Ghosts of Havana (A Judd Ryker Novel) (13 page)

“Well, don’t you worry. We’ve just had some trouble around here, that’s all.” He shrugged and held up his hands. On the other arm was a tattoo of a naval ship, a cross, and the numbers
2506
.

“I can see that,” she said, gesturing toward the camera crews.

The man grunted. “You just here to admire trucks,
chiquita
, or can I help you?”

“I hope so,” she said, cocking her head to the side. “I want to hire a boat.”

“This is the place.” He grinned. “Take your pick.”

“I’m looking for Ricky.” His smile disappeared.

“Don’t know any Ricky.” He shook his head.

“You’re . . . not Ricky?”

“I just said I don’t know any Ricky,” he said through pursed lips.

“Becky over at Castaways said I could find Ricky around here.”

“I don’t know any Becky either.” He pointed at the charter boats. “You should ask Bill or Frank. They’ll take you out on a boat for the right price. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got to go.”

The man ducked his head and slipped into the truck, started the engine, and reversed out. Jessica waved good-bye to the man, who acknowledged her with a slight nod, before he quickly drove off, heading southwest.

Once the pickup truck was out of sight, Jessica ran back to the Mustang and peeled out of the parking lot in the same direction.

—

W
ith only one road out of town, it wasn’t long before Jessica caught up with the bright red truck just as it accelerated onto the Seven Mile Bridge, a low, flat, two-lane highway suspended over the ocean. She settled behind at a safe distance and forwarded the photo of the Ford to Sunday back at Langley.

A few minutes later, she received a reply text:

   
   
Richard Green, Everglades City, Florida.

“Ricky!” she tsked to herself. “You little liar.”

—

J
essica trailed the truck for twenty more minutes and several more bridges before the Ford finally turned off the main road and headed north on one of the islands, then slowed again and veered down a dirt path cut through a mangrove stand.

Jessica crawled along slowly behind the truck and then parked behind a thicket to hide the Mustang. She stashed her hat, grabbed her phone, binoculars, and a bottle of water and pursued the truck on foot.

On the other side of the mangroves, she found a clearing and crouched in the tall grasses at the tree line to get a clear view. Through her binoculars, she watched the Ford pickup drive over another bridge, which led to a small private island with a single structure. The truck parked in front of the house, an enormous Spanish-style villa of whitewashed walls and a red tile roof. At the front were immaculately trimmed gardens, a tropical blend of elephant’s ear plants, bougainvillea, banana trees, and pineapple bushes. Orchid vines of flourescent pink and purple flowers covered a trellis at the main door.

Ricky exited the Ford with a bucket and walked right into the house without knocking. Jessica scanned the windows, unable to see where he had gone. She aimed her binoculars at the back of the house, where she could see a vast deck with a pool overlooking
a small private beach. A ring of orange bouys in the sea marked a swimming area.

With no sign of any activity, Jessica set down her binoculars and took out her phone. She marked her location with GPS and sent the coordinates to Sunday, along with a short note:

   ID on this house?   

Just as she pressed
SEND
, she heard the loud bang of a door slamming and a man yelling, “Sunshine!
Compadre guapo!
”

Through the binoculars, she watched Ricky lumber out to the edge of the deck by the beach, carrying the bucket. He pulled a bloody fish from the bucket by its tail and dangled it for a moment before tossing it into the swimming area, igniting an eruption of white water. The shiny black skin of a shark leapt out of the water and then disappeared again. After a few seconds, the shark’s fin reappeared, cutting through the surface. Ricky threw another fish, which was immediately attacked by the shark.

“Sunshine!
Compadre guapo!
” he shouted again, a huge smile plastered across his face.

It wasn’t a swimming area, Jessica realized with alarm. It was a shark pen.
What kind of lunatic keeps a shark for a pet?

Her phone vibrated with a reply from Sunday to both her questions:

   Ruben Sandoval.   

25.

ARLINGTON, VIRGINIA

THURSDAY, 2:07 P.M.

R
uben Sandoval was bored.
Dead bored.
He’d been at the George P. Shultz National Foreign Affairs Training Center all week. Stuck in dull seminar rooms, under fluorescent lights, and now on his fifth straight hour sitting in an uncomfortable plastic chair.

His stomach rumbled with hunger. He’d paid fourteen dollars cash for a squished ham-and-cheese sandwich wrapped in plastic and crammed into a small cardboard box along with a bag of salty potato chips and a bruised apple. He had picked up the lunch, examined each item with mounting disgust, and then had thrown the whole thing in the trash. Even the coffee was unbearable. He licked his lips at the thought of a proper thick, black café cubano, with a twist of lemon, sipping it while relaxing on a chaise longue in the Florida sun.

The woman sitting next to him coughed loudly, a wet, mucousy bellow that jolted Ruben back to the seminar. At the front
of the room, a plump man in an ill-fitting suit with a bad comb-over was tediously explaining how to handle classified documents.

“Standard procedures for determining the level of classification are based on Executive Order 13526 . . .”

This wasn’t how it was meant to be. An ambassadorship was supposed to be
glamorous
. This was to be the pinnacle of his professional life, coming from nothing to be the official representative of the President of the United States of America. His mind drifted again, marveling at what he had done to get here.

—

R
uben had been just six years old when he had arrived in America alone. His family had tried to flee, hustled onto a plane in the middle of the night, carrying only what they could stash in their pockets. But they were stopped, yanked right out of their seats on the plane by armed men. Ruben remembered his mother screaming, his baby brother wailing, as they dragged away his father. It was the last time he would see his
papi
.

Ruben’s father had been one of six children raised in a poor village in eastern Cuba. He had moved to the capital at sixteen and worked his way up through Havana’s casinos. His
papi
started by sweeping floors on the overnight shift, then became a bartender, a blackjack dealer, a pit boss. When American investors opened the grand Hotel Habana Riviera, the same year that Ruben was born, his father was named head of casino security. Links to powerful gringos had been the reason his family had seats on a plane to Miami after the communist guerrillas closed in on the capital.

But those connections were also why they dragged his father away, leaving a single mother with young Ruben and his infant brother, Ernesto.

“There are three levels of document classification. ‘Confidential’ is the lowest level, where release of such information to the public would cause damage . . .”

Without his
papi
, Ruben’s mother was heartbroken and alone. Their family home was then seized by the government and turned into a headquarters for the local chapter of the communist Rebel Youth Association. So Ruben’s mother, through an inconspicuous friend at the Catholic church, made the most difficult choice for a parent: She sent her eldest son away to safety. Ruben, along with fourteen thousand other unaccompanied Cuban minors, was flown to America in a secret effort dubbed Operation Peter Pan. It was the last time Ruben would see his mother or his baby brother Ernesto.

Unlike the fictional Peter Pan, Ruben was forced to grow up immediately. He was sent to an orphanage in Buffalo, New York, and then on to a boarding school in Oklahoma. Once he turned sixteen, he quit school, like his father, and made his way to the big city. Ruben hitchhiked to Miami, where he took odd jobs running errands up and down Calle Ocho for the old men of Little Havana. At eighteen he worked as a hotel cabana boy, bringing clean towels and cold tropical drinks to middle-class tourists on Miami Beach.

As he ran along the pool deck in the sun, young Ruben remembered something valuable he had learned from his father: There was big money to be made in selling effortless leisure. The tourists in Havana’s casinos didn’t know that the bright lights
and shiny hotels were a façade for a crumbling system. And they didn’t care. They paid handsomely to escape their regular lives, to have fun, and to look fabulous. Pretending to have it all was
good enough
.

Miami in the 1980s was so similar to Havana of the 1950s.

The notion of effortless leisure was the inspiration for Ruben’s first Sunshine Yoga Studio & Juice Bar, opened in Coral Gables. The upscale neighborhood, known as “The City Beautiful” and home to the University of Miami, was the training ground for South Florida’s attractive elite. Within a few years, Ruben had Sunshine Yoga Studio & Juice Bar branches in Fort Lauderdale, Boca Raton, and Palm Beach. After a decade, he had a studio in every wealthy zip code in the state of Florida. Then he cashed out.

“SBU is a special designation which stands for ‘sensitive but unclassified.’ This is used for personnel records and other information that is not technically . . .”

Getting rich wasn’t enough for Ruben. He had learned that, too, from his father and the pain of his exile. Sure, he had grown to appreciate fine wine and Italian sports cars. He owned luxurious vacation homes in the Bahamas, the Florida Keys, and in Puerto Banús on the Spanish Costa del Sol. But Ruben also knew that to protect his fortune and his family, he needed to be politically connected. To get what he really wanted, he would use his wealth to buy power.

Ruben learned quickly that hosting fund-raisers for American politicians was easy. For a catered cocktail party and fifty grand
in cash, passed through a network of straw donors, you could buy a congressman every other November. It was almost too easy.

“The distinction between Secret and Top Secret information is based on a determination of whether revelation of that information might cause extreme damage . . .”

Ruben was always thinking of a grander plan. If he could own a congressman for a pittance, then what about a President? Campaign donations paid his way into the inner circle of the White House. He had stayed with his wife in the Lincoln Bedroom and then with a girlfriend at Blair House, the President’s official guesthouse just off Lafayette Park normally reserved for visiting heads of state.

Why not bigger? What about an ambassadorship? It didn’t matter which one, really. Just a title and an entrée into the upper echelons of the American political game. Which he could leverage to expand his network and plot his ultimate goal.

“Top Secret information that is designed to be sensitive compartmented information is handled only in specially designated areas . . .”

Sitting in the dreary seminar room, that final dream, the inner motivation that drove everything Ruben Sandoval did, seemed so very far away.

Ruben wasn’t even supposed to be here. Officially, he
wasn’t
here. The President had not yet formally announced his nomination to be the next U.S. Ambassador to Egypt. And then he’d
need a Senate confirmation hearing and a full Senate vote before he could go to Cairo. He could be weeks, if not months, away.

But Egypt was important. The State Department was especially anxious to have that post filled quickly, so someone in the Secretary of State’s office had arranged for Ruben Sandoval, the presumptive nominee, to spend an inconspicuous—and, technically, unofficial—week at the Schultz Center to get an early start on ambassadorial training and to begin Arabic-language lessons. He had also been fast-tracked for his security clearance. Filling out all those pages of disclosure forms had been painful. This all seemed so unnecessary, a distraction from what he was hoping to achieve. Rather than sitting in this pointless seminar, he should be ensuring that his plan was in motion. He needed to get out of this room.

“For Top Secret information we use a Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility, which we usually call a SCIF, pronounced ‘skiff.’ Inside a SCIF, communications are protected from external listening devices and swept regularly . . .”

Ruben snapped out of his daydreaming and interrupted the speaker. “Excuse me. You’re saying that discussions and phone calls in a SCIF are entirely private? They can’t be bugged or decoded?”

“Yes, sir. That’s where any information that has been classified as TS/SCI can be handled and discussed.”

“And phone calls from a SCIF are undetectable?”

“Yes, sir. All communication in and out of a SCIF is encrypted and untraceable. It’s fully secure.”

“Where are these SCIFs?” Ruben asked.

“Everywhere. In the State Department. Inside our embassies. Anywhere that a cleared USG official needs to handle Top Secret information.”

“Is there a SCIF here?”

“Yes, sir. We have a SCIF on campus. Would you like to see it?”

26.

CIA HEADQUARTERS, LANGLEY, VIRGINIA

THURSDAY, 2:15 P.M.

S
unday had never heard of Ruben Sandoval, but there was plenty of information on him.