Valley of the Templars

can hold on to it.”

“Deep thinking for a crop duster,” said Turturro.

“Before I left the country in a hurry, I was finishing up a postgraduate degree in political science at McGill University in Montreal.” He picked up the Camels from the table. “Mind if I keep these?”

Turturro nodded. “Go ahead.”

Laframboise slipped the matches back under the cellophane, then put the package of cigarettes into his pocket.

“And you?” Turturro asked, staring at Arango. The Cuban turned his head and spit onto the floor.

“I am the man who cut off your compadres’ cojones fifty years ago. I was also the man who loaded the rocket into the RPG that brought down that airplane out there.”

“A CIA analyst, an MI6 agent, an old Fidelista and a gray-haired grad student from Montreal fly into an armed camp in a piece-of-crap crop-dusting plane. Why?”

“Sounds like the opening to a bad joke,” said Carrie. “We know why we’re here, but what about you?”

“This is the part when the bad guy tells the hero his evil plans for world domination?” Turturro said. “I don’t think so.” He stood up. “You’ll be held here until things…are under way. “After that you’ll be released and you’ll be on your own.”

“Not much of an interrogation,” said Black. “Where are the lasers and the pools full of sharks? Snakes maybe?”

“There are no poisonous snakes in Cuba,” said Turturro. “And I don’t need to interrogate you. For the moment I just need to keep you out of the way. Try to escape and my men will shoot you. Survive that and there’s thirty miles of jungle between here and the next best thing to civilization. So just stay put.” Turturro walked to the doorway, then turned. “Don’t piss me off,” he said, and then he was gone. A guard stepped halfway into the room and shut the door.

“That was a bit weird,” said Carrie. “It wasn’t much of an interrogation, was it?”

“You believe any of that bull-puckie?” Laframboise drawled, still smoking the Camel.

“I don’t think he has the slightest idea of what to do,” said Will Black. “We weren’t part of whatever game plan he’s got in mind. Flies in the ointment, so to speak.”

“So, what does he do with us?” Carrie said.

“He goes up the chain of command until he gets someone who can make a decision.”

“What chain of command?” Carrie asked. “Who is Blackhawk working for? The Pentagon wouldn’t sanction an invasion of Cuba; they wouldn’t dare and neither would the president.”

“I don’t know who his ultimate employers are, but the colonel is in the middle of something very big here. Those men and that equipment aren’t here as some sort of resistance army in the mountains. They’re an assault force.”

“You think this is part of Selman-Housein’s Operacion de Venganza?” Carrie asked.

“I think it has to be.” Black nodded.

“Okay, I’m lost,” said Laframboise. He wet his fingers and pinched out the butt of his Camel. “What the hell is Operation Vengeance and what does El Comandante’s doctor have to do with it?”

“It’s a long story.”

“I’m not going anywhere,” said Laframboise. “And neither are you, boss.”

“We’d better be,” said Black, staring at the closed door, his tone ominous.

“Why’s that?”

Carrie answered, “Because pretty soon the colonel’s going to get his orders from on high and he’s going to kill us.”

20

The old man sat in the shade of the avocado tree growing beside the main house and watched his great- grandchildren splashing and playing at the far end of the large swimming pool. Their laughter seemed very far away, almost as if they were living in a different world from his own. In his world the voices were clear and the images were sharp and brightly colored and there was no need for the hearing aids he wore or the bifocal spectacles that pinched his nose.

He let his head fall forward a little and glanced at his hand on the arm of the old wicker chair. The chair came from the old family finca in Oriente where he and his nine brothers and sisters had spent their early childhood.

Cords of sinew and veins ran like creeping worms beneath parchment, liver-spotted skin, and the nails were thick and ribbed like yellowing horn. The old man lifted the hand and placed the tips of his first and second fingers below his nostrils, hoping to catch some faint scent of the cohibas his man Eduardo Irizarri had rolled for him. There was nothing, not the slightest memory of an odor; not surprising, really. It had been a quarter of a century since he’d given them up, and he chuckled aloud as the thought drifted through his mind like smoke.

He’d had his first cigar with his old friend David de Jongh behind the gymnasium at the Dolores School in Santiago and they’d coughed their lungs out on one of Father Alvarez’s Montecristos. They’d called him Bola de Churre then—“Greaseball.” Not anymore, and he smiled at that thought as well.

All so long ago, and that long life, a life without great love or change or real happiness, had been haunting him for some time now. What had he missed except to outlive all his enemies and watch presidents of the United States come and go like the turning of their leaves in autumn? There was no fall or winter here; it was always summer, it was always the twenty-sixth of July and he and his brother and Camilo, Huber Matos and Che were young again and attacking the Moncada Barracks with nothing but hope and bursting hearts and a few old weapons. Siempre Veintiseis!

“Papa?”

It was his son Antonio, the handsome one who traveled with the baseball team.

“Yes, Antonio?”

“You looked very sad, Papa.”

“I was thinking about snow,” the old man said, remembering.

“Has it ever snowed here?” Antonio laughed at the idea of snow in this place.

But the old man remembered it clearly. It had been Christmas Eve, 1976, and a blizzard in Montreal diverted them to the old airport in Gander, Newfoundland. He’d had Nitza and Margot prepare papa rellena and lechon in the airport kitchens for everyone, and then a reporter from the newspaper took him for a drive around the town. Behind the local hospital he’d seen some children with their trineos, their toboggans, sliding down a hill and he’d tried it for himself. He fell off, of course, and he and everyone had laughed except his bodyguards, but the children showed him how to make los angelas in the snow and he’d lain there in the darkness, staring up into the night, the snowflakes falling on his beard and then his tongue.

“They were all different,” said the old man. “They were all different and that was the problem.” The great constant that Marx had overlooked in his squalid Soho garret in London—that there are no constants and that every man was as individual as his fingerprints…or a snowflake.

“What was different, Papa?”

“The snowflakes…they were all different.” To bend eleven million minds to yours and hold them for fifty years was just like catching snowflakes on your tongue—impossible.

There was a long silence, broken only by the children in the pool and the wind spinning the leaves above his head.

“The doctor is here for your checkup, Papa.”

The old man blinked and came back to the present. He stared at his son, letting his mind put itself together