the embassy in Ballsbridge, Dublin, he was sitting in the expansive office of Sir John Sawyers, pronounced “Saws,” the fifty-six-year-old, dashing James Bond–ish director of the Secret Intelligence Services. He even
Sawyers had been educated at the University of Nottingham, St. Andrews, in Scotland and at Harvard. He spoke with a clearly upper-crust accent, but not plummy enough to be offensive. He and his wife, Shelley, had three children, including the twenty-three-year-old Connie, who was famous for posing with a gold-plated Kalashnikov in front of the family Christmas tree on her Facebook page.
Black had been surprised that his call to the Caribbean Section earlier in the day had been taken seriously enough for a meeting with Sawyers, but nevertheless, here he was.
“You confirmed that the man was actually Dr. Eugenio Selman-Housein Sosa?” Wormold asked. The Section head had the accent and attitude of a fifth-form English grammar teacher.
“Yes, sir.” Black nodded. “I checked with the Shelburne and he is registered there. He’s also registered at the Trinity convention. Just to make sure, I had one of our people take a file photograph over to the registration clerk at the Shelburne and he confirmed it, as well.”
“Why do you think he wants to defect?” Sawyers asked mildly.
“I think it’s probably a case of shoot the messenger, Sir John. If Castro is dying I think he’s afraid that he’s going to be blamed. In Cuba that means a bullet in the head, a plane crash or a ‘sudden heart attack.’”
“Mr. Wormold?” Sawyers asked.
“It’s quite possible.”
Sawyers sat back in his expensive-looking leather chair and surveyed the George Stubbs painting hanging there—
