Pauline Caufield’s cover was as extravagant as the Agency got. Her current front was TransAmerica Construction, an American-based corporation that ostensibly provided engineering assistance to Latin American businesses. In her role as CEO of TransAmerica, Pauline traveled for weeks at a time throughout Central and South America. A wonderful perk.
As an NOC, her diplomatic status was defined as nonofficial cover in the directorate of operations. Which meant, when she was traveling, she had no immunity to protect her if she was exposed. At her age, she should have been frightened. In the more dangerous countries of the Southern Hemisphere where drug trafficking and political corruption drove the economies, what rule of law existed was maintained with a capricious combination of bribery and brute force. Yet over the decades of her service as a covert operative, the thrill of roving through such places had never diminished.
Her stateside duties were less adventurous but vital. When she returned to TransAmerica headquarters, it was only natural she should host dignitaries and industrial bosses from a wide array of tropical nations. Though in truth, the parade of men and women were usually in her office to swap information for cash or favors, or else to apply for an increase in their Agency remuneration.
It was a multimillion-dollar cover, an investment Pauline had richly repaid with a reliable stream of information and years of successful operations.
Foremost among her missions was the decades-old effort to undermine the stability of communist Cuba. On that front one of her recent triumphs was Machado Precision Tool, a manufacturing enterprise in Venezuela that was a wholly owned subsidiary of the CIA, and Pauline’s own creation. Late last year Machado Tool had filled an order from Cuba’s Ministry of Basic Industries for half a dozen steam turbines that were to be used to power the three-phase generator at the Antonio Guiteras electrical power plant. One of seven plants that supplied electricity to the island’s 11 million citizens, Antonio Guiteras contributed only 11 percent of the total 3,200 megawatts used on the island. However, it was a crucial 11 percent.
A month after delivery, when half the steam turbines Machado Tool delivered seized up right on schedule, the Guiteras plant had to be taken off-line. It stayed out of action for a total of eight months. Blackouts began to roll throughout the island. Without the Guiteras plant, the Ministry of Basic Industries could produce electrical power at only 50 percent capacity when 65 percent was needed to meet the nation’s demand. Machado Precision Tool closed up shop shortly after the problems were discovered, and as far as Pauline knew, the Cubans never discovered the CIA’s involvement.
While sabotage against Cuba was not official U.S. policy and might not have played well in middle America, it served a crucial purpose in sustaining the support, financial and otherwise, of the fervently anticommunist Cuban-American community. A central feature of Pauline’s job was to keep the exile population under the impression that their concerns were being honored. Miami was the only American city with an official foreign policy—to make Castro’s life as miserable as possible. The pressure to fulfill this mandate had grown steadily over the years as Miami’s Latinos gained increasing muscle.
TransAmerica Construction’s corporate headquarters occupied the upper two floors of the south tower a few blocks from downtown Miami. Pauline’s own suite consumed a third of the top floor. Leather furniture in muted grays, swanky architecture—several generations more refined than the Miami Vice style that still plagued the city skyline. Those outlandish buildings with their gaudy primary colors and chest-thumping innovations—like the cut-out sections mid-building, as though an errant missile had opened up a wound that never healed. That was all so passé.
Claughton Towers consisted of four smooth barrels of smoked glass and gunmetal steel, staggered in height like the pipes of a church organ sprouting along Biscayne Boulevard. Pauline had been told by the architect that her floor-to-ceiling view commanded exactly three hundred degrees. To the south were the downtown spires of banks and legal offices and insurance firms, and to the east across the glimmer of the Intracoastal Waterway she could keep abreast of the daily count of new high-rises soaring along Miami Beach. Northward there were the posh man-made islands, the sprawl of North Miami and the blue haze of the Atlantic.
Though she mostly ignored the wraparound view through the long hours of her busy days, Pauline was not indifferent to its symbolism. In her business, such a sweeping vista was as close to an acknowledgment of status as she would ever have. Anyone stepping into her office for the first time quickly realized that Caufield had clout unequaled by anyone in the Agency outside of Langley.
It was ten-thirty on Monday morning, a new work week well under way, and Pauline was finishing her fourth café con leche and had toiled halfway through the latest stack of intercepts that had come in overnight from Ecuador. American oil executives were growing anxious at the gathering crowds in the streets. The throngs of demonstrators had been moving inexorably from peaceful displays to window breaking and rock-and-bottle attacks on the national militia. From the intercepted cell phone calls and e-mails, it was not completely clear what stage the citizen outrage had reached. Was a coup attempt imminent, or were they simply looking at more marches?
The two agents working out of the Quito station were in prickly disagreement about the level of opposition to President Manuel Cevayano, the general whose government had been cooperating so smoothly with Gulf + Western for these past three years. So far the current U.S. administration had put its chips squarely on Cevayano, but Pauline was tasked with moving those chips the instant the situation tilted the other way. One of her tasks. One of hundreds.
When her console buzzed she was just dashing off an e-mail to Silma Herrera, the Quito station chief, requesting that she shake the banana trees a little harder. Surely they had more penetration into the leadership of the opposition. If they didn’t have a source inside, why not?
“Can’t talk right now,” Pauline said. “Take a message.”
“It’s himself, Ms. Caufield, the Big Cheese.”
Pauline’s hand drew back from the console.
Big Cheese was the handle they’d given Hadley S. Waters. A Wisconsin native, and die-hard Packers fan. More important, Waters was a forty-year vet of the intelligence service, now occupying the top spot at Langley. In this tricky election cycle, Waters had emerged as a top contender for the Republican presidential nomination. Although still two years out, the campaign was already under way, broadsides being fired, and Hadley Waters had grown touchier every week. Finding fault with veteran agents, even terminating a couple of highly placed clandestine ops working out of the Beijing station for a trifling slipup. Though Pauline and Waters went back four decades, they hadn’t spoken in years. A call from him during his period of intense public scrutiny didn’t bode well.
Pauline reached out and clicked open the secure line.
“Director Waters. What a pleasant surprise.”
That’s when she first learned of the photograph. Cassius Clay-Sonny Liston, 1964, Miami Beach.
And the floor beneath her chair began to sway.