17

Miami

Lieutenant Philip Navarro of the Dade County Police was an uncommon kind of cop, articulate, smart, inquisitive, loaded down with none of the weariness and cynicism, the suggestion of emotional numbness you sometimes find in forty-year-old policemen. He had enthusiasm still, a vitality Pagan liked. He was short and slim, his face boyish; to offset this impression of youth he’d grown a thick moustache and wore a sombre three-piece suit of the kind you might encounter in the lobby of a Hilton during a bankers’ convention. He listened to Pagan’s convoluted story with the look of an impartial, but kindly, branch manager about to make a loan to somebody with no collateral.

Navarro was a big fan of Martin Burr, who had apparently deported a notorious Colombian drug lord from the United Kingdom some years ago, a man Navarro wanted for a variety of crimes in Florida. Burr had smoothed the extradition process, overriding paperwork and red tape, and Navarro had always been grateful. It was this gratitude that Frank Pagan hoped to tap now as he sat in the Lieutenant’s cramped office, whose window looked over a lamplit yard containing impounded cars. On the wall behind Navarro’s desk hung framed awards commending him for his civic work and his marksmanship.

Navarro said, “With your British passport you can enter Cuba legally. Fly out of Miami to Jamaica or Mexico City, get a visa, fly to Havana. I don’t see any problem there.”

“That takes too much time,” Pagan said. “I’m looking for a fast alternative.”

“The age of immediacy,” Navarro said, and sighed, as if he longed for slower eras. He rose from his chair and walked to the window where he leaned his forehead against the pane a moment. “When I got your call, first thing I did was check you out with Martin Burr.”

“And?”

“He asked me to extend the hand of co-operation. Said you were sometimes on the headstrong side but otherwise okay.”

“Good of him.”

“Also you were less than objective at times.”

“Character analysis isn’t Martin’s strong point,” Pagan remarked. “Besides, objectivity’s overrated. I get involved.”

“At the gut level,” Navarro said.

“Usually.”

Navarro, who had no great regard for professional detachment himself, liked Frank Pagan. He turned from the window. “I’m happy to extend the hand of co-operation. I’m just not sure how far it should go. If I understand you, what you’re asking me to do is break the law.”

“Purely in a technical sense,” Pagan said.

“Easy for you to say, Frank. I live here. You don’t.”

“I don’t have your connections in this town, Phil. I don’t know where to go, whom to ask. If I did, I wouldn’t have come here and bothered you.”

Navarro remembered now that Martin Burr had mentioned something about how persistent Pagan could be. Worse than a bloody door-to-door salesman, Burr had said. “What makes you sure Rosabal can help you?”

“I never said I was sure. Put it another way. I’m running very low on options, Phil. I have to talk to Rosabal. It might be a dead end, but right now I don’t have anywhere else to go.”

Navarro sat up on the edge of his desk, swung one leg back and forth, looked sympathetic. He had been in predicaments similar to Pagan’s, when you had nothing more than some bare hunch to base your actions on and your superiors quibbled about the adequacy of your instincts. You can’t make a case on your intuitions, Phil – he’d heard it all before.

Another reason he was sympathetic to Pagan was because the man had been at the very centre of the Shepherd’s Bush Massacre, which – according to Martin Burr – had made Pagan understandably anxious, some might even say overly so. A smidgen of kindness would not go amiss, Burr had added. Phil Navarro, surrounded every day of his life with news of murdered colleagues in the continuing drug wars of Dade County, hadn’t grown immune to the shock of loss he felt when he heard of policemen slain on duty.

“What you want is tricky,” he said. “Also risky.”

“I expected that,” Pagan remarked.

Navarro, who had recently quit smoking, took a wooden toothpick from a container on his desk and poked his lower teeth with it. “Costly too, Frank.”

“That might be a problem,” Pagan said. He had about four hundred dollars in traveller’s cheques and a Visa card whose limit was dangerously close. “I assume that nobody in this clandestine line of business takes plastic?”

Navarro smiled and said. “The only plastic they understand is the kind that explodes. But my credit’s always good in certain circles. There’s always somebody happy to please Lieutenant Navarro. You know how it is.”

“I know exactly how it is,” Pagan said. In London he had his own pool of shady characters who were always delighted to score points with him. They reasoned, quite rightly, that it was better to have Pagan on your side than against you.

“Okay.” Navarro snapped his toothpick, discarded it. “I’ll make a phone call. I’m going to have to ask you to wait outside, Frank.”

Pagan understood. He found a chair in the lobby and slumped into it. He shut his eyes. Through the thin wall he could hear the low mumble of Navarro’s voice, but the words were indistinct. Two uniformed cops went past, glancing at him with looks of surly curiosity; he felt like a suspected criminal. He sat for ten minutes, then Navarro called him back into the office.

“I’ll drive you to meet a man called Salgado. He’ll take you.”

“I owe you one, Phil.”

Navarro raised a smooth well-manicured hand in the air. “Don’t thank me too soon. You ever been in Cuba?”

Pagan shook his head.

“It’s not terrific under the best of circumstances, Frank, and the way you’re entering the country isn’t the best by a long shot. You don’t have a visa. Your passport hasn’t been stamped at any point of entry. You have no return ticket. No hotel booking. Worst of all, you’re carrying a gun. You’ve got to watch for police. You’ve got to be very careful you aren’t seen behaving suspiciously by those charmers who call themselves the Committee for the Defence of the Revolution – they watch everything that goes on. Some of them are old ladies who sit in their windows all day long to see who’s coming and who’s going. They report strangers immediately. Be careful. Act normal. Act as if you know where you’re going. And for Christ’s sake don’t get caught.”

Navarro paused and looked at Pagan with concern. “I can get you in, Frank. When it comes to getting you out, I don’t know how I can help.”

“I’ll take my chances,” Pagan said. What else could he do?

Navarro was quiet for a time. “I was born in Cuba. My parents took me out when I was eight and I haven’t been back. I’ve got family still there. It’s an unhealthy place, Frank, like any police state.”

They left the office. When they were out in the lobby Navarro said, “Salgado will deliver you to somebody who can provide you with a car and the address you need in Havana. After that, buddy, you’re on your own.”

“I realise that.”

“You get into any trouble, you never saw me, you don’t know who I am, you don’t know who flew you into Cuba, you know absolutely nothing. You’re a clam. Pretend amnesia. Pretend lunacy. But give nothing away.”

“Lunacy should be easy,” Pagan said.

Navarro drove through North Miami and past Florida International University. Pagan was very quiet during the ride. He felt an odd kind of tension, as if Cuba were a haunted house he was about to enter – Navarro spoke now and then about his vague memories of his birthplace – little things, a horse-race he’d seen at Oriental Park in 1958, going with his father to a baseball game played between something called the Hershey Sport Club and the University of Havana in 1957, a brief adventure in shoplifting at a Woolworth store in Havana. Pagan had the feeling that Navarro might have been reminiscing about life in the United States in the 1950s, as though Cuba, in the doomed reign of Fulgencio Batista, had been nothing more than an unofficial American state.

Dark fields loomed up. Navarro became silent as he drove over a rutted track between meadows. He stopped the car, got out. Pagan followed him over the field. Beyond a stand of trees a small plane idled. A dim light glowed in the cockpit.

“This is it, Frank,” Navarro said.

Pagan shook the man’s hand, then glanced at the plane. The propellers turned, the craft rolled forward a little way. To Pagan’s anxious ear the engine sounded erratic, a heart missing a beat; you’re afraid, he thought. Dead scared and hearing things.

“I’m not convinced this is right,” Navarro said.

“Maybe not.”

“What the hell. Sometimes the wrong thing turns out to be right. In your place, I’d do exactly what you’re doing. I justify it that way.”

Pagan understood that he was meant to find some comfort in Navarro’s approval. What he felt instead was a kind of clammy apprehension and a tightness coiled around his heart.

Honduras

Two hours before dawn the cruise missile and the tarpaulined missile control module were transported to the freighter Mandadera. They were raised by shipboard cranes and lowered into the hold of the vessel. Ruhr, demonic by lamplight, supervised every movement, scolding the crew, hovering over the cylinder in a way that reminded Captain Luis Sandoval of a fussing abuela, a grandmother. The German, who carried a canvas bag he would not let out of his sight, checked the strength of the crane cables and the integrity of the winch; he was busy here, busy there, vigilant, energetic, fastidious.

Luis Sandoval, anxious to begin the five-hundred-mile voyage to Santiago de Cuba, fretted impatiently, especially over the child in the entourage, a teenage girl whom Sandoval had not expected. He showed her to a small cabin, where she sat on the edge of the bunk with her knees jammed together and her eyes flat and dull. Why was this child aboard, this urchin, this unsmiling granuja?

It was not only the sad-faced child that made Luis Sandoval uneasy. A conspiracy of nature also contributed to his discomfort; he had heard over the ship’s radio news of a storm front moving across the Gulf of Mexico toward the Caribbean. Scanning the dark sky proved nothing. He saw only a certain starry clarity. But in this part of the world he knew storms could spring up out of nowhere, streaking darkly from skies that only minutes before were clear. They could race across the heavens, dense cloud masses blown by great winds, rains that fell without apparent end, coastal regions submerged under insane tides. He’d seen it many times and, in those circumstances where science was impotent, a man was thrown back on older gods; Luis Sandoval often crossed himself during storms.

When the missile was safely lowered in the hold, Fuentes and Bosanquet disembarked and reboarded the launch that would take them back to the shore. Luis Sandoval gave the order for the freighter to sail a north-easterly course between the Cayman Islands and Jamaica to Santiago de Cuba, a journey of more than nine hours. Not a difficult trip normally, but there was a nervousness about his ten-man crew that Sandoval disliked.

Anchor was weighed, the ship’s engines came rambunctiously to life as if iron bones were shaking beneath the decks. La Mandadera set sail, turning in a wide, ungainly arc away from the Honduran coastline. Sandoval observed Gunther Ruhr go down inside the hold. A pistol in the German’s belt was visible beneath the blue denim jacket he wore. A great square of light rose from the hold, traversed now and then by Ruhr’s enormous shadow.

Luis Sandoval stood on the bridge. The ship’s awful cargo was something he didn’t want to ponder; the cause of freedom sometimes involved undesirable things. He turned his thoughts instead to the child in the cabin, the scared little girl who sat on the edge of the bunk and had, by all reports, refused water and food.

Sandoval had a daughter of roughly the same age as that sad girl who wouldn’t eat and wouldn’t talk. He sympathised with the waif, even if he didn’t understand her predicament entirely – but what could he possibly do to help her? She was Ruhr’s property, or so Tomas Fuentes had hinted during the loading process, and she was to be left completely alone. And Sandoval would never interfere with a man like Gunther Ruhr.

In her coffin-like cabin Steffie realised that it was the blood that so appalled her. It had run down her inner thigh and she’d cleaned it with the sleeve of her jacket but now she thought she could feel it again, warm upon her flesh. She wondered if she were damaged inside somehow. For her age she was lamentably ignorant of her body and knew only what little her mother had told her and what she’d picked up from her friends – a mixture of fact and foolishness. She’d never paid much attention in biology class except when Charlie Hapgood, the blushing, timid teacher, had shown nude illustrations. Now she wished she knew more.

She shut her eyes, laid her small white hands in her lap, tried to forget how Ruhr had undone the buckle of his belt and stood over her, how even then she’d scratched and fought and kicked to no avail, how she hadn’t been able to avoid seeing him and the way he was aroused.

She’d bit into her lip to keep from screaming as Ruhr forced her to accept him. He was whispering kindnesses, tender words she couldn’t understand because they were in German, but she knew he was speaking to her from his innermost self, as if a part of him was untouched by cruelty –

But the pain! She’d stuffed her mouth with the edge of a blanket as he crushed her into the cot and moved inside her, growing harder and bigger with every motion – and then he gasped, and his words had come faster then, less tender, harsher, and his nails had dug into her hips. He rolled away from her almost at once and lay in silence looking up at the roof of the tent.

Puddles gathered in folds of canvas. Olive puddles, olive light. She’d closed her eyes and turned her back to him, smoothing her skirt down, trying to show she felt no pain. Trying to be brave.

She heard him rise and go out of the tent. When he’d come back it was dark and he told her they were leaving at once. She found it hard to walk, legs unsteady, muscles stiff. He helped her board a launch; the black sea scared her almost as much as Ruhr’s touch.

When she was obliged to climb the scary ladder into the freighter, she thought: I hate you. I’ll kill you one day. He was immediately beneath her, climbing, looking up her skirt – but what modesty did she have left?

Now she sat without moving inside the small cabin. There was a tiny porthole but no view. What difference would a view make anyhow? Sea was sea. She studied her hands. Broken fingernails, colourless, unvarnished. She’d broken them in the struggle against Gunther Ruhr. Once she’d been proud of her fingernails, attentive to them, painting them this colour and that – how long ago and silly it seemed to her now, such a petty vanity.

She got up, walked around the cabin, and felt the ship lurch briefly. She lay down, closed her eyes, listened to the rhythm of the engines, dahda dahda dahda. On and on. She rose again, went to the cabin door, found it locked; surprise, surprise. She walked back to the bunk. Face down now, head buried in the smelly grey blanket.

She felt so incredibly lonely. But she wasn’t going to get weepy about it. That wouldn’t serve any purpose. She listened to the ship, couldn’t really help listening. Ruhr would come back, she knew that. He’d come back and unlock the door and step inside.

She knew he wasn’t finished with her.

Something echoed in the back of her mind from days and days ago, a whole lifetime, something she’d glimpsed in a newspaper, the kind of paper with pictures of tits on page three, a paper her parents never purchased, a story about some girl in Cambridge, a prostitute Ruhr had picked up, a sensational tale of how he’d tried to do this terrible thing to her, shove something sharp up inside her, and that was all she’d read because her father had confiscated the paper. She remembered the girl had been reported as saying I thought he was going to kill me.

Now she thought, Something sharp.

What came to her mind was the sheathed knife that lay strapped to his shin.

In the dank hold which contained the relics of a past cargo – shapeless bananas turned to foul mush – Ruhr worked under a bright lamp. Now and again an inquisitive crew member peered down into the hold, and Ruhr would curse and gesture with his pistol.

He worked with the kind of concentration one might see on the face of a zealous bible scholar studying gospel. It was exacting work and required all his patience. He used wrenches and special screwdrivers from his precious canvas bag. He removed a plate from the side of the cylinder, exposing a confusing bundle of different-coloured wires – reds, whites, yellows, blacks, purples. There was nothing simple in the nuclear world.

These wires were connected to a variety of receptacles, openings into which the pins of the armed nose-cone would fit. Male, female. Since Ruhr had had the warhead specially assembled for him, the regular correspondence of male to female, of pin to receptacle, the precise sequence mandated by a classified technical manual was not going to make the missile functional.

Peering into the guts of the thing, Ruhr began to make his adjustments, carefully severing certain wires and splicing them with others. He did it without reference to any diagram but schemata he carried in his head. He was conscious of nothing except for what lay beneath his hands. Even the bad hand, limited as it was, seemed to shed its deformity and take on new agility as he explored and snipped, spliced and joined – a surgeon, he thought, somebody repairing arteries and redirecting them; an inventor modifying a tested device; an artist bent over a demanding sculpture whose finished intricacy he alone knew.

Erected, ready to launch and travel the distance from Santiago de Cuba to Miami, Florida – some five hundred and fifty miles as both crows and missiles flew – this lethal tube would, if released, destroy the downtown, the bridges, the water supply, the freeways, hundreds of thousands of people in an area that stretched from Coral Gables to Miami Beach. This warhead would inflict upon Miami more devastation than that wrought on Hiroshima in 1945 by the atomic bomb.

If it were ever released.

Of course it would not be, a fact that caused Ruhr a moment of regret. The responsibility for destruction on such a vast scale was something he would have accepted gladly. But he had been paid only to deliver an armed missile, not to light its fuse.

A slick of sweat ran over his eyelids. The intimacy he forged between himself and the missile was more rewarding than any he’d ever shared with a human. He wiped his forehead with his sleeve, thought of the child locked in a cabin above him. She’d fought him, resisted. He admired her spiritedness. He stared into the body of the cylinder, the veins, the sinews, and he thought of how he’d laid this complex machine wide open with simple instruments. There was a parallel here, a correspondence that couldn’t possibly escape him – when he was finished with this operation, he’d go upstairs to the locked cabin.

He picked up a screwdriver; it glinted under the powerful lamp. The slight scratch the girl had inflicted under his right eye with her fingernail began, some two hundred and fifty miles out from Cabo Gracias a Dios, to throb.

Pinar del Rio Province, Cuba

It was not a comfortable flight. The black twin-engine Cessna (a doper’s plane painted the colour of night) bounced through layers of turbulence like a shuttlecock in an angry game of badminton. Salgado, the pilot, a Cuban-American with the physique of a linebacker, was imperturbable, a fatalistic observer of the elements. “If we don’t have no control, man, what’s the point of worrying?” he’d asked a concerned Pagan who sat in the front passenger seat.

The Cessna dropped through clouds; the sea was agitated. Lightning flared over Key West and the Straits of Florida.

“Hey, something nasty’s on its way, man,” Salgado said with the confident air of a hardened weather-watcher. Pagan saw the moon being sucked behind speeding clouds. The lights of the Florida Keys vanished. The plane flew south-west toward the Gulf of Mexico where more lightning lit the sky with hard white electricity. Some fifty miles north of Pinar del Rio, Salgado turned south.

Cuba was visible, mysterious and mainly dark. The Cessna tipped, tilted, battered by a sudden uprising of air currents. Pagan stared at the green instrument lights, which meant nothing to him; how absurd it was to be suspended in black air, kept aloft by a device one didn’t understand and whose instrument display was baffling.

He nervously pressed the palms of his hands together. It wasn’t altogether comforting to know that Salgado, according to his own boasts, had flown surreptitiously into Cuba more than fifty times. A piece of cake, man, was how he put it when he detected Pagan’s misgivings. He knew how to outfox Castro’s observation posts. Just the same, Pagan’s throat was very dry. He wondered what the penalties were for armed illegal entry into Cuba. He assumed Communist countries were not in the vanguard of charitable treatment toward prisoners, especially those who violated borders with Pagan’s disregard.

The Cessna began to come down more rapidly now. How Salgado knew where he was going to land mystified Pagan. There were no obvious markers, no well-defined runways. The airstrip, such as it was, had been hacked out of a tobacco field. Salgado’s guides were thin moonlight and instinct. He flew as if navigating blindfold. The wings of the plane brushed branches and shook foliage before it came finally, thankfully, to a safe landing.

Pagan stepped down. There was a scent of tobacco in the air, strong and vaguely bitter. What was supposed to happen next? Did Salgado fly out and simply leave him here in this dark, lonely place? No sign of habitation anywhere, no lights, just unbroken night. In a few hours it would be dawn.

Salgado came out of the cockpit. “This is goodbye, man. I gotta get back before that storm becomes real bad. Somebody’s gonna meet you here.”

“When?”

“This is Cuba, friend. Time ain’t measured by watches in this place. They got their own system.”

“Terrific.” Pagan didn’t care for this information at all. He wanted to hear that Cubans were punctual and reliable and kept all their appointments.

“Adios,” Salgado said.

“Wait –”

“Relax, man. Somebody’s gonna show. Count on it.”

Pagan was silent. He watched Salgado climb back up into the cockpit. The Cessna turned around, stopped, then began its run, taking off over the field, skimming trees, vanishing, a black plane in a black sky. With the departure of Salgado the night was emptier than before, as if Pagan’s one thread back to safety had been snapped and here he was, stuck, uncertain, in an inhospitable country.

The night yielded nothing. The call of disturbed birds, frogs croaking, the wind occasionally rushing through plants, nothing else. He felt blind, robbed of any sense of direction.

Ten minutes, perhaps fifteen, passed before a lantern appeared on the edge of the field, swinging slightly as it came closer. It illuminated the broken-nosed face of a middle-aged man who wore a black shirt and blue jeans and a straw hat.

“You are Pagan?” Pronounced pah-gan.

Pagan said that he was. The man came closer, shining his lantern directly into Pagan’s eyes. The stench of kerosene was overwhelming. Pagan stepped away from the flame.

“My instructions are to take you to the highway. A car waits for you there.” The Cuban, who said he was known as El Boxeador, spoke an English that was understandable if slowly enunciated.

“How far is the main road?”

“Two miles. Not far.”

Pagan, wondering about the nature of the network that had made this trip possible, the collusion between Salgado and El Boxeador, walked behind the lantern. He decided they had to be part of some drug-smuggling ring that Navarro had exposed but chose, for his own reasons, not to prosecute.

The air was stuffy. The ground underfoot became marsh-like. Here and there a darkened hut was visible, and once a dog barked inquisitively, but nobody appeared to investigate. El Boxeador, who said he was the former welterweight champion of all Cuba – he emphasised all with a sweep of an arm – explained that there were many Castro loyalists even in rural areas, some of them important members of the Committees for the Defence of the Revolution – a name that caused him to hawk up a quantity of phlegm and spit with contempt.

On and on they slogged, through fields and between trees and dense foliage. Pagan felt the familiar ache in his chest and pondered the notion of a painkiller, then decided against it. Now and then El Boxeador switched off his lantern when he heard a noise; then he had to relight it, which was a seemingly complicated task because either the wick was burned low or kerosene was running out, Pagan wasn’t sure which. Finally the highway was reached, a narrow, isolated road with a rough surface that had been patched time and again.

Pagan looked along the highway, which twisted just into the blackness on either side of the road, half-expecting a military patrol, rifles, the indignity of arrest. But nothing moved, no traffic passed.

Finally, they came to the place where a car was parked in a grove of trees. It was a late 1950s Oldsmobile, finned, rusted, painted many times, and, like the narrow highway, patched. It had once clearly been in a collision; a clumsy attempt had been made to fibreglass the hole in the boot, but it looked like a scar. There were still thousands of American cars in Cuba, relics of pre-Revolutionary times, loved and cared for by their devout owners.

El Boxeador gestured to the vehicle proudly and said that it ran like a campeón; a little quirky, maybe, but it had more than four hundred thousand miles on the clock and the Cuban expected it to run for the same distance again. The upholstery was torn. Springs came up through the seats, bypassing the greasy duct tape used to repair the material. Pagan, a hopeless lover of American cars, looked at the dashboard affectionately.

“In the glove compartment, you will find a flashlight and a map,” El Boxeador said. “The address you need is there also.” He reached inside the car and pointed to a scrap of paper taped to the back of the glove box, where it was barely visible. “There is also a map of Havana. In the Vedado, Rosabal lives on the top floor of a new three-storey apartment building. A place for big shots, you understand. It is guarded usually by an armed man in the hallway, sometimes more than one. You will have to deal with that situation on your own, my friend.”

Pagan didn’t want to anticipate trouble. If and when he encountered an armed guard he’d cope with it somehow. He shook the Cuban’s hand and then got behind the wheel.

El Boxeador tapped the window and said, “The road goes all the way to Havana. Good luck!”

Pagan forced a little smile of gratitude, then stared through the glass at the bleak highway ahead. He had come a long way, but suddenly it seemed to him that the three thousand miles behind him were nothing compared to the hundred that lay directly ahead. Neither tourist nor legitimate visitor, he had absolutely no rights in this country. He started the car, which hummed rather smoothly.

This is it, he thought. A point of no return had been passed.

In slightly more than an hour and a half he would be in Havana.

Ohio

Before dawn, Sheridan Perry had left Washington for what he considered his safe retreat, his private sanctuary. Now, terrified by last night’s murderous attack and the memory of how he and Kinnaird had fled the scene before the arrival of police, he sat in the back of a Cadillac limousine as it headed through autumnal Ohio. A monotony prevailed in the landscape, a sense of the year moodily turning. A great cold sun the colour of a brand-new penny appeared low on the horizon, sending chilly light across wasted fields and stubble.

Perry, who saw Harry Hurt each time he shut his eyes and heard once again that dreadful gasp Hurt had made as he turned from the broken window and fell to the floor, his skull shattered like a hammered pumpkin, stared at the fields as if hypnotised. He asked his driver to stop at Youngstown because he wanted coffee. Accompanied by his overweight chauffeur and a stout bodyguard he’d hired from the entourage at Hurt’s apartment, he sat on a stool at the counter and listened to Raving Dave Dudley sing “Six Days on the Road” on the jukebox. Today was the day, Perry thought. Today was the day when things happened in Cuba. Too bad Harry Hurt wasn’t going to be around to see the fruits of his work.

Perry finished his coffee. He got up from the counter. Shielded by chauffeur and guard, he walked back to the limo.

North of Youngstown, in the vicinity of Ashtabula, was a house Perry had bought some years before, his secret place. Located on the shore of Lake Erie, the house was set amid dense trees and surrounded by an electrified fence. He’d never taken visitors there, never had a woman out at the house. Only a cleaning lady, a fastidious old bat from Ashtabula, and the Polynesian servant Paco, knew Perry lived there.

Now, as he travelled north, Perry flicked through business papers he’d lately been neglecting, but found it hard to work up much interest in the cash-flow problems of a lumber company located in Vittoria Conquista, Brazil. He shut the case, poured himself a small snifter of scotch from the bar, gazed back at the road again.

The car was only twenty miles from Lake Erie. He began to feel more comfortable the closer he got to his home.

The placid waters of Lake Erie appeared. It wasn’t the most beautiful stretch of inland water in the world, but just then it looked marvellous to Sheridan Perry.

His house came in sight beyond stripped trees, mainly cottonwoods whose denuded branches suggested fragile clouds of smoke. The house, constructed of fine stained pine, stood on a knoll. A remote device opened the electrified gate in the fence and the limousine went through, then climbed the drive up to the front door.

Perry was glad to be here. He stepped out of the car.

Mrs Stakowski from Ashtabula appeared on the porch, and so did the manservant Paco in his snow-white jacket. They looked nervous. They never expected Perry to visit this house in late fall. Usually he came only in mid-spring, sometimes very early summer, because he disliked the climate during other months. He stepped up to the porch. The fat chauffeur and the stout bodyguard followed.

Home, Perry thought. Here he had his computers, his modems and fax machines, and current stock-market prices flashed across his TV screens, he had his sizeable hot-tub and vibrating bed and his library of pornographic movies from the Philippines, he had his electronic games and his collection of rifles.

“Welcome,” said the houseboy.

Mrs Stakowski opened the door for Perry to enter. She did so with noticeable reluctance and a slight frown whose meaning Perry could not read. The room was dim; he couldn’t make out anything but the shapes of three men who stood near the fireplace. Perry dropped his briefcase. He heard Mrs Stakowski groan and say she was sorry, but she hadn’t had any choice, the strangers were armed; then there was a flash of white as Paco scampered across the porch and headed for the woods. Perry, terrified, turned toward the open door, the porch beyond, where the overweight chauffeur stood motionless.

Sheridan Perry was cut down by gunfire from automatic pistols. It was over in seconds. He was shot in the throat and chest and groin and although he made a valiant effort to turn and flee, the attempt was hopeless; he staggered on to the porch, slipped and fell against the thigh of the chauffeur, rose again with a kind of instinctive strength, then toppled over the porchrail into a pile of raked leaves.

Mrs Stakowski was shot once through the skull and fell to the bottom of the steps. The chauffeur tried to flee and was shot in the back of the neck. The bodyguard freed his pistol from a shoulder-holster and returned the fire into the dim recess of the house, but he was caught by several bullets in the windpipe and one in the eye.

The three killers conferred in Spanish. It was decided that the houseboy, Paco, was barely worth pursuing. What could he tell the authorities anyway? Besides, as the Cuban killers guessed, he’d never go to the cops for one simple reason: he had no green card.

Santiago de Cuba Province, Cuba

Before daylight, the first Cuban troops began to move through the countryside around the city of Santiago. They travelled in Soviet trucks. The convoys passed under the shadows of the Sierra Maestra mountains where, more than thirty years ago, Fidel Castro had gathered his revolutionaries together for their assault on the regime of Batista. In the dark before dawn these mountains seemed indomitable and mysterious, lost in shadows and vapours, legends and myths, more iconography than geography.

The troops, a battalion of them in fifty-three trucks, went by road through the ancient city of Bayamo, where the vibrations of the vehicles rattled shop windows and stained-glass and trembled the old bell in the tower of San Juan Evangelista. The convoys, enlarged at Bayamo by thousands of reservists from the Territorial Troops Militia, passed propagandist billboards with pictures of the blue-uniformed teenagers of the Youth Brigade and captions like En La Educatión Y La Salud. From Bayamo the convoys would eventually reach Holguin, where manoeuvres would begin near Guardalavaca Beach, which would be closed to visitors and tourists for a day or two.

At the same time as the convoy rumbled through the countryside, four battleships of the Cuban Navy – built in Odessa twenty years ago and obsolete by Soviet standards – sailed around Guantanamo towards Guardalavaca Beach. Shortly after dawn, ten aeroplanes, modified versions of Russian MIGs, flew over Santiago towards Holguin. These too were to play a role in the manoeuvres.

Thus was the province of Santiago de Cuba laid defenceless. And the site for the placement of the cruise missile, a mere fifteen miles from the historic Morro Fortress on Santiago’s shoreline, was occupied by a score of anti-Communist officers and more than two hundred men, some of them Soviet-trained missile technicians, who had remained behind on the specific orders of General Capablanca. They would be joined later by the invasionary force from Honduras with its sophisticated weaponry and advanced fighter aircraft that would destroy Castro’s air force on the ground; and later still, on the road to Havana, by other disaffected officers and their battalions, a number that Capablanca estimated would total more than ten thousand fighting men. Backed by popular support, by peasants prepared to take up arms against Castro, by disenchanted men and women willing to strike and block main roads and occupy public buildings, by the whole underground movement Rosabal said was firmly in place and ready to rise, how could there be any doubt about the outcome?

West Virginia

The near-sighted technician at the isolated tracking-station, which was dome-shaped and stood in wooded privacy like a very large boiled egg, had analysed the early photographs transmitted from the satellite twenty-three thousand miles above the earth. Magnified many times, enhanced by computers, these images depicted various blobs that to any untrained eye would suggest absolutely nothing. The technician was skilled, however; he also knew what he was looking for.

He telephoned a number in Washington DC. A young lady named Karen answered in a silken voice that made the lonely technician experience a certain sexual longing. She asked for the pictures to be sent at once by courier to the office of Allen Falk. The technician, who spent far too many hours without human company, and who found Karen’s voice delightful, offered to deliver them personally.