They went into one of the nightclubs and found an empty table. Six whores were sitting around the table beside them. The girls were drinking daiquiris and having a fine, loud time. One of the girls looked the two men over while the band tuned up just a few feet away.
“Washington wants more information,” Carmellini said, ignoring the whores.
“They would.” Chance chewed on his lip for a bit, then picked up the wine list. “Tonight’s the night we go into Vargas’s safe. Are you comfortable with that?”
Carmellini took his time answering. Chance was about to repeat the question when he said, “If the alarms are off.”
“They’ll be off.”
“Sure.”
“Trust me.”
When the waiter came they ordered dinner.
“So tell me again about the Ministry of Interior,” Carmellini said. “Everything you can recall. Everything.”
Chance leaned back, closed his eyes, tried to visualize how the building looked when he had stepped from the taxi out front on his way to his meeting with Alejo Vargas.
“There is a guard kiosk out front on the sidewalk. You then walk through the front entrance to the guard station inside. They check your credentials again, call whoever you say you want to see. This person comes to get you, leads you through the halls to the office you are to visit.”
“Cameras?”
“Security cameras mounted high in corners, monitored by the main guard station. There are two separate systems, at least, with pictures playing on separate monitors.”
“Infrared sensors?”
“I think so ….” The fact is he should have paid more attention. Looked more carefully, consciously noted what he was seeing. “Yes, I remember seeing one.”
“Motion detectors?”
“No.”
“Laser alarms?”
“Yes, mounted at ankle height.” Presumably these were only on when the building was not occupied.
“Alarms on the windows?”
“Yes.”
“Vibrators on the glass?”
“No.” If there had been vibrators, the computer would have had a much more difficult job sorting out the voices from the electronic noise of the vibrators when it tried to read the light refracted by the crystals.
“Were there internal security doors, doors that might be closed when the building is not occupied?”
“Yes. Every hall had them, but I doubt they were ever used.”
“And internal security stations?”
“I saw none.”
Carmellini thought about it. Closed security doors made a burglar’s access more difficult, but they provided a peaceful, quiet place for a burglar to work once he had gained entry.
“Do they have backup power when the power goes off?” Carmellini mused.
“They must,” Chance replied thoughtfully. “A backup generator of some type. I’m going to walk in assuming that they do, but I’ll be improvising as I go.”
“We’ll sure as hell find out soon enough, won’t we?” Carmellini said, and grinned. That was the first grin he had managed all afternoon. The death of the lab worker had hit him hard, but the cool execution of the guard at the front door by William Henry Chance had hit him like a punch to the solar plexus. Chance just gunned the man down and kept on trucking, as if killing another human being were something he did every morning before lunch.
All evening Carmellini had studied the older man, watched him for a sign that the murder of the guard was anything more than absolutely routine. And he had seen nothing. Nothing at all. Chance looked as if he might be having dinner in a restaurant in the Bronx with a Yankees game from a kitchen radio as background noise.
Carmellini stared at the food on the plate that the waiter put in front of him. He didn’t want a mouthful. But what he wouldn’t give for a stiff drink! He sipped at a glass of water, felt his stomach knot up.
“Order a drink,” Chance said as he used his knife and fork. “One. Something on the rocks. You need it. We have a long night ahead.”
Carmellini looked around for the waiter, and found himself staring at one of the whores at the next table, who gave him a big grin. He grinned back. A man just has to keep things in perspective.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
The sun had been down for several hours when Enrique Poveda and Arquimidez Cabrera drove up to the fourth EHV tower they hoped to blow. After a quick look around, they unlocked the padlock on the gate and put on their tool belts. Each of the men picked a tower leg and started up. About ten feet above the ground they found the shaped charges of C-4 plastique still firmly taped to the steel legs. Working in the darkness by feel, each man took a chemical timer from his belt, a device about the size and shape of a fountain pen, and inserted it into the plastique. The timer was already set to explode as near to 1:30 A.M. as possible.
After setting the timers, they climbed down to the ground, then ascended the other two legs. In minutes they were back on the ground.
They locked the padlock, closed up the back of the van, and drove away.
“One more,” Poveda said. He wished he had a map or diagram, but all that had been left behind in Florida. There he and Cabrera and the U.S. Army power grid expert had labored for days over satellite reconnaissance photos, photographs taken from the ground by not-so-innocent tourists, and computer-generated diagrams. They selected the target towers and committed their locations to memory. Not a single sheet of paper left the room with them.
So now Cabrera pointed down one street and Poveda motioned toward another. The men chuckled. “I am very sure,” Poveda said. “Two blocks down, right turn, then on for a half mile.”
“Okay.”
“I am glad it was tonight,” Cabrera said. “The charges had been in place too long, the new padlocks were there too long, I was getting nervous — you know what I mean, my friend?”
Poveda grunted. He knew. His stomach felt as if it were tied in a knot. He hadn’t felt this uptight about an operation since his first one, fifteen years ago, when he was very young. He had been to Cuba many times since, eight as he recalled, and none of them were as tense as that first time, until now.
The Cubans had almost caught him and his partner that time. The partner was eventually caught six years later and died under interrogation, or so they heard months after that. Poveda had promised himself then and there that he would never be taken alive, that he would not die in a Cuban prison.
Communists! He made a spitting motion out the open window. The communists took everything from the people in Cuba who had worked and saved and built for the future, and gave it to the people who had not. Now look at the place! Everyone poor, everyone on the edge of starvation, the cities and towns and factories rotting from lack of investment. The communists ran off the people who could make Cuba grow, the people the nation needed to feed everyone else. Ah, these bastards deserved their misery, and by God they had had some. Universal destitution was Castro’s legacy, his gift to generations yet unborn.
Poveda was a pessimist. He knew that soon Castro would be dead and things would change in Cuba. “They’ll forget Fidel’s faults, remember just the good,” he told Cabrera, for the hundredth time. “You wait and see. In a hundred years the church will make him a saint.”
“Saint Fidel.” Cabrera laughed.
“I shit you not. That is the way of the world. The people he pissed on the most will call him blessed.”
“Saint or devil, we’ll fuck the son of a bitch a little tonight,” Cabrera said as the van pulled up to the last tower.
Poveda killed the van’s engine and lights and the two men got out. Silence.
“Awful quiet, don’t you think?” Poveda asked.
Cabrera stood by the van’s rear doors, listening, looking around. Poveda dug in his pocket for the key to the padlock, inserted it.