The Successor Read online

  “Now why would I be mad about that, Mr. President?”

  Wood rolled his eyes. “Call me, Jesse, will you? Like you did before. At least when we’re alone like this. Besides, I owe you big-time. Hell, you’re the one who pulled my ass out of the ringer.”

  Which was true. Christian had saved Wood’s ass, then been kicked in the teeth. “Okay, okay. It’s Jesse from now on.” The Secret Service agent reappeared with the water. “Thanks.” He opened it and took a quick sip.

  Wood pointed at him. “You look good, Christian. Like you haven’t aged at all since the last time I saw you. Still look like you’re in your midthirties, not your midforties.”

  Christian was six-two, weighed a trim 190 pounds, and kept himself in good shape with daily workouts, even when he was traveling. He had straight, dark hair combed back over his ears—highlighted with silver now—intense gray eyes, and sharp facial features: high cheekbones, a thin nose—bent slightly thanks to a face-to-face rugby collision in college—and a strong jaw.

  “Thanks.” Christian wanted to say the same thing to Jesse, but he couldn’t. Jesse looked as if he’d aged ten years since they’d last seen each other. His face had so many creases and lines that hadn’t been there before, and his hair had gone from slightly to completely gray. The pressure had to be enormous. Not only as the leader of the free world, but as the first black man to hold the job. Christian kept thinking about the famous before-and-after pictures of Abraham Lincoln. Before taking office and having to deal with a divided nation—then afterward, just before his assassination. An energetic and youthful man in 1861, a tired and worn-down politician in 1865. Just as it seemed Jesse was going to be, especially if he won a second term. “You seem to be handling the stress of being the first—”

  “Don’t even try to con me,” Jesse cut in. “I can’t take looking at myself in the mirror anymore. I look like an old man now. But I guess that comes with the job, huh?” His expression brightened. “Hey, congratulations on selling Laurel Energy to Exxon. I saw that announcement in the Journal a couple of months ago.”

  “Thanks.”

  “How much did you get?”

  “A lot. It was a nice transaction for us. So, why did you ask me out here to Camp David, Jesse?” It wasn’t that Christian was being coy about the number, he just didn’t like dwelling on his own good fortune. He was uncomfortable talking about his successes, always had been. Besides, he wanted to turn the conversation to what he was really interested in. What Jesse wanted from him. “I’ve gone through all the damn background checks.” Three months’ worth of them, including a daylong enema detailing his entire sexual history. “What do you want from me?”

  Wood motioned for the agent to leave. When he was gone, the president leaned forward on the wicker couch. “It involves Cuba,” he said quietly.

  That sounded interesting. “What about it?”

  Wood pursed his lips a few times. “Look, here’s the thing. Our people in Cuba are fairly sure El Jefe is dead.”

  Christian glanced up.

  “He hasn’t been seen in public in a couple of months,” Wood continued. “And we think the guy meeting people behind the scenes is a double.” He chuckled. “The CIA has assassinated three of Fidel’s doubles over the years, so they ought to know when they see one by now.”

  “Jesus.”

  “Yup. That’s what they tell me anyway.”

  Amazing stuff, Christian thought to himself. There was so much the American people didn’t know, so much they couldn’t know. “There’s been no announcement of the guy’s death.”

  “I know. But we think he handed the reins over to his brother several weeks ago. Made him Cuba’s new president for life right before he died. The thing is, the new man needs to consolidate power before he makes El Jefe’s death official, so he’s keeping the body iced down. But it’s been harder for him to get control than he anticipated. Harder for him to get that same stranglehold on the country his brother had. The situation is just so bad inside Cuba. Food shortages, energy shortages, poverty. People are itching for change and they aren’t mesmerized by him the way they were his brother, which is making it very hard for him to pull everything together. With some key factions inside Cuba’s military, especially.” Wood hesitated, letting out a long breath. “Which could be very good…or very bad.”

  “How sure is the CIA that El Jefe is dead?” Christian asked. Wood hadn’t specifically identified “our people in Cuba” as the CIA, but Christian assumed that was whom he meant.

  “Ninety-eight percent,” Wood answered, smiling. “Same first question I asked.” His expression quickly turned serious again. “Several of the country’s highest-ranking officials have fled the country secretly in the last few weeks. Minister of tourism, minister of mining. A couple of others were caught trying to escape and were executed, families, too. People are really scared. More than they’ve ever been because the state has stepped up its spying activities on citizens. Which we think is more proof that El Jefe is dead. The paranoia level has heated up to a nuclear level and the crackdown’s on.” Wood paused. “A couple of years ago I’d have said we’d never have a chance to win back the Cuban people, but we may have a window of opportunity after all. We may have a chance to influence the island again, develop close ties to a new government that understands how helpful we can be.”

  “How do we do that?”

  “Our guys on the ground there are telling me that the power struggle is incredibly intense. Several groups within the government are trying to take control, and a couple of them are actually trying to get rid of the Communists. Those groups are quietly getting support from some of the influential ministry honchos. People who want to see Cuba move away from Communism and come into the twenty-first century and who can do something about it. People who want to see the country open its borders to free trade and believe that capitalism is ultimately the way to go. I mean, it wouldn’t be our kind of capitalism, at least not right away. It would be more like Argentina or Brazil, but at least that’s a start. The problem is the support has to stay so quiet because people are worried about being hauled off in the middle of the night and never being seen or heard from again. So the progress isn’t coming as quickly as we’d hoped.” The president shook his head, as if he had a hard time believing what he was about to say. “We think the group that may have the best chance inside the government to wrest control from the Communists is one with ties to a guy named Alberto Ochoa.”

  Christian raised his eyebrows. “Sorry, Jesse, but I guess I’m not as up to speed on Cuba as I ought to be. Who’s Alberto Ochoa?”

  The president chuckled. “You mean you don’t have time to run Everest Capital, all those portfolio companies Everest owns, have some sort of personal life, and be completely caught up on Cuban history?”

  “I might if I had the entire State Department working for me,” Christian muttered. A gibe, but there was a serious undercurrent to it. As he’d passed his fortieth birthday, his thirst for knowledge had dramatically intensified. He’d realized more and more how much he still didn’t know about the world—but how much he wanted to know. He was trying to read something every week—a biography, a period piece—but it was tough with his schedule and all the reading he had to do for Everest.

  “That does make it a little easier,” Wood admitted. He checked the doorway, making certain the agent wasn’t standing there. “Here’s the abridged version. Along with Raúl and Che Guevara, Ochoa was one of the guys who made it happen for Fidel back in the day, back when the Revolution was coming to a head in the late fifties. When it was all said and done, Ochoa ended up being one of the most senior generals in the Revolutionary Armed Forces, in the FAR. He had a nice career going until the late eighties, when he suddenly found himself in Fidel’s doghouse. It’s not exactly clear what happened, but we think it might have had something to do with the fact that he supported the Russian brand of Communism, which ultimately couldn’t fend off Big Macs and MTV. During the eighties, F
idel was demanding that all his top people strictly support his hard-line approach. When Ochoa wouldn’t, the general basically bought his ticket to the execution train.”

  “Whoa.”

  “Yeah, they tied him to a post in front of a four-man firing squad in 1989 after a kangaroo court convicted him of treason. There were trumped-up drug charges and bribery allegations, but there wasn’t anything to them. From everything the guys up the Potomac tell me, the only thing Alberto Ochoa was guilty of was defying Fidel.”

  But sometimes that was enough when the guy you were dealing with was a paranoid schizophrenic. History had proven that over and over. “First rule of living in a dictatorship. Don’t piss off the dictator.”

  Wood nodded. “Too bad Ochoa didn’t have you around, Chris. Maybe he’d still be alive. Maybe he could have led this thing.”

  “So there are still people around who are bitter about what happened to Ochoa?” Christian asked.

  “Yeah, there are. Apparently Ochoa was a stand-up guy. Took care of his people and they were loyal back. They didn’t take revenge for what happened to him because there wasn’t much they could do. Castro isolated Ochoa’s senior supporters very effectively. Paranoia has its positives.” Wood winced. “Turns out Ochoa was a tough bastard. I mean, most of those senior FAR guys are, but listen to this. Ochoa had two requests at his execution. First, he didn’t want a blindfold. Second, he wanted to give the command to fire. Fidel granted both requests.”

  “Damn.” Christian tried to imagine giving a firing squad the command to shoot him. It seemed like one of those ultimate acts of bravery you never knew whether you were really capable of unless you were in the moment. “That’s amazing.”

  “Yeah, right? Well, they ended up burying him in an unmarked grave in the hills outside Havana somewhere. Didn’t even tell his wife where his body was for a while.” Wood hesitated, gathering his thoughts. “Here’s the bottom line. Now that there’s weakness inside the regime, these people who were loyal to Ochoa are trying to take control. Turns out they haven’t forgotten after all and they’ve formed an alliance with a group of civilians who are pro-capitalists. Maybe anti-anticommunists is a better way to put it. Chris, any way you look at it, you’re going to need the Cuban military on your side to win the day down there. You’ll need them afterward, too, and that’s just the way it is. We’ve decided this combination has the best shot at bringing the Communists down and taking Cuba where it needs to go from both the military and private-sector perspectives. We also think this group is the most likely to stay loyal to us, which is probably the most important consideration of all. But we’ve got to act fast. We’ve got to let them know we’re a hundred percent committed to them as soon as possible. We’ve told them we’re almost there, but I have one more box I need to check before I dive into the deep end with them.”

  “Why so fast?” Christian asked.

  “The problem, what we’re all really worried about here, is that the people who are clinging to power in Cuba right now might look for help from the outside if they decide they can’t hang on by themselves. If they sniff some kind of conspiracy they think actually has legs.”

  “Help as in a terrorist state,” Christian suggested, anticipating where Wood was going with this. “Like Iran or Syria. Even China.”

  Wood pointed at Christian. “Exactly. China. I can’t have China putting missiles on the ground ninety miles from Miami. Then I might start drinking something a lot stronger than beer on the job.” Wood grimaced. “And our intel indicates there are those kinds of secret discussions going on. You probably know about that oil deal Cuba signed with China.”

  “Just what I read in the newspapers,” Christian said. Which wasn’t exactly true. He knew more than that, but he also knew the best way to get more information was to act as if you didn’t know. Especially when the other person wanted something from you. “Which wasn’t much.”

  The president nodded, as if he expected Christian not to know much because everything he was about to say was so hush-hush. “China and Cuba have signed a formal agreement to develop oil fields right off Cuba’s coastline. They’re big fields, too, bigger than what’s being reported in the press. The right side of the aisle in Washington is going nuts on this, of course, but even some of my friends on the left side are getting nervous.”

  Which Christian already knew.

  “What hasn’t been reported,” Wood continued, “is that we believe there are very secret discussions going on about China basically stepping into the old Soviet Union’s role. Massive loans and subsidies, particularly with respect to the military and agriculture.” President Wood raised his eyebrows. “We all know nations don’t lend other nations billions and billions just to earn interest. There are other, very dark motivations here.”

  “Those missiles you mentioned.”

  “Right,” the president confirmed. “First-strike missiles. Even today, that’s a huge advantage.”

  “Jesus.”

  “Yeah, so basically what we’re talking about here comes down to a defensive play. I mean, I would really like to help the Cuban people. They’ve suffered for a long time. But I absolutely can’t have China getting a beachhead that close to us. That first-strike potential is terrifying.”

  “Of course.” There was obviously a point to all this background and Christian could feel an excitement building, hoping he understood what Wood wanted him to do. “Why are you telling me all this, Jesse? Why did you have me come here?”

  Wood stared at Christian for a few moments. “I need your help. I need you to meet with that group I mentioned, which includes some very senior ministry people who are secretly allying themselves with the Ochoa-legacy faction inside the FAR. But before I commit the United States to these people, I need you to tell me if they’re real. If you think they can handle setting up a free-market economy in Cuba while the Ochoa people take care of the muscle side. And, if you think they are capable, I’ll need you to advise them going forward. You’ll be on the ground there for a while, starting when the whole thing breaks out. So you can advise them right from the get-go.”

  “You mean—”

  “I mean right out of the box. You’ll be in Cuba when the switch is turned on. When the general gives the order to take out the Party leaders and all hell breaks loose.” Wood pointed at Christian. “You’re the best person I can think of for this job. I trust your instincts completely.” Wood picked a rose out of the arrangement of fresh flowers on the table and passed it beneath his nostrils. “As I’m sure you can imagine, there are a few major challenges with this thing.”

  Again, Christian could see the immense toll the day-to-day strain of being president was taking on Wood. The way the scent of a rose was such a welcome distraction—even if the distraction lasted only a few seconds. “Other than the possibility of me being killed, what?”

  Wood slid the rose stem back into the vase. “Like I said, this thing is obviously top secret. If what I’ve asked you to do is ever uncovered by the press or people opposed to my administration, I won’t be able to admit we had this conversation. I won’t be able to say you had any backing from the United States government to do what you were doing. Hell, I won’t even be able to admit you and I have spoken since I’ve been in office. If the rest of the world could prove we were supporting a new regime in Cuba, basically supporting a revolt, I’d have a massive diplomacy problem on my hands. Even our closest allies might line up against me.”

  Christian eased back in his chair, mulling over what the president had just laid out for him. “Well, I do have one specific concern with all that.”

  The president motioned inwardly with his fingers. “Tell me.”

  “United States citizens aren’t supposed to do business with Cuban nationals. In fact, it’s illegal to even have discussions with them.” A few weeks ago, Christian had read an article about several Oklahoma businessmen being arrested for meeting with executives of Cuba’s state-run oil company in Mexico City. They’d bee
n arrested by federal authorities at the Tulsa airport at the entrance to the Jetway as soon as they’d returned. Then they’d been escorted away in handcuffs in front of a large crowd, which included their wives and children. “Even if you meet with them on neutral ground, it’s a crime.” He hesitated. “Unfortunately, I’ve made some enemies as the chairman of Everest Capital. It’s been unavoidable and they might see it as an opportunity if they found out about it.”

  Wood acknowledged Christian’s point with a quick wave. “I certainly understand the inevitability of making enemies.”

  “Right. Well, the problem is—”

  “The problem,” Wood interrupted, “is that if one of your enemies found out you were meeting with people and alerted the local authorities, you’d have an issue. A potentially big issue because the local authorities would detain you, and the chairman of Everest Capital can never be detained anywhere for anything if he’s going to keep his credibility with his investors.”

  “Detained might be okay. Convicted of something is out of the question.”

  “Already thought about all this,” Wood assured Christian. “We’ll make certain you’re issued a valid license to meet with these Cubans. We’ll arrange that through the Office of Foreign Assets Control. You’ll get the license under an exemption for humanitarian projects and support for the Cuban people. It’s pretty common stuff. You’ll have a whole cover story, which will obviously have nothing to do with why you’ll really be meeting with them. And you’ll be carrying the license on you so there won’t be a problem. I assume you’ll take the right precautions such that no one will be able to follow you or be able to figure out where you’re going in the first place,” Wood said, his voice taking on a paternal tone. “Then we won’t have to worry about this at all.”

  “I’ll need help on that,” Christian spoke up quickly. “I’ll need to let Quentin Stiles in on this.” Quentin Stiles was one of Everest’s five managing partners—the five senior people who reported directly to Christian—and an expert in security, including physical protection. He was also Christian’s best friend. “You remember Quentin, don’t you?” Quentin and the president had met when Wood was considering naming Christian his vice president.