The Successor Read online

  Still, the men were committed to their objective—freedom for Cuba and its people. Cuba had been operating in the dark ages of oppression for too long. It was time for it to come into the light. If sacrifices had to be made, so be it. If it got really dicey, they’d do their best to get their families out. They had assurances from their benefactors in the United States that their escapes could quickly be arranged. That choppers could get to pre-agreed remote locations on the island an hour after the coded SOS had been received. That there were ships out in the Gulf to support the rescues.

  Which didn’t mean they weren’t scared to death and didn’t take every precaution they could think of to keep their actions veiled. Going so far as to arrange meetings by means of placing used paper napkins in different sections of one of Havana’s parks. The napkins were made to look like nothing but blown trash, but they were hung on specific branches of specific shrubs as code for dates and places of meetings. The men never got together in public, either, unless it involved a social function they would typically attend. A function authorities might consider it unusual if the men didn’t attend. They also made certain their wives and children didn’t become friends or acquaintances with the other wives and children. Made sure they never communicated unless it was a passing conversation at one of the functions.

  Now the six men sat around a crude wooden table in the dingy basement of a cramped two-bedroom home in a lower-middle-class section of the city, conducting business by candlelight. The home had no running water and no electricity, but it was still coveted like another child by the family who lived here. One of the men in the group, a highly respected attorney at the Ministry of Justice who had midlevel connections within the government’s housing department, had arranged for the destitute family who had been living on the street to move into it a year ago. After making absolutely certain that his connection at the housing department had no ties whatsoever to the regime’s counterintelligence groups—the General Directorate for State Security or the D-VI inside the FAR. The connection at the housing department had enabled the family to skip over many others in the queue in return for just $5 U.S.—which he thought was an incredibly generous gesture by the attorney. Thankfully, the connection never dug for the hidden agenda behind the generosity.

  The Secret Six needed places to meet and this house served as one of them. That was the attorney’s real agenda, the real reason for getting the family in. He was glad to do a good deed, but the group had to have safe houses in which to conduct business. The state would never think of looking for treasonous activities of the upper-middle class here. Even if they did, the mother was so indebted to them they knew she would never give them away.

  “What’s the update, señor?” the attorney who had arranged for the house asked. They never addressed each other as anything but señor in these meetings. Just in case someone was listening. “What is our contact saying?”

  Nelson Padilla took a long puff off his cigar, tapped the ash onto the basement’s dirt floor, and leaned away from the table, clasping his hands at the back of his head as he blew a huge cloud of sweet-smelling smoke into the air above him. He was thinking about that night three months ago when his Chrysler had slammed into Gustavo Cruz’s cow. How he had learned so much that night and how far the Secret Six had come since then.

  Padilla had waited an hour in the main house of the ranch Cruz ran for General Delgado to return. Sat in the living room on an old couch opposite Cruz, who was sitting in a wooden chair, handcuffed and watched carefully by the three FAR officers—one with his pistol drawn. Padilla remembered the way Cruz had been slumped over, despondent, almost at the point of tears, as if waiting for his execution. And the way Cruz’s expression had turned to absolute terror when Delgado had returned and ordered the officers and Padilla out of the room. Ordered the officers to drag Padilla’s car out of the ditch and get him on his way, then to wait for him down on the road.

  Twenty minutes later Padilla was driving home—after wiping the cow’s blood from the windshield with a towel. Driving slowly because the transmission wouldn’t go into any gear above first. It had taken him two hours to get home, but he’d never been happier to see his wife. They’d made love until three in the morning even though he had to perform that tonsillectomy a few hours later. Made love with mad passion, like teenagers. Like they hadn’t done in years.

  Remarkably, an army sergeant driving a tow truck had shown up at his door at 5 a.m. and taken the Chrysler away to be repaired, leaving the doctor a Ford station wagon to use in the meantime. He’d gotten to the hospital on time for the tonsillectomy, which had gone off without a hitch—despite just two hours of sleep. Magically, the sergeant had returned three days later with the Chrysler—in even better shape than before he’d hit the cow.

  A week after the Chrysler had been returned, Delgado made contact about another rendezvous. Two days later they met in the darkness of a remote beach east of Havana. It was then that Padilla found out the fate of Cruz and Rodriguez. Cruz was now running both ranches, and Rodriguez—the little snitch wearing the oversize cowboy hat—was dead. Shot in the back of the head, his body lying at the bottom of a ravine a few miles from the Cruz ranch.

  Delgado had explained all of that as if he were taking roll call—with no emotion whatsoever. Apparently not the least bit worried that Padilla would take the information to someone inside the Party and try to use it. Information that a high-ranking general was committing treason would have been prized by the state, and he would have been rewarded handsomely—if he could prove it was accurate. So Padilla very much appreciated the trust Delgado showed in sharing it. They were forming an alliance for the greater good of Cuba, and they needed to depend on each other at a high, high level if that was ever going to happen.

  But Padilla also understood the reality of Delgado’s willingness to give him the explanation. Ultimately, Padilla might risk as much by passing on the information as Delgado had giving it to him. Delgado might be able to turn the tables on Padilla—accuse Padilla right back of murdering the rancher—if Padilla tried to go to someone with the information. And Delgado probably had a good chance of making his accusation stick. Delgado commanded forty thousand troops and was a trusted member of the Party. Padilla, on the other hand, was just a doctor. One who nine months ago had come under intense scrutiny from the state for turning down a coveted position in one of the medical brigades—groups of physicians the Party sent to other Central and South American countries as emissaries to spread the word about the righteousness of Cuba’s way of life. Padilla had begged off by citing the sickliness of his youngest child—which was documented—and the fact that he was doing so much other traveling for the state. His rejection had been accepted, but he knew he’d raised eyebrows downtown. Which was not a good thing. But if he’d been away on one of the medical brigade missions for several months, it would have seriously slowed the progress of the Secret Six because he was the lone contact between the Six and Delgado—as well as between the Six and the United States.

  The news about Rodriguez’s murder had shaken Padilla to his core because it made him understand the coldness of the man he was dealing with. But after he’d thought about it long and hard, he realized that Delgado had to be like that. It was the only way a man in charge of the western and central armies could act—and survive. He couldn’t switch his coldness off and on; it had to be perpetually on. It was difficult for a doctor—a man dedicated to preserving life—to deal with Delgado, to try to make sense of the general’s indifference to taking life—but there was no way the Secret Six could be successful without the military and, therefore, him. That was an undeniable truth that everyone inside the group agreed upon—as did their benefactors in the United States. Without that military connection, there would be no independence.

  Padilla closed his eyes and inhaled deeply, not ready to answer the attorney’s question yet despite the impatience he sensed building around the table. He wanted a few more puffs first. He’d never smoked
cigars before the night he’d hit Gustavo Cruz’s cow—now he did several times a week. The same brand Delgado smoked—a Dominican, because no one with any love of the old days—before Castro—would smoke a Cuban cigar, Delgado had explained. As a doctor Padilla knew better than most how bad cigars were for the lungs; he’d seen the damage they caused on so many X-rays. But there was something about the general that made Padilla want to emulate him in every way. Something about the way the general carried himself, how he was like ice when it came to tough decisions, how he was so effortlessly in charge of situations, how he had no compassion whatsoever for Rodriguez. Delgado’s lack of emotion flew in the face of everything Padilla had ever believed in, was diametrically opposed to the way he’d lived his entire life. But it dawned on Padilla that caring and gentleness didn’t have much chance of emancipating a nation. It had also dawned on him that he might be at the very core of a movement that could in the end bring a new, much better way of life to millions of people who’d never known it. But that the means to achieving those lofty goals might well involve a terrible level of brutality in the interim.

  Over the last three months Padilla had accepted that awful reality and that he might even be a conduit to it in the short term. He’d taken a number of psychology courses at medical school in Toronto, and he was aware that his temporary change of attitude was manifesting itself in his daily routine in an increasing number of ways. Smoking cigars; eating foods that tasted good as opposed to being healthy for him; being shorter and stricter with nurses at the hospital and his children at home; asking Delgado to get him a gun at their last clandestine meeting; frequently demanding sex from his wife—once a few weeks ago even forcing her to have it with him when she’d said no at first.

  Padilla’s eyes narrowed, thinking about the intensity of that encounter. How his wife had actually fought him for a few moments as he’d held her down and pulled her clothes off—the first time that had ever happened in their seventeen-year marriage. How she’d admitted to him afterward as they lay wrapped in each other’s arms that she hadn’t been so aroused in years.

  “Señor, will you please—”

  “I’m sorry for taking so long, gentlemen,” Padilla interrupted the attorney, pulling the cigar from his mouth. “I’ve been collecting my thoughts.” He leaned forward, put his arms on the scarred table, and looked each of them squarely in the eye in turn: the deputy minister of foreign investment and economic development just to his left; the number four man at the Ministry of Science and Technology next to him; the attorney at the other end of the table who had been at the Ministry of Justice for twenty years; the deputy minister of agriculture to the attorney’s left; and, directly to Padilla’s right, the number three executive at the Central Bank of Cuba, who was also a former executive of the country’s cartography company—a company owned and run by the army so that no military installations on the island ever made it onto a map of Cuba. “Forgive me, I have much to tell you about my recent trip.”

  The other men around the table nodded to each other expectantly.

  Padilla had just returned yesterday from a weeklong trip to the United States, where he’d been a guest observer at eleven operations performed at Lenox Hill hospital in Manhattan. The operations had ranged from a triple-bypass procedure to brain surgery. It had been an intense schedule, but he’d still managed to slip away to meet his contacts twice. The primary reason he was a member of the Secret Six was because he was a doctor—he couldn’t add much to what they were going to do after the Incursion, as they were calling it, but being a doctor allowed him to travel to and from the United States frequently. Which was invaluable to the group at this stage because it enabled them to keep in frequent touch with their U.S. intelligence contacts without having to use phones or e-mail, which could easily have been traced.

  Despite the official embargo on products and services between the two countries, the United States wanted to be able to demonstrate to the rest of the world that it wasn’t shirking its responsibility, as a superpower, to keep underprivileged nations up to speed on the latest medical procedures and technologies. So they allowed Padilla—and other Cuban physicians—to travel to the United States often. And Cuba had a history of being one of the most advanced Central and South American nations when it came to medicine—despite the country’s other terrible problems—so Castro had been lenient in terms of allowing his doctors to travel to the United States.

  “I had a very good meeting with our backers while I was in the United States,” Padilla continued. “The support for us is very strong.”

  “What does very strong mean exactly?” the deputy minister of agriculture asked anxiously. “I’m still suspicious of these people.” He looked around the table. “I think I have good reason to be; I think we all have good reason to be. Just look at history.”

  “It means,” Padilla answered quickly and strongly, “that our efforts have been recognized at the highest levels of the United States government.”

  “Is it a firm commitment?” the deputy minister pushed. “I need to know that there are ships off our beaches with helicopters on them so I can get my wife and children out if I need to.”

  “They’ve chosen us, only us,” Padilla answered. “They will not back any of the other groups we believe are operating in the city.” He watched the men around the table nod and smile. Suddenly the huge risks seemed worth it. They were helping Cuba—and themselves. In the island’s post-Communist world they would certainly have esteemed status with President Wood’s government and would be showered with significant economic favors from their American benefactors. “That’s what my contact told me on my recent trip, señor.”

  “This is very good,” the man from the Ministry of Science and Technology spoke up. His brother was a senior executive at Cuba’s state oil company and would be the logical choice to become its CEO after the Incursion. The family would stand to make a great deal of money when the company was privatized. “But there is risk to that decision, too,” he continued. “More eyes will be upon us, more people will know about us in the U.S. Because of that there is a greater chance now that we may be discovered by the spies in Washington…and here. We must be even more careful now.”

  Padilla shook his head. “I’m not saying we shouldn’t continue to be as careful as possible, but I don’t believe that the risk of spies in Washington uncovering our plans is as great as you may think.”

  “Why?”

  “My contact tells me that President Wood is almost as afraid of being discovered as we are. For different reasons, of course. Us for our personal necks,” Padilla said, bringing the hand holding the cigar ceremoniously across his throat, “him for his political neck. Apparently, he thinks if it comes out that he is supporting us in any way, economically, militarily, even just with advisers, the world will line up against him. So his people are going to be very quiet about this. Even after the Incursion.”

  “Does this mean that the help they give us will be enough?” the deputy minister of foreign investment asked, concern obvious in the lines on his forehead.

  “It will be enough, but they are going to make sure we”—Padilla gestured around the table—“have the right stuff,” he said, smiling, using the term his contact had used. One he knew Americans had loved since the early space-exploration days of John Glenn. He’d done his homework on America. “I will be having a preliminary meeting with one of their senior advisers in the United States very soon. If that goes well, that man will come here to Cuba to meet with all of us. Secretly, of course. Then the help will be plenty enough.”

  “Are you sure you weren’t being followed when you met your contact in New York?” the attorney asked.

  When Padilla traveled in the United States—anywhere, really—he was aware of being watched, but the surveillance was sporadic and easy to evade. He’d been exposed to it long enough now that it was easy to escape their eyes without seeming as if he were trying to. “Positive.”

  “Are you certain tha
t our contacts in Washington know who we are allied with in the military?” the executive from the Central Bank of Cuba asked.

  “Absolutely.”

  “Are we sure he’s the right person?” the deputy minister of agriculture wanted to know.

  There couldn’t be a better officer in the FAR to be allied with than General Delgado, Padilla believed. His contacts in the United States couldn’t agree more. Over the last several months they’d met with the general and one of his direct reports clandestinely on a farm outside Havana—where Delgado had been coming from the night Padilla had hit the cow. But the men sitting around the table wouldn’t understand how strong a partner the general was because they’d never met Delgado.

  Suddenly the gravity of his situation hit Padilla, as it never had before. He was the conduit for everything. For the Six’s contact with the United States and their contact with the FAR. If anything happened to him or Delgado, the Incursion would fail, or at least suffer a major setback that would delay it for years. For now, he was the key.

  “We couldn’t have a better partner,” Padilla said confidently.

  “Why?”

  “He’s in charge of a great many troops and has a senior level connection in the air force, which includes the Mi-8 helicopters. Once he’s firmly in control, our contacts in the U.S. are convinced that the other six thousand Cuban troops will fall right into line.”

  “How do we know he won’t get drunk with power once he’s in charge?” the bank executive asked, aggravated. “Like all these military people do.”