Noel Hynd - Hostage in Havana

She indulged him with conversation for a few minutes, then went upstairs by herself. By then, the night team had relieved MacPhail and Ramirez. In her room, she lay awake, wondering what had just happened – and why.

Then she slept.

Alex woke up early the next morning and opened her laptop. There were documents in her secure email. Nothing of much importance from Rome. Gian Antonio Rizzo had managed to cadge a few files – a half dozen official ones plus one extra from his private stock. They reaffirmed what she already knew about Roland Violette. At least there were no glaring discrepancies. In his email, which was dated the previous evening, June 7, he sent these seven items along with a funny, literate, affectionate, flirtatious, mildly obscene and thoroughly decadent note in Italian. “Mia Carissima Alejandra,” he wrote in Italian,As you continue to contact me for sources and the deep dark background of these sordid matters, I conclude that you have chosen me to serve as your personal Mephistopheles. Elated at the anointment, I note that Mephistopheles first appeared in the Faustian legend as one of the seven princes of hell. There are seven deadly sins in the Bible. A Roman, I come from the city of “i sette colli”-the seven hills. Today is the seventh of June. Coincidences, Alex? I believe not! Hence, I forward these seven files to you, my wicked, divine, beautiful American friend, with only one regret – that they are transmitted electronically and not on seven ragged fragments of human skin, upon which they deserve to be. May these seven items bring you better luck than they brought to those discussed therein …

Rizzo then proceeded to regale her with personal news. He had apparently lost both his heart and the final vestiges of his common sense to his young associate Mimi, a girl one third his age, and one of his best code breakers in Rome. They were heading off on holiday together to Vietnam, stopping in Los Angeles on the way so they could both go to Disneyland. He noted in closing that he was booked on an Alitalia Boeing 777.

What a world. And this was how Alex’s friends behaved. She was disappointed that Gian Antonio didn’t have more, but at least he had made her laugh. When she closed out of that correspondence, she glanced at the time on her monitor. It was noon in Europe. Just now the U.S. Embassy in Madrid had sent their file on Roland Violette. It was from Peter Wilkins, her CIA case officer in Spain. There were some attachments of significant size.

Alex ordered breakfast from room service and scanned the new material. Breakfast arrived. She kept reading. One document considerably piqued her curiosity.Soviet espionage efforts against the United States via Roland Violette

Document USSR/2007/10/12/cia- Esp.hg.7

On July 9th, 1983, the US Central Intelligence Agency intercepted a series of memos in Caracas, Venezuela, in which two Soviet consular officials discussed the contributions of a compromised intelligence officer who had been formerly assigned to Central American affairs in Langley. They mused about the possibility of obtaining confidential files generated by Secretary of State George Schultz vis-a-vis continuing efforts against (a) the government of Daniel Ortega in Nicaragua and (b) all upper-level government officials in Cuba, including Fidel and Raul Castro. One of the Soviet officials had commented that they may get the letter from “Vortex,” apparently a code name for the bribed CIA official in Langley, and belittled “Vortex” for his excessive and ostentatious display of personal jewelry, including a wristwatch that cost more than half his annual salary. Examining officer’s note: It has never been established when surveillance efforts actually commenced on Violette, but it is believed that attention settled upon him following the interception of the Cuban memos. He was tipped by the Israeli service he was supplying: GHL 01/23/05

Mention was also made that Vortex had married a Costa Rican woman with expensive tastes who was currently spending him into oblivion in “the best style of a devoutly capitalist Central American woman of a privileged family …”

None of this was new. The memo only put an exclamation point on what Alex already knew, rather than to add question marks. The fact that Violette had been a renegade agent was history. But the memo, she noted, was the beginning of crazy Roland Violette’s unraveling. It was curious that he had finally become undone by comments made by his Soviet handlers, rather than observation by his peers. In retrospect, to Alex’s suspicious eye, the man had been off-kilter twenty-five to thirty years ago. Why hadn’t anyone said anything, made inquiries, called in the attention of superiors?

Alex wondered who might have been protecting Violette, and why. Who had been the extra gardener for the corrupt little flower, if anyone? Under normal circumstances, she might have followed the flow of this and seen where it led. She made a mental note to examine this at greater length later on, if she ever had the time.

And yet, no matter what sort of nut case he had now turned into, she was increasingly steadfast in her desire to bring Violette back to the U.S. The Madrid files added a few tidbits. Fifteen agents, possibly as many as twenty-one, lay in Cold War graves due to this man.

At one time there had been a plan to send some Miami Cubans into Cuba, grab him, and return him, Eichmann-style, to the U.S. But that plan had been nixed at the cabinet level during the administration of Bush 41. Rendition, which would gain favor with a later administration, was considered downright impolitic and incorrect in the pre-9/11 world. That nixed the abduction plan, as did the fact that Violette had a few doubles at the time, and it would have been a further embarrassment to the CIA to have broken every rule of international law and emerged with the wrong individual.

Must be a great package of goods he’s planning to bring back, Alex concluded, if he’s really planning at all. Tempers hadn’t subsided over the years. There was an undertone of rage to almost all the notes on the case.

She was about to exit her email when another curious dispatch was smacked down in her account. It was a forwarded document from an anonymous sender within the FBI, a series of emails with names and addresses removed, forwarded to her as an “undisclosed recipient” from a sender who was equally undisclosed. It had to do with Paul Guarneri.

Overnight, some busybody – MacPhail? Ramirez? she wondered – had inquired from the U.S. Passport Service and subsequently the IRS – whether Paul Guarneri was eligible to leave the country, financially speaking. Did he have a valid passport, did he have any warrants outstanding, tax debts, civil liens, criminal investigations pending, child support overdue? Overnight, the gnomes of the IRS had been prowling, bureaucratic meddling and snooping at its finest. The inquiries stopped just short of investigating whether he had been good to his mother and was kind to animals. The inquisitors had failed to find anything. Paul Guarneri, in fact, seemed to have graduated from their probes with a certain fiduciary pedigree. He paid his taxes properly, had nothing derogatory lurking anywhere, and, from a quick assessment, was personally worth five to seven million dollars, while sitting astride a real estate empire worth several times that, even taking into account outstanding debt, which seemed to be minimal. In the end, the gnomes seemed to be on Paul’s side, cheering him on, if anything. Aside from the associations of his birth, if Paul had come off any cleaner, he would have been squeaky.

She finished breakfast and closed the files. She packed up the flash drives and the hard copy CIA file. She showered and dressed.

MacPhail and Ramirez were in the hallway and wished her a good morning when she popped open the door.

“Sleep well?” she asked. “Feel good?”

“No,” MacPhail answered.

“No,” Ramirez echoed.

“Me neither,” she said. “But I’m packed and ready. Let’s get out of here.”

That afternoon at Langley, Alex again spent time with Thomas Meachum in the Technical Resources Division on the second floor of the main CIA building. Meachum was in charge of providing her documents and equipment. From a file in his office, he pulled out an assortment of documents, all with recent photographs of Alex. On top was the forged Canadian passport in the name of Josephine Marie LeSage, the name she had used in Cairo. Beneath it was the U.S. passport that she had used in Ukraine. Meachum looked at the two passports, compared the pictures, glanced at Alex, and raised a bemused eyebrow.

“Do you remember the name you used in Ukraine?” he asked.

“Anna Marie Tavares,” she said.

“Very good,” he said. “Date of birth? Place of birth? Remember what we did last time you were Anna Tavares?”

It took her a second. Then she recalled the formula.

“I think you took my real normal birthday, December twenty-fourth, and cut it in half. Twelve twenty-four became six twelve. And I was born in Los Angeles, right?”

“Good memory,” he acknowledged.

From the folder, Meachum pulled a new item that the CIA had just concocted, using pictures on file. It was a Mexican passport in the name of Anna Marie Tavares, complete with a photograph of Alex.

“You’re the same chica,” he said, “but you’re mexicana now.”

“Muchas gracias,” she said.

“De nada.”

She examined the passport. It looked just like the standard Mexican government issue because it was. Like her ersatz American one, it had been backdated to reflect an issue of June 2007.

Entry stamps had been impressed into it from Ireland, France, and Ukraine.

“We continued the same persona that we created for you for Kiev,” he said, “but we made you a year younger and changed your birthplace to Mazatlan. Aside from that everything is the same.”

“That’s fine,” Alex said.

“Do you need to review the bible on your persona? We have it here.”

“I’ll take a look to refresh myself, but I think I remember.”

“I’ll add the usual precautions,” Meachum said. “Don’t bring any items with monograms. Same for magazines with labels or books with your name in them. If you want an address book, create a new one – or better yet, don’t bring one.”

“Uh-huh. I’ll be traveling light,” she said. “By boat. Hopefully we’ll be in and out in five or six days. So I’m not bringing a library. Not even a Kindle.”

He laughed. “Okay, notice those travel stamps,” he said. “Ireland, France, and Ukraine. They’re there because you’ve been to all three. Have cover stories for your trips, and note the days of entry and exit. Just in case you’re quizzed by the Cuban police.”

“A situation I’d like to avoid,” she said.

“Yeah,” he said, without expanding on the thought. “Please do. For everyone’s sake, including your own. No Cuban police. Please.”

Meachum began opening envelopes and pulling out supporting material.

There was a Mexican driver’s license, valid, he claimed, which used another file photo of her. Then there were a pair of credit cards: MasterCard and American Express, plus an ATM card from Banco Azteca.

“These are both live credit cards,” he said. “But only use the MasterCard. You can expense up to a thousand dollars on it, no questions asked, but be cautious. The Amex card is now a ‘fly trap,’” he said. “If used, each card will function up to $200 but will issue an immediate alert that something has gone wrong. The ATM card will only work in a teller machine that takes photographs. If primed, it will send a picture immediately to the State Department as to the location plus the photo of the user.”