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“And you will have it, Lancer. Get to the airport.”
Kincaid ended the call, then closed his laptop. Scrolling the articles and posts by the other Nazis had given him energy, an edge, a fight in his belly. It had given him reason to be when he would have otherwise just been sitting in a comfy suite in a tourist destination casino, the antithesis of a warrior.
But now he had a new mission, a new fight, and he would put NewPatriotsFront away until the next time he felt rudderless, when it would again seek to find purpose for his unquenchable hate.
It was time to focus, to clock back in, because somebody in Havana needed to die.
•••
Carlos Contreras had never been to Cuba, but he thought if the situation had been different, he might actually like it there.
After the mission in Tulum, Mexico, he and his loadmaster had received orders from Cyrus to sanitize the aircraft while in flight. They dumped every single piece of equipment that was not part of the aircraft itself out of the rear hatch, and then they landed in Grand Cayman, Cayman Islands. Here all three men went their separate ways without so much as a goodbye, again by order of Cyrus.
He spent half a day at a resort hotel on Grand Cayman, sitting morosely in his room, surfing a new laptop he’d bought and smoking cigarettes while listening to the thumping techno beat played by a DJ at a pool outside, and then he got the call ordering him to return to the airport.
A four-seat Cessna 182 picked him up and flew him north in the fading daylight, and then, in darkness, they descended to just over the waves.
His pilot didn’t speak one word to him, even when he asked where they were going and how much time was left in the flight, but once they shot over a rocky and sandy beach and then began picking their way through hills, the man—Contreras couldn’t even tell where he was from—said a single word.
“Cuba.”
They landed at a grass strip lit by four old men with flashlights, and then one of the men loaded Contreras into a pickup truck and drove him north through the night.
At four a.m. he saw the signs for Havana, and by six a.m. he sat alone in a postcard-sized room in a teal-green shack in a ramshackle residential neighborhood. Downstairs, an elderly husband and wife, obviously the owners of this low-end casa particular, or private homestay, paid him little attention, so he stayed upstairs, drank coffee, smoked, and stared at his phone, willing it to ring.
His laptop was open on a rickety card table but there was no Internet; the heat spun around the dark room with the help of a lazy ceiling fan with a bad bearing that Contreras was certain would very soon drive him mad.
All he did was think about what he was involved in. He had theories about the mission he’d been sent on, though he had no idea what the hell he was doing here in Cuba. And he had a theory about Cyrus himself, a theory he would put to the test whenever he called again.
The old lady brought him rice and beans at eight, and again at one, and then, mercifully, his mobile phone rang at three p.m.
Before he answered it, however, he took it to the table with his laptop, then turned on the laptop’s microphone and pressed record. He attached the phone to a cable that fed into the laptop, and then he answered.
“Yes?”
“This is Cyrus.” It was the same voice as before. American, he thought. Authoritative, but not aggressive.
“I’m here in Havana.”
“I am sending you coordinates. It’s a church. Take a taxi there. In the parking lot you will see a van with two men inside. That is your conveyance and your security team. The boxes inside contain your equipment. This operation will be conducted on the ground, not from an aircraft.”
Suits me, Contreras thought, but he had other questions.
“I am still not working for Gama, correct?”
“Correct.”
“Because whatever happened in Mexico confirmed to you that there is a compromise at your operations center?”
“There was a compromise. The compromise has been resolved.”
“Then why are you still running me?”
“Your controller at Gama has been removed from her position.”
Holy shit, Contreras thought. She was the compromise?
He said, “Am I in danger?”
