Felix Monatero was a worried man. This alone illustrated the seriousness of the situation he now found himself in. His state of anxiety was uncharacteristic. He was a lifelong, committed revolutionary and Fidelista with the iron self-discipline demanded of the commandante of the Supremo spy cell. Espionage is no game for those with weak nerves.
Monatero had been a deep-cover agent for many years. He had not been home to Cuba for more than fifteen years, not since first establishing his assumed identity here in the Gulf Coast. He was no comfortable resident spy attached to the Cuban diplomatic corps, with the priceless immunity to arrest and prosecution it conferred.
He was an illegal, subject if caught by the U.S. counterintelligence to spending many years, if not the rest of his life, in a Federal super-max prison.
He'd devoted his life to the cause. He was a bachelor, living alone. A wife and family could only be an encumbrance at best and a vulnerability at worst for one in his profession. Being a man with natural physical urges, he satisfied them in the company of prostitutes. He rarely patronized the same one more than a few times.
No one could be allowed to get too close to him emotionally. He avoided making friends with colleagues and associates and others in the profession. The time might come when operational necessity would force him to put them in danger or even sacrifice them to gain an objective. He dared not risk having his judgment clouded by the bonds of friendship, fearing it could compromise the clear-thinking objectivity required of him as commander.
He himself had killed on behalf of the cause, having personally slain a number of men and women. Some were traitors and double agents, others merely hapless types whose removal was deemed necessary by Havana.
He'd looked his victims square in the face when shooting them at point-blank range, not flinching when struck by blood spray, brain bits, and bone fragments.
In the course of his long career, he had ordered the deaths of dozens more, rarely if ever giving a second (or even first) thought about it. His peace of mind was untroubled by compunctions about having carried out his soldierly duties. A revolutionist must obey orders without question.
He was a hard man, not given to self-doubt or second thoughts. The revolution justified all.
Yet now he was a worried man. Not for himself — never for himself — but for the cause.
Seated behind the desk in his office in the showroom of the Supremo Hat Company, he chain-smoked a succession of the little brown cigarillos he affected. He was unsure if the smoking was easing his tension or increasing it.
Even here, in the matter of smoking, his revolutionary fervor came into play. Back home in Cuba, he'd enjoyed the finest cigars. Compared to them, these cigarillos were only so much dried horse droppings.
Now, of course, he couldn't smoke those fine Cubanos, not without violating his cover. His mission required that he sanitize himself from all contact with the home island. His connections would have easily allowed him to procure a steady supply of the finest Cuban cigars. But he denied himself even that little luxury, for fear of compromising his cover.
Here, Cuban cigars were contraband; their possession was a violation of U.S. law. A little thing, but attention to detail often made the difference between concealment or exposure.
It was a sacrifice, a hardship, for a man who knew and savored the finest in cigars. Yet he continued to smoke these detestable cigarillos, puffing away, filling his office with stale clouds of smoke.
His desktop ashtray was littered with cigarillo butts. One lay smoking in the ashtray, while another was wedged in the corner of his mouth. He'd set down the first for a moment and forgotten it, lighting up another and going to work on it.
He had a troubled mind. He was being tossed and gored by a two-horned dilemma. A product of the shadow world of false fronts and double identities to which he'd devoted his life.
The problem was, how far could he trust Beltran?
The Generalissimo was a fabled figure in the spy world. Back when Monatero was a rookie, a raw recruit in communist Cuba's intelligence service, the phantom spymaster's exploits were already the stuff of legend. As Monatero rose through the ranks, earning ever-higher security clearances that allowed him entree into the deepest secrets of Havana's spy system, his insider's knowledge had only burnished Beltran's achievements with a brighter luster.
It was a measure of the trust that Havana reposed in his fidelity and ability that Monatero had been designated as the contact for Beltran's ongoing operations in the United States. Even in the top ranks of Cuba's intelligence corps, few were aware that Beltran was still actively engaged in operations in the homeland of the counterrevolutionary Colossus of the North.
This ultrasecret professional association — his and Beltran's — had resulted on a number of occasions in Monatero's putting the Supremo cell's resources at Beltran's disposal. Due to the paramount operational principle of compartmentalization, Monatero's agents had carried out their tasks without knowing that they were performing at Beltran's behest. They were unaware of his very existence, or at least of his role as invisible puppet master pulling their strings to carry out sensitive missions for Havana.
Only Monatero, commander of the cell, was privileged to have that knowledge. And yet even he had never come face to face with Beltran. Never met him in the flesh.
Had no idea of what he looked like, or any other details of his cover or operations in the Gulf Coast, except for those few scraps of hard fact he had managed to piece together over the years in the course of carrying out Beltran's orders.
To Monatero, Beltran existed as no more than a cleverly disguised fax message, an encrypted e-mail, or, at most, a voice that came to him over the phone. Sometimes, rarely, Beltran found it necessary to initiate telephonic communication with the spy cell commander.
Such rare encounters could hardly be called conversations. They consisted of Beltran passing clarifications or special instructions that needed to be conveyed in a timely manner.
At such times, Beltran spoke through some kind of electronic distorter that not only disguised his voice, but digitized and reassembled it so that no identifiable voiceprint could be taken from it.
Voice patterns are like fingerprints and DNA, each one is individual, unique, and belongs solely to the speaker. Should Monatero's cover ever be blown, his cell penetrated or communications surveilled by NSA or the like, the opposition would be unable to sample Beltran's voiceprint for their records.
Beltran was always prepared with the recognition codes and passwords supplied to him and changed daily by Havana. These passwords and codes were his sole and singular badge of identity.
Remarkable measures, taken to protect the identity of a unique asset. They worked: the proof of their efficacy was Beltran's continuing success in the spy game, when even most of the experts were unsure whether the Generalissimo was alive or dead.
The system worked; Monatero had never thought to question it. Until now. Because Beltran had committed the Supremo cell to an extraordinary risk level based solely on his say-so.
This was how the system worked, how it had always worked, but never before had the stakes been so high.
The Supremo cell had been uninvolved in today's dawn assault on Colonel Paz.
Uninvolved was an understatement. Monatero himself had been in the dark about it.
None of his people had participated in it. Indeed, he would have appreciated some advance notice of the strike, rather than having it fall on him like a stone dropping out of the sky.
He now knew, on the basis of information gathered from some of his sources and from Beltran's subsequent actions, that the attack had been orchestrated by none other than the Generalissimo himself.
Confirmation of his darkest suspicions on that score had come thanks to Beltran's communiques that had reached him earlier today. He had ordered Monatero to put three of the cell's best field men under his command: Rubio, Torres, and Moreno.
Specialists in violence and sudden death.
Their mission: the abduction of Raoul Garros.
Monatero had obeyed, of course — as always. As per standard operating procedure, the assignment was handled so that Monatero's men were unaware of the identity of the man for whom they would be working.
This was accomplished easily enough, the trio being equipped with special cell phones and a specific set of
