Hostage in Havana - Noel Hynd

A separate Treasury Department document also indicated that Joseph Guarneri’s business interests had included parts of several legal casinos in Cuba, laundry and catering services to those casinos, a Havana drive-in movie theater, shares in La Sirena Gorda restaurant in Miramar, where Hemingway and the literary set liked to knock back booze, a racetrack in Havana, a catering service in Havana, and several other restaurants and bars in Tampa, Florida.

Alex read the concluding sections carefully:Joseph Guarneri was frequently arrested on various charges of bribery, bookmaking, and loan sharking. He escaped conviction all but once, receiving a two-year sentence in 1954 for bribery of a judge, but his conviction was overturned by the New York State Supreme Court before he entered prison …In 1959, Castro’s revolutionary government seized the assets of Guarneri’s Cuban businesses and expelled him from the country as an “undesirable alien.” Thereafter, Guarneri came into contact with various American and expatriate Cuban organizations that opposed Fidel Castro. He later served in the military brigade that invaded Cuba at the Bay of Pigs in 1961. Captured and held as a prisoner after the failure of the invasion, he was ransomed by the United States. Guarneri either lost his taste for underworld life in later years or was forced out of his businesses and settled in Florida and New York …A fan of thoroughbred and standardbred horse racing, Joseph Guarneri would, when in Manhattan, have his driver stop in front of the sprawling newsstand that once stood at New York’s Times Square. Guarneri would emerge from the rear door, enter, pick up his reserved copy of The Morning Telegraph, hand three dollars to the clerk, climb back into his car and proceed to either Aqueduct or Belmont …He focused on real estate in his later years but still retained some old enemies. His execution took place one night when Guarneri was coming home from Yonkers Raceway in the New York suburbs. On the porch of his house, he was ambushed by three gunmen; two opened fire with pistols, a third with a shotgun. The hit was particularly brutal and was an exception to organized crime’s own rules about not hitting a victim in or near his home if he had family …An additional quirk: even in the New York underworld, there was consternation over the hit. No one knew who had arranged it or who had set it up, especially since Guarneri was believed to have been retired at the time. Yet, for a man with such a career, it wasn’t entirely incredible to have an enemy step out of the shadows of the past, bearing a grievance, either real or imagined, and effect a day of reckoning. The homicide inquiry was never resolved …Alex further noted a short addendum:Examiner’s note: FBI picked up the trail of a known Cuban operative named Julio Garcia who had covertly entered the United States in May 1973 with a Honduran passport. Garcia was a known “verdugo” or executioner for the Cuban Intelligence Serv ices. The FBI lost his trail in New York and had no record of him leaving the U.S., but he was believed to have been in the U.S. when Joseph Guarneri was murdered. Garcia was last known to be in Cuba as a member of Cuban State Security in 1981 and remains a member of the Cuban Communist Party … Notes between FBI and CIA were never compared or correlated at the time. SpAg J.N.H., 07/19/1993.

Julio Garcia, Alex mused. How many Cubans had that name? Five thousand? Ten thousand? She proceeded to the next email. This one, from the CIA, was a series of briefs on Roland Violette. Alex made some coffee, then spent an hour reading the reports and reviewing surveillance photos, the most recent taken fifty-six days earlier.

She noted that Violette had been stationed in Washington, then Madrid, which rang some loud bells for her. Within the last year she had worked out of the U.S. Embassy and the CIA office in the Spanish capital. She wondered if her contacts from those operations might be able to tell her things that might not be in the official summary.

“Okay,” she told herself. Bringing Violette out of Cuba was the assignment. Can do, can do, can do, she told herself. As she started to ease into her new assignment, however, she realized how shaken she still was from the sniper’s near miss. Shock and trauma were like depression, she concluded; you don’t realize how bad it is until you’re past it.

She wasn’t the only one whose brains felt like scrambled eggs these days, she realized. She read a pair of blurbs from a CIA contact with a Honduran passport who had encountered Violette in Havana by chance six weeks earlier.Examiner’s note: HW File 7-TF, 05/14/11: Roland Violette sits in Juanita’s Cafe on the Calle San Rafael … and he tells the old stories over and over. They frequently have no appearance of reality and bear not even a faint resemblance to the truth.But he has told them so often over his morning daiquiris that it’s obvious he’s come to believe them himself. Sad. His head has turned to mush with a destroyed spirit and body to match …

This was followed by another examiner’s note from within the last two weeks.Ronnie the Violet, also known as Ronnie the Deep Purple Red [some recent sorehead had written while reviewing the file] remains a rat bastard. May he burn in hell forever over what he did to this agency in the ‘70s and ‘80s.

She reread that one-line entry. It was fascinating that Violette still elicited such strong feelings. His defection had been a full quarter century earlier, and the damage that he had done went even farther back. But she was intrigued, too, that someone else had preceded her through this file within the last few days. She could feel someone’s hot breath on it. Were the fingerprints from this present operation or some other?

Then she recalled that if Violette was looking to return to America, the file had undergone a Lazarus effect. It was back from the dead. She decided to do a little water testing of her own and threw a few keystrokes onto the computer, trying to make her own comments on the file. But the file was closed and refused to receive any new amendments. She looked at the initials following the examiner’s notation: HW.

She didn’t know an HW, but she would now look out for one. HW was clearly senior enough to add his or her own notes to the file, which meant that HW carried some weight in the CIA.

And since the file was closed to her but not to HW, that told her something too.

Okay, she would double check this herself. Her fingers worked the keyboard. Via secure email, she fired an inquiry to a colleague she had worked with in Madrid. She asked for anything the Madrid office might give her on Roland Violette and his defection. He had worked at the CIA office there in the 1980s, she noted, and the office had been on the top floor of the embassy. So surely Madrid had files. And surely they could share, even if the files didn’t officially exist. Since she wouldn’t have time to read through entire documents, she asked for an overview.

Then, for good measure, she sent the same dispatch to her old friend Gian Antonio Rizzo in Rome. Alex had worked with him on various occasions in the past, including the Madrid assignment. He was a retired municipal policeman who continued to moonlight for the CIA. Rizzo always had his ear to the ground, always had some odd bit of pertinent information. If nothing else, he was always amusing.

If she were lucky – and often she wasn’t – she would be able to compare the three responses. By the time she finished, it was ten minutes to five. She was so deep in thought, searching for implications and inferences, that at first she didn’t hear the three low rings of her cell phone. She stared at it in an unfocused way. It sounded a fourth time before she answered.

“It’s ‘no go’ on Gilberto, beautiful,” Sam purred. “I told you I’d try to call him, since he was my old informant in Havana, but he died seven years ago. His store folded, his son works for the Castro government out in the Sierra Maestra, and another family runs a bodega out of his storefront.”

“So you don’t know anyone else on the island?” she asked.

“Gilberto was my best guy and he’s gone,” he said. “Sorry.”

“But do you hear anything?” she asked. “Unofficial or otherwise?”

Sam shrugged. “Just some low level stuff. The U.S. diplomats are teed off because Cuba gets a free pass on human rights abuses from most of the world’s democracies. Diplomatic visitors from Canada, Australia, and Switzerland never criticize the Castro regime or meet with dissidents while they’re on the island. A friend showed me a confidential diplomatic cable sent to the State Department from Havana. The cable was transmitted in November 2010 and was signed by the top American diplomat in Habanera town. It said there were economic motives behind the suck-up approach. But if so, these countries weren’t getting much in return. The rewards for acquiescing to Cuban sensitivities were laughable: over-pumped dinners and for those who bowed lowest a photo-op with drooling old Fidel or dithering old Raul. Big fat deal, huh? And that’s all I hear, other than the fact that all the Cuban dissidents supported by Washington for decades were old, out of touch and so split petty squabbles that the United States needed to look elsewhere for future leaders. Like Miami, maybe.”

“I appreciate your insights,” she said. She wondered if someone had gotten to Sam in the hours since they’d seen each other. She rejected the notion. Sam was his own man these days.

Then Sam interrupted her thoughts. He said he had also made a few other calls about Paul Guarneri’s father and found an old contact who’d known Joseph Guarneri during the 1961 invasion. The old man had been a good soldier and a stand-up guy to his comrades-in-arms, Sam’s unidentified contact said. And he had been hip deep in a number of anti-Castro endeavors in the late sixties.

“CIA stuff, Sam? Do you think?” Alex asked.

“More than likely,” Sam said. “You can just about take that to the bank.”

“Here’s the funny part, Sam,” Alex said. “I spent two hours going through Joseph Guarneri’s FBI file this afternoon. It mentioned all the racketeering, the family, the contacts, touched on the anti-Castro stuff-but it uttered not a peep about the CIA. The CIA wasn’t even mentioned in Guarneri’s file. What do you think?”

Sam laughed. “Typical. The CIA would never share information with the FBI, and the FBI is too dumb to discover it on their own.”

“Should I make something of the omission?” Alex asked.

“In an FBI file?” Sam said. “No. Forget it. When it comes to the FBI, never attribute to duplicity what can be attributed to laziness, pigheadedness, or stupidity,” Sam said. “They miss the big picture all the time. They probably missed it here.”

“That or they’re keeping a second file they won’t let me see,” she said.

“There’s always that,” Sam said philosophically. “Anything else I can do?”

“Keep my cell number handy if you think of anything else. And I’ll keep yours.”

“God bless,” Sam said, then, “Oh, I remember the other thing I was going to tell you,” he said. “Thought of it right after I got back inside the fortress.”

“What?” She was almost starting to like Sam. Almost.

“A travel tip. Havana has two million people,” he said. “And one million of them are police. So be careful. Don’t get pinched by the Cuban cops. It’ll take you years to get out.” Then he rang off.

TWENTY-EIGHT

At his hotel in Manhattan’s East Fifties, Manuel Perez ran his room card through the slot in the door above the doorknob. The little green light came on. He pushed the door open. His hand was still on the knob when a blackjack smashed across his temple above the right ear. The blow staggered him. A second intruder, crouched behind the door, came from the left with a baseball bat and took out Perez’s knee from the left side. A second harder blow to the lower back dropped him to the floor.

Perez threw his elbows at the men on top of him. He caught one in the center of the face. The room resounded with crashes, thumps, and profanity. Perez clenched a fist, threw a massive backward punch at one of his assailants and caught him in the throat. The man staggered and loosened his grip. But there were five of them, Perez now realized. He was outnumbered and outmuscled. From the blow to his head, blood flowed into his eyes. He could barely see.

Two men started to yank Perez’s hands upward behind his back. One of them shoved a Taser to the base of Perez’s neck and unleashed several seconds of current. He was aware of the numbing pain and the buzzing, zapping sound. His body convulsed. He howled again, then gagged. At the same time, the two men worked his hands upward and handcuffed him.

Perez lay on the hotel carpet, stunned but still not unconscious. Someone grabbed him by the hair, lifted his head, and slammed it down again. He was breathing hard, more blood flowing from his brow. He wondered how he could have walked right into this trap.

He could hear someone unleashing a strand of tape with a ripping sound. From behind, someone wrapped the tape firmly across Perez’s mouth. Then they sat him up on the floor. One of the assailants, a burly man with a gray crew cut, pushed a gun to Perez’s throat, and the Mexican was convinced that he had less than a few seconds to live.

“You’re coming with us, Manuel,” the man said in Spanish. “If you resist, we kill you. If you cooperate, you live to work again. How’s that sound, amigo?”

Perez barely had the stamina to give a nod, but he found enough to do so.

“Get him to his feet,” the leader said.

His legs throbbed where he had been hit, and he stood with great difficulty. Then he heard the hotel door open again. A shaft of light from the hallway burst into the room and into his eyes. Someone dropped a black hood over his head, prisoner-of-war style, and they pulled him out into the hall.

At first he thought these men were police, but now he realized they weren’t. They were something else, but he didn’t know what. They frog-marched him down the hallway. Then, another note of absurdity: they spoke to each other in a language he didn’t understand, an Eastern European language of some sort, Czech, maybe, or Polish or Hungarian.

Where was he being taken? Out of the country? Had some foreign intelligence service grabbed him for their own inventory? Or worse, did this have something to do with the shots he had fired a few nights earlier? Was it payback for some previous mission, in Croatia perhaps … or Afghanistan or Russia? He heard an elevator door open and he was pushed inside. The doors closed, he staggered again. Strong arms on each side of him held him up.

The elevator reached the ground floor. He felt cool air, air conditioning. The sound of automobiles. He sensed one pulling close to him. Vehicle doors opened. There was a hand on his head, and he was forced into a backseat. He could barely breathe. He was pushed low at first, then fixed upright. He guessed the windows were tinted. No one could see in. He had previously done operations like this himself, but he had never been on the receiving end. Until now.