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GHOSTS OF HAVANA

Prologue
Straits of Florida
Wednesday, 5:28 p.m.

“Pirates don’t drive minivans, dammit!”
Alejandro Cabrera was about to reply when he heard the first shot.
Booosh!
“What’s that?” Dennis shouted, whipping his head around.
The hollow explosion was followed by an accelerating whistle and, after a momentary pause, a loud splash just off the bow.
The four middle-aged Americans all hit the deck of The Big Pig, a white sportfishing boat with a pink stripe along its side.
“Mierda,” Alejandro hissed.
“What’s happening, Al?” Dennis whined, lying on the floor and covering his head.
“Cubans,” Brinkley said matter-of-factly.
“Cubans? Holy cow!” Dennis screamed. “Why, why, why?”
“What the fuck have you gotten us into, Al?” Crawford clenched his teeth.
“Probably MGR,” Brinkley offered, his cheek pressed flat against the boat deck.
“MGR? What the fuck is that?”
“Marina de Guerra Revolucionaria,” Brinkley replied as calmly as he could. “The Cuban navy.”
“I told you we were over the line! I freaking told you we were over the line!” Dennis shrieked.
“Goddamn bonefish,” Crawford growled. “We’re gonna get killed over a goddamn bonefish.”
“We are in international waters, gentlemen. There’s nothing to worry about,” Brinkley tried to reassure his friends. “Everybody stay calm.”
“Hijo de puta!” Alejandro spat.
“Holy cow . . . Holy cow . . .” Dennis muttered to himself, his voice quivering.
“Calm down, Deuce,” Crawford said. “What do we do now, Brink?”
Brinkley Barrymore III picked himself up and peered cautiously over the side of the boat, which was rocking gently on the ocean swell. He squinted toward the horizon through a pair of high-powered binoculars. The sky was starting to turn a blue-pink in the late sun. “There,” he said, pointing off the stern. Brinkley tossed the binoculars to the much larger man next to him. “Craw, give me an assessment and an ETA.”
Crawford Jackson caught the binoculars and, in one smooth motion, raised them to his eyes.
“Al, get down below. The radio’s in the hold. Call our friends for help. Let them know we’ve been intercepted.”
“The Big Pig is my fucking boat, Brink!” Alejandro snapped. “I’m the captain. I say we hit the engine and run for it.”
“You want them to shoot at us?”
“I’ve got more horsepower,” Alejandro said. “This baby can outrun anything MGR has on the water.”
“Dead astern, naval patrol boat approaching at high speed. Cuban flag,” Crawford announced.
“Negative. We’re not running from the Cuban navy,” Brinkley said. “It’s not the prudent move.”
“I don’t surrender.” Alejandro scowled. “Cabreras never surrender.”
“Al, who knows what other ships are out there? And planes?” Brinkley said. “We aren’t running.”
“ETA: three minutes,” Crawford said.
“We are just fishing, gentlemen,” Brinkley insisted. “There’s no need to escalate.”
Alejandro removed his Miami Marlins baseball cap and rubbed his goatee.
“This is not the time, Al. Go down below. Call our friends. And take Deuce with you,” he said, pointing at Dennis, lying frozen on the deck.
“I don’t like it,” Al said, putting his cap back on and licking his lips.
“They’re still approaching at full speed,” said Crawford.
“Now, Al!” Brinkley raised his voice for the first time. “You have to call now.”
“Puta!”
“Two minutes,” Crawford announced.
“Deuce, get your ass off the floor and go down below to help Al. Do it now.” Brinkley was trying to contain himself. “This is no time for one of your panic attacks.”
“This is a perfect time for panic.” Dennis looked up, his face flushed and his eyes already red. “What am I gonna tell Beth?”
“Now, Deuce!”
Alejandro pulled on Dennis’s arm. “What does Brink mean by ‘intercepted’?” Dennis asked. Al ignored the question, and the two men scampered down the steps to below deck.
The boat’s radio erupted with Spanish chatter. “Barco no identificado! Pare! Ustedes se encuentran en las aguas nacionales Cubanas! Pare!”
“Ninety seconds,” said Crawford, binoculars glued to his eyes. “And they’re armed.”
“Es La Marina de Guerra Revolucionaria! Pare!” the radio blared.
“This is The Big Pig,” Brinkley spoke slowly into the radio. “We are American civilians. We are fishing. Just fishing. Over.”
“Pare! Prepárense para ser abordados!”
“No Spanish. No hablo español. We are just fishing. Over,” he repeated.
“One minute,” Crawford said. “They aren’t slowing down.”
Brinkley hollered down to Alejandro. “Have you called yet? You’ve got one minute!”
“Yes I fucking called them,” Alejandro appeared in the companionway, gripping an M16 assault rifle.
“What are you doing, Al?”
“I’m not going back to Cuba,” he said, raising the gun barrel toward the approaching boat.
“Are you crazy? Throw that overboard. We can’t take on the Cuban navy. Throw them all overboard.”
“What ‘all’?” Crawford lowered the binoculars. “What the fuck is going on here, Brink? Al?”
“I don’t surrender.” Alejandro bit his lower lip and aimed the rifle. “I told you Cabreras never surrender.”
“Lower that weapon now!” Brinkley ordered. “Throw them all overboard. You’re giving them a reason to shoot us. We are just fishing.”
“Why the hell do you have an M16 on your fishing boat, Al?” Crawford clenched his two fists in anger.
Rat-a-tat-tat-tat-tat! the deck exploded in a line of gunfire. The men hit the deck again.
“Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!” Crawford hissed.
“Stay calm, everybody,” Brinkley said.
Dennis appeared in the stairwell with a small arsenal of weapons. Crawford’s eyes widened as Dennis began throwing guns into the ocean: another M16, an AR-15, two pistols.
“No!” Alejandro shouted.
“What the fuck is going on here, Brink?” Crawford demanded.
“Deuce, no!” Alejandro lurched toward him too late. Just as Dennis dropped the last pistol over the side of the boat, his body suddenly convulsed, a bright red stain oozing across his back. Dennis Dobson pitched forward and fell into the rolling blue sea.
“Man overboard!” Crawford shouted. Brinkley threw a lifesaver over the side just as Crawford dove headfirst into the ocean.
“Pare! Pare!” bellowed the loudspeaker on the approaching vessel. The fishing boat was raked with more gunfire.
Crawford reached Dennis, floating facedown in the waves, and spun him onto his back. “I’ve got you,” he gasped, trying not to swallow seawater. Crawford tucked his arm under his friend’s neck and grabbed the lifesaver’s rope with his free hand. “I’ve got you, Deuce.”
“Beth!” Dennis gurgled. “Beth!”
Brinkley pulled in the rope, ignoring the Cubans who had stopped shooting and were now circling the fishing boat like a lion stalking an injured gazelle.
“Puta,” Alejandro hissed, flipping his weapon into the sea and raising his hands. He stared ahead with dead eyes as the patrol boat pulled alongside. The deck of the larger ship was lined with Cuban soldiers, all aiming weapons at the now-unarmed Americans. The setting sun bathed the naval ship in a soft, calming pink light.
Brinkley dragged Dennis onto the deck and applied pressure to the wound. Crawford hauled himself back on board, raised his hands, and then collapsed on the deck, panting, out of breath.
Alejandro, his hands still raised high, waved his baseball cap at the soldiers and forced a smile. “Just fishing, señores.”

Thirty-Six Hours Earlier

1.
Georgetown, Washington, D.C.
Tuesday, 5:30 a.m.

Judd Ryker opened one eye and winced at the clock. Five-thirty. The good news was that he had slept through the night. And he was home. My own bed, he thought, feeling the cool clean sheets as he stretched his legs.
As Judd cleared the jetlag haze from his mind, the conversation of the previous evening flooded back into his brain. Was it a dream?
Judd rolled his head and Jessica came into view. His wife was still sound asleep, breathing softly, a slight, satisfied smile on her lips, an expression of gentle relief on her face. He watched the contours of her mouth and listened to her lungs, a comforting rhythm of inhale and exhale. Yes, Jessica was asleep. And they were both still here.
The night before, Judd had returned from Zimbabwe, a grueling twenty-two-hour journey that had provided him far too much time alone with nothing but his thoughts. Too much time to think about his latest assignment on behalf of the Secretary of State and how it all had unfolded. It had all come together just a bit too smoothly, a touch too succinctly. Judd’s mind ran through the events—the downfall of Zimbabwe’s dictator; the election of a new, hopeful democratic leader for that shell-shocked country; a murderous Ethiopian general dead, the victim of a premeditated campaign of revenge—all good results, but . . .
It had required a thick dollop of good luck. A suspicious amount of good luck. And so, too, had his previous mission three months earlier to rescue an American ally in the West African nation of Mali.
Judd knew that luck was random. Luck was always random. Before he’d arrived at the State Department, he had been a professor at Amherst College, a number cruncher, a leading expert at teasing out patterns in data to uncover what was really going on. And, like any decent scholar of statistics, Judd knew that randomness always—always—washed out in the end.
So, somewhere over the Atlantic Ocean, wedged into a middle seat in row 64 of a South African Airways Airbus A330, Judd Ryker had finally admitted to himself the only possible way it could make any sense at all. The source of his luck could only be . . . Jessica.
His wife never conceded what she did, exactly. She never spoke the letters CIA, never said the word “spy,” never mentioned anything about operations or cover. But she didn’t have to.
Zimbabwe, Mali. How far back did it go? Was their whole relationship, going back to their very first meeting in the Sahara Desert eleven years ago, built on a lie?
Judd should have been furious, he knew. His wife—his most trusted confidante, the mother of his two children—had been deceiving him for years. She had always been private and a bit of a loner. He accepted that. It was one of her attractions. But now he knew that she had been playing him like a puppet master. Worse, if Jessica had manipulated him into an unwitting role in a political assassination in Zimbabwe, then his own wife had tricked him into murder.
As jarring as these realizations were, Judd marveled to find that he wasn’t upset. Once he pushed through the confusion, he was, deep down . . . grateful.
Who had ever heard of a college professor running his own special one-man team inside the U.S. government? It was ridiculous, he now knew. Judd’s experiment at the State Department, his Crisis Reaction Unit, the baby he had created from scratch, had been set up to fail. How could he have expected to succeed without help, without some hidden hand? How could Landon Parker, the Secretary of State’s powerful chief of staff, who had created S/CRU and hired Judd, not have known this, too?
Lying in the warm comfort of his bed, Judd realized his world was suddenly turned upside-down. But he wasn’t angry, because, on the most essential issue, Jessica had been utterly convincing. While he was only now learning her true identity, he still believed that their marriage, their family, their life together, was all real. Her love was real.
Jessica’s big brown eyes opened.
“Hey,” he whispered.
“Hi.”
“You sleep?”
She nodded. “You?”
“Yeah. I think so,” Judd said.
“Are we still . . . good?” she asked.
Judd paused. “Uh-huh.”
“I’m glad we got it all out in the open last night.”
“Me too.”
“It’s better this way,” she said.
Judd scooted over in the bed and kissed her softly on the lips.
“Better,” she repeated. “I feel . . . free.”
“Me too,” Judd said.
“But, Judd”—she shook her head—“what are the new rules?”
“Rules? Can’t we just be honest with each other?” Judd started to feel sick. “Isn’t that what last night was about? Finally coming clean?”
“Not possible, sweetheart,” she said. “I think you know that.”
“Then let’s just promise to stay out of each other’s business.”
“Also not possible,” she said. “We’re too good a team. If there’s anything to learn from the past few days, it’s that.”
“Okay,” he sat up. “So what are the Ryker family rules of engagement?”
“I think we need three.”
“Three? You’ve already thought a lot about this, Jess.”
“Of course I have. Rule one is easy: Assist. We help each other. That’s been working so far. I think we can achieve a lot by working together. I’ll help you with S/CRU and you can help me rebuild my career once I’m active again.”
“Rule one is assist,” Judd nodded. “Fine. Agreed. What’s next?”
“Rule two is avoid. We can help each other but let’s not work the same issue. I can help you on your problem. You help me on my problem. But we don’t play each other on the same problem. Got it?”
Judd exhaled. “Avoid. Okay . . . makes sense. What’s your last rule? Does it start with an a?”
“Of course it does. Rule three is admit. If we find ourselves somehow forced to compromise on rules one and two, we have to be open about that. We have to tell the other.”
“No more lies?” Judd asked.
“No more lies,” Jessica said.
“Assist. Avoid. Admit . . . Those are your rules of engagement, Jess?”
“Yes,” she nodded. “Do you agree?”
“Do you think rule three is really necessary, Jess? It’s a big world. Lots of problems. What are the chances that we both find ourselves working on the same country again?”

2.
CIA headquarters, Langley, Virginia
Tuesday, 5:54 a.m.

“Not dead yet.”
“I know that, goddammit,” swore the Deputy Director of Operations. “I don’t give a frog’s ass about El Comrade Jefe. We know he’s staring at the ceiling and drooling all day. He’s still eating and shitting through a tube, right?”
“Yes, sir,” said the team leader, a tall, muscular man with a flattop brush cut.
“So fuck El Jefe,” the Deputy Director scoffed. “If he’s out of the game, then we focus squarely on his little brother. El Comrade Presidente controls the security forces, secret intelligence, and the Party. So we aim our sights on ECP. You got that?”
“Yes, sir. ECP, sir.” Around the windowless room, a dozen heads, a mix of men and women of different ages, all nodded.
“So what’s the latest on his medical prognosis? When’s El Comrade Presidente going to start pushing daisies?”
“We have no indications of ECP having any specific health problems, sir.”
“How’s that possible?”
“He takes Mexican generics of Lipitor and Levitra,” one of the analysts offered.
“Christ! He’s got cholesterol and can’t get his dick up? That’s it?” A thick vein, like a lightning bolt, appeared on his forehead, never a good sign for the team in front on him.
“Other than vitamins, yes. That’s it, sir.”
The Deputy Director aggressively rubbed his bald head. “Don’t these Cuban fuckers ever get sick and just die? What the hell do they eat down there? How old is he now?”
“ECP just turned eighty-six, sir.”
“Christ!” He wiped his hand on his pants. “Are we sure there aren’t any more brothers? Are we sure their mama didn’t have some other half-brother spawn hidden in the jungle? Is there some goddamn cousin waiting to come down from the Sierra Maestras to play Jesús when we least expect it?”
“No, sir. No cousins. Not as far as we know.”
“Fine,” he exhaled. “So, then, who’s next on the list?”
“You mean the successor to ECP, sir?”
The Deputy Director’s face fell lifeless, his eyes dead and his jowls drooping low. This was a common reaction from the longtime intelligence chief, a sign his staff recognized as a prelude to an explosion of anger. “That’s the whole fucking purpose of the Caribbean Special Projects Unit!” he shouted. “That’s why you’re here and not pumping gas at some strip mall in Leesburg, goddammit! That’s why you’re all here!”
“Sir—” The team leader cleared his throat. “Sir, we have no clear successor to ECP identified.”
“No one at all?”
“We believe the Communist Party leadership has kept succession deliberately in the dark. It’s a tactic to prevent factions and infighting. If no one knows who’s next in line, then everyone stays in line.”
“I don’t care what the fucking Cuban politburo knows or doesn’t know. But we are the C-I-fucking-A. We should know. That’s our job. That’s your job.”
“Yes, sir.”
No one spoke up.
“What about O?” the Deputy Director asked.
“Oswaldo Guerrero?”
“That’s what I asked. What about O?”
“Oswaldo Guerrero is their military intelligence chief in charge of running counter-destabilization operations. He—”
“I know who O is! He’s the fucker who keeps embarrassing this goddamn team. He’s why all our people keep getting killed. O’s the reason Operation Rainmaker failed.” The Deputy Director made a fist and ground his teeth.
“Sir, we still don’t know much about him.” The analyst rifled through a stack of papers. “Oswaldo Guerrero, trained in Moscow, new-generation intelligence officer, we believe he’s connected to the Party, the army, the navy—”
“I know all that, goddammit!”
“Here’s the only confirmed image we have, sir,” the analyst said, holding up a grainy photo of a dark-haired man with a small, gentle face, the sole discernible feature a crooked broken nose.
“He looks innocent,” the Deputy Director whispered. “But he’s the Devil.”
“Yes, sir.”
“O is the goddamn Diablo!” he said, his voice rising again.
“Yes, sir. That’s what we call him in the Caribbean Special Projects Unit. El Diablo de Santiago.”
“So that’s why I’m asking,” the Deputy Director said, trying to calm himself down. “Is O . . . Oswaldo Guerrero . . . El Diablo . . . whatever the fuck we call him”—he jabbed his finger between the eyes of the face in the photograph—“Is this man next in line to run Cuba?”
“We . . . don’t know, sir.”
“Well, then, is he a recruitment target? If we can’t beat him, can we turn him?”
“The HUMINT asset assessment is negative. Human Intelligence sources suggest he’s a nationalist. Loyal to ECP. Raised through the commie schools and clubs, recruited early, now a lifer. He’s a true believer.”
“Pshaw!” the Deputy Director scoffed. “True believers. I don’t think there are any pure idealists anymore. Everyone’s got a weakness. Even our man O.”
The Deputy Director started to pace the room, his staff clearing a path.
“So, what’s our leverage?” he asked. “He’s got to have something hidden. Everyone does. What’re his anxieties? What’s his fetish?”
“We haven’t found anything. Our past attempts to plant—”
“Fuck me,” the Deputy Director interrupted and held up his hand. The room fell silent while he rubbed his head again. After a moment, he stopped, then scanned the room and made eye contact with every member of the Caribbean Special Projects Unit. “Those Girls Scouts over at the State Department may think they can snuggle up to ECP. That Cuba will change if we just play nice and pretend foreign policy is about friendship circles.We can shake their hands, let them hug the Pope, even allow them to host POTUS for goddamn tean and biscuits. We can stick our fucking heads in the sand. But the United States of America hasn’t surrendered to that pissy little island yet. In this building, we still know who those communist bastards really are.”
“Yes, sir.”
“I want a list of all potential successors to ECP, with an assessment of their recruitment potential and some leverage points on each one. I want to know who they are, what they dream about, where they shit, and what they think about when they jerk off. And I want this by the end of the day!”
“Today, sir?”
“That’s what I said! You think I called you all to the office before dawn by accident?”
“Is there some special urgency we should know about, sir?”
“Cuba is going to blow up. It could be any day. It could be any minute. Things are heating up in Havana. They are ready to explode in Santiago.”
“Explode, sir?”
“I can feel it. Everything looks calm, but underneath the surface Cuba is a tinderbox. The only thing missing is the spark.”
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