“What took so long?”
“When she left Guantánamo the Americans sent a destroyer to accompany her. The captain was beside himself — he thought the destroyer would accompany them all the way to Norfolk. He faked an engineering casualty in the Windward Passage, crawled along at three knots. Of course, then the destroyer refused to leave. He finally had to announce that he had fixed the problem and steam off at twelve knots before the destroyer turned back.”
Vargas smiled. “If this works, I will be very grateful to you, Delgado.”
“There are real problems, which we have discussed. I give this operation no more than a fifty percent chance of success.”
“Fifty percent is optimistic,” Alejo Vargas replied. “I suspect the odds are a lot worse than that. Yet they are good enough to take a chance, and if we don’t do that, we have only ourselves to blame, eh?”
“Doing business with the North Koreans is an invitation to be double-crossed. How do you know they will perform?”
“We need long-range ballistic missiles, the North Koreans want well-designed, well-made biological warheads. The exchange is fair.”
“I still do not trust them,” Delgado countered. “This is a once-in-a-lifetime deal.”
Vargas changed the subject: Delgado was not a partner, he was the hired help. “Tell me about your evening cruise with Maximo Sedano.”
“He wants political backing when Castro dies.”
“What did you promise him?”
“I told him you buy people or blackmail them, that he has no chance.”
“And Alba?”
“He agreed with my assessment.”
Vargas smiled. “Let us hope Maximo stifles his ambitions. For his sake. You told the man the honest truth; if he chooses to disregard it the consequences are on his head.”
Delgado said nothing. He suspected Vargas had already talked to Alba: the admiral hoped the general didn’t try to dress up the tale. Telling Vargas the truth was the only way to stay alive.
Toad Tarkington was sitting by the window in the BOQ room thinking about biological weapons and marines dug in around a warehouse when Rita unlocked the door and came in. She was still in uniform. His head was thumping like a toothache and he felt like hell.
“Some anniversary,” he said. “I feel like an ass.”
She came over to the chair, knelt and put her arms around him.
“This wasn’t the way the evening was supposed to go. I’m sorry, Rita.”
“Our life together has been terrific, Toad-man. You’re still the guy I want.”
He hugged her back.
“Let’s go to bed,” she said.
CHAPTER SEVEN
The emotional impact of what he had done didn’t hit Maximo Sedano until the jet to Madrid leveled off after the climbout from Havana airport.
He took the transfer cards bearing Castro’s thumbprint from his inside left breast pocket, and holding them so no one else in first class could read them, studied them carefully.
He was holding $53 million in his hands and he could feel the heat. Hoo, man! He had done it!
He took a chance, a long chance. When he walked into Castro’s bedroom he had had the real transfer cards in his left jacket pocket and the ones bearing his bank account numbers in his right. Mercedes wasn’t there that second time he was admitted, which was a blessing. His former sister-in-law was too sharp, saw too much. She might have decided something was wrong merely from looking at his face.
So it was just Fidel and a male nurse, a nobody who handled bedpans and urinals. There wasn’t a notebook or ledger anywhere in sight, and Fidel certainly was in no condition to closely scrutinize the cards. He signed the cards, transferring the money to Maximo, then let Maximo put his thumb in an ink pad and press it on each of them.
Fidel said little. He had obviously been given an injection for pain and was paying minimal attention to what went on around him. He merely grunted when Maximo said good-bye.
The Maximo Sedano who walked into that bedroom was the soon-to-be unemployed Cuban finance minister with a cloudy future. The Maximo Sedano who walked out was the richest Cuban south of Miami.
Just like that!
The icing on the cake was that the Swiss accounts should have perhaps a million more of those beautiful Yankee dollars as unpaid interest. Every penny was going to be transferred to Maximo’s accounts at another bank in Zurich. It wouldn’t be there long, however. Tomorrow morning after he turned in these transfer cards to Fidel’s banks, he would walk across the street and send the money from his accounts to those he had opened in Spain, Mexico, Germany, and Argentina. These were commercial accounts held by various shell corporations that Maximo had established years ago to launder money for Fidel and the drug syndicates, accounts over which he had sole signature authority. The shell corporations would quickly write a variety of very large checks to a half dozen other companies Maximo owned. After a long, tortuous trail around the globe and back again, the money would eventually wind up in Maximo’s personal accounts all over Europe.
The scheme hinged on the bank secrecy laws in various nations, not the least of which was Switzerland, and the fact that anyone trying to trace the money would see only disorganized pieces of the puzzle, not the big picture.
Maximo smiled to himself and sighed in contentment.
“Would you care for a drink, sir?” the flight attendant asked. She was a beautiful slender woman, with dark eyes and clear white skin.
“A glass of white wine, please, something from Cataluña.”
“I’ll see what we have aboard, sir.” She smiled gently and left him.
Maximo told himself that he would find a woman like that one of these days, a beautiful woman who appreciated the finer things in life and appreciated him for providing them.
His wife was expecting him to return to Cuba in three days: “I must go to Europe in the morning,” he had told her. “An urgent matter has arisen.”
She wanted to go with him on this trip of course — anything to get off the island, even for a little while.
“Darling, I wish you could, but there wasn’t time to make reservations. I got the only empty seat on the airliner.”
She was not happy. Still, what could she say? He promised to bring her something expensive from a jeweler, and that promise pacified her.
The flight attendant brought the glass of wine and he sipped it, then put his head back in the seat and closed his eyes. Ah, yes.
He had a new identity in his wallet: an Argentine passport, driver’s license and identity papers, a birth certificate, several valid credit cards, a bank account and a real address in Buenos Aires, all in the name of Eduardo José Lopéz, a nice common surname. This identity had been constructed years before and serviced regularly so that he might move money around the globe when drug smugglers sought to pay Fidel Castro. Becoming the good Señor López would be as easy as presenting the passport when checking into a hotel.
He had the papers for two other identities in a safe deposit box in Lausanne, across the lake from Geneva.
Maximo Sedano fingered the bank transfer cards one more time, then reclined his seat.
How does it feel to be rich? Damned good, thank you very much.
Lord, it was tempting. Just walk away with the money as Señor López, and poof! disappear into thin air.
And yet, the gold was there for the taking. His plans were made, his allies ready … all he had to do was find the gold and get it out of the country.
He reclined his seat, closed his eyes, and savored the feeling of being rich.
Doña Sedano was sitting on her porch, inhaling the gentle aroma of the tropical flowers that grew around her porch in profusion and watching the breeze stir the petals, when she saw Hector walking down the road. He turned in at her gate and came up to the porch.