Valley of the Templars

“Not here,” said the Cuban. He pointed to the French doors leading out to the balcony. Holliday nodded. Eddie opened the doors and Holliday stepped out into the cool evening air.

A table and chairs sat facing out toward the sea and the Malecon far below. The tide was in and people were promenading along the famous seawall, half of them tourists and the rest predatory prostitutes. A breeze was blowing. From the balcony it was a vision of paradise, but Eddie ignored it. He was too busy checking the table and chairs and even the candle lamp in the middle of the table for bugs. He found what he was looking for under the third chair, an old-fashioned radio microphone that belonged in a Cold War museum. Eddie pointed it to it, carefully carried the chair back into the sitting room of the suite and then came back out onto the balcony again, closing the French doors behind him.

“I turned on the radio so the microphone will not be lonely. They are playing an old speech of Fidel’s—it will go on for hours.”

“They really bug hotel rooms?”

“Certainly.” Eddie smiled. “They must give the last few Chinese at Bejucal something to listen to.”

Holliday spread out the map again, anchoring it with the candle lamp. There was enough light from the French doors to see the map clearly. “Show me,” he said again.

Eddie ran a large black forefinger through a gently curving arc in the center of the island. “These are the mountains of Escambray. They run like a spine down the middle of Cuba, not high, but mostly covered with jungle. The roads are still dirt and the only way in or out is in military trucks. This is where the War of the Bandits was fought.”

“War of the Bandits?” Holliday asked.

“It is an old story in Cuba, once taught to schoolchildren, but heard of very little in the United States.”

“So tell me,” said Holliday.

Eddie lit a cigar with his old Zippo, something that Holliday hadn’t seen him do in a very long time. Being back in Cuba and the loss of his brother were clearly taking their toll.

“There are two versions—the bedtime story CIA agents tell their grandchildren and the one Fidel tells. The only one that I know to be true is the one from 1962 in which my brother at fifteen years old fought in the Sierra del Escambray with an old Springfield rifle and almost died.”

“Who was he fighting?”

“The remains of Batista’s army—the truly corrupt one who had so much to lose—control of drugs, prostitution, gambling, other criminals, some right-wing anticommunists and of course the CIA. Fidel spent three years trying to get them out with the regular army, but his losses were too high; fighting in the Sierra del Escambray is like fighting your own shadows, and the Batistanados were better armed—by the CIA.

“Eventually Fidel had a better idea; he gathered together everyone and anyone he could think of—young people especially. He soon had fifteen thousand volunteers. They walked, almost arm in arm, through the jungle like when you search for a lost child, a cordon?”

“Cordon.” Holliday nodded.

“Anyway, like this they enclosed the banditos like fish in a net and then they killed them all. My brother was wounded badly in the leg. He almost lost it and walks with a limp still, and Fidel lost many people, but eventually all the banditos were gone. It took almost three years. By the second year the CIA saw there was no hope, so they withdrew their support.”

“And the Valley of Death?”

“The Sierra del Escambray is divided into two parts, the Sierra Guamuhaya and the Sierra de Sancti Spiritus. Between them flows the Agabama River. This is the Valley of Death.”

“You think this is where he has gone to hide himself?”

“No,” said Eddie. “I don’t think he is hiding; to hide, all you have to do is lose yourself in the favelas of Havana. There are places in those slums and baracoas even the Secret Police will not go. I think perhaps he knows something, maybe too much. I think perhaps he has gone there to find something.”

“So, how do we get there?”

“To go by the motorcycle or even a rented car would attract too much attention.”

“We’re tourists. We can go anywhere.”

“This is Cuba, mi colonel. You cannot go anywhere without a reason, even a tourist. And this is not a place where tourists go.” For a moment Eddie’s eyes settled on the tourists and prostitutes lingering by the sea wall. Then his focus shifted farther out.

“By sea,” said Eddie finally. “We must find a boat.”

“One of my people in Cardinal Ortega’s office in Havana has been in contact,” said Father Thomas Brennan, head of Soladitum Pianum, the Vatican Secret Service. Brennan was in the office of his master, Cardinal secretary of state Antonio Niccolo Spada. The cardinal, every day of his seventy-nine years etched into the lines on his face and every glass of Bardolino he’d ever sipped visible in the blown veins of his hooked and shiny nose, looked up at the disheveled Irish priest and frowned.

“His Eminence Jaime Cardinal Ortega is an unrepentant finocchio and even the pope knows it,” said Spada. “What does his bum boy have to tell us—that Fidel has finally confessed his sins?” He coughed dramatically and waved his hand at the cloud of smoke from Brennan’s fuming cigarette, the ashes of which were all over the front of the priest’s wrinkled black collarino shirt. Brennan was standing at the ornate Italian Renaissance–style oak carved console table that served as Cardinal Spada’s bar.

“No, but someone else did.”

“Don’t keep me in suspense, Brennan. The longer our conversation goes on, the longer I have to endure the foul stench of your cigarette.”

“A sin that has haunted me since I was eight and my da gave me enough money to buy a five-pack of Gallaghers. We all have our burdens, I’m afraid.” The priest toyed with the cut-crystal stopper of a decanter of sherry on the bar for a moment.

“Get on with it,” snapped the cardinal. If the testa di merda wasn’t so valuable, he would have had the little Irish bastardo snuffed out like a votive candle in the Sistine Chapel.

“It was some time ago in the cathedral. According to the priest, the man had been drinking and was clearly very upset. He was incoherent about most things, but the priest was able to pick up one or two things of interest. The words Valle des Muertes, the Valley of Death, and Operacion de Venganza. The priest eventually reported it to me.”

“Why in the name of all that is holy would we be interested in the ravings of a drunk Cuban in his cups muttering tales of death and revenge? It sounds like one of those dreadful romanzos His Holiness likes to read before he goes to sleep.”

“The priest knew the man. His name was Domingo Cabrera and he works for the Cuban Department of the Interior—their DGI, the Secret Police.”

“Cabrera,” said Spada, frowning. He took off his glasses and pinched the bridge of his nose with a thumb and forefinger. “Why do I know that name?”

Brennan whisked some ash off the front of his shirt and down onto the seventeenth-century Anatolian Lotto rug that covered the cardinal’s floor. “Because he is a close companion of Colonel John Holliday, whose path has crossed ours on several occasions. He cost us Pesek, the assassin, last winter and we lost any chance of ever finding the Book because of his antics in the Kremlin. He cost us Harris in Africa the year before that and he also knows far too much about the death of the present Holy Father’s predecessor and our possible involvement in that ‘arrangement.’”

Spada laid his hands flat on the table. The liver-colored age spots were everywhere now and the veins stood out like thick wormlike cables. The skin was so thin it looked like parchment, and unless he concentrated he could no longer stop the faint, tremulous shaking. It was the very earliest stage of Parkinson’s disease, but according to the doctors, at his age the symptoms, especially the cognitive ones, would progress rapidly. He sometimes wondered why he cared so much about living and had finally concluded that it was because he was so terrified of what faced him, or did not face him, after death. He frowned. Best not to think of such things.